Vladislav Khodasevich
In front of the mirror

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.¹

“I, I, I.” What a strange word he’s saying!
That man there — can he really be “I”?
Such a creature my mother watched playing —
Ashen skin, and the hair slightly graying,
As all-wise as a snake, and as sly?

The boy dancing at country-house dances
In Ostankino’s² summer-night heat —
Was that I, who at each of my answers
Can read loathing and fear in the glances
Of the half-fledged young poets I meet?

Can that boy who poured out all his feeling
In debates that went on half the night
Be myself — the same self that was steeled in
Sadder talk where I learned to conceal,
To say nothing, or keep my words light?

But all this is the traveler’s hazard
On the journey by which life is spanned:
You look up, for no cause you could guess at,
And you’re lost in a featureless desert,
Your own tracks even vanished in sand.

No black tigress in Paris defied me —
I can’t claim a Bohemian past —
And I’ve no ghostly Virgil to guide me. —
Merely loneliness standing beside me
In the frame of the truth-telling glass.

____
1. “In the middle of the road of our life.”
2. A region of Moscow far from the center.

Translated by Michael Frayn