When Love waters your buried root
With springs of tears, and bleak gloom,
Like Death's canopy, by a magic grove
Where Dante wandered surrounds the living trunk —
You rise up with your proud heads,
O hymns, into the light, shining translucent over the crimson darkness
Of blue valleys, like a laurel wood
Carved out against the fiery firmament!
Under the intoxicating waves, in a purple dungeon,
In the pearl-oyster lachrymatory of the bitter expanses,
Like pearls of the abyss, you are born in the tomb.
Who took soothsaying Daphnes into ethereal captivity
And clad them in laurel, and reflected them in the well
Of immortal transparency? — Apollo.
Когда вспоит ваш корень гробовой
Ключами слез Любовь, и мрак суровый,
Как Смерти сень, волшебною дубровой,
Где Дант блуждал, обстанет ствол живой, —
Возноситесь вы гордой головой,
О гимны, в свет, сквозя над мглой багровой
Синеющих долин, как лес лавровый,
Изваянный на тверди огневой!
Под хмелем волн, в пурпуровой темнице,
В жемчужнице — слезнице горьких лон,
Как перлы бездн, родитесь вы — в гробнице.
Кто вещих Дафн в эфирный взял полон,
И в лавр одел, и отразил в кринице
Прозрачности бессмертной? — Аполлон.
«Night. Street. Lamplight. Pharmacy. / A dim senseless glow all about. / Live twenty more years, look around, what’s to see? / Nothing will change. No way out. Then die — and all begins over to breathe and to be, / And the same bleary haze hovers over the damp / Night, icy ripples...»
«The day will come; I’ll disappear, / While in this selfsame empty room, / That table, bench, icon austere / The same contours of space consume. And just as now will flutter in / That silken butterfly serene, / To rustle, palpitate and ding / Against the ceiling’s bluish-green. And ...»
«I’m glad that you’re not indisposed with feelings steeped in me. / I’m glad that I’m not indisposed with feelings steeped in you. / That never will earth’s gravid sphere float free / Beneath our giddy footsteps specked with dew. / I’m glad that we can laugh capriciously, / Ligh...»
«Midnight estate, Genghis Khanerate! / Rustle, blue birches. / Bright sunset, Zarathustrate! / And you, blue sky, Mozartate! / You twilight-cloud, be Goya! / And you at night, cloud, rainate! / A whirlwind of smiles just flew by, / Laughing with claws of shrieking, / Then I saw the ha...»