Yuri Levitansky
So what if I`d gone through it all?..

So what if I'd gone through it all?
It's been a while. I don't recall.
I can't recall dates any more,
nor the locations of attacks.

(I am one atom of that war,
a nameless private. I came back.
I am one shot's mistaken trace,
I'm bloody ice of January.
I am imprisoned in that ice,
like a fly in amber jewelry.)

So what if I had seen it all?
I've purged it all. I can't recall.
I don't remember dates, nor days,
nor names of villages and towns.

(I am the hoarse scream in the fray,
I'm foaming horses falling down.
I am a day that will take lives,
I am soldiers in a distant fight.
I'm somber torch by common graves,
and a dug-out's feeble candlelight.)

So what if I had seen it all,
that mad "To be or not to be."
It's faded almost past recall.
I want to crush that memory.

I don't still dwell on that past war,
the war still dwells inside of me,
and tongues of the Eternal Flame
are licking at me steadily.

No tools exist to have me hewn
out of that war, out of those years;
There are no medicines to cure me
of that winter, of those snows.
We cannot part, it can't be done:
I'm in that snow, I'm on that ground,
until the snows without a sound,
where all our tracks merge into one...

So what if I had seen it all...

Translated by Tanya Wolfson