Sparrow Hills
Boris Pasternak


Like water pouring from a pitcher, my mouth on your nipples!
Not always. The summer well runs dry.
Not for long the dust of our stamping feet, encore on encore
from the saxes in the casino's midnight gazebo.

I've heard of age—its obese warbling!
When no wave will clap hands to the stars.
If they speak, you doubt it. No face in the meadows,
no heart in the pools, no god among the pines

Split your soul like wood. Let today froth from your mouth
It's the world's noontide. Have you no eyes for it?
Look, conception bubbles form the bleached fallows;
fir-cones, woodpeckers, clouds, pine-needles, heat

Here the city's trolley tracks give out.
Further, you must put up with peeled pine. The trolley poles are
       detached.
Further, it's Sunday. Boughs screwed loose for the picnic bonfire,
playing tag in your bra.

The world is always like this," say the woods,
as they mix the midday glare, Whitsunday and walking.
All's planned with checkerberry couches, inspired with clearings—
the piebald clouds spill down on us like a country woman's house-dress.

Translated by Robert Lowell


_____________________________________________________


Sparrow Hills
Boris Pasternak


Kisses on your breast like water from an ewer;
But not forever, summer is no ever-flowing spring.
Nor shall we, night after night, raise up from the dust
The accordion's drone, stamping and pounding our feet.

I have heard about old age. Dreadful prophecy!
Not one crest of a wave will reach for the stars.
They say — you won't believe it — there is no face on the 
       meadows;
In the pond, no heart; no god in the pine grove.

Set your soul rocking! Today all is frenzied:
This is the high noon of the world. Use your eyes! Look!
In the hilltops, thought is whipped to a white boiling
Of woodpeckers, clouds, heat, pine cones, and needles.

Here the rails of the city trolleys come to an end.
From there on the pine trees take their place —
The end of the line for machines. The beginning of Sunday.
A breaking of branches, a caper of clearings and slidings on
       grass.

Here, filtering sunlight, Whitsunday, walking about,
The woods beg belief: The world is always so!
This is the thought of the forest depth, the meadow's
       intimation;
Thus, on us, on colorful calico, it is poured from clouds.


Translated by Phillip C. Flayderman

Voronezh
Anna Akhmatova

for Osip Mandelstam


All the town's gripped in an icy fist.
Trees and walls and snow are set in glass.
I pick my timid way across the crystal.
Unsteadily the painted sledges pass.
Flocks of crows above St Peter's, wheeling.
The dome amongst the poplars, green and pale in
subdued and dusty winter sunlight, and
echoes of ancient battles that come stealing
out across the proud, victorious land.
All of a sudden, overhead, the poplars
rattle, like glasses ringing in a toast,
as if a thousand guests were raising tumblers
to celebrate the marriage of the host.

But in the exiled poet's hideaway
the muse and terror fight their endless fight
throughout the night.
So dark a night will never see the day.

1936

Translated by Peter Oram

February
Boris Pasternak


February. Get ink and weep!
Burst into sobs — to write and write
of February, while thundering slush
burns like black spring.

For half a rouble hire a cab,
ride through chimes and the wheels' cry
to where the drenching rain is black,
louder than tears or ink —

where like thousands of charred pears
rooks will come tearing out of trees
straight into puddles, an avalanche,
dry grief to the ground of eyes.

Beneath it — blackening spots of thaw,
and all the wind is holed by shouts,
and poems — the randomer the truer —
take form, as sobs burst out.

Translated by Angela Livingstone

___________________________________

February
Boris Pasternak


February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.

Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,
Race through the noise of bells and wheels
To where the ink and all you grieving
Are muffled when the rainshower falls.

To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,
A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,
Fall down into the puddles, hurl
Dry sadness deep into the eyes.

Below, the wet black earth shows through,
With sudden cries the wind is pitted,
The more haphazard, the more true
The poetry that sobs its heart out.

Translated by Alex Miller

For Anna Akhmatova
Boris Pasternak


It seems I am choosing words that will stand,
and you are in them,
but if I blunder, it doesn't matter—
I must persist in my errors.

I hear the soiled, dripping small talk of the roofs;
the students' black boots drum eclogues on the boardwalks,
the undefined city takes on personality,
is alive in each sound.

Although it's spring, there's no leaving the city.
The sharp customers overlook nothing.
You bend to your sewing until you weep;
sunrise and sunset redden your swollen eyes.

You ache for the calm reaches of Ladoga,
then hurry off to the lake for a change
of fatigue. You gain nothing,
the shallows smell like closets full of last summer's clothes.

The dry wind dances like a dried-out walnut
across the waves, across your stung eyelids—
stars, branches, milestones, lamps. A white
seamstress on the bridge is always washing clothes.

I know that objects and eyesight vary greatly
in singleness and sharpness, but the iron 
heart's vodka is the sky
under the northern lights.

That's how I see your face and expression.
This, not the pillar of salt, the Lot's Wife you pinned down
in rhyme five years ago to show up our fear,
limping forward in blinders, afraid of looking back.

How early your first dogged, unremitting idiom
hardened—no unassembled crumbs!
In all our affairs, your lines throb
with the high charge of the world. Each wire is a conductor.

Translated by Robert Lowell

Silentium
Osip Mandelstam

Nobody knows what silence is.
Silence is words and music.
It's the thing that links all things alive,
the link that lasts forever.

Let me open my mouth and let nothing come out,
silent as an unborn baby.
Let me be a perfect crystal note
that lasts unchanged forever!

Do nothing, love, don't ever change.
Change only words to music.
And let my heart of hearts grow still
as a life I can barely remember.

¿Y ha de morir contigo el mundo mago?

Antonio Machado

¿Y ha de morir contigo el mundo mago 

donde guarda el recuerdo 

los hálitos más puros de la vida, 

la blanca sombra del amor primero,

 

  la voz que fue a tu corazón, la mano 

que tú querías retener en sueños, 

y todos los amores 

que llegaron al alma, al hondo cielo?

 

  ¿Y ha de morir contigo el mundo tuyo, 

la vieja vida en orden tuyo y nuevo?

 

¿Los yunques y crisoles de tu alma 

trabajan para el polvo y para el viento?

____________________________________

[And is that magical world to die with you]

Antonio Macahado

And is that magical world to die with you,

where memory goes guarding

life's purest breaths

first love's white shadow,

the voice that entered your heart, the hand

that you had wished to hold in dream,

and all things loved

that touched the soul, the depths of sky?

And is that world of yours to die with you,

the old life you renewed and set in order?

Have the anvils and crucibles of your spirit

laboured here only for dust and wind?

Translated by A. S. Kline

_____________________________________

Nothing
Antonio Machado


So is this place to die with us?
I mean that world where memory still holds
the breath of your early life:
the white shadow of first love,
that voice that rose and fell
with your own heart, the hand
you'd dream of closing in your own...
all those beloved burning things
that dawned on us,
lit up the inner sky?
Is this whole world to vanish when we die,
this life that we made new in our own fashion?
Have the crucibles and anvils of the soul 
been working for the dust and for the wind?

A Version by Don Paterson

_____________________________________________

The Stray Dog Cabaret
Anna Akhmatova


All of us here are hookers and hustlers.
We drink too much, and don't care.
The walls are covered with birds and flowers
that have never seen sunshine or air.

You smoke too much. There's always a cloud
of nicotine over your head.
Do you like this skirt? I wore it on purpose.
I wanted to show lots of leg.

The windows here have been covered forever.
Is it snowing out?...maybe it's rain.
You've got that look in your eyes again,
like a cat in a crouch for a kill.

Sometimes I feel this awful pain,
as if someone were breaking a spell.
Take a good look at that one over there!
She's dancing her way into hell!

Translated by Paul Schmidt

__________________________________________________


We're all boozers and floozies here,
altogether a joyless crowd!
On the walls, the flowers and birds
yearn for the clouds.

You sit puffing your black pipe;
smoke is rising, strange and dim.
This tight skirt makes me look
slimmer than slim.

The windows are boarded up for good —
what's out there? Lightning? Snow?
Like those of a cautious cat
your eyes glow.

What is my heart longing for?
Am I waiting for Death's knell?
And the woman dancing now
is bound for hell.

1913

Translated by Margo Shohl Rosen

The Eyes
Antonio Machado


When his beloved died
he decided to grow old
and shut himself inside
the empty house, alone
with his memories of her
and the big sunny mirror
where she'd fixed her hair.
This great block of gold
he hoarded like a miser,
thinking here, at least,
he'd lock away the past,
keep one thing intact.

But around the first anniversary,
he began to wonder, to his horror,
about her eyes: Were they brown or black,
or grey? Green? Christ! I can't say...

One Spring morning, something gave in him;
shouldering his twin grief like a cross,
he shut the front door, turned into the street
and had walked just ten yards, when, from a dark close,
he caught a flash of eyes. He lowered his hat-brim 
and walked on...yes, they were like that; like that...


a version by Don Paterson

Lot's Wife
Anna Akhmatova


The righteous man followed God's luminous angels
And hurried after them over the hill.
But his wife heard an anxious voice that whispered:
"It isn't too late, not yet; you can still

Look back at the towers of the town you came from,
At the street where you sang and the room where you spun,
At the empty windows of the house you cared for
And the bed where all your children were born."

And of course she looked back. She felt a quick pang
And then everything ended. Her eyes closed
And her body dissolved into bitter crystals.
Her small feet stopped and grew into the ground.

No one seems to have mourned this woman;
She was only a minor event in the book.
But my heart holds fast to her memory:
A woman who gave up her life for a look.

Translated by Paul Schmidt

Lot's Wife
Wislawa Szymborska


They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the obedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now — every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation. 
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh