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