Дождь (Rain) by Boris Pasternak

Inscription on the ‘Book of the Steppe’

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She’s here with me. Come strum, pour, laugh,

Tear the twilight through and through!

Drown, flow down, an epigraph

To a love like you!

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Scurry like a silk-worm

And beat the window’s drum.

Combine, entwine,

And let the darkness come!

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Noon midnight, cloudburst – come for her!

Walking home, soaked to the skin!

Whole tree-loads of water

On eyes, cheeks, jasmin!

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Hosanna to Egyptian darkness!

Drops chuckle, slide, collide,

And suddenly the air smells new

As to patients who’ve come through.

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Let’s run and pluck – as from guitars

Guitarists pluck a phrase –

The garden Saint-Gothard

Washed with a lime-tree haze.

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By Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к

(Boris Leonidovich Pasternak)

from Сестра моя — жизнь (My Sister, Life)

(Summer 1917)

translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France

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Beneath is the original Russian version of the poem in Cyrillic.

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Дождь

Надпись на “Книге степи”

Она со мной. Наигрывай,
Лей, смейся, сумрак рви!
Топи, теки эпиграфом
К такой, как ты, любви!

Снуй шелкопрядом тутовым
И бейся об окно.
Окутывай, опутывай,
Еще не всклянь темно!

– Ночь в полдень, ливень — гребень ей!
На щебне, взмок — возьми!
И — целыми деревьями
В глаза, в виски, в жасмин!

Осанна тьме египетской!
Хохочут, сшиблись, — ниц!
И вдруг пахнуло выпиской
Из тысячи больниц.

Теперь бежим сощипывать,
Как стон со ста гитар,
Омытый мглою липовой
Садовый Сен-Готард.

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

 

by William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)