Зимняя ночь (Winter Night) by Boris Pasternak

Snow, snow, all the world over,

Snow to the world’s end swirling,

A candle was burning on the table,

A candle burning.

.

As midges swarming in summer

Fly to the candle flame,

The snowflakes swarming outside

Flew at the window frame.

.

The blizzard etched on the window

Frosty patterning.

A candle was burning on the table,

A candle burning.

.

The lighted ceiling carried

A shadow frieze:

Entwining hands, entwining feet,

Entwining destinies.

.

And two little shoes dropped,

Thud, from the mattress.

And candle wax like tears dropped

On an empty dress.

.

And all was lost in a tunnel

Of grey snow churning.

A candle was burning on the table,

A candle burning.

.

And when a draught flattened the flame,

Temptation blazed

And like a fiery angel raised

Two cross-shaped wings.

.

All February the snow fell

And sometimes till morning

A candle was burning on the table,

A candle burning.

.

.

By Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к

(Boris Leonidovich Pasternak)

(Poem from Dr Zhivago)

(1948)

translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France

A recital of Pasternak’s poem set to music by Boris Vetrov and accompanied by photos of sculptural works by Auguste Rodin. The recital begins at 1:30.

Beneath is the original Cyrillic version of the poem.

Зимняя ночь

Мело, мело по всей земле
Во все пределы.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

Как летом роем мошкара
Летит на пламя,
Слетались хлопья со двора
К оконной раме.

Метель лепила на стекле
Кружки и стрелы.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

На озаренный потолок
Ложились тени,
Скрещенья рук, скрещенья ног,
Судьбы скрещенья.

И падали два башмачка
Со стуком на пол.
И воск слезами с ночника
На платье капал.

И все терялось в снежной мгле
Седой и белой.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

На свечку дуло из угла,
И жар соблазна
Вздымал, как ангел, два крыла
Крестообразно.

Мело весь месяц в феврале,
И то и дело
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

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‘Вооруженный зреньем узких ос’ (‘Armed with wasp-vision. With the vision of wasps…’ by Osip Mandelstam

Armed with wasp-vision, with the vision of wasps
that suck, suck, suck the earth's axis,
I'm filled by the whole deep vein of my life
and hold it here in my heart
and in vain.
 
And I don't draw, don't sing,
don't draw a black-voiced bow over strings:
I only drink, drink, drink in life and I love
to envy wasp-
waisted wasps their mighty cunning.
 
O if I too
could be impelled past sleep, past death,
stung by the summer's cheer and chir,
by this new air
to hear earth's axis, axis, axis.
 

by Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам (Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam.)
His surname is commonly latinised as Mandelstam)
(8 February 1937)
translated by Robert Chandler 

the poem read by Stanislav Komardin

Below is the original Russian Cyrillic version of the poem.

Вооруженный зреньем узких ос, 
Сосущих ось земную, ось земную, 
Я чую всё, с чем свидеться пришлось, 
И вспоминаю наизусть и всуе. 

И не рисую я, и не пою, 
И не вожу смычком черпоголосым, 
Я только в жизнь впиваюсь и люблю 
Завидовать могучим, хитрым осам. 

О, если б и меня когда-нибудь могло 
Заставить, сон и смерть минуя, 
Стрекало Еоздуха и летнее тепло 
Услышать ось земную, ось земную.  

Extra information: The wasp-waist was a fashion regarding a women’s fashion silhouette, produced by a style of corset and girdle, that has experienced various periods of popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its primary feature is the abrupt transition from a natural-width rib cage to an exceedingly small waist, with the hips curving out below. It takes its name from its similarity to a wasp’s segmented body. The sharply cinched waistline also exaggerates the hips and bust.

To put it bluntly Mandelstam is talking about admiring women, at least in part, in this poem.

Mandelstam was said to have had an affair with the poet Anna Akhmatova. She insisted throughout her life that their relationship had always been a very deep friendship, rather than a sexual affair. In the 1910s, he was in love, secretly and unrequitedly, with a Georgian princess and St. Petersburg socialite Salomea Andronikova, to whom Mandelstam dedicated his poem “Solominka” (1916).

In 1922, Mandelstam married Nadezhda Khazina in Kiev, Ukraine, where she lived with her family. He continued to be attracted to other women, sometimes seriously. Their marriage was threatened by his falling in love with other women, notably Olga Vaksel in 1924-25 and Mariya Petrovykh in 1933-34.

During Mandelstam’s years of imprisonment, 1934–38, Nadezhda accompanied him into exile. Given the real danger that all copies of Osip’s poetry would be destroyed, she worked to memorize his entire corpus, as well as to hide and preserve select paper manuscripts, all the while dodging her own arrest. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the political climate thawed, she was largely responsible for arranging clandestine republication of Mandelstam’s poetry.

‘Разрывы круглых бухт, и хрящ, и синева’ a.k.a. ‘Breaks in round bays, and shingle, and blue’ by Osip Mandelstam

Breaks in round bays, and shingle, and blue,
and a slow sail continued by a cloud -
I hardly knew you; I've been torn from you:
longer than organ fugues – the sea's bitter grasses,
fake tresses – and their long lie stinks,
my head swims with iron tenderness,
the rust gnaws bit by bit the sloping bank...
On what new sands does my head sink?
You, guttural Urals, broad-shouldered Volga lands,
or this dead-flat plain – here are all my rights,
and, full-lunged, gotta go on breathing them.
 

by Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам
(Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam.)
His surname is commonly latinised as Mandelstam)
(4 February 1937)
translated by Andrew Davis 

Below is the original Russian Cyrillic version:

Разрывы круглых бухт, и хрящ, и синева,
И парус медленный, что облаком продолжен,-
Я с вами разлучен, вас оценив едва:
Длинней органных фуг - горька морей трава,
Ложноволосая,- и пахнет долгой ложью,
Железной нежностью хмелеет голова,
И ржавчина чуть-чуть отлогий берег гложет...
Что ж мне под голову другой песок подложен?
Ты, горловой Урал, плечистое Поволжье
Иль этот ровный край - вот все мои права,
И полной грудью их вдыхать еще я должен. 

Additional information:

The Volga (Во́лга) is the longest river in Europe with a catchment area of 1,350,000 square kilometres. It is also Europe’s largest river in terms of discharge and drainage basin. The river flows through central Russia and into the Caspian Sea, and is widely regarded as the national river of Russia. Eleven of the twenty largest cities of Russia, including the capital, Moscow, are located in the Volga’s drainage basin. Some of the largest reservoirs in the world are located along the Volga.

The river has a symbolic meaning in Russian culture and is often referred to as Волга-матушка Volga-Matushka (Mother Volga) in Russian literature and folklore.

The Ural Mountains ( Ура́льские го́ры), or simply the Urals, are a mountain range that runs approximately from north to south through western Russia, from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Ural River and northwestern Kazakhstan. The mountain range forms part of the conventional boundary between the continents of Europe and Asia. Vaygach Island and the islands of Novaya Zemlya form a further continuation of the chain to the north into the Arctic Ocean.

The Urals have been viewed by Russians as a “treasure box” of mineral resources, which were the basis for its extensive industrial development. In addition to iron and copper the Urals were a source of gold, malachite, alexandrite, and other gems such as those used by the court jeweller Fabergé. As Russians in other regions gather mushrooms or berries, Uralians gather mineral specimens and gems. Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak (1852–1912) Pavel Bazhov (1879–1950), as well as Aleksey Ivanov and Olga Slavnikova, post-Soviet writers, have written of the region.

The region served as a military stronghold during Peter the Great’s Great Northern War with Sweden, during Stalin’s rule when the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex was built and Russian industry relocated to the Urals during the Nazi advance at the beginning of World War II, and as the center of the Soviet nuclear industry during the Cold War. Extreme levels of air, water, and radiological contamination and pollution by industrial wastes resulted. Population exodus resulted, and economic depression at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in post-Soviet times additional mineral exploration, particularly in the northern Urals, has been productive and the region has attracted industrial investment.

Февраль. Достать чернил и плакать! (February. Get ink and weep!) by 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 wheel's 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.
 
 
 By  Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к
 (Boris Leonidovich Pasternak)
 (1913)
 translated by Angela Livingstone 

An alternate to Jon Stallworthy and Peter France’s translation of the poem ‘It’s February. Weeping take ink!‘ provided elsewhere on this site. The Original doesn’t have a specific title and is usually referred to by it’s first line, as is the case with many untitled poems, but my source for this translation titled it as ‘February’. Also of note this translation gives the date as 1913 but my research of Russian sources all agree to it being published, or at least written, in 1912. The discrepancy may be due to the date it was initially published in a collection of poetry or journal possibly.

A recital of the Russian version read by Sergei Yursky (a Russian actor who died on 8th February this year sadly) set to music by Chopin:

The original Russian Cyrillic version of the poem:

 Февраль. Достать чернил и плакать!
    Писать о феврале навзрыд,
    Пока грохочущая слякоть
    Весною черною горит.
    
    Достать пролетку. За шесть гривен,
    Чрез благовест, чрез клик колес,
    Перенестись туда, где ливень
    Еще шумней чернил и слез.
    
    Где, как обугленные груши,
    С деревьев тысячи грачей
    Сорвутся в лужи и обрушат
    Сухую грусть на дно очей.
    
    Под ней проталины чернеют,
    И ветер криками изрыт,
    И чем случайней, тем вернее
    Слагаются стихи навзрыд. 

‘It’s February. Weeping take ink’ by Boris Pasternak

 It's February. Weeping take ink.
 Find words in a sobbing rush
 For February, while black spring
 Burns through the rumbling slush.
 
 
 And take a cab. Ride for a rouble
 Through wheel racket and bell's throbbing
 To where the downpour makes more din
 Than the sound of ink and sobbing;
 
 
 Where rooks in thousands, like charred pears
 Windfallen from their branching skies,
 Drop into puddles and bring down
 Desolution into deep eyes.
 
 
 Thawed patches underneath show black,
 The wind is furrowed with cries, and then,
 The more suddenly the more surely,
 Verses sob from the pen.
 
 
 By  Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к
 (Boris Leonidovich Pasternak)
 (1912)
 translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France