Путем зерна (The Grain’s Path) by Vladislav Khodasevich

The sower walks down the even furrows;

his fathers all furrowed the path he follows.

 

The young seed glitters gold in his hand,

but it must fall into the black ground.

 

There, amid the tunnels of the blind worm,

it will die on its due day – and grow again.

 

So now my soul treads the path of the grain –

down into darkness – and spring’s return.

 

And you, my people, and you, my native land,

you will die and live, when the dark months end,

 

for we have been granted only this one truth:

whatever lives must follow the grain’s path.

 

by Владислав Фелицианович Ходасевич (Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich)

(1917)

translated by Robert Chandler

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Dream by Mikhail Lermontov

At blazing noon, in Dagestan’s deep valley,

a bullet in my chest, dead still I lay,

as steam yet rose above my wound, I tallied

each drop of blood, as life now now seeped away.

 

Alone I lay within a sandy hollow,

as jagged ledges teemed there, rising steep,

with sun-scorched peaks above me, burning yellow,

I too was scorched, yet slept a lifeless sleep.

 

I dreamt of lights upon an evening hour,

a lavish feast held in my native land,

and fair young maidens garlanded with flowers:

their talk of me was merry and off-hand.

 

But one of them, not joining their free chatter,

sat timidly apart, bemused, alone,

sunk in a dream, her soul by sadness shattered:

God only knows what made her so forlorn;

 

she dreamed of sand in Dagestan’s deep valley,

a gorge in which a man she knew lay dead,

black steam still rose above the wound’s scorched hollow,

as blood streamed down and cooled like molten lead.

 

by Михаил Юрьевич Лермонтов (Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov)

(1841)

translated by Alexander Levitsky