I loved you – and maybe love
still smoulders in my heart;
but let my love not trouble
you or cause you any hurt.
I loved you but stayed silent,
timid, despairing, jealous;
I loved you truly – God grant
you such love from someone else.
by Александр Сергеевич Пушкин (Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin)
a.k.a. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin
(1829)
translated by Robert Chandler
Cars pass him by; he’ll never own one.
Men won’t believe in him for this.
Let them come into the hills
And meet him wandering a road,
Fenced with rain, as I have now;
The wind feathering his hair;
The sky’s ruins, gutted with fire
Of the late sun, smouldering still.
Nothing is his, neither the land
Nor the land’s flocks. Hired to live
On hills too lonely, sharing his hearth
With cats and hens, he has lost all
Property but the grey ice
Of a face splintered by life’s stone.
by R. S. Thomas
from Tares (1961)
This, not graveyard roses, is my gift;
And I won’t burn sticks of incense:
You died as unflinchingly as you lived,
With magnificent defiance.
Drank wine, and joked – were still the wittiest,
Choked on the stifling air.
You yourself let in the terrible guest
And stayed alone with her.
Now you’re no more. And at your funeral feast
We can expect no comment from the mutes
On your high, stricken life. One voice at least
Must break the silence, like a flute.
O, who would have believed that I who have been tossed
On a slow fire to smoulder, I, the buried days’
Orphan and weeping mother, I who have lost
Everything, and forgotten everyone, half-crazed –
Would be recalling one so full of evergy
And will, and touched by that creative flame,
Who only yesterday, it seems, chatted to me,
Hiding the illness crucifying him.
by Анна Ахматова (Anna Akhmatova)
(House on the Fontanka, 1940)
from Тростник (Reed) / Из шести книг (From the Sixth Book)
translation by D. M. Thomas
Rambling At The Bridge Head 