Translations

I love your eyes, my dearest friend,
With playful sparks, burning and brightening,
That a gently raised glimpse may tend,
And, like a cloud-strewn ring of lightning,
Your graceful glance would let descend…

Still there’s a charm of greater powers:
You gaze on the ash of a zeal
That once shone through passion-kissed hours;
Your eyelashes hardly conceal
The dim embers where desire cowers.

…I’d like, maybe, to live with you
In a small city,
Where the twilight is eternal
And bells let out eternal chimes.
And in a small, cosy lodge in the countryside —
Delicate ringing
Of ancient hours — like little droplets of time.
And sometimes, in the evening, out of an attic somewhere —
Flute sounds,
The flautist at the window.
And large tulips are on the windowsills.
And you, by any chance, might have even loved me…

For you there’s a sea, brimming
With longing — calm, pristine
Cradled in your arm a city sleeps
Where my dreams are slow and serene

A feeble lamp, under a half-moon window
I see your name — laces of gold and silver
For five decades binding me in their coils

Through a mirror shrouded in dust,
In the haze of slumber,
I strain to find ways — as I must —
Toward you, to shelter.

I see a steamboat with its mast,
And you are there, aboard…
You, in the train’s fumes… Fields are vast,
Where twilight’s grief is poured…

O, Muse of tears, most beauteous of the muses!
O you, furious issue of the glowing night!
You unleash a pitch-black snowstorm all over Rus’,
And your wail pierces us like a hail of arrows.

We are stricken; and Lo! the name that was repressed
One hundred thousand times — pledging to you: Anna
Akhmatova! — escapes as a sigh of protest
That sinks into the namelessness of Gehenna.

I dwell in a land up the Great River
That winds its way to your murmuring shore.
I long for you each day in the desert of your absence
As the River quenches our thirst and sore.

This inner passion would only wither
If the River should halt its winding flow.
I hope for nothing but to be in such thought of yours too —
And that is everything you are supposed to know.

All eyes under the sun — burning,
A day like no other.
‘Tis to you, I am confiding,
In case I should wander —

Whoever’s lips I’d be kissing
As time strikes for lovers,
Whomever I’d pledge to, trembling
With the midnight’s darkness, —

Live, as passed from mother to child,
Like blossoms blossoming,
Never letting glances go wild
To someone, fancying…