Стихотворения - Владимир Набоков

Михаил Лермонтов{*}

449. FAREWELL{*}

Farewell! Nevermore shall we meet,we shall never touch hands — so farewell!Your heart is now free, but in nonewill it ever be happy to dwell.

One moment together we came:time eternal is nothing to this!All senses we suddenly drained,burned all in the flame of one kiss.

Farewell! And be wise, do not grieve:our love was too short for regret,and hard as we found it to partharder still would it be if we met.

450. MY NATIVE LAND{*}

If I do love my land, strangely I love it:'tis something reason cannot cure.Glories of war I do not covet,but neither peace proud and secure,not the mysterious past and dim romancescan spur my soul to pleasant fancies.

And still I love thee — why I hardly know:I love thy fields so coldly meditative,native dark swaying woods and nativerivers that sea-like foam and flow.

In a clattering cart I love to travelon country roads: watching the rising star,yearning for sheltered sleep, my eyes unravelthe trembling lights of sad hamlets afar.

I also love the smoke of burning stubble,vans huddled in the prairie night;corn on a hill crowned with the doublegrace of twin birches gleaming white.

Few are the ones who feel the pleasureof seeing barns bursting with grain and hay,well-thatched cottage-roofs made to measureand shutters carved and windows gay.

And when the evening dew is glistening,long may I hear the festive soundof rustic dancers stamping, whistlingwith drunkards clamoring around.

451. THE TRIPLE DREAM{*}

I dreamt that with a bullet in my sidein a hot gorge of Daghestan I lay.Deep was the wound and steaming, and the tideof my life-blood ebbed drop by drop away.

Alone I lay amid a silent mazeof desert sand and bare cliffs rising steep,their tawny summits burning in the blazethat burned me too; but lifeless was my sleep.

And in a dream I saw the candle-flameof a gay supper in the land I knew;young women crowned with flowers.... And my nameon their light lips hither and thither flew.

But one of them sat pensively apart,not joining in the light-lipped gossiping,and there alone, God knows what made her heart,her young heart dream of such a hidden thing....

For in her dream she saw a gorge, somewherein Daghestan, and knew the man who laythere on the sand, the dead man, unawareof steaming wound and blood ebbing away.

452. THE ANGEL{*}

An angel was crossing the pale vault of night,   and his song was as soft as his flight,and the moon and the stars and the clouds in a throng   stood enthralled by this holy song.

He sang of the bliss of the innocent shades   in the depths of celestial glades;he sang of the Sovereign Being, and free   of guile was his eulogy.

He carried a soul in his arms, a young life   to the world of sorrow and strife,and the young soul retained the throb of that song   — without words, but vivid and strong.

And tied to this planet long did it pine   full of yearnings dimly divine,and our dull little ditties could never replace   songs belonging to infinite space.

453. THE SAIL{*}

Amid the blue haze of the oceana sail is passing, white and frail.What do you seek in a far country?What have you left at home, lone sail?

The billows play, the breezes whistle,and rhythmically creaks the mast.Alas, you seek no happy future,nor do you flee a happy past.

Below the mirrored azure brightens,above the golden rays increase —but you, wild rover, pray for tempests,as if in tempests there were peace.

454. THE ROCK{*}

The little golden cloud that spent the nightupon the breast of yon great rock, next dayrose early and in haste pursued its wayeager to gambol in the azure light.

A humid trace, however, did remainwithin a wrinkle of the rock. Aloneand wrapt in thought, the old gentle stonesheds silent tears above the empty plain.

455. IMITATION OF HEINE{*}

A pine there stands in the northern wilds   alone on a barren bluff,swaying and dreaming and clothed by the snow   in a cloak of the finest fluff —

dreaming a dream of a distant waste,   a country of sun-flushed sandswhere all forlorn on torrid cliff   a lovely palm tree stands.

456. THANKSGIVING{*}

For everything, for everything, О Lord,I thank Thee —for the secret pangs of passions,the poisoned fangs of kisses,the bitter tasteof tears;for the revenge of foesand for the calumny of friends,and for the wasteof a soul's fervor burning in a desert,and for all things that have deceived me here.But please, О Lord,henceforth let matters be arrangedin such a waythat I need not keep thanking Theemuch longer

457. THE SKY AND THE STARS{*}

Fair is the evening sky,clear are the stars in the distance,as clear as the joy of an infant.Oh, why can't I tell myself even in thought:The stars are as clear as my joy!

What is your trouble —people might query.Just this is my trouble,excellent people: the sky and the starsare the stars and the sky, whereas I am a man.

People are enviousof one another.I, on the contrary, —only the beautiful stars do I envy,only to be in their place do I wish.

458. THE WISH{*}

Open the door of my prison,let me see the daylight again,give me a black-eyed maidenand a horse with a jet-black mane.Over the wide blue grasslandlet that courser carry me,and just once, just a little closer,let me glance at that alien portion —that life and that liberty.

Give me a leaky sailboatwith a bench of half-rotten woodand a well-worn sail all hoaryfrom the tempests it has withstood.Then I shall launch on my voyage,friendless and therefore free,and shall have my fling in the openand delight in the mighty strugglewith the savage whim of the sea.

Give me a lofty palacewith an arbour all aroundwhere amber grapes would ripenand the broad shade fleck the ground.Let an ever-purling fountainamong marble pillars playand lull me to sleep and wake mein a halo of heavenly visionsand the cool dust of its spray.

Афанасий Фет{*}

459. ALTER EGO{*}

As a lily that looks at itself in a streamso my very first song was your mirrored dream.But whose was the triumph? Who gave and who took?Was it brook from blossom or blossom from brook?

Your childish soul could so easily guessthe thoughts I was inwardly moved to express.Though I live without you by a dreary decree,we are one — for nothing can part you and me.

The grass on your grave in a distant climeis here in my heart growing greener with time.When I happen to glance at the stars, then I knowthat together like gods we had looked at their glow.

Love has words of its own, these words cannot die.Our singular case special judges will try:in the crowd they will notice us right from the start —for as one we will come — we whom nothing can part.

460. «When life is torture, when hope is a traitor…»{*}

Die Gleichmössigkeit des Loufes der Zeit in allen Köpfen beweist mehr, als irgend etwas, dass wir Alle in denselben Traum versenkt sind, ja dass es Ein Wesen ist, welches ihrt träumt.[20]

When life is torture, when hope is a traitor,when in the battle my soul must surrender,then daily, nightly I lower my eyelids,and all is revealed in a strange flash of splendor.

Like nights in autumn, life's darkness seems denserbetween the distant and thunderless flashes.Alone the starlight is endlessly friendly —the stars that sparkle through golden bright lashes.

And all this lambent abyss is so limpid,so close is the sky to my spirit's desire,that, straight out of time into timelessness peering,your throne I discern, empyrean fire.

And there the altar of all creationstands still and smokes in a glory of roses.Eternity dreams of itself, as the smoke-wreathsvibrate with the forces and forms it composes.

And all that courses down cosmic channels,and every ray of the mind or of matteris but your reflection, empyrean fire,dreams, only dreams that flit by and scatter.

And in that wind of sidereal fanciesI float like vapor, now dimmer, now brighter —and thanks to my vision, and thanks to oblivion,with ease I breathe, and life's burden is lighter.

461. THE SWALLOW{*}

When prying idly into NatureI am paticularly fondof watching the arrow of a swallowover the sunset of a pond.

See — there it goes, and skims, and glances:the alien element, I fear,roused from its glassy sleep might captureblack lightning quivering so near.

There — once again that fearless shadowover a frowning ripple ran.Have we not here the living imageof active poetry in man —

of something leading me, banned mortal,to venture where I dare not stop —striving to scoop from a forbiddenmysterious element one drop?

Фёдор Тютчев{*}

462. NIGHTFALL{*}

Down from her head the earth has rolledthe low sun like a redhot ball.Down went the evening's peaceful blazeand seawaves have absorbed it all.

Heavy and near the sky had seemed.But now the stars are rising high,they glow and with their humid headspush up the ceiling of the sky.

The river of the air betweenheaven and earth now fuller flows.The breast is ridded of the heatand breaths in freedom and repose.

And now there goes through Nature's veinsa liquid shiver, swift and sweet,as though the waters of a springhad come to touch her burning feet.

463. TEARS{*}