By Joseph A. Brodsky

The English Poetic Translation, by Anna Polibina-Polansky

* * * New Stanzas to Augusta (1962)

So I embraced the shoulders and looked up

Onto a distant point. There  was a chair.

There were like walls there far away. They dubbed

The hue. The bulb was diligent and fair.

The furniture was tarnished, wrinkled, dark.

The sofa was gliding, coming yellow.

The empty table was so clean and stark.

The parquet seemed its shady, gloomy fellow.

The oven was ash. In a darkened frame,

The landscape looked all dead. And just the cupboard

Was half-alive. All those details untamed

Were playing at my nerver, from lofts to carpets.

A butterfly was twirling like a moth,

And it attracted, so, my sunken pupils.

Perhaps there had lived ghosts, but they flied forth,

To other nooks - like dislocated troopers.

Tr-ed in 2020

* * *

So not the Muse tries to stay that calm.

So not the dream stays unseen and dumb.

So not that one who weaved up her scarf,

Comes about to scratch my breast, with a scar.

So back to birch trees, are those logs.

So words come out from miry bogs.

So the eyes are leaking about the pillows.

So the eggs at nests, roll outside the willows.

So warming are woolen patch-work quilts.

So high are daydreams and reveries built.

So I am a fish all in need of you.

I would sip the plumbum and drinks undue.

I would come up as sunken ships only do.

And I would get drown at lakes, all doomed.

But the destiny says I am old and grey,

From upside and downwards, pray or don't pray.

I am more of veins than of hasty blood.

And my thoughts are crooky and all of mud.

We are parting, darling, forevermore.

So draw a circle, us, to remorse.

It will be myself; nothing, yet, inside.

So erase it, baby sweet, from your sight.

Tr. in March, 2020