Читать книгу In Praise of Poetry - Ольга Седакова - Страница 61

4. SON OF THE MUSES

Strange images and pictures

will enter through closed doors,

will find their own names

and something for me to do.

They’ll pour my simple reason

just like sand onto the shore,

rock it like a cradle,

or weave it into a basket.

And they will ask:

what do you see?

And I shall say:

all I can see

are waves beating the shore.

Waves beating without end,

for a lofty wave is a chest

for the best and most beautiful ring

and a cellar for wine, the best.

Let the deep swallow its visions

or let it rumble like a furnace,

it will carry us out—

But where?

Wherever we happen to go,

wherever we are told.

But where, my spirit, but where?

O, how should I know?

The abyss is better than a shepherd

at tending its own flocks:

visible to no one

they climb all over the hills

and play there like the stars.

Their constant ringing,

their milky way,

scatters like mercury far away

and then comes back to us:

For poor are folk, and scant is our tale,

for all end here, and the world has long forgotten us.

As Policrates threw his ring

to whatever was meant to be—

whoever was poor,

whoever was rich,

whoever waged wars,

or tended calves—

the most precious

of all these things

is the one smallest grain flying back.

So take your ring, Policrates,

you have lived your life in vain.

Whoever throws out the most

will be loved by people the most.

In blackened sores and in his sins

he is like those smoky hearths

with the same old fire, the same old glint

of the heavens’ merry crackle.

And the waves beat, they know no end,

for a lofty wave is a chest

for the best and most beautiful ring

and a cellar for wine, the best.

When the deep swallows its visions,

we will say:

there’s nothing to lose!

And the deep will say that’s so.

And the dead are not embarrassed

by a strange and meager zeal—

they whisper in his ear

all that he forgot.

Having said goodbye to torment,

they crowd around the doors

with stories like those

they tell on Christmas Eve—

of gold and pearls and of the light

that comes out of nothing.