Читать книгу In Praise of Poetry - Ольга Седакова - Страница 66

9. A DWARF TELLS FORTUNES BY THE STARS

(and also about leprosy)

O leprosy, all ancient horror

can fit into this one thing alone.

Immortality itself seems to sink

like a stone at the very sight of it:

can the heavens cause such offense

that a man will hate another man

as he does his own death?

Yet evil which no eye can see

is more abysmal than leprosy.

The worthiest man visits lepers

and cleans their wounds with tender hands

and serves them as a miser does his gold:

they’re bounty for such holy hearts.

And he carries their shame with him,

as the ocean carries a hollow canoe,

and rocks,

and shifts, and moves around,

and does as God has bid . . .

But who will help one who is wicked,

when he gnaws at another’s life

like a dog with a stolen bone?

Why does he understand the stars?

They fall to pieces, part, divide.

All love this clustering—but not him.

He is like a nail driven into himself.

Who digs such nails out?

Who’ll bring him medicine and sit

at his bedside? Who is

the doctor that will, without revulsion,

treat his guile and envy?

Maybe shame alone—

and the dwarf too knows this.

He pushes away each constellation

and asks for retaliation.

(The evil once done by us,

now, with the same secret lust

it always grew on, feeds

on self-immolation):

“I am, but may I be made

like something not yet made,

and you will read the pure light of suffering

in me, just as I read the stars!”

And he broke free from the deepest dark

to a new and different sky,

from the gloom that would but growl and bark,

being what it was: himself, his I.