«Человек, первым открывший Бродского Западу». Беседы с Джорджем Клайном - Синтия Л. Хэвен

and flowers, or fishes

displayed on boards?

V

Perhaps a landscape smokes

among your ashes,

and with thick reading glasses

I’ll scan its slopes —

its beaches, dancers, nymphs.

Is it as bright as

the day, or dark as night is?

And could one glimpse —

ascending that sky’s screen —

some blazing lantern?

And tell me, please, what pattern

inspired this scene?

VI

It seems to me you are

a protean creature,

whose markings mask a feature

of face, or stone, or star.

Who was the jeweler,

brow uncontracted,

who from our world extracted

your miniature —

a world where madness brings

us low, and lower,

where we are things, while you are

the thought of things?

VII

Why were these lovely shapes

and colors given

for your one day of life in

this land of lakes?

– a land whose dappled mir-

rors have one merit:

reflecting space, they store it.

Such brief existence tore

away your chance

to be captured, delivered,

within cupped hands to quiver —

the hunter’s eye entrance.

VIII

You shun every response —

but not from shyness

or wickedness or slyness,

and not because

you’re dead. Dead or alive,

to God’s least creature

is given voice for speech, or

for song – a sign

that it has found a way

to bind together,

and stretch life’s limits, whether

an hour or day.

IX

But you lack even this:

the means to utter

a word. Yet, probe the matter;

it’s better thus.

You’re not in heaven’s debt,

on heaven’s ledger.

It’s not a curse, I pledge you,

that your small weight

and span rob you of tongue.

Sound’s burden, too, is grievous.

And you’re more speechless,

less fleshed, than time.

X

Living too brief an hour

for fear or trembling,

you spin, motelike, ascending

above this bed of flowers,

beyond the prison space

where past and future

combine to break, or batter,

our lives, and thus

when your path leads you far

to open meadows,

your pulsing wings bring shadows

and shapes to air.

XI

So, too, the sliding pen

which inks a surface

has no sense of the purpose

of any line

or that the whole will end

as an amalgam

of heresy and wisdom;

it therefore trusts the hand

whose silent speech incites

fingers to throbbing —

whose spasm reaps no pollen,

but eases hearts.

XII

Such beauty, set beside

so brief a season,

suggests to our stunned reason

this bleak surmise:

the world was made to hold

no end or telos,

and if – as some would tell us —

there is a goal,

it’s not ourselves.

No butterfly collector

can trap light or detect where

the darkness dwells.

XIII

Should I bid you farewell

as to a day that’s over?

Men’s memories may wither,

grow thin, and fall

like hair. The trouble is,

behind their backs are:

not double beds for lovers,

hard sleep, the past,

or days in shrinking files

backstretched – but, rather,

huge clouds, circling together,

of butterflies.

XIV

You’re better than No-thing.

That is, you’re nearer,

more reachable, and clearer.

Yet you’re akin

to nothingness —

like it, you’re wholly empty.

And if, in your life’s venture,

No-thing takes flesh,

that flesh will die.

Yet while you live you offer

a frail and shifting buffer,

dividing it from me.

1973

Глава 10. Томас Венцлова, «In Memory of a Poet: Variation on a Theme»[202] (перевод Джорджа Л. Клайна)

В Петербурге мы сойдемся снова.

Osip Mandelstam [203]

Did you regain this promised place, revisit

This skeleton, this bare map, of a city?

The Admiralty spire sinks through the blizzard[204];

The geometric paint on level squares

Turns pale.

            Electric power is disconnected,

A shade emerges from its icy spectrum;

Behind Izmailov Boulevard a specter

Of rusty locomotives looms and stares

This streetcar is the same, this threadbare topcoat…

A scrap of paper spins above the asphalt,

The nineteenth century’s enormous icefloe

Blocks off the station’s stream.

            The roaring sky

Slams shut. The decades fade and lose their features,

The clouded cities blow past like bad weather;

There is a kind of gift in echoed gestures[205],

But no man’s ever born a second time.

He draws back to the February morning

Which grips this slow and sluggish northern Rome, and

Moves off to test a different horizon,

Whose rhythms reproduce the beat of snow.

He’s called to wolf-caves where the tense walls glisten,

To mental hospitals, to dirt, to prison,

To Petersburg’s bleak, black familiar vision,

At which his words were pointed long ago.

There’s no rebirth of harmony or