Владимир Набоков - Стихотворения

Farewell! Nevermore shall we meet,
we shall never touch hands — so farewell!
Your heart is now free, but in none
will 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 part
harder still would it be if we met.

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 romances
can 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 native
rivers that sea-like foam and flow.

In a clattering cart I love to travel
on country roads: watching the rising star,
yearning for sheltered sleep, my eyes unravel
the 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 double
grace of twin birches gleaming white.

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

And when the evening dew is glistening,
long may I hear the festive sound
of rustic dancers stamping, whistling
with drunkards clamoring around.

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

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

And in a dream I saw the candle-flame
of a gay supper in the land I knew;
young women crowned with flowers.... And my name
on 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, somewhere
in Daghestan, and knew the man who lay
there on the sand, the dead man, unaware
of steaming wound and blood ebbing away.

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.

Amid the blue haze of the ocean
a 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.

The little golden cloud that spent the night
upon the breast of yon great rock, next day
rose early and in haste pursued its way
eager to gambol in the azure light.

A humid trace, however, did remain
within a wrinkle of the rock. Alone
and wrapt in thought, the old gentle stone
sheds silent tears above the empty plain.

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 sands
where all forlorn on torrid cliff
   a lovely palm tree stands.

For everything, for everything, О Lord,
I thank Thee —
for the secret pangs of passions,
the poisoned fangs of kisses,
the bitter taste
of tears;
for the revenge of foes
and for the calumny of friends,
and for the waste
of 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 arranged
in such a way
that I need not keep thanking Thee
much longer

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 stars
are the stars and the sky, whereas I am a man.

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

Open the door of my prison,
let me see the daylight again,
give me a black-eyed maiden
and a horse with a jet-black mane.
Over the wide blue grassland
let 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 sailboat
with a bench of half-rotten wood
and a well-worn sail all hoary
from the tempests it has withstood.
Then I shall launch on my voyage,
friendless and therefore free,
and shall have my fling in the open
and delight in the mighty struggle
with the savage whim of the sea.

Give me a lofty palace
with an arbour all around
where amber grapes would ripen
and the broad shade fleck the ground.
Let an ever-purling fountain
among marble pillars play
and lull me to sleep and wake me
in a halo of heavenly visions
and the cool dust of its spray.

As a lily that looks at itself in a stream
so 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 guess
the 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 clime
is here in my heart growing greener with time.
When I happen to glance at the stars, then I know
that 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.

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 denser
between 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 creation
stands still and smokes in a glory of roses.
Eternity dreams of itself, as the smoke-wreaths
vibrate with the forces and forms it composes.

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

And in that wind of sidereal fancies
I 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.

When prying idly into Nature
I am paticularly fond
of watching the arrow of a swallow
over the sunset of a pond.

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

There — once again that fearless shadow
over a frowning ripple ran.
Have we not here the living image
of active poetry in man —

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

Down from her head the earth has rolled
the low sun like a redhot ball.
Down went the evening's peaceful blaze
and 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 heads
push up the ceiling of the sky.

The river of the air between
heaven and earth now fuller flows.
The breast is ridded of the heat
and breaths in freedom and repose.

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