Владимир Набоков - Стихотворения

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.

Friends, with my eyes I love caressing
the purple of a flashing wine,
nor do I scorn the fragrant ruby
of clustered fruit that leaves entwine.

I love to look around when Nature
seems as it were immersed in May;
when bathed in redolence she slumbers
and smiles throughout her dreamy day.

I love to see the face of Beauty
flushed with the air of Spring that seeks
softly to toy with silky ringlets
or deepen dimples on her cheeks.

But all voluptuous enchantments,
lush grapes, rich roses — what are you
compared to tears, that sacred fountain,
that paradisal morning dew!

Therein divinest beams are mirrored,
and in those burning drops they break,
and breaking — what resplendent rainbows
upon Life's thunderclouds they make!

As soon as mortal eyes thou touchest,
with wings, Angel of Tears, the world
dissolves in mist, and lo! a skyful
of Seraph faces is unfurled.

Soft sand comes up to our horses' shanks
   as we ride in the darkening day
and the shadows of pines have closed their ranks:
   all is shadow along our way.

In denser masses the black trees rise.
   what a comfortless neighborhood!
Grim night like a beast with a hundred eyes
   peers out of the underwood.

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.

How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.

Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blended by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard…
take in their song and speak no word.

Love at the closing of our days
is apprehensive and very tender.
Glow brighter, brighter, farewell rays
of one last love in its evening splendor.

Blue shade takes half the world away:
through western clouds alone some light is slanted.
О tarry, О tarry, declining day,
enchantment, let me stay enchanted.

The blood runs thinner, yet the heart
remains as ever deep and tender.
О last belated love, thou art
a blend of joy and of hopeless surrender.

Now the ashen shadows mingle,
tints are faded, sounds remote.
Life has dwindled to a single
vague reverberating note.
In the dusk I hear the humming
of a moth I cannot see.
Whence is this oppression coming?
I'm in all, and all's in me.

Gloom so dreamy, gloom so lulling,
flow into my deepest deep,
flow, ambrosial and dulling,
steeping everything in sleep.
With oblivion's obscuration
fill my senses to the brim,
make me taste obliteration,
in this dimness let me dim.

When sacred Night sweeps heavenward, she takes
the glad, the winsome day, and folding it,
rolls up its golden carpet that had been
spread over an abyssmal pit.

Gone vision-like is the external world,
and man, a homeless orphan, has to face
in utter helplessness, naked, alone,
the blackness of immeasurable space.

Upon himself he has to lean; with mind
abolished, thought unfathered, in the dim
depths of his soul he sinks, for nothing comes
from outside to support or limit him.

All life and brightness seem an ancient dream —
while in the very substance of the night,
unravelled, alien, he now perceives
a fateful something that is his by right.

When Autumn has just come, there is
most brief a lull: brief but divine.
All day 'tis like some precious prism,
and limpidly the evenings shine.

Where lusty sickles swung and corn-ears bent
the plain is empty now: wider it seems.
Alone a silky filament
across the idle furrow gleams.

The airy void, now birdless, is revealed,
but still remote is the first whirl of snow;
and stainless skies in mellow blueness flow
upon the hushed reposing field.

The storm withdrew, but Thor had found his oak,
and there it lay magnificently slain,
and from its limbs a remnant of blue smoke
spread to bright trees repainted by the rain —

— while thrush and oriole made haste to mend
their broken melodies throughout the grove,
upon the crests of which was propped the end
of a virescent rainbow edged with mauve.

Human tears. О the tears! you that flow
when life is begun — or half-gone,
tears unseen, tears unknown, you that none
can number or drain, you that run
like the streamlets of rain from the low
clouds of Autumn, long before dawn…

The heat was fierce. Great forests were on fire.
Time dragged its feet in dust. A cock was crowing
in an adjacent lot.
                     As I pushed open
my garden-gate I saw beside the road
a wandering Serb asleep upon a bench
his back against the palings. He was lean
and very black, and down his half-bared breast
there hung a heavy silver cross, diverting
the trickling sweat.
                      Upon the fence above him,
clad in a crimson petticoat, his monkey
sat munching greedily the dusty leaves
of a syringa bush; a leathern collar
drawn backwards by its heavy chain bit deep
into her throat.
                 Hearing me pass, the man
stirred, wiped his face and asked me for some water.
He took one sip to see whether the drink
was not too cold, then placed a saucerful
upon the bench, and, instantly, the monkey
slipped down and clasped the saucer with both hands
dipping her thumbs; then, on all fours, she drank,
her elbows pressed against the bench, her chin
touching the boards, her backbone arching higher
than her bald head. Thus, surely, did Darius
bend to a puddle on the road when fleeing
from Alexander's thundering phalanges.
When the last drop was sucked the monkey swept
the saucer off the bench, and raised her head,
and offered me her black wet little hand.
Oh, I have pressed the fingers of great poets,
leaders of men, fair women, but no hand
had ever been so exquisitely shaped
nor had touched mine with such a thrill of kinship,
and no man's eyes had peered into my soul
with such deep wisdom… Legends of lost ages
awoke in me thanks to that dingy beast
and suddenly I saw life in its fullness
and with a rush of wind and wave and worlds
the organ music of the universe
boomed in my ears, as it had done before
in immemorial woodlands.
                               And the Serb
then went his way thumping his tambourine:
on his left shoulder, like an Indian prince
upon an elephant, his monkey swayed.
A huge incarnadine but sunless sun
hung in a milky haze. The sultry summer
flowed endlessly upon the wilting wheat.

That day the war broke out, that very day.

What is the use time and rhyme?
We live in peril, paupers all.
The tailors sit, the builders climb,
but coats will tear and houses fall.

And only seldom with a sob
of tenderness I hear… oh, quite
a different existence throb
through this mortality and blight.

Thus does a wife, when days are dull,
place breathlessly, with loving care,
her hand upon her body, full
of the live burden swelling there.

Brightly lit from above I am sitting
in my circular room; this is I —
looking up at a sky made of stucco,
at a sixty-watt sun in that sky.

All around me, and also lit brightly,
all around me my furniture stands,
chair and table and bed — and I wonder
sitting there what to do with my hands.

Frost-engendered white feathery palmtrees
on the window-panes silently bloom;
loud and quick clicks the watch in my pocket
as I sit in my circular room.

Oh, the leaden, the beggarly bareness
of a life where no issue I see!
Whom on earth could I tell how I pity
my own self and the things around me?

And then clasping my knees I start slowly
to sway backwards and forwards, and soon
I am speaking in verse, I am crooning
to myself as I sway in a swoon.

What a vague, what a passionate murmur
lacking any intelligent plan;
but a sound may be truer than reason
and a word may be stronger than man.

And then melody, melody, melody
blends my accents and joins in their quest,
and a delicate, delicate, delicate
pointed blade seems to enter my breast.

High above my own spirit I tower,
high above mortal matter I grow:
subterranean flames lick my ankles,
past my brow the cool galaxies flow.

With big eyes — as my singing grows wilder —
with the eyes of a serpent maybe,
I keep watching the helpless expression
of the poor things that listen to me.

And the room and the furniture slowly,
slowly start in a circle to sail,
and a great heavy lyre is from nowhere
handed me by a ghost through the gale.

And the sixty-watt sun has now vanished,
and away the false heavens are blown:
on the smoothness of glossy black boulders
this is Orpheus standing alone.