NINA GORSKY: But the Ideal...

But the Ideal...

(From Juan Ramon Jimenez)
Palms send firs their polite salutation 
with a stream, very quiet and clear;
and the firs pay the palms their attention
with a clean stream you can never hear.

All the green and the blue, enveloped 
in the night, becomes greenish and brown,
and a doleful face of a hope
in the soulless mirror is found.

But all that’s ideal is our base real,
but a faith always is our treasure,
and that that was out of us the ideal,
Becomes our ideal’s main measure.


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, December, 2002