Bella Akhmadulina

To recollect! It’s better than to have.
Just when this trice and one, that’s gone to yore,
together merge, like a bell’s tongue and cave,
a world receives one sound-poem more.

I love the passed spring, so sweet and frail;
I love my garden and my dear home,
that by a hill might were obliged to sail
over the earth and ‘neath the heaven dome.

I’m now in love, but, in the spring of past, 
I’d only felt the weakness and low fear
before the sea, which through the window’s glass
was so vague and – for my mind – so clear.

When moon and sea were merging through the night,
a rear of head was frozen by time’s flashes,
as if I, having overrun a mind,
were roughly testing Universe’s patience.    

My terrace – scanning essence of the world –
how daring was! Yet here was gladness staying
that, having had the current day and thought
in the past day, I’ll win back in the gambling.

Isn’t it a sass to spend the moon and sea –
when they are present – and to faint from passion:
they both alive, now in a draft, may be,
but soon will wake up in the clean expression?

Oh, what’s now going between ‘that’ and ‘that’ 
two instants? And how long is going?
In soul of mine is growing a shade
of something lost when old times still were growing.

Isn’t in this lies the true of the craft, fine, 
whose canons are: the deadly fear and valor,
to burn to ashes all the being’s shine
and gain the grand reflection of the halo?


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, January 20, 2005