Pavel Antokolsky

The painter, ardent, friendly, pure and smart,
Knew that this child, so shy and so rosy,
Is yellow and dry as a lemon squeezed from sides,
That blood of hers bears dreams of the many frozen
In gorgeous tombs; that not the Brabant lace
Is priceless, -- but all colleges, that famous,
Could not define the quantity of deaths
By which she lives. He saw a chip of nervous
And feeble a family. A cur of idol’s race,
Demur, sweet-toothed; the love of court’s dwarfs, sexless,
The black confessors’ scourge. He saw in her the state
Of Spanish History. He saw: the veil of breathless, 
Dead soul beats in air. Its vessel’s fully drained.

The duennas came as herds of ships. They sighted 
In the portrait – mirror. And he heard the stream
Of florid phrases. In the immense title,
The word like “charming” drowned after him.
Her father-king was loosing his jaw, idle.
Unblocking his black mouth, - pale and grim -
He croaked: ‘You’ll be fed below stairs, Velazkquez.’
And he went off to see her in his dreams.

His days and years flew in the dancing, hellish,
All was there: Gold. Forgetfulness. And thirst
For sleepless toil. Was cut from public, selfish, –
The painter’s soul, constant as it was. 
It craves for youth. Yet it will soon be aging,
It craves for vision. Vision will be lost.

Then centuries passed. The whole long three centuries,
And she looks past their eyes, as he told her to do, -
The child Infanta in the portrait, senseless, -
The empty Louvre, the old museum through,
Through sheen and silence as it was at home.              

And the little girl sees from the people’s eyes,
That she has loosen nothing of her years –
Neither her dwarfs, nor dolls, nor martyrs of the pasts;
That our world is made of the same materials
Which she inherited. The world of golden stripes,
Of carving’s notches, traces of the ringing
Of a bronze clock. Its chime got dead in nights. 

And pitilessly set in silk, so hard and so stout,
And older than her Dad and even her granddad,
Dull as an idol, proved as a grass on mounds,   
The child is laughing. Strong, because she’s dead.


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, December, 2000