Zinaida Gippius

The vomit of the war – the feast of the October!
From all this wine, that desperately stinks,
Oh, how loathsome was later your hangover,
My country, sunk in poverty and sins!             

To please which dogs or swarms of awful demons,
To what a dream of what an evil sleep,
The people killed their freedom in their madness,
And even didn’t killed  – just flogged to death by a weep?

The dogs and imps laugh o’er a fishy bone
And guns, too, laugh, through their mouths-spans … 
You’ll soon be penned by sticks into your pigsty, old, --
The people, not respecting own saints. 


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, November, 2000