Boris Pasternak

A little nightingale, for a night,
Means what a pail means for wells, fulled.
I’m not sure, that starry skies glide
From songs to the other ones, truly.

But when her night song fuller rings,
The night o’er the song comes else broader.
A root of a tree better brings
When sop strikes into rooter’s borders.

And if there is wordless delight
Of beauty of leafage of birches,
It seems, that a song strikes a hut,
With chain, that is mighty and tortures.

And then sadness drops from the steel,
And then night dissolves into mire,
And all, till the far ploughed fields 
Through it from the garden, is spied.


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, May, 2001