Boris Pasternak

To be the famous isn’t attractive,
Not this could ever elevate,
You needn’t to make your archive active,
You needn’t your scripts to be all saved.

Self-offering’s aimed by creation,
But ballyhoo or cheap success,
It is a shame, if worthless persons 
Are talks of towns’ populace.

But you’ve to live without phony,
To live such life that, after all,
To gain love of the space symphony,
And answer to the future’s call,

And oft to leave gaps in your traces
In fate, but in the papers, crooked,  
To mark the chapters and main places
On margins of your being’s book,

To fully sink in the unknown,
And hide in it your own steps
Like hide itself, if mist is grown,
The whole landscape of the place. 

The others, by the living traces,
Will pass your way through, bit by bit,
But wins and losses of your battles
You have not to discern on it.

You’ve never – not by fate or folly –                    
To lose an atom of your face,
But – be alive, alive and only,
Alive and only, till your last. 


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, May, 2001