Aleksandr Pushkin

If all this true, that at the night,
When the living men are sleeping,
And from a sky, a pale moonlight
To stones of graveyards are slipping,
If true, that under cover, black,
The dead ones leave their coffins, quiet,
I call the shade of my beloved:
To me, my friend, come back, come back!

Appear! Oh, beloved shade,
Such as you were at last partition,
Such pale and cold, as winter, late,
With face deformed by last infliction.
Come, like a star from distant track,
Like puff of wind or sound's fiction,
Or like the awful apparition,
It's same to me: come back, come back!

I call you not because I tend
A hurt to men, whose fierce hatred
Had killed my dear gentle friend,
Or to cognize the Coffin, sacred,
And not because the doubts break
Sometimes my heart -- but only here,
To say that, yet, I love, my dear,
That, yet, I'm yours: come back, come back!


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, January, 2000
Edited by Dmitry Karshtedt, August, 2000