Aleksandr Pushkin

What means for you my simple name?
It soon will die as voice of grief --
A wave splash at a distant reef,
A stir in wilderness untamed. 

In pray-for-dead despondent rolls
It will leave just the lethal trace
That likes the epitaph in lace,
Which nobody discerns at all.

What does it hold? Forgotten whole 
In new and rebel agitation,
It will not give to your young soul  
The clear and gentle commemorations.

But in the sad and silent day
You will repeat this name with fervor;
There is in whole world, you say, 
The heart in which I live forever... 
 

© Copyright, 1996
Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, September 1995,
Edited by Dmitry Karshtedt, July 1996.