By Joseph A. Brodsky

The English Poetic Renditions, by Anna A. Polibina-Polansky

*** A Part of Speech
("Ya ne to chto s'hozhu s uma, no ustal za leto...")
I do not get mad, but rather, for the summer, defatigated.
So you flip through the wardrobe, and the day is done.
So let the wintry season coming, neagate them,
Cities, mankind, but especially, the leaves' rattling tongue.
I will go to sleep in all garments or read someon's book from behind.
So the remnants of years remind
A dog fleeing from a blind.
So they cross the road at a place all due.
The liberty allows you,
To forget the tyrant's name's tune.
So your saliva seems sweeter than candies of Shiraze, and so it crusts.
Your brain is twisted like horns. But your thoughts, you do trust.
Never once in a blue moon, you can remain
Of blue spirits, and no dripple makes a visible stain.

*** A Lulluby of a Herring's Cape
X. ("Opuskaya veki, ya vizhu krai...")
I drop my lids and watch the bending elbow
And cloth. So the landscape means, paradise.
Of no strangth. The orchard cannot be helped, so.
It's a planet of no prospective, a flood, in my eyes.
So touch the feather with your finger. It's aching.
So acrid feeling are what, the bliss, are making.

So the substance can't be physically prolongued.
It's a peak, a summit. The air of Chronos is further.
Keep this speech. The paradise, is a direction wrong.
The cape is a cone. The nose of the ship, seeks its earth sweet.
Follow the hands if you mean to know the hour.
The eye is sunk in a plate of a handface. The clock is no more empowered.

Multiply it twice, as it is nothingness sheer.
Sum it up, and you'll get the idea of a place.
So the words are stirring about, someplace near.
Figures are just a wide gesture, to be traced.
So the air, with not a trace, melt away.
It's like ice: it existed, but all in vain.

*** ("V tvoih chasah ne tol'ko hod, no tish...")
In your watch the pace is overwon by silence.
It is no walking by a strict circle.
So the pendulum reminds a mouse, not a cat ever violent.
They both give a trembling smirking.
They scratch about and mix up dates.
Their rattling and battling and ceaseless existence -
Can't be noticed in villages. Their traits
Are seen where the cattle is kept at no distance.
So each hour gets erased in brain.
And former years are in strokes, fleshless and bashful.
By the wintry season they ought to be lost in rains.
Hens, sheep, goats crowd up in barns, in fear od snowy ashes.
Tr. in May, 2020