Joseph A. Brodsky

The English Poetic Translations, by Anna Polibina-Polansky

*** At the 'Continental' Hotel

Invincible is MondriAn, the artist.

In windows, cubes do celebrate themselves.

The air is sipped. The angles straight, are hard so.

Thighs of a beauty symbolize a shelf.

Oh ninety grades, my arms all blankly last.

Her robe reminds of magic semicircles.

The face of clock, its image, forth, does cast.

Acteks and other Indian tribes, are workers

Of fair calendars. Just to refuse,

It's needed, all those empty, misty days.

When one can't get indulged to the caves

Of Platon. There is none, our path to pave.

We are left, rules of circles, to obey.

Those thighs and ankles are, just an excuse.

*** A Village Excerpt

You forgot the village lost in countless bogs.

And in groves thick, where the scare-crows

Are not kept in gardens. The oat lets through its rows, just cows.

And the snowdrafts cover up those scattered logs.

Granny Stacia must now be dead, and Pesterev is hardly alive.

Or he sits at the backyard, and the thing he thrives

At is the following: he makes, out of legs of the bed,

Either a door or gates, just to shut up the shed.

Logs slowly go splinters,

And folks sit at raddish, in winters.

The star blinks because of the fume

There in the frosty sky; the constellations are few.

The bride sits not in silks, the festivity of frozen vapor

Goes on. Empty is our place where we made love at nights.

The loneliness, by the soul, is denied.

Out are close ones and neighbors.

Tr-ed in 2020, Moscow