classic

7 poems, translated or retranslated by Lara Biyuts
The Butterfly
by Afanasy Fet (1820-1892)
You’re right. An outline of AirI am so sweet.My velvet with its living blinking--only two wings.Don’t ask me whence, what brought me,where I speed.I light the flower down, here,and now I breathe.How long, so aimless, so effortless,I want to breathe?That’s it now, flashing, raising wingsI fly away.
Godsby Henri de Regnier (1864-1936)
I dreamt gods talked with me:one god--streams- and seaweeds-clad;one more--with vines and ears of wheat;one more--winged, inaccessibleand beautiful in his nude;and one more--with covered face;and one more--he who plucks omegas and pansies, singing,and two snakes enwind his gold thyrsus;and others…And then I said: here are flutes and baskets--taste my fruits,listen to humming of bees and the humble rustle of willows and reeds. And also I said: Listen, listen--there is someone who speaks by echo’s mouth,who is lonely amidst the world’s life,who holds the double bow and torch,he who is so inconceivably we…O sacred face! I coined you as medallionsof silver, soft as autumn dawn,of gold, hot as the sun,of copper, gloomy as night,of all the metals that sound clear as joy,that sound fatal as glory, love or doom;but the best medallions I’ve made of clay.Smiling you will count them one by one,and say, They are skillfully made; and smiling you’ll pass by.So, no one of you saw my hands tremble from tenderness,and the world’s great dream lives in me to come to life in them.No one of you realizes that I’ve coined my gods of good metals,that they are a face of all sacred, what we feelin the forests, grass, sea, winds and roses,in all phenomena, and in our body,and that they are divinely we.
Mystical Evening Twilight
by Paul Verlaine
Memory and Evening Twilight redden and tremble at the glowing skylineof expectations in flames that retireand thus enlarge, of which partitionmysterious or repeated bloom--dahlia, lily, tulip, banewort--climb around the trellis, and circleamidst the morbific exhalationsof warm and disturbing perfumes, which is poison --dahlia, lily, tulip, banewort--flooding my senses, my soul and my reason,they mix, into immense languor, Memory and Evening Twilight.
Artistby Ivan Bunin
Pebbles rustling underfoot. Through the slopping garden,he walks, glances round the basinsand subsides on a bench… Behind the new white housethe Yayla mountain range so close and heavy.Heat-wearied, looking crayon-drawn,the crane is standing in the bush, tail down,a cane-like leg… He says, “What, Bird?It’s nice at Volga now! At Yaroslavl!” Smiling,he begins thinking of his own funeral,how they will carry his coffin outdoors, how graythe vests will be in the hot sunrays,how yellow light, how white the house against the blue.“From the porch, a fat old priest goes downstairs.The choir follows him… Frightened and clicking,the crane takes wing off the old fence and dances,and with its beak it knocks on the coffin.”A tickling in his breast. Dust rushes from the highway,hot and especially dry.He takes off his pince-nez and thinks while coughing,“Yes, vaudeville… and all the rest is guille.”
La Lune Blanche
by Paul Verlaine
The white moonshines in the woods;from each boughcomes a voiceunder the branch…Oh, beloved.
The pond reflects,deep mirror,the silhouetteof the black willowwhere the wind cries…Let’s dream, now is the hour.
A vast and tenderappeasing seems to descendfrom the firmament as an iridescent orb...It’s the exquisite hour.
To Myself, by Leopardi                     And so, you’ll quiet down for ever,o my poor, tired heart.The deception’s perished--final, ultimate,which I reckoned immortal within me.I feel that not only the hopeof the dear deceptions has died,but the desire for them has gone out. Calm down, for ever. You thrilled enough.There is nothing worthy of yourpulsing, and the earth is not worthy of the sighs.Our life is melancholy and bitterness, no more;the world is dirtiness. Quiet down and stop.Despair for the final time. Fate doesn’t give usother gift than dying.From now on, despise itself,the nature, the insulting strengththat covertly bosses the showof the universal vice, despise the futility of it all.
from the Epigrams by Marcus Valerius Martialis
“King of the birds, tell me whom you are carrying?”             “The Thunderer.” “Why he has not thunderbolts in his right hand?”                              “He’s in love.” “Whose fire did smite him?”                                                              “A child’s one.” “Why are you looking at god, your beak is half-open?” “I’m whispering of Ganymede.”
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some of the poems are published as a part of my collected notes and essays The Sunless Parlour (ISBN 9781446192290). Notes, stories and translations by author of the novels La Lune Blanche (ISBN 9781409299011 and 9781445237596), Forever Jocelyn (ISBN 9781445204062) and La Arme Blanche (ISBN 9781446157916). Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, Kuzmin, Clodt, Henri de Regnier, Verlaine, Chekhov, Stéphane Mallarmé, poetry, humor. “…in a sunless parlour where an old clock ticked in the shadows and a cat slept by the empty grate.” (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited)http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/...