By Joseph Brodsky

The Poetry Translation into English, by Anna Polibina-Polansky

* * * Six Years Later

("Tak dolgo vmeste prozhili, chto vnov'...")

We'd lived together, dear, for so long,

That January, the second fell at Thuesday,

Again. Amazed, the wipers sung their song.

The going sadness was brief and confusing.

The distant contours were left truly pure.

All was habitual, prepared, endured.

The snow seemed, to fall forevermore.

My palm allowed her to escape in blinking

And to return. Her eye-lids looked like sore.

In tight hugs, old-styled though, we were sinking.

I blowed a candle. She kissed, so, my shoulder.

The psychoanalyst is not that bold, yet...

The shaggy walls were now of roses stark,

Instead of birches. Both were now, with money.

For thirty days, dawns grew into a dark,

Smooth contour. It reminded southern honeys.

No pieces of good furniture, nor books.

A sofa we'd been granted, poorly looked.

Our den reminded now, a triangle.

Out of our shadows, we had made a door.

The shells were not ajar, and we were tangled.

We came through them, once and forevermore.

So from a hidden porch, we both encountered

Our common future, at its sudden bounty.

* * *

("Pomnish' svalku veschey na zheleznom stule...")

It's high time I forgot the camels' hum,

And the white mansion at the strand Zhukovsky...

By Anna Akhmatova

Can you remember a pile of goods, at an iron chair;

How you accompanied a thoughtless ethnic song,

In your low voice; do you recall a sheet at a window fair?

The snowdrafts over the cracks of the yard, slowly drawing along?

They leaved no chance for passers-by but to turn away.

Tsars, herds, animals, all stood in dismay.

We were left to get warmed under a soldier's coat

So the whirling snow mixed up our reveries, haphazard and blank.

Not a squeak, nor a voice, nor a birdie from Yalta, nor a note -

At midnight. So the flame ate a toy plane, and some true sounds sank.

At the guts of flat Empire where the Polish comes into what is Chineese to me,

You cannot avoid a burnt, nor shun a trauma.

So the nook of rich people lurks under an angle meek.

The dusty tear of a bulb is yet, what all keep in common.

You know, the winter is disturbing  cedars and piny woods.

The peasant of Frost, celebrates with a predicate and a subject, his former fears.

So he victimizes the present to the deities. He feels that grammar intrudes

Into the soul's whisper, cry, tears.

Tr. 2020