1.
And now there rolls in, as on casters, a character,
waxlike, lean-loined, with red nostrils soot-stuffed,
and I sit and cannot decide: is it human
or nothing special—just garrulous dust?
Like a blustering beggar, the pest of the poorhouse,
like an evil old schoolmate, like the head spy
(in that thick slurred murmur: “Say, what were you doing
in such and such place?”), like a dream,
like a spy, like a hangman, like an evil old schoolmate,
like the Influence on the Balkan Novella of—er—
the Symbolist School, only worse. There are matters, matters,
which, so to speak, even … (Akakiy Akakievich
had a weakness, if you remember, for “weed words,”
and he’s like an Adverb, my waxy guest),
and my heart keeps pressing, and my heart keeps tossing,
and I can’t any more—while his speech
fairly tumbles on downhill, like sharp loose gravel,
and the burry-R’d meek heart must harken to him,
aye, harken entranced to the buoyant gentleman
because it has got no words and no fame.
Like a mockery of conscience in a cheap drama,
like a hangman, and shiverings, and the last dawn—
Oh, wave, swell up higher! The stillness is grateful
for the least bit of ternary music—No, gone!
I can’t make my tongue conform to those accents,
for my visitor speaks—and so weightily, folks,
and so cheerfully, and the creep wears in turn
a panama hat, a cap, a helmet, a fez:
illustrations of various substantial arguments,
headgear in the sense of externalized thought?
Or maybe—oh, that would be really something
if thereby the clown indicated to me
that I kept changing countries like counterfeit money,
hurrying on and afraid to look back,
like a phantom dividing in two, like a candle
between mirrors sailing into the low sun.
It is far to the meadows where I sobbed in my childhood
heaving missed an Apollo, and farther yet
to the alley of firs where the midday sunlight
glowed with fissures of fire between bands of jet.
But my word, curved to form an aerial viaduct,
spans the world, and across in a strobe-effect spin
of spokes I keep endlessly passing incognito
into the flame-licked night of my native land.
To myself I appear as an idol, a wizard
bird-headed, emerald gloved, dressed in tights
made of bright-blue scales. I pass by. Reread it
and pause for a moment to ponder these lines.
Addressed to non-beings. Apropos, that shuffle
is no viaduct, but a procession of elouds,
and deprived of the simplest of possible blessings
(reaching up to the elbows, the temples, the eyes),
“Your poor books,” he breezily said, “will finish
by hopelessly fading in exile. Alas,
those two thousand leaves of frivolous fiction
will be scattered; but genuine foliage has
a place where to fall: there’s the soil, there’s Russia,
there’s a path drenched by maples in violet blood,
there’s a threshold where lie overlapping gold aces,
there are ditches; but your unfortunate books
without soil, without path, without ditch, without threshold,
will be shed in a void where you brought forth a branch,
as bazaar fakirs do (that is, not without faking),
and not long will it bloom in the smoke-colored air.
Who, some autumn night, who, tell us, please, in the backwoods
of Russia, by lamplight, in his overcoat,
amidst cigarette gills, miscellaneous sawdust,
and other illumed indiscernibles—who
on the table a sample of your prose will open,
absorbed, will read you to the noise of the rain,
to the noise of the birch tree that rushes up windowward
and to its own level raises the book?
No, never will anyone in the great spaces
make mention of even one page of your work;
the now savage will dwell in his savage ignorance,
friends of steppes won’t forget their steppes for your sake.”
In a long piece of poetry, “Fame,” the author
is concerned, so to speak, with the problem, is irked
by the thought of contacting the reader’s awareness …
“This too, I’m afraid, will vanish for good.
So repeat after me (as one rakes a delicious
sore to get to the end, to its heaven): Not once,
not once will my name come up briefly, save maybe
-as a star briefly passing among tragic clouds—
In a specialist’s work, in a note to the title
of some émigré churchyard and on a par
with the names of my co-orthographical brethren
which a matter of locus had forced upon me.
Repeated? And furthermore, not without brio,
you happened to write in some quite foreign tongue.
You recall the particular anise-oil flavor
of those strainings, those flingings in verbal distress?
And a vision: you are in your country. Great writer.
Proud. Unyielding. But no one dares touch you. At times,
A translation or fragment. Admirers. All Europe
Esteems you. A villa near Yalta. A hero.”
II.
Then 1 laugh, and at once from my pen nib a flight
of my favorite anapaests rises,
in the night making rocket streaks with the increase
in the speed of the golden inscribing.
And I’m happy. I’m happy that Conscience, the pimp
of my sleepy reflections and projects,
did not get at the critical secret. Today
I am really remarkably happy.
That main secret tra-tá-ta tra-tá-ta tra-tá—
and I must not be overexplicit;
this is why I find laughable the empty dream
about readers, and body, and glory.
Without body I’ve spread, without echo I thrive,
and with me all along is my secret.
A book’s death can’t affect me since even the break
between me and my land is a trifle.
I admit that the night has been ciphered right well
but in place of the stars I put letters,
and I’ve read in myself how the self to transcend—
and I must not be overexplicit.
Trusting not the enticements of the thoroughfare
or such dreams as the ages have hallowed,
I prefer to stay godless, with fetterless soul
in a world that is swarming with godheads.
But one day while disrupting the strata of sense
and descending deep down to my wellspring
I saw mirrored, besides my own self and the world,
something else, something else, something else.