By Joseph Brodsky
The End of a Gorgeous Epoch
The English Poetic Translation, by Anna Polibina-Polansky
As the poetry still demands all to get verbalized,
I'm a sullen embassador bald, and I tell no lies,
Of the second-hand motherland, and I am tied up with this;
I will not, so, abuse my poor brain, tokens bright - to enlist.
And I search for my garments, I visit the ultimate store,
To buy my evening paper, it is a reductible score.
So the wind traces leaves. Dim are lamps in those dark, sullen lands.
For the epilogue, mirrors are given, me, to reprimand.
Ample are those avenues. Riches, withy rains, multiply.
Out of tins, comes the orange, and thieves, to the goodness, rely.
However you, yet, have forgotten the feeling unsaid
How you watch, in brisk glasses, your rare, phenomenous head.
Those sad places are all of the winter's brief tokens blue.
So eloquent are dreams and jails, coats and bride's greyish hues.
Snowy days, drinks and running hands, sparrow's dark color.
Tedious morals and lingerie, warm wooden violins in parlors.
So immovable, plumbs make you dizzy. That power of swords!
So the hay is in nails, iron birds peck the steel of our words.
Numb are fish that appreciate freedom. We think up the labels.
Checks and cash all are forced to be used. Time is starkly enabled.
One needs bodies and things, but the grocery grows instead.
Hens agree to the chime. The elated comes choken, unsaid.
So the end of prospectives meets so, your expolding lust.
You keep no fairy tale, your suppressed, empty thoughts, to entrust.
No card of all Europe. Only six continents bleak.
I sip wine, I comb up my cat, all for the exit I seek.
I am helped, but I stay here. To be God, I have to pretend.
Ships and steams, pray at me, as I slowly come to the end.
One's condemned, papers tell. One is lying nearby a brick wall.
He is dead, not asleep. Jesus' glasses reflect nearly all.
So further than death white-eyed dwellers of ices don't look.
Deafly argue with Rurick and find that the cribs are at crooks.
And the sharp-eyed are doomed to decipher how hollow, are, things.
All in vain, you just spit. Monsters use the angelic sweet wings.
So alienating of feathers is no good for larks.
Wait for axe, and the laureate's wreath, and the moralties stark.
Tr. 2020, Moscow
My film "The Carmine Frescoes of Joseph Brodsky: the Venetian Sheen" (2011, director-essayist Anna Polibina-Polansky) was approved by Solomon Volkov, a musical cryticist. His book "Dialogues with Brodsky" is commonly known. Brodsky himself meant his daughter Anna Brodskaya to become an opera cryticist, like his friend by Leningrad and emigration, Solomon Volkov. Here is a reel where Brodsky recites "The End of a Gorgeous Epoch" (my English translation of the title) in Russian. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cGjN2Qb1HQ Also Solomon Moiseevich Volkov aproved my film-essay devoted to Yury Vizbor and his 1970s. The film was charged to me by T.Yu.Vizbor and S.N.Kryuchkova (they entrusted me the theme, and I elaborated the plot in my verses, tunes and drafts). Saint Petersburg diligently keeps its unrepeatable reminiscences. Anna Brodskaya is among characters of my film "The Carmine Frescoes...": there I recite her early lyrics translated by myself into Russian. Solomon Volkov, Igor Smirnov-Ohtin, Asya Pekurovskaya and Eugeny Rein were one of my basic inspirators for a Petersburg series of films. I knew them all in person, more or less. By Anna Polibina-Polansky (text and idea for the article). Moscow, 2020.