Translation of Poem by Boris Pasternak, БОРИС ПАСТЕРНАК, "Памяти Марины Цветаевой," IN MEMORY OF MARINA TSVETAEVA

 

БОРИС ПАСТЕРНАК

(1890-1960)

         Памяти Марины Цветаевой
 
Хмуро тянется день непогожий.
Безутешно струятся ручьи
По крыльцу перед дверью прихожей
И в открытые окна мои.
 
За оградою вдоль по дороге
Затопляет общественный сад.
Развалившись, как звери в берлоге,
Облака в беспорядке лежат.
 
Мне в ненастьи мерещится книга
О земле и ее красоте.
Я рисую лесную шишигу
Для тебя на заглавном листе.
 
Ах, Марина, давно уже время,
Да и труд не такой уж ахти,
Твой заброшенный прах в реквиеме
Из Елабуги перенести.
 
1942/43
 
d
 
                                        Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
 
            In Memory of Marina Tsvetaeva
 
Somberly drags on the bad-weather day.
Rivulets stream inconsolably, soddenly
Past porch leading up to my cottage doorway;
Mist blows into my window despondency. 
 
Surging down roads like the rivers they’d rather be,
Streaming waters submerge the municipal park.
Sprawled out anyhow like some beasts in menagerie,
The clouds in the sky lie haphazard and dark.
 
Beneath storm clouds I daydream, imagine a book
For you, about God’s blessed earth ever glistening,
And a wood demon lass by a fairyland brook
I sketch on the title page, doodling and scribbling.
 
Ah, Marina, you know that it’s long past high time—
And how easy the effort, you’re light as fresh loam—
The forsaken ashes, as bells toll and chime,
To bring back from far-flung Yelabuga home.

Translator’s Note

 I’ve seen this poem published in several different variants. I translate the shortest of these here. The longer form has a second part, much lengthier. The shorter form is sometimes published with one additional stanza, but I prefer the variant that omits it. For the reader’s interest that extra final stanza is this:

 

Торжество твоего переноса
Я задумывал в прошлом году
Над снегами пустынного плеса,
Где зимуют баркасы во льду.
 
Your triumphant return to the streets of Moscow
Last year I planned out and described in
My notebook while watching the bleak fields of snow,
Where the barges spend winter days iced-in.
 

d

 Yelabuga—city on the Kama River, near Kazan, to where Marina Tsvetaeva was evacuated during WW II. There she succumbed to despair and hanged herself on Aug. 31, 1941. She was buried in the Petropavlovskoe Cemetery in Yelabuga on Sept. 2, 1941. Pasternak never realized his intention to bring her remains back home. When he wrote the above poem he apparently was unaware that the exact location of her burial place was unknown. It was never definitively established. In 1970 a granite gravestone was erected (see photograph), and in the early years of the twenty-first century this spot was declared Marina’s official gravesite. But the exact location of her remains is still undetermined.