Illustration to the Bunin Poem, "Birdless," by Gennadi Novozhilov
Иван Бунин
(1870-1953)
Не видно птиц…
Не видно птиц.
Покорно чахнет
Лес, опустевший и больной.
Грибы сошли, но крепко
пахнет
В оврагах
сыростью грибной.
Глушь стала ниже и светлее,
В кустах
свалялася трава,
И, под дождем осенним тлея,
Чернеет тёмная листва.
А в поле
ветер. День холодный
Угрюм и свеж — и целый день
Скитаюсь я в степи
свободной,
Вдали от сел
и деревень.
И, убаюкан шагом конным,
С отрадной
грустью внемлю я,
Как ветер звоном однотонным,
Гудит-поет в стволы
ружья.
1889 г.
d
Literal
Translation
No birds can be seen. Meekly
languishes
The forest, now deserted and
sick.
The mushrooms are gone, but in
the ravines
There is the stringent smell of
fungal dampness.
The wilds now grow lower and brighter,
Grass has piled up under bushes,
And rotting beneath the autumn
rain,
Lies the darkness of leaves.
It’s windy in the fields. The day
is cold
Morose and crisp—and all day
long
I wander in the open steppeland,
Far from villages and hamlets.
And lulled by the footfalls of
my horse,
With exultant gloom I hearken to
The sounds of the wind as it
blows on monotonous,
Whines and sings in the barrels
of my gun.
d
Literary
Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
Birdless
No birds in sight. Meek in its languishing
Lies the bleak forest, bare,
vacant and ill.
Mushrooms are gone, but the air
reeks of anguish in
Fungal damp smells that are
stringent and shrill.
The wilds have a look that is
lower and brighter,
Grass bent and crushed piles up under bush,
Beneath the fall rain under
skies ever lighter,
Leaves on the rot lie in
darkening blush.
Cold is the day and windblown is
the landscape,
Damp is the air playing sullen
refrains,
All day I ride through the steppe’s
weary dreamscape,
Far from the settlements, heart
unrestrained.
Lulled by the footfalls of equine
stark prosody,
Rapt in my sadness, I heed the
wind’s long
Whines of implacable callous monotony;
In my shotgun’s barrels they
drone their drear song.
d
Translator’s
Note
Bunin was only nineteen years
old when he wrote this poem. Published in the journal “God’s World,” St.
Petersburg, Oct., 1898, it attracted notice. In his reminiscences of Tolstoy, Maksim
Gorky describes one “morose, autumn day” in the rain when he and Lev Tolstoy
went out for a walk in the birch forest. He describes Tolstoy “jumping over
ditches and puddles like a young man, shaking drops of rainwater off branches
onto his head, and marvelously relating how Shenshin [the poet Fet, landowner
neighbor of Tolstoy] explained Schopenhauer to him in that very birch grove.
“Lovingly stroking the dampish,
silken trunks of the birches with a tender hand,” Tolstoy said, ’Somewhere I
recently read these lines’ [third and fourth lines of the first stanza of
Bunin’s poem]:
Грибы
сошли, но крепко
пахнет
В оврагах
сыростью грибной.
‘That’s really good, and really
true,’ said Tolstoy.”
[cited from Gorky’s Collected
Works in the nine-volume collection of Bunin (1965): I, 527]
Bunin's Shotgun on Display at the Bunin Museum in Elets
