Translation of Poem by Ivan Bunin, Иван Бунин, "Не видно птиц…" BIRDLESS

                           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