Four Seasonal Poems (1913-22)
Winter Morning
Air falls in little grey plaits and pleats.
Snow with its fugitive glances recalls:
‘Time for bye-byes’ – the whispers, the treacle,
While day falls behind the cradle.
Go out and you shiver all over, your skin
Stings, tingles: satchels, children,
And the street is laying itself down in the quiet
Pleats of a grey fishing-net.
All things were folded: the fox in the folktale
Who flung out fish from the truck,
The tree, shed, knitting-needles, mittens,
Wintry air, wonder-struck.
And later, by flower-pots, under the bird-cage,
Wasn’t it arithmetic’s pleating and plotting
That chilled the school-desk, from out in the open,
Blowing and snowing?
Your aching tooth would be treated, anointed.
But the doctor’s eye had in it a madness,
Ruled and chequered, of schoolbags, snowballs,
Sums all sleepy scrawls.
Today that same purring and wintry folktale
Rustles like a snowstorm across my gazette,
To be thrown past the foam of manes and pavements
Like a grey fishing-net.
Tiny-windowed, ice-stuck, sleeved in fleece,
That same old eeriness of nestless birches
Rolls clothy night up, at dawn, over tea-cups.
Wintry air, wonderstruck.
Notes (assisted by the notes of Pasternak and Polivanov in the volume mentioned below) The Russian poems can be found in Volume I of Boris Pasternak, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, edited by EB Pasternak and KM Polivanov (Moscow, 1989), on thefollowing pages: ‘Reisner’ – 246; ‘Akhmatova’ – 227; ‘Tsvetaeva’ – 229; ‘Meyerholds’ – 230; (Chopin) – 406; (February) – 27; ‘Dream’ – 51; ‘Snowstorm’ – 176; ‘Winter |
Translated by Angela Livingstone
Page(s) 119
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