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The City of Yes and the City of No
I am like a train
rushing for many years now
between the city of Yes
and the city of No.
My nerves are strained
like wires
between the city of No
and the city of Yes.
Everything is deadly,
everyone frightened, in the city of No.
It’s like a study furnished with dejection.
In it every object is frowning, withholding something,
and every portrait looks out suspiciously,
Every morning its parquet floors are polished with bile,
its sofas are made of falsehood, its walls of misfortune.
You’ll get lots of good advice in it -- like hell you will!--
not a bunch of flowers, or even a greeting.
Typewriters are chattering a carbon copy answer:
"No--no--no…No--no--no. No--no--no."
And when the lights go out altogether,
the ghosts in it begin their gloomy ballet.
You’ll get a ticket to leave –- like hell you will!--
to leave the black town of No.
But in the town of Yes--
life’s like the song of a thrush.
This town’s without walls--
just like a nest.
The sky is asking you to take any star
you like in your hand.
Lips ask for yours, without any shame,
softly murmuring:
"Ah--all that nonsense!"
And in no one is there even a trace of suspicion,
and lowing herds are offering their milk,
and daisies, teasing, are asking to be picked,
and wherever you want to be, you are instantly there,
Taking any train, or plane, or ship that you like.
And water, faintly murmuring, whispers through the years:
"Yes--yes--yes. Yes--yes--yes. Yes--yes--yes."
To tell the truth, the snag is it’s a bit boring at times,
to be given so much, almost without any effort,
in that shining multicolored city of Yes.
Better let me be tossed around--
To the end of my days,
between the city of Yes
and the city of No!
Let my nerves be strained
like wires
between the city of No
And the city of Yes!
1963
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
From "Bratsky Station and other new poems" 1966
Translated by Tina Tupikina-Glaessner, Geoffrey Dutton,
and Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin
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I LOVE YOU MORE THAN NATURE I love you more than nature, because you are nature itself. I love you more than freedom, because without you freedom is prison. I love you incautiously, like an abyss – not a groove. I love you more than possible, and more than impossible too. I love you timelessly, tirelessly even being drunk, being rude. I love you more than myself I love you more than only you. I love you more than Shakespeare, more than all bookish wisdom even more than all music, because you are music and book. I love you more than glory of fame, -- even glory of future times. I love you more than my Motherland, because my Motherland is you. Are you unhappy? About what do you complain? Don’t bother God with your prayers and petitions. I love you more than happiness. I love you more than love. 1995 by Yevgeny Yevtushenko From PRE--MORNING 1996 Translated by Gay Hoaglund with Yevgeny Yevtushenko Back to the Yevtushenko index Back to Russian Index |
GOODBYE OUR RED FLAG
Goodbye our Red Flag.
You slipped down from the Kremlin roof
not so proudly
not so adroitly
As you climbed many years ago
on the destroyed Reichstag
Smoking like Hitler’s last fag.
Goodbye our Red Flag.
You were our brother and our enemy.
You were a soldier’s comrade in trenches,
you were the hope of all captive Europe,
but like a red curtain you concealed behind you
the Gulag
Stuffed with frozen dead bodies.
Why did you do it,
our Red Flag?
Goodbye our Red Flag.
Lie down.
Take a rest.
We will remember all the victims
deceived by your Red sweet murmur
that lured millions like sheep
to the slaughterhouse.
But we will remember you
because you too were
no less deceived
Goodbye our Red Flag.
Were you just a romantic rag?
You are bloodied
and with our blood we strip you
from our souls.
That’s why we can’t scratch out
the tears from our red eyes,
because you so wildly
slapped our pupils
with your heavy golden tassels.
Goodbye our Red Flag.
Our first step to freedom
we stupidly took
over wounded silk,
and over ourselves,
divided by envy and hatred.
Hey crowd,
do not trample again in the mud
the already cracked glasses
of Doctor Zhivago.
Goodbye our Red Flag.
Pry open the fist
that imprisoned you
trying to wave you in Civil War,
when scoundrels try to grab
your standard again,
or just desperate people,
lining up for hope.
Goodbye our Red Flag.
You float into our dreams.
Now you are just
a narrow red stripe
in our Russian Tricolor.
In the innocent hands of whiteness,
In the innocent hands of blue
maybe even your red color
can be washed free of blood.
Goodbye our Red Flag.
Be careful, our Tricolor.
Watch out for the card sharks of flags
lest they twist you around their fingers.
Could it be that you too
will have the same death sentence
as your red brother,
to be shot by foreign and our own bullets,
devouring like lead moths
your silk?
Goodbye our Red Flag.
In our naïve childhood
we played Red Army – White Army
We were born in a country
that no longer exists.
But in that Atlantis we were alive,
we were loved.
You, our Red Flag, lay in a puddle
in a flea market.
Some hustlers sell you
for hard currency:
Dollars, Francs, Yen.
I didn’t take the Tsar’s Winter Palace.
I didn’t storm Hitler’s Reichstag.
I am not what you call a "Commie."
But I caress the Red Flag
and cry.
1992
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
From PRE--MORNING 1996
Translated by Albert C. Todd
with Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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UNCERTAINTY Self assurance is blissful, but uncertainty is venal. In a flash it covers with thin ice the soul’s hidden ferment. I’m superstitiously uncertain. Concealing an innermost fright, in some things I’m too intemperate, some things too constrained and tight. I repeat constantly to myself: why, why do I lie to people, why do I play at power, when in reality I am powerless?! What if suddenly they catch me, like a thief, and I, for everyone already someone different, a fraud, a cheat, and pretender, go off with hands behind my back?! And the thought of this won’t let me dip my pen in ink… Oh let me, God, be a poet! Don’t let me deceive people. 1962 by Yevgeny Yevtushenko From PRE--MORNING 1996 Translated by Albert C. Todd Back to the Yevtushenko index Back to Russian Index |
"My love will come…"
-- To B. Akhmadulina
My love will come,
will fold me in her arms,
will notice all the changes,
will understand my apprehensions.
From the pouring dark, the infernal gloom,
forgetting to close the taxi door,
she'll dash up the rickety steps
all flushed with joy and longing.
Drenched, she'll burst in, without a knock,
Will take my head in her hands,
and from a chair her blue fur coat
will slip blissfully to the floor.
1956
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
From THE COLLECTED POEMS 1952-1990
Translated by Albert C. Todd
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PATCHWORK QUILT
Scrap
by scrap
Granny put the quilt together for us
and to this day I remember the kindness
with which the quilt was endowed.
Patches gleamed with red,
Like glowing coals,
and radiating gold,
Like the honeyed eyes of bears,
exhaled blue,
as do corn flowers in a field,
and darkened black,
like the tatters of night.
I didn't come to Siberia like the meteorite,
and was myself, in Zima's chimney corners,
sheltered from blizzards by a rainbow of patch-work,
and was myself, like a small patchwork,
all in tiny flowers.
Scrap
by scrap
we somehow gathered Russia together,
sewing into her mighty scraps of melancholy
and into her strength
scraps of impotence.
False ideals ripped us asunder,
and without mercy,
senselessly mocking our homeland,
like a quilt,
we tear our ideals into shreds.
And above the again ravished land,
as if once more at the beginning,
once more at the crossroads,
nothing but ashes of unending holocaust --
miserable scraps of banners and destinies.
Salvation will not come down from Moscow --
it will rise in the heartland
together with wheat, potatoes and rye.
Salvation will be slow,
made of scraps
but the scraps will grow into each other.
Farewell, Empire!
Long live, Russia!
Rule Russia,
but only over yourself.
Amidst our clashes, shelter the children
with a destiny,
like Granny's quilt, made from patchwork.
To the gentle singing of the stove pipe,
I so want
to press myself into Granny's patchwork,
so that she can sew Russia together anew
scrap
by scrap…
1993
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
From PRE--MORNING 1996
Translated by Albert C. Todd
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Perfection The wind blows gently, fresh and cool. The porch is fragrant with damp pine. A duck stretches its wings wide, having just laid its egg. And it looks like a faultless girl, having laid in God's design, a perfection of white roundness on an altar of straw. And above the muddy, thawing road, above the moldering roofs of the huts, the perfection of the disc of fire rises slowly in the sky. The perfection of the woods in spring all shot through by the dawn, almost disembodied, shimmers in mist like the breath of the earth, all over the earth. Not in the frantic shapes of new fashions, not in shapes borrowed from others-- perfection is simply being natural, perfection is the breath of the earth. Don't torment yourself that art is secondary, destined only to reflect, that it remains so limited and lean, compared with nature itself. Without acting a part look to yourself for the source of art, and quietly and uniquely reproduce yourself just as you are. Be reflected, as a creation of nature bending over a wall draws the reflection of its face up from the ice-ringed depths. 1963 by Yevgeny Yevtushenko From "Bratsky Station and other new poems" 1966 Translated by Tina Tupikina-Glaessner, Geoffrey Dutton, And Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin Back to the Yevtushenko index Back to Russian Index |
October 13, 1999