| Ben had a stack of photography books and I sat flicking through them, unable to settle on one in particular. I lasted the longest with a collection of photographs from the nineteenth century. There were exotic landscapes and dramatic events, battles and revolutions and disasters, but what I looked at were the faces. There were men and women and children. Some were distracted, terrified. Others were celebrating at fairs and fiestas. Sometimes a face would look round at the camera with a conspiratorial smile. |
У Бена было несколько фотоальбомов. Я принялась их листать, не задерживаясь на снимках. Но больше всего увлеклась коллекцией девятнадцатого столетия: экзотические пейзажи и драматические события — войны, революции, катастрофы. Но я смотрела на лица. Там были мужчины, женщины, дети. Одни растеряны и напуганы. Другие веселились на ярмарках и празднествах. Кто-то смотрел в объектив и заговорщически улыбался. |
| That was what struck me most. The strangeness of those faces. I thought, and I couldn't stop thinking, that all of those people, the beautiful and the ugly, the rich and the poor, the lucky and the benighted, the evil and the virtuous, the religious and the godless, now had one thing in common: they were dead. Each of them, singly, utterly alone, in a street or on a battlefield or in a bed, had died. All of the people in that world were gone. I thought about that but I didn't just think about it. I felt it like toothache. This was part of what I had to get over. I looked at the higher shelves at the spines of the smaller books, which wouldn't have any pictures in them. Poetry. That was what I needed. I've probably only read about eight poems in the years since I left school but I suddenly felt the need to read a poem. It would also have the extra advantage of being short. |
Эти лица поразили меня больше всего. Своей отчужденностью от меня. Я невольно подумала, что у всех этих людей — красивых и уродливых, богатых и бедных, счастливых и несчастных, злых и добродетельных, набожных и неверующих — было одно общее: все они давно умерли. Каждый, персонально, поодиночке — на улице, на поле сражения, в постели — они скончались. Все в этом бренном мире смертны. Я не то чтобы специально размышляла об этом — мысль сверлила мозг, словно зубная боль. Смерть — это часть того, что и мне предстояло пройти. Я подняла глаза на полки, где стояли книги меньшего формата. Уж в них-то точно не будет никаких иллюстраций. Поэзия. Именно то, что мне надо. Я едва ли прочитала десяток стихотворений с тех пор, как закончила школу. Но сейчас ощутила потребность в поэзии. И кроме всего прочего, у стихотворений есть еще одно преимущество — они короткие. |
| Ben obviously wasn't much of a poetry reader either but there were a few of the sort of anthologies that grandparents and godparents give you when all inspiration fails. Most of them looked too much like textbooks for me or else they were poems on subjects that didn't interest me, like the countryside or the sea or nature in general.But then my eye fell on a volume called Poems of Longing and Loss, and even though I felt like an alcoholic reaching for a bottle of vodka, I couldn't resist it. I sat with my coffee and dipped into the book. I was hardly aware of tracing the meaning of individual poems.Instead, there was a blur of grief and regret and absence and grey landscapes. It was like being at a party of depress-ives, but in a good way. Trying to pretend that I was happy and relaxed had been a mistake. It was much better to find that there were other lost souls who felt the way I did. I was among friends, and after a while I found I was smiling with recognition. |
Бен, судя по всему, тоже не был заядлым любителем стихов, но имел несколько кратких поэтических антологий — из тех, что дарят бабушки и дедушки, когда на большее не хватает фантазии. Многие из них напоминали учебники или были на тему, которая меня не интересовала, например, деревня, море или природа. Но мой глаз натолкнулся на томик под названием "Поэзия желаний и потерь". И как алкоголик, который тянется за водкой, я не удержалась и схватила книгу. Села за кофе и углубилась в чтение. Я едва понимала смысл отдельных стихотворений. Однако почувствовала общий смысл антологии — настроение печали и сожалений, тоска человека на фоне унылых пейзажей. Словно побывала в компании депрессивных, но хороших людей. И поняла, что совершала ошибку, когда пыталась притворяться беззаботной и радостной. Гораздо правильнее искать такие же родственные потерянные души. Я оказалась среди друзей и через некоторое время обнаружила, что понимающе улыбаюсь. |
| I liked the book and turned to the beginning to see who had compiled this wonderfully bleak anthology and I saw that a message had been scrawled on the title page. I experienced the tiniest flash of an impulse that it was wrong to read the message. I ignored it. It wasn't as if I had rifled through Ben's desk and found his diary or some old love letters. An inscription in a book is like a postcard that has been pinned to a wall. Even if it's addressed to a single person, it's still a sort of public declaration. At least, that's what I told myself in that fraction of a second, and when I saw the first three words of the inscription, which were "Dearest darling Ben', I began to suspect that this wasn't really a public declaration but by that time I was reading it and this is what I read: "Dearest darling Ben. Here are some sad words which are better at saying what I feel than I am myself. I am so so sorry about all this and you are probably right but I feel torn apart and terrible in different ways. And this is a hell of a message to write in a book. All of my love, Jo." It was dated November 2001.
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