You have, of course, seen more than once the album
of a provincial miss, by all her girl friends
scrawled over from the end,
4 from the beginning, and around.
Here, in defiance of orthography,
lines without meter, [passed on] by tradition,
in token of faithful friendship are entered,
8 diminished, lengthened.
On the first leaf you are confronted with:
Qu' écrirez-vous sur ces tablettes? signed: toute à vous Annette;12 and on the last one you will read:
“Whoever more than I loves you,
let him write farther than I do.”
XXIX
Here you are sure to find
two hearts, a torch, and flowerets;
here you will read no doubt
4 love's vows “Unto the tomb slab”;
some military poetaster
here has dashed off a roguish rhyme.
In such an album, to be frank, my friends,
8 I too am glad to write,
at heart being convinced
that any zealous trash of mine
will merit an indulgent glance
12 and that thereafter, with a wicked smile,
one will not solemnly examine
if I could babble wittily or not.
XXX
But you, odd volumes
from the bibliotheca of the devils,
the gorgeous albums,
4 the rack of fashionable rhymesters;
you, nimbly ornamented
by Tolstoy's wonder-working brush,
or Baratïnski's pen,
8 let the Lord's levin burn you!
Whenever her in-quarto a resplendent lady
proffers to me,
a tremor and a waspishness possess me,
12 and at the bottom of my soul
there stirs an epigram —
but madrigals you have to write for them!
XXXI
Not madrigals does Lenski
write in the album of young Olga;
his pen breathes love —
4 it does not glitter frigidly with wit.
Whatever he notes, whatever he hears
concerning Olga, this he writes about;
and full of vivid truth
8 flow, riverlike, his elegies.
Thus you, inspired Yazïkov,
sing, in the surgings of your heart,
God knows whom, and the precious code
12 of elegies
will represent for you someday
the entire story of your fate.
XXXII
But soft! You hear? A critic stern
commands us to throw off
the sorry wreath of elegies;
4 and to our brotherhood of rhymesters
cries: “Do stop whimpering
and croaking always the same thing,
regretting 'the foregone, the past';
8 enough! Sing about something else!” —
You're right, and surely you'll point out
to us the trumpet, mask, and dagger,
and everywhence a dead stock of ideas
12 bid us revive.
Thus friend? — “Nowise!
Far from it! Write odes, gentlemen,
XXXIII
“as in a mighty age one wrote them,
as was in times of yore established.”
Nothing but solemn odes?
4 Oh, come, friend; what's this to the purpose?
Recall what said the satirist!
Does the shrewd lyrist in “As Others See It”
seem more endurable to you
8 than our glum rhymesters? —
“But in the elegy all is so null;
its empty aim is pitiful;
whilst the aim of the ode is lofty
12 and noble.” Here I might
argue with you, but I keep stilclass="underline"
I do not want to make two ages quarrel.
XXXIV
A votary of fame and freedom,
in the excitement of his stormy thoughts,
Vladimir might have written odes,
4 only that Olga did not read them.
Have ever chanced larmoyant poets
to read their works before the eyes
of their beloved ones? It is said, no higher
8 rewards are in the world.
And, verily, blest is the modest lover
reading his daydreams to the object
of songs and love,
12 a pleasantly languorous belle!
Blest — though perhaps by something
quite different she is diverted.
XXXV
But I the products of my fancies
and of harmonious device
read but to an old nurse,
4 companion of my youth;
or after a dull dinner, when a neighbor
strays in to see me — having caught
him by a coat skirt unexpectedly —
8 I choke him in a corner with a tragedy,
or else (but that's apart from jesting),
haunted by yearnings and by rhymes,
roaming along my lake,
12 I scare a flock of wild ducks; they, on heeding
the chant of sweet-toned strophes,
fly off the banks.