But, reader, be it as it may,
alas, the young lover, the poet,
the pensive dreamer, has been killed
4 by a friend's hand!
There is a spot: left of the village
where inspiration's nursling dwelt,
two pine trees grow, united at the roots;
8 beneath them have meandered streamlets
of the neighboring valley's brook.
'Tis there the plowman likes to rest
and women reapers come to dip
12 their ringing pitchers in the waves;
there, by the brook, in the dense shade
a simple monument is set.
XLI
Beneath it (as begins to drip
spring rain upon the herb of fields)
the herdsman, plaiting his pied shoe of bast,
4 sings of the Volga fishermen;
and the young townswoman who spends
the summer in the country,
when headlong on horseback, alone,
8 she scours the fields,
before it halts her steed,
tightening the leathern rein;
and, turning up the gauze veil of her hat,
12 she reads with skimming eyes
the plain inscription — and a tear
dims her soft eyes.
XLII
And at a walk she rides in open champaign,
sunk in a reverie;
a long time, willy-nilly,
4 her soul is full of Lenski's fate;
and she reflects: “What has become of Olga?
Did her heart suffer long?
Or did the season of her tears soon pass?
8 And where's her sister now? And where, that shunner
of people and the world,
of modish belles the modish foe,
where's that begloomed eccentric,
12 the slayer of the youthful poet?”
In due time I shall give you an account
in detail about everything.
XLIII
But not now. Though with all my heart
I love my hero;
though I'll return to him, of course;
4 but now I am not in the mood for him.
The years to austere prose incline,
the years chase pranksome rhyme away,
and I — with a sigh I confess —
8 more indolently dangle after her.
My pen has not its ancient disposition
to mar with scribblings fleeting leaves;
other chill dreams,
12 other stern cares,
both in the social hum and in the still
disturb my soul's sleep.
XLIV
I have learned the voice of other desires,
I've come to know new sadness;
I have no expectations for the first,
4 and the old sadness I regret.
Dreams, dreams! Where is your dulcitude?
Where is (its stock rhyme) juventude?
Can it be really true
8 that withered, withered is at last its garland?
Can it be true that really and indeed,
without elegiac conceits,
the springtime of my days is fled
12 (as I in jest kept saying hitherto),
and has it truly no return?
Can it be true that I'll be thirty soon?
XLV
So! My noontide is come, and this
I must, I see, admit.
But, anyway, as friends let's part,
4 O my light youth!
My thanks for the delights,
the melancholy, the dear torments,
the hum, the storms, the feasts,
8 for all, for all your gifts
my thanks to you. In you
amidst turmoils and in the stillness
I have delighted... and in full.
12 Enough! With a clear soul
I now set out on a new course
to rest from my old life.
XLVI
Let me glance back. Farewell now, coverts
where in the backwoods flowed my days,
fulfilled with passions and with indolence
4 and with the dreamings of a pensive soul.
And you, young inspiration,
stir my imagination,
the slumber of the heart enliven,
8 into my nook more often fly,
let not a poet's soul grow cold,
callous, crust-dry,
and finally be turned to stone
12 in the World's deadening intoxication
in that slough where with you
I bathe, dear friends!40