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Лифшиц / Лосев / Loseff. Сборник памяти Льва Лосева - стр. 21
Разрушил церкви, в злобном пустосвяте
находит утешенье, от небес
поспешно отказался. В результате —
вонь, очереди, сыр навек исчез,
газеты врут, гэбэшники у власти.
По радио краснознаменный хор
орет, что мы построим людям счастье.
А впрочем (веселеет) это вздор.
Есть крепость духа. Есть служенье музам.
Еще мы расквитаемся с Союзом
Советских соц., пробудимся, отыщем
вождя, что чист и честен, и придет
такая пропасть и духовной пищи,
и матерьяльной! Бедный мой народ!
Забитый и ограбленный, угрюмый,
как тот Ермак, счастливей и добрей
ты станешь, в Государственную думу
пошлешь своих сынов и дочерей,
откроешь Божьи храмы, скажешь «здравствуй!»
соборности – припомни, что гласят
пророчества… «Ну, шевелись, очкастый,
тебе кило?» – «Нет, триста пятьдесят».
Shana Smith
Lev Vladimirovich
They ask me why.
How does a Southern hillbilly speak
the language of a frozen tundra,
the Cold War, of purges and pogroms?
A practical question, a pragmatic people —
It all started with a contradiction… or three.
A Saltine cracker wrapped in golden ivy.
An Amazon felled by a gray-sweatered sprite.
A swamp city eclipsing the sun.
Incomplete smiles answer words
that cannot explain an impossible dream shared:
Svoboda i odinochestvo.
He never told me that, above all,
he craved freedom and solitude,
but perhaps I understood in a way that knowing can’t —
He lived best when feeling found form;
the inexplicable metered out into wing-tipped words
trailing snowberry velvet on rough cave walls.
From this fullness of solitude
he took me to parasite trials and silenced voices
until exile escaped the censors;
to an endless icy plain that caged
innocence, suffering, expectation;
to the indifferent candlelit window
and confused gloves of a final yellow parting;
to mothers, sisters, wives huddled hopeless,
breath fading into stone-cold prison walls;
to a monkey in a crowded bus,
tip-tapping chaos onto Soviet commuters’ heads.
All this he showed me without ever leaving
the white clapboard halls whose windows
saw the same sky of Brodsky, Zoshchenko, Akhmatova.
In him he carried a world that was sometimes absurd
to show us our rules are ephemeral, at best.
He carried what had been taken but never lost,
and with a finger to his beard,
a light passing through thick glasses
to small, dark, bottomless eyes paused in thought,
he would crack open the door, and it burst full
with lacquered music, stringless puppets,
and cucumbers chasing vodka until dawn.
But when he left, the door did not close;
the wings he found for us still soar,
shimmered to life by motley stars dancing
beneath the prism of his humble lion’s soul.
Страница 21