B.Pasternak, The Yard – Translation (Rus.)

The yard
By Boris Pasternak

The finely scribbled with a hoar-frost yard!
You – as the sentence to exile
To insufficient food, sleep, plant,
Drink and the pain in nape, in particular.

Thickly scattered by the shrunken leaves,
With salt of a cooler, low-beetled!
Look, there blacken the stiches of skids
And the frozen abscess of pavement’s out-picked.

Yard, have you noticed? Yesterday it turned
To go rape, today – passed through autopsy,
The wind wafts fell from the October’s pawns,
And buried theirselves in the mane of horses.

Yard! This wind, as a coachman during frost,
Dashes forward, up to brows smeared
With a squeak of way, as well as to rack, in-grown
To the precipices of the booming suburbs and mills.

The hands – opened, the hooks – to back,
The figure – is distended with the khazakin’s (* kaftan) cloud,
And the shout, the whistle, ‘Beware! ‘, ‘Set back! ‘ –
Yard! This frosty wind – as a coachmen, rather.

Yard! This wind seems to be a relative to me
With its ability from all around – to stick
To wall with such a bulletin:
‘People, they love and for a work they seek!

People, there’s the anger higher, than mine!
There even I bend my knees down.
People – numerous as a sea in Laplandia,
And as an ice bristles their going.

Strong to the darkness with a burning of fire!
Strong to the cold with a shoot of  logs!
Their cold in books – colder than mine one,
Their revelation – darker than my thought.

With a bribe winter levies, as a baskak (* – the turkish taxman in old Russia) ,
The windows and stoves, but cold – in their books –
The khan’s ukase (* – decree) on the waxen bricks about
The imposing of a winter yoke land through.

Let’s protect from the blizzard in poems – with a fur-coat,
From skies – with a candle, and all those three-hilled –
From the breath of hopes, loaded occasionally
Onto the disobedient mob by him.’

1916,1928