Английская поэзия XIV–XX веков в современных русских переводах (билингва)

The seeds we sowed a year ago
Bring in their harvest now:
A pleasing straw to those who know
They must forsake the plough.

God speed the plough! And broad and even

Drive on an honest furrow straight:
The schoolmasters of Carlyle’s heaven
Give prizes at the honours gate.

But who from serious tasks would turn

Race with wind, or play with fire,
Contempt from honest men shall earn,
Emptiness from all desire.

And who with blistered hands turns back

Shall hear the blackbird chacking dark,
When at his shoulder, endless black,
Cold fogs obliterate his mark.

In jubilation bonfires blaze:

So well entrenched the dragon’s teeth
We broadcast, Caesar’s self shall praise
The cenotaphs we lie beneath.

Visualization of Marxism

Expose the world, anatomize,
Strip clothes from skin, strip skin, then flesh, from bone.
Himself no surgeon, true, can sterilize,
But yet the self-infection can be shown.
Corrode and doubt; anesthetize the heart;
Morphia or curiosity drown the reviving smart.

Clear as white water in the stream we see

Shadowed the species of eternity;
The working process, self a working part:
For not one necessary fiction’s grace
Can quite make mask th’ observer’s outward face,
Or thought one extra atom’s movement start.

The moving pointer tells, and having told

Not the immediacy of hot and cold,
Nor yet the pale abstraction of a mind
(For algebra and instruments record
No immanent emergence of the Word.)
Tells solid, painful foothold all we find.

Why turn, why seek, why question for an end?

Why hope? Time flows: shows useless to defend
A cosy corner in the rising flood.
The tide is coming in: the dykes are down:
War, Terror, Poverty, swing through the town,
And the cold wind claims to be understood.

Джулиан Хьюэрд Белл (1908–1937)

Чепуха

Песня на́ шесть пенсов
Да в горсти овёс,
В огороде хахаль,
В небе бомбовоз.

А банкиру льётся

Золото за так;
Жаль не продаётся
Тот овёс никак.

Пьёт шерри королева,

Под джаз лихой пляша;
Толпа глядит без гнева,
Не смысля ни шиша.

Деньжата обернул банкир,

Но не ушёл овёс,
И ты остался гол и сир
И задаёшь вопрос:
Что за пушки в огороде,
А в небе бомбовоз?

Перевод В. Ослона

Ноябрь