Английская поэзия XIV–XX веков в современных русских переводах

Comforting is sleep, but the comfort falls:

The waves break on the bare rock; the traveler remembers

Shipwreck, the struggle with the waters, the wild climb,

Cries of the wind; and then nothing.

Rockall, two hundred miles west of Bembecula,

Bare rock, eighty-three feet wide, seventy feet high,

First seen captain Hall, 1810, reported inaccessible —

The last spur on the Great Atlantic Shelf.

How shall the mind think beyond the last abandoned islands?

The gulls cry, as thy cry in the isles despair,

The waves break, as they break on Tiree or Foula;

Man is alone, and death is certain.

Was is better to have died in shipwreck?

Here, naked under the bare sky,

The traveler wakes; and sanity is the same as madness

Under the grey sky pressed down to the sea’s rim.

Words fall, words fail, like rocks, like falling stones;

Out of the towered clouds and the dark air,

Words fail, and a tree of blackness falls:

There is nothing at all to surrender or defend.

It was a grim castle, built in the bad years,

Built by an old man after years of failure,

Stuccoed with long complacency, and now

No more than an empty wineskin or a crushed fruit.

From the dark earth, the tree broke out, and men

Died with a frantic zeal, and spitting death:

Who knows what it was they died for?

Their bones are a dust, and their names forgotten.

Suburbs creep up the hill, and the trams are running,

Children find ghostly playmates in the ruins;

The sun glares on the emptiness, and vanished walls

Burn with a bitter death and unfulfilled perfection.

Stamp out the memory of old wars and lost causes:

Build a grave citadel of peace, or a tower of death:

The castle stands, inhuman, incorruptible,

Like a film before the eyes, or a mad vision.

The hawk, the furred eagle, the smooth panther—

Images of desire and power, images of death,

These we adore and fear, these we need,

Move in the solitude of night or the tall sky,

Move with a strict grace to the one fulfilment:

The Greenland falcon, the beautiful one,

Lives on carrion and dives inevitably to the prey.

To be human is more difficult:

To be human is to know oneself, to hold the broken mirror,

To become aware of justice, truth, mercy,

To choose the difficult road, to aim

Crookedly, for the direct aim is failure,

To abandon the way of the hawk and the grey falcon.

These fall, and fall stupidly:

To be human is to fall, but not stupidly;

To suffer, but not for a simple end;

To choose, and know the penalty of choice;

To read the intensity of human eyes and features;

To know the intricacy of life and the value of death;

To remember the furred eagle and the smooch panther,

The images of death, and death’s simplicity.

This is the cave of which I spoke,

These are the blackened stones, and these

Our footprints, seven lives ago.

Darkness was in the cave like shifting smoke,

Stalagmites grew like equatorial tree,

There was a pool, quite black and silent, seven lives ago

Here such a one turned back, and there

Another stumbled and his nerve gave out;

Men have escaped blindly, they know not how.

Our candles gutter in the mouldering air,

Here the rock fell, beyond a doubt,

There was no light in those days, and there is none now.

Water drips from the roof, and the caves narrow,

Galleries lead downward to the unknown dark;

This was the point we reached, the farthest known.

Here someone in the debris found an arrow,

Men have been here before, and left their mark

Scratched on the limestone wall with splintered bone.

Here the dark word was said for memory’s sake,

And lost, here on the cold sand, to the puzzled brow.

This was the farthest point, the fabled lake:

These were our footprints, seven lives ago.