Английская поэзия XIV–XX веков в современных русских переводах

Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocketful of rye,

The lover’s in the garden

And battle’s in the sky.

The banker’s in the city

Getting off his gold;

Oh isn’t it a pity

The rye can’t be sold.

The queen is drinking sherry

And dancing to a band;

A crowd may well feel merry

That it does not understand.

The banker turns his gold about

But that won’t sell the rye,

Starve and grow cold without,

And ask the reason why

The guns are in the garden,

And battle’s in the sky.

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.

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.