Marina Tsvetayeva

Deux poèmes de ma nouvelle poète préférée. (Son histoire est vraiment tragique, si jamais vous avez la chance de faire un peu de recherche à son sujet.) Lisez-les; ils sont bons!

To kiss a forehead is to erase worry.
Translated from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky

To kiss a forehead is to erase worry.
I kiss your forehead.

To kiss the eyes is to lift sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

To kiss the lips is to drink water.
I kiss your lips.

To kiss a forehead is to erase memory.
I kiss your forehead.

I like it that you're not diseased with me
Translated by Boris Leyvi
* * *

I like it that you're not diseased with me
I like I'm not enflamed by bland love shivers
And happy that the whole eternity
Won't slip off our feet in lovely fevers

With you, I like, I may afford the wit,
Be free of norms and needless to pretend
And not get blushed in a suffocating bleat
When unexpectedly we touch each other's hand

Thank you with all my heart, with a hand
For love you have for me, though unaware,
For nightly bits of time we calmly spend
Alone and rarely, which is only fair,

For our ineptness under moon,
For sun that's shining not above our sky
Where I, alas, am not to love you soon
Where you, alas, will not be ever mine