Early Pasternak

three poems translated by John Coleman

How you begin. At two You tear from Nurse into the singing gloom, Cluck, chirp, twitter, tuwhoo. In the third year, words loom.

How you begin to understand.

The turbine hums and all is other—

You are not you, the house a foreign land, The mother no mother.

Why does that raving beauty beguile, Sidling up on the lilac bench?

Madam, she must be after your child. How suspicions entrench.

How fears ripen. A man insists A star swing out of its course. What is he—Faust or fabulist? How gipsies enforce.

How seas, sudden as sighs, soar Tremendous over the fence

Where, as you thought, houses were. How blank verse begins.

How summer nights call you to be— Prostrate on the oats—and threaten pawn with a woman's eye.

How quarrels strike up with the sun.

Row you begin to inhabit poetry.

As epigraph to this book The wasteland's hoarse voice, Lions roared and Kipling looked Into tigers' eyes.

A yawn of dust; the black Abyss of despair.

They swayed, chattering. Sleek Their chilly fur.

And sway on yet in verse That barely rhymes them— Fade in the greendew mist. The Ganges dreams them.

Dawn like a clammy viper Crawls into pits.

In the jungle a ritual vapour, Damp requiescats.

Your grove of nut-trees shuts you from the light And mossy coins of sun strike from its height, Now tails, upon a thick, decaying log, Now heads, a tarnished eagle, on to a frog.

Your trees outstrip you. You had become too sure Of that thicket-heart beating with yours to make demur When they sprang beyond bounds in leafy arc on arc.

Till the wood thins out, a bird becomes a barque,

Its song spindrift and, rowing across the blue, The silhouette of a wild duck, or canoe, Passes . . . The forest hushes, turning an eye Through shrouded tops on the bird boat scudding

by.

This is the meeting-place of fruit and thunder. Antlers of lichen prick the clouds. Fens glow, Stupefying the young intelligence-

0 lilac cinders of the pagan fens!