Speaking In Tongues
Scribbling In Voices

Fyodor Tyutchev

Translated by Boris Leyvi


Silentium!
Last Love
Exists in the autumnal growing...




Silentium!


Disguise, conceal, and do not whine
Of thy emotions, hopes thine.
Keep them inside thy soul's gist
To rise and fall onto night's mist,
All tacit, like the starlets' string:
Enjoy it, and don't say a thing.
How does thy heart expression quest?
How does another know thou, lest
He fathoms of thy being's sake?
A thought once mouthed is a fake.
Disturbed is an erupted spring:
Drink from it, and don't say a thing.
To live inside thy soul thou learn:
A whole world inside is born;
A world of secret, magic muse,
That outer noise would once suffuse,
Permeated by a solar wing:
Hark to it, and don't say a thing!
1829


Last Love

How oft at dusking of our days
Our love is gentler and lacking reason...
Shine brighter, o expiring rays
Of my night-dawn, the last love season!
The firmament half-masked with shade,
The West alone lusters with gleaming,
O tarry, tarry, nocturnal date,
O lengthen, ever passioned dreaming!
Let blood run thinner through the vein,
To molder tenderness won't dare!
O, last love, thou art to remain
My blissfulness and my despair...


* * *

Exists in the autumnal growing
A brief, but an enchanting phase:
The day as if in crystal glowing,
The dusk in the resplendent glaze.
Where ears fell to zesty sickle's rending,
It's bare around; through a widespread range
Glows only, thinning and unbending,
A web string on an idle trench.
The air's depleting, quiet birds have pealed,
Of nascent wintry storms there isn't a clue,
And pours the warm and the transparent blue
Onto a resting field...