Speaking In Tongues
Guided by Voices

Vladimir Nabokov

Translated by Boris Leyvi



A Prompter


In a congested den I hide from eight to twelve
With volumes: those I've read already quite a few.
You're charming, I confess in silence to myself,
But fearing a mistake, I do not look at you.
I never have disclosed to you my hidden hurts..
The sounds of your voice, the scarcely fizzled ones,
Yes, only them, and not dilapidated words
Allow the bliss and grief a periodic chance.
And everything's so dim, and everything's so clear!
You're made to cry and laugh, and tap with your high heel.
You're slowly passing by; your gown, swaying near,
Is giving me a light and unexpected chill.
And I, so much consumed by sorrow and by passion,
And jumping through old lines in my forsaken cage,
Am reading muppet-love's caricature confessions
For you to say aloud on surface of the stage.

1922


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, 1927

An Execution With A Gun


Some nights, as soon as I'm asleep,
To Russian shores my bed would run;
And now to the ravine's rip
Be executed with a gun.


Awake... From a chair, in the dark,
The watch and matches there in place,
Into my eyes, like a muzzle, sparks
The watch's double-handed face.


My chest have covered and my nape
(I know, now it will blaze),
I stare at the muzzle's gape
And cannot turn away my face.


At last, the ticking of the clock
Will palpitate my stiffened mind;
And I in the exile flock
Myself exuberantly find.


But you, my heart, would go further
This you with passion would assume:
Still Russia, stars, the night of murder,
The ravine the bird-cherry bloom.


* * *

A dream. It's coming back a quiet, feeble
thump of incarcerated. In it, stark,
with an enormous beele I slowly dibble
and find a broken nugget in the dark.
A flashlight would unveil its mystic matters:
some writing's trace, a naked worm in mud.
Read, read! runs through my, hasty, thinning blood:
R, U, S, no, I can't discern the letters.
1956


* * *

So long, my book! Ingenious drowse
Bears not a terminal delay.
From angled feet Eugene will rouse,
But poet retrogrades away.
Yet hearing lingers further, stable,
To grasp the music and the fable
Won't let arrest. Its very bind
Still tolls, and for a watchful mind
The borderlines will never order
Wherein the period I stain.
The ghost of Being would remain
Aglow behind the pages' border,
Alike the morrow's cloudy strand,
And line proceeds without an end.