View of St. Petersburg at 4 am.The white nights in St. Petersburg are truly magical. But I’m a programmer, not a poet, so I couldn't explain or illustrate the majesty of St. Petersburg's white nights. But, I think Pushkin, even when translated into English, does a nice job of depicting the white nights. Here's a short excerpt from his poem, "The Bronze Horseman":
I love thy harmonies austere,
And Neva's sovran waters breaking
Along her banks of granite sheer;
Thy traceried iron gates; thy sparkling,
Yet moouless, meditative gloom
And thy transparent twilight darkling;
And when I write within my room
Or lampless, read--then, sunk in slumber,
The empty thoroughfares, past number,
Are piled, stand clear upon the night;
The Admiralty spire is bright;
Nor may the darkness mount, to smother
The golden cloudland of the light,
For soon one dawn succeeds another
With barely half-an-hour of night.
And Neva's sovran waters breaking
Along her banks of granite sheer;
Thy traceried iron gates; thy sparkling,
Yet moouless, meditative gloom
And thy transparent twilight darkling;
And when I write within my room
Or lampless, read--then, sunk in slumber,
The empty thoroughfares, past number,
Are piled, stand clear upon the night;
The Admiralty spire is bright;
Nor may the darkness mount, to smother
The golden cloudland of the light,
For soon one dawn succeeds another
With barely half-an-hour of night.
1 comment:
here's Pasternak in the voice of his Doctor Zhivago.
4
"White Night"
Amid visions of eras long past
I see a house in the Petersburg quarter,
And the daughter of steppe-dwelling gentlefolk,
Born in Kursk and now auditing courses.
You're attractive, with many admirers.
And in the pale Petersburg night
The two of us sit at your window
Peering down at the town from on high.
The streetlamps - like moths made of gauze -
Are touched with the morning's first shivers,
And all that I softly recount
Bears the mark of that sleeping far distance.
And the two of us sit in the thrall
Of a shared timid faith in some secret -
Like the outspreading Petersburg scene
Beyond the expanse of the Neva.
And now, on that white night in spring,
In the distance of faraway forests
Nightingales flood each wooded reach
With the peals of their thunderous praises.
The lunatic trillings unfurl,
And the voice of that delicate songster
Awakes a commotion and thrill
In the depths of enraptured forests.
And the night steals away to those places,
Past the fence, like a barefooted vagrant;
In its wake, from the eavesdropping sill
Hangs the trail of our half-heard exchanges.
In those echoes of overheard dialogue,
Across the lath fencing and gardens
The boughs of the apple and cherry
Are decked in their white blossom garments.
And into the street from the orchard
The trees' pallid phantoms come drifting,
As if bidding farewell to the white
Night, and to and all it witnessed.
Post a Comment