Automobile Poem by Vladislav Khodasevich

We make our way in somber silence.
The empty dark, the row night.
And suddenly - with singing summons -
Automobile arrives in sight.

While shone with facets of his glasses
And a black varnish of side screens,
‘He' stretches in the nightly darkness,
Like Angel, two ‘His' whiting wings.

And buildings were at once mutated
Into the walls of festive halls,
And there, a passer-by, belated,
Run through the wings, ‘He' wildly holds.

The light had splashed and get off farther,
Swinging in rain's transparent sea…
But hark to me: now another,
Another Car arrives to me.

‘He' runs to us in light of dawns
‘He' runs to us on sunny days
And on ‘His' sides two wings like those,
But they are black - the wings, ‘He' spreads.

And all that only could be found
Under the black shaft of ‘His' rays,
Without any trace flew out
From my remembrance far away.

I do forget, I loose forever
My Psyche, my untainted soul,
I stretch my arms of a sightless beggar,
And could not recognize that all:

There was the world here, simple and whole,
But from the time as ‘He' appeared,
The blanks gape in the world and soul,
As from the acids which were spilled.


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, December, 2000