Longing for Homeland

[Ilya Shambat]

Longing for homeland! Long ago
Exposed torment! To me
It is completely all the same
Where completely lonely to be,

By which stones on the road home
With the bazaar knapsack to drag
Home, not knowing, that it's mine,
Like hospital or a barrack.

It's same to me, among which faces
Like an imprisoned lion to bristle,
And from among which people's midst
To be forced out - without fail -

Into oneself, into individual feelings.
As polar bear without ice floe
Where not to live - it's the same to me
(And I don't dare) - where to go low.

I won't be tempted by the milky
Call of the tongue of my homeland.
It is the same to me on which
People me would misunderstand.

(To reader of newspaper tons,
To gulper, milker of rumors.) He
Is of the twentieth century,
And I - of any century!

Grown petrified just like a log
Remaining only of an alley,
They're all the same, it's all the same,
And maybe most the same - to me -

Dearer than everything that was.
All marks from me, all signs that were,
All dates - brushed off as if by hand:
Soul, that had once been born - somewhere.

Thus my land did not keep me there,
That the detective most keen
Along the soul, across it all!
The birthmark has not sought or seen!

Alien is home, temple - empty,
And all's the same and one to me.
But if along the road a bush
Rises, especially - ashberry...

By Marina Tsvetayeva
Translated from Russian by Ilya Shambat