Here young boys play. A heavy shadow spreads
Over brown dung. Servant women walk
Through the moist blue, and sometimes their eyes mock
It, longing, as bells toll above their heads.

An inn leans for the down and lonely there.
Patiently it waits beneath dark arches,
Moved by clouds of gold tobacco smoke,

Yet always black and near. A stranger soaked
In booze stands in the shade of older arches
After the wild birds take to the air.

after the German of Georg Trakl (1887-1914)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in The New Formalist

And why did he, looking into death’s flame,
Give them, who are not, such an eternal name?

after the Polish of Boleslaw Lesmian (1877-1937)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in The Susquehanna Quarterly

still radiant, though dimmed. If not, his bare
breast would not blind you in the silent turn
of hip and thighs, a smile not flash and burn
through groins, his genitals not ever glare.

If not, this stone would seem deformed and small,
the light beneath his shoulder’s sudden fall
not seem a preying panther’s shimmering mane,

not burst beyond the limits of the skies,
starlike, until there is no point or plane
blind to your ways. You must change your life.

after the German of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in The New Formalist

That’s Mary murdered at the entrance gate,
Hair frozen to the bloody stones and grate.

Masked in rags, three soldiers limping by
Cannot burn from her ear the infant’s cry.

The last canteen sunflower won’t get them far.
They seek the way and cannot see the star.

Aurum, thus, myrrham offerunt…
Crow and cur come to a manger ruined.

…quia natus est nobis Dominus.
On a bleached skeleton gleam soot and ooze.

The way to Stalingrad’s a smouldering glow.
And it leads to a charnel house of snow.

after the German of Peter Huchel (1903-1981)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in Trinacria

And why does she keep staring at the fish like that,
What’s its sickly mouth trying to tell her?
Why are old lipsticks fragile and cracked,
And powdered rouge paler and paler?

after the Polish of Stanislaw Grochowiak (1934-1976)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in The Tennessee Quarterly

You will die, rise from where you fell,
All be repeated, cold and damp:
The night, the wavering canal,
The pharmacy, the street, the lamp.

after the Russian of Alexander Blok (1888-1921)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in The New Formalist

Light-by-light, light dies in a dim glade—
And light’s death moves a wood to sorrow.
Midnight expires before a gate,
But the gate—silvers with tomorrow.

Where’s the untrod way? And where the trod?
Where—breath after death? Pain—after dying?
So there is no breath and there is no God?
Not anything—yet the moon’s shining?

The moon’s a hamlet huge and serene
Where my brother Silver hordes the hush
And outgrows himself in his own dream
And paints himself with a silver brush.

And so he’s a poet—a bad wight!
A connoisseur of rare wines and mist,
A dream-fawning boy in the wrong light,
A bustling tune eternity kissed.

In rhymed nets he catches silver pups,
And silver apples and silver weeds—
And tosses tatters of silver hush
Onto moon meadows, or primal meads.

‘Death!’—he says—’Dark will overhear us!
Don’t mock heaven, or it will roil!’—
And tosses tatters of deep-blue hush
Onto moon toil, or pre-toil.

‘I breathe forth’—he says—’fog in a rush
And know God’s—tears in a blizzard’s hold!’—
And tosses tatters of golden hush
Onto moon gold, or ancestral gold.

It’s a hilly, marshy and valed place
With deep-blued Danubes and deep-blued Niles,
And like a stage sans actors, empty space
Despairs in the spotlight—down dark aisles.

And Silver whispers in the back rows:
‘Dark does not live by light alone—
Everyone’s unhappy to the bone,
Yet why one silvers?—Nobody knows.

‘Ere death turns the first fathering thought
Of my soul and my tears into dark—
May the golden grinding-wheel of naught
Dust my eyes with myriad stars!’—

And as he says this—naught reveals bright
Twinkling fangs—evil and sincere—
And one more nova wanes in the night—
And one more God dies in the stratosphere.

after the Polish of Boleslaw Lesmian (1877-1937)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in The Susquehanna Quarterly

It’s dusk now, not a road in sight, nor ancient barrows.
I look up at the sky and look for stars to catch.
There distant clouds glint—there tomorrow starts to etch;
The Dnieper glimmers; Akkerman’s lamp shines and harrows.

I stand in stillness, hear the migratory cranes,
Their necks and wings beyond the reach of preying hawks;
Hear where the sooty copper glides across the plains,

Where on its underside a viper writhes through stalks.
Amid the hush I lean my ears down grassy lanes
And listen for a voice from home. Nobody talks.

after the Polish of Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in the Sarmatian Review

Of winter, white
In the faint glow
Of early light
And softest snow.

The birch still yields
Stars at this time,
Though over fields
Sun breaks through rime.

Dawn wakes the grounds
And sleeping ploughs,
But makes its rounds
Through silver boughs.

after the Russian of Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in Trinacria

On naked spars the banner-shaped sails hang at ease.
The vessel is in chains now, leeside facing west,
Lulled by slow rocking. Passengers lampoon in jest,
Swabbies sigh to one another, slapping knees.

Blithe Sea! Among your jolly living creatures is
The polyp, sleeping in your depths when dark clouds swarm,
Wielding longish arms amid each starfish grave.

Sweet dreams! Below a hydra of remembrances
Sleeps in the middle of mishaps and raging storm,
And when the heart is calm, its pincers flash and wave.

after the Polish of Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855)
translated by Leo Yankevich
first appeared in the Sarmatian Review