All That Had Filled my Soul

ALL THAT HAD FILLED MY SOUL

Nikolay Zabolotsky

Translated by Misha Semenov

Revised 5 Mar, 2012

All that had filled my soul felt as if it’d been lost again,

And I lay in the grass, wearied by boredom and grief.

And the wondrous body of a flower rose up above me,

And a grasshopper, miniature guardsman, kept watch on a leaf.

Then I took out my thickly-bound volume and opened it,

To the first page—the engraving of a plant, an inky old picture.

Was it the truth of that flower, or its implicit falsehoods,

That reached out from the book, dark and dead, to nature?

And the flower looked at its reflection with wonder,

As if trying to grasp this stranger’s great wisdom and skill.

And then a thought arose, flowed through it, sent tremors through the leaves,

A movement never known before, an inexplicable power of will.

And the grasshopper raised up its trumpet, and nature awoke all at once

And the sad creature sang praise to the mind and to thought.

And the flower’s likeness stirred in my old book,

So that my heart stirred too and edged toward it.

1936