From: ibshambat@gmail.com   
      
   1   
      
   Upon Pieria's great stone cascades   
   The muses were conducting their first choir   
   And just like bees, the blind musicians made   
   Gifts of Ionian honey from their lyres.   
   From a young woman's convex forehead   
   Cold air blew in gusts like rays of sun   
   That the archipelago's tender coffins   
   Would open for the far-off great-grand-son.   
      
   2   
      
   The springtime stomps across the meadows of Hellas,   
   The rainbow-booted Sappho runs along   
   Cicadas ring as if with tiny hammers   
   And interweave like tendrils with sweet song.   
   The carpenter has built a giant tower,   
   For wedding day they suffocated hens   
   And to create the shoes the clumsy cobbler   
   Has stretched and tattered all the five ox skins.   
      
   3   
      
   Unhurried and unkempt is turtoise-lyre   
   Like something legless barely crawling past   
   She lies under the sunshine of Epirus,   
   Her golden stomach warming not-too-fast.   
   Well, who in such a shape will care for her,   
   Who'll turn her over while she sleeps at night?   
   In dreams she is awaiting for Terpander   
   Sensing at dawn the drying fingers' flight.   
      
   4   
      
   Cold dew is feeding oaks with gentle ease   
   The unkempt grass with erudition speaks her view,   
   Honeycomb falls to the delight of bees -   
   Oh, holy isles, exactly where are you,   
   Where broken bread is never eaten,   
   Where there is only honey, wine and milk,   
   Where fiddle's labor does not reach the heaven,   
   And languorously turns the fortune's wheel.   
      
   By Osip Mandelshtam   
   Translated from Russian by Ilya Shambat   
   https://sites.google.com/site/ibshambat   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)