Йейтс Уильям Батлер
«Стихи. (В переводах разных авторов)»

Сказал и рассмеялся от того,

Насколько трудной кажется загадка -

Но как проста разгадка. Нетопырь

Из зарослей орешника взметнулся

И закружил над ними, вереща.

И свет погас в окне высокой башни.

An old man cocked his ear upon a bridge;

He and his friend, their faces to the South,

Had trod the uneven road. Their boots were soiled,

Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape;

They had kept a steady pace as though their beds,

Despite a dwindling and late-risen moon,

Were distant still. An old man cocked his ear.

Aherne. What made that sound?

Robartes. A rat or water-hen

Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream.

We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,

And the light proves that he is reading still.

He has found, after the manner of his kind,

Mere images; chosen this place to live in

Because, it may be, of the candle-light

From the far tower where Milton's Platonist

Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince:

The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,

An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;

And now he seeks in book or manuscript

What he shall never find.

Aherne. Why should not you

Who know it all ring at his door, and speak

Just truth enough to show that his whole life

Will scarcely find for him a broken crust

Of all those truths that are your daily bread;

And when you have spoken take the roads again?

Robartes. He wrote of me in that extravagant style

He had learnt from Pater, and to round his tale

Said I was dead; and dead I choose to be.

Aherne. Sing me the changes of the moon once more;

True song, though speech: "mine author sung it me."

Robartes. Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,

The full and the moon's dark and all the crescents,

Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty

The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in:

For thereТs