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

Are met on the waste hills by countrymen

Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul

Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves,

Caught up in contemplation, the mind's eye

Fixed upon images that once were thought;

For separate, perfect, and immovable

Images can break the solitude

Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.

And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice

Aherne laughed, thinking of the man within,

His sleepless candle and laborious pen.

Robartes. And after that the crumbling of the moon.

The soul remembering its loneliness

Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,

It would be the world's servant, and as it serves,

Choosing whatever task's most difficult

Among tasks not impossible, it takes

Upon the body and upon the soul

The coarseness of the drudge.

Aherne. Before the full

It sought itself and afterwards the world.

Robartes. Because you are forgotten, half out of life,

And never wrote a book, your thought is clear.

Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man,

Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,

Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all

Deformed because there is no deformity

But saves us from a dream.

Aherne. And what of those

That the last servile crescent has set free?

Robartes. Because all dark, like those that are all light,

They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud,

Crying to one another like the bats;

And having no desire they cannot tell

WhatТs good or bad, or what it is to triumph

At the perfection of oneТs own obedience;

And yet they speak what's blown into the mind;

Deformed beyond deformity, unformed,

Insipid as the dough before it is baked,

They change their bodies at a word.

Aherne. And then?

Rohartes. When all the dough has been so kneaded up

That it can take what form cook Nature fancies,

The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more.

Aherne. But the escape; the song's not finished yet.

Robartes. Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents.

The burning bow that once could