The Inexpressible

The Inexpressible I want what’s inexpressible! Impudent, I play with fire without a queen My queen-reason is under the knight’s hooves What joy to lose to the fire! What flaming in the uncombed night From slender you, as from a candle! How you’ve fired-up The idea of sin! I writhe but the cry of my flesh is bliss The heretic is already freed by the fire Gul’ripshi New York Paris Madrid in flames And someone dear to me burns in them But if from the heretic’s fire The flame leaps to some poor bastard’s roof All the heretic burns for Shall be forever damned to hell For truth, when you burn down the scene of someone nearby, Is no longer truth but a lie. Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko English translation by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Anthony Kahn

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko † (Gangnus, Zima junction, Siberia, USSR, July 18, 1932 – Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, April 1, 2017). Photo: irkipedia.ru.