"The Letter Carrier's Satchel" by Varlam Shalamov

a translation of "СУМКА ПОЧТАЛЬОНА" from Колымские тетради

Frigid, the hours at nighttime,
In monstrous disquietude,
To the sky I send up my call sign
from the seventieth latitude.

Warming at a fire somewhere,
May a bearded geologist,
Locate my position there
On this cursed mountain,

Where, like Tannhäuser and Venus,
A captive of barren snows,
Having lived twenty years in a cave,
Misery, the only dream I know.

Still, longing to break free,
my shoulders like Samson heaving,
to bring down this vault of stone,
so many years I've imagined leaving.

          *  *  *

I held on to that fairy tale —
Until that fairy tale was dead.
Its human caress
had long since fled.

A moth in a snowstorm,
She was hidden,
To the light she came,
To the window bidden.

The flakes of snow
Became moths in crowds,
A flutter of wings let loose
From the low clouds.

Out into the snowy distance
With a tear on my cheek,
Through my fingers the delicate
White pollen sweeps.

          *  *  *

In memory are great evils disguised — 
In number and degree unperceived.
While in life lies, only lies,
In it we can no longer believe.

Maybe, the cities are gone,
Gone too the orchard's trees,
Only the power of ice lives on,
and the briny seas.

Maybe, the world — is only snow,
A road lit by stars.
Maybe, the world — is only taiga,
In God's mind, not ours.

          *  *  *

I — Archimedes — fishing upon the sand,
In the swift shadows of the mind,
On a crumpled, tattered page in hand
Have this poem's last line signed.

I — Archimedes — will not avert my gaze
from these vague stanzas' theoretical resolution.
In those moments of life in my last days —
Another line in this poem's evolution.

I know for me this is no game or test,
But deadly. It is for life itself played.
I — Archimedes — will not let my pen rest,
And this notebook must not be mislaid.