"I wandered through the city of my youth..." and "One-thousand-year-old Kyiv"

by Vasyl Stus

Translated from the Ukrainian by Bohdan Tokarskyi and Uilleam Blacker

I wandered around the city of my youth,
vainly searching, in the new blocks, 
for yesterday’s buildings, parks, and paths,  
for familiar patterns on pediments,
geography is lost.
The city had become prettier and grown,
new avenues had appeared, new hotels, streets,
monuments, stadiums, and trees,
yet not a single familiar face in the crowd, 
not a single face
that would evoke 
your vanished youth.
I hoped at least to run into myself,
right where the fountain flowed,
hemmed by artificial marble.
All in vain.
Nothing.
Disappeared without a trace. 
The light high-rises took off into the sky, 
and you so very small next to them,
not visible even to yourself,
let alone to passers-by. 
A taxi driver stopped his car 
and walked up to the fountain,
which sprinkled water
on a gentle, unfamiliar poplar,
he washed his hands,
got out his handkerchief,
carefully dried his palms,
then got behind the wheel and sped off,
leaving a little cloud of dust behind.
Watching him drive away,
I realised for the first time: I failed at life. 

***

One-thousand-year-old Kyiv
fancied feeling young again.
Suddenly Kyiv was aware of hotels,
trolleybuses, trams and trains, 
the Paton Bridge,
the ungainly buildings on Khreshchatyk.
Kyiv licked
the rough asphalt
with its pagan tongue – 
the slopes of the Green Theatre
became overrun by martens,
squirrels, aurochs,
and the god Yarylo’s roaring heathen laughter
drove the Dnipro’s waves.

Kyiv coughed asthmatically.
Through the metro’s drafts
the electric trains fearfully rattled,
as a dozen layers of ground,
white from human bones,
horses’ skulls,
and grey ash of funeral pyres,
rippled like the skin
on an angry bull’s neck.

Kyiv strained but then gave up:
just how the devil 
to lift this whole assemblage
of new-builds, avenues, motorways,
and the stately birthless bellies
of the inhabitants?

May sacred forces strike you down,
heathen Kyiv hurled a curse.

But then it saw a pack of pioneers
and, ashamed, it bowed its head.
It hid itself away – without a peep.

IV 1965

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Photo cover by Julia Dragan