Poem in Your Pocket

In honor of the end of National Poetry Month, I offer up Boris Pasternak's "Defintion of Poetry" translated by Tatiana Tulchinsky, Gwenan Wilbur, and Andrew Wachtel:

A perfectly ripened trill,
The cackling of crushed ice,
Night, frosting a leaf,
A duel between nightingales.

A sweet pea-vine grown wild,
God's tears upon a peapod,
Figaro from flutes and conductors' stands
Crashing down like hail on a flower bed.

The crucial discovery of night
In the depths of swimming holes,
And the star it must bring to the garden
On trembling wet palms.

The heat is flatter than planks on water.
Heaven is felled like an alder.
It would become these stars to laugh -
Too bad the world is a wilderness.

For more Russian poetry, I highly recommend the site where I found this translation, which features all poems in the original and in excellent translations and sound files of many of the poems being recited. -Zh.