Original
Romantic ballad
Лунной ночью летней,Гулял с тобою я.И помню взгляд твой нежный,Й глаза, что смотрят на меня.
Ветер стих уже довольно,Мы одни вдвоем – привольно.Слышно только шум реки,Около какой присели мы.
Мы друг друга забавляли,На небе звезды мы считали.И мечтали, долго мечтали,И что случилось?, – не понимали.
Translation
Romantic ballad
On a moonlit summer nightI walked with you. And I recallyour tender look, your eyes that fallon me — and look at me.
The wind had dropped by then, and wewere on our own, we two — and free.Only the river's sound was there,the one we'd sat down near.
We entertained each other, played,we counted stars up in the sky,and dreamed, and dreamed for long — and thenwhat happened? — we could not tell why.
About the poem
The English title sits over a Russian poem that tells, in quatrains, a first night of love on a riverbank: counting stars, undressing, “Eve and Adam,” the river that “washed away new sins,” a morning of happiness. What makes it a ballad rather than a boast is the tone — candid, tender, faintly astonished — and the parenthesis at the end, where the speaker looks back and allows that his first night “was even very good.” The longest and most innocent of the infatuation poems. The ballad’s simplicity is deliberate: landscape, body and first love are remembered as one continuous summer scene. The river is more than setting; by carrying away the night, it turns intimacy into something already passing while it is being lived.