Original
Воспоминание
Я помню как-тоХолодно было,Холодный воздухОбнимал мое лицо.
Холодный ветер проникалВо все людское тело,И мороз по телу пробегалЗимнее и быстрее все.
Глаза у всех на лицахБез теплоты замерзли.И как-то все было не то,Но почему?, не знал никто.
Translation
Memory
I remember, once,it was cold —the cold airembraced my face.
A cold wind made its wayinto the whole human frame,and frost ran over the body,more wintry and faster all the time.
The eyes on every facehad frozen, with no warmth in them.And somehow all of it was wrong —but why? — nobody knew.
About the poem
The longest of the early poems moves from a grey, frozen day — everyone’s eyes “frozen without warmth,” the clouds “holding together in a solid clump” — into a private night of snow and moonlight with “my tender talisman.” Walking, star-gazing, thinking “of everything and at once of nothing,” meeting the sunrise and parting with a kiss until evening: the poem is almost a film, and its structure — public cold, then shared warmth — is its meaning. What gives the poem weight is the movement from weather into memory. The outer world freezes first, then the private past begins to thaw inside it. Love becomes a source of heat remembered against a landscape that seems determined to erase warmth.