Original
Встреча
Когда мы встретились впервые,Я увидел глаза твои безобидные.Твой взгляд пронзил меня насквозь,И в этот миг все началось,И тогда уж мне пришлосьПодумать о тебе всерьез.Я не знаю почему, но мне хотелосьСнова встретится с тобой,Узнать те таинственные силы,Что так меня к тебе манили.Где не был я, повсюду,Являлась ты ко мне причудой.И в снах ко мне ты приходила,И в снах ко мне ты говорила,
Translation
The Meeting
When we met for the very first time,I saw your eyes — they meant no harm.Your glance went through me like a blade,and in that instant all began,and from that moment I was boundto think of you in earnest.I don't know why, but I desiredto meet again, to learn what firedthose secret forces, strange and true,that drew me on and on to you.Wherever I was, in every place,you came to me, a whim, a face.In dreams you'd come, in dreams you'd stay,in dreams I'd hear you softly say
About the poem
A first encounter told in one unbroken breath of twenty lines. The eyes are “harmless” yet they pierce; the girl returns in dreams and promises to love always; the speaker wakes “out of his mind” — and then, in a startlingly self-aware turn, admits it is “only a game, which, like a stanza, must find its end.” The poem knows it is a poem. Infatuation and the craft of writing about it arrive at the same moment. That final self-interruption matters: emotion is intense, but the speaker is already watching himself turn experience into form. The encounter therefore becomes both a love memory and an early declaration of the poet learning how to end a poem.