Autumn

To A. Simonov


Inside me the season is autumn,
the chill is in me, you can see through me,
and I am sad, but not altogether cheerless,
and filled with humility and goodness.

But if I rage sometimes,
then I am the one who rages, shedding my leaves,
and the simple thought comes sadly to me
that raging isn't really what we need.

The main need is that I should be able
to see myself and the struggling, shocked world
in autumnal nakedness,
when even you, and the world, can be seen right through.

Flashes of insight are the children of silence.
It doesn't matter, if we don't rage aloud.
We must calmly cast off all mere noise
in the name of the new foliage.

Something has apparently happened to me,
and I am relying on nothing but silence,
when the leaves laying themselves one on another
inaudibly become the earth.

And you can see it all, as if from a height,
when you manage to shed your leaves at the right time,
when without passion inner autumn
lays its airy fingers on your forehead.

1965

--Yevgeny Yevtushenko

(Trans. by Tina Tupikina-Glaessner, Geoffrey Dutton, and Igor Mezhakoff-Koriankin (Revised) )