Siberian Restaurant Cars

Siberian Restaurant Cars


Siberian Restaurant-Cars designed for passenger
comfort over thousands and thousand of miles!
Here, over a carafe, people sing and quarrel
and wounded hearts are torn and torn again.
The sailor hurrying back from leave,
the beetle-browed actor about to go on tour:
for miles and miles these friends
against their will sit there,
touch foreheads, and they stare
into each other's eyes.
And all the pain of half a lifetime,
and all that they have hidden deep within them,
they dare confide to one another's hearts
among the passengers as if in private.
Your whole life, espousals, separations,
sad mistakes of former days, the need of
human nature for confession - stronger
than diffidence. How many novels, stories,
poems here, if you dug about enough.
How to remember them and not go crazy!
The friends are mumbling: light, darkness,
and light, darkness once more,
break across their faces.
If only they could forget about all this
how simple their heavy lot would be.

Through the window, unpeopled Siberia
and midnight forests stretch
for a thousand miles.



Evgeny Vinokurov

translated from the Russian by
Anthony Rudolf and Daniel Weissbort

Posted over on Friko's Musings