The original poem here is so breathtakingly beautiful, and I am so embarrassed by the crimes against rhyme and meter I committed trying to make it fit into English.

I am not happy with this — far from it, I think it’s probably the worst poetic translation I’ve done yet — but done is better than perfect and habit is better than honor. Maybe someday I’ll get it right.

When I at least have decent pairs of end rhymes but the meter is lumpy and the phrasing is awkward, I can untangle that. When the rhymes themselves are bad, I find myself a little stuck. This poem had a lot of words that were quite difficult to rhyme or rearrange adequately in the relatively short lines.

I am pleased with how well I stuck to the subject matter of the original, though. The only truly extraneously injected bits here:

1. The original line about unraveling is more like a simple “Life unraveled, unraveled,” and
2. The “farewell” was not, strictly speaking, in the original, but I needed an iamb and it made sense thematically.

And I do love that last line.

This is the sixteenth poem in Kostenko’s Three Hundred Poems, originally untitled and found on page 23.