Flipped to a random page in Kostenko’s Three Hundred Poems yesterday, which turned out to be page 378, and translated this little poem.

Little, but challenging. I initially translated the first line as “There’s planets somewhere out beyond our view,” but there’s [plural] isn’t technically grammatically correct, though it’s a native speaker sort of error to make and is common in colloquial speech. I could have gone with “Planets are somewhere out beyond our view,” but I couldn’t get over the meter being backward on the first word.

I also don’t love how far I stray from the original with the final line. The literal translation is more like “And maybe we are their little night star?” But done is better than perfect, and I can change it later.

A confession: sometimes when I need feminine trochaic rhymes, I simply open up the text of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe and pluck a pair of words. This trick is perhaps particularly obvious here.