Without Lifting A Finger

Also reading: Khodasevich (a real live book!). Bilingual edition. Translated from the Russian by Peter Daniels. (Maybe I'll put up Daniels' version of "The Monkey" alongside Nabokov's someday. Maybe I'll have some time -- far down the road -- to dabble in the Russian myself.) Will certainly look more at Nabokov's Pale Fire in relation to Khodasevich's "Ballada." * Khodasevich's "Petersburg": They gave themselves to sad monotonous tasks, until their strength was spent. Half-dead among them, only I distracted their predicament. They looked at me and they forgot their bubbling kettles boiling dry, the boots of felt that scorched on stoves -- all listening to my poetry Then in sepulchral Russian dark a flowery herald-girl took my hand; and music's concord was revealed to me, knocked sideways in the wind. Mad with visions, over the sheet-ice on the canal, I'd reach the bank and slither up the crumbli...

Read Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry  (a bilingual text selected and translated by Vladimir Nabokov) a few months ago. Picked up some new names; even tried to decode the Cyrillic with the help of Nabokov's translations. One of the best poems in the entire collection (IMO) is Hodasevich's "The Monkey." The Monkey The heat was fierce. Great forests were on fire. Time dragged its feet in dust. A cock was crowing in an adjacent lot.                            As I pushed open my garden-gate I saw beside the road a wandering Serb asleep upon a bench his back against the palings. He was lean and very black, and down his half-bared breast there hung a heavy silver cross, diverting the trickling sweat.                    ...