By Andrey Bely

1. A big moon flew along torn clouds.

2. Now here, now there rose tall inclines ingrown with young birches.

3. Bald hills were seen, seeded with tree stumps.

4. Sometimes pines turned up, clinging to each other in lonely piles.

5. A forted wind blew screaming, and trees waved their long branches to.

6. I sat by a creek and spoke in a wavering voice:

7. “How? Still alive... Not yet asleep?”

8 “Sleep, sleep… oh, torn heart!”

9. And in response a mocking laughter would roll: “Sleep… Ha, ha… Sleep… Ha, ha, ha…”

10. It was the tumult of a giant. Above the creek I saw his vast shadow…

11. And when I raised my eyes in fear to the resounding, defiant heights, from the pined inclines gazed at me the giant’s eye.

12. For long I sat by a creek and spoke in a wavering voice:

13. “For how long, for how long to saw logs?... And to reap grasses?”

14. And in response a mocking laughter would roll: “Ha, ha… Reap grasses?.. Ha, ha, ha…”

15. It was the tumult of a giant. Above the creek stood his vast shadow…

16. And when I raised my eyes to the resounding heights, amidst the pined heights, meandered shifting the giant’s face.

17. The giant clenched white teeth and laughed, laughed his heart away…

18. Then I bent whole and spoke in a wavering voice:

19. “Oh me, the young fool, a dead branch and a broken wheel fiddle…

20. Could a shattered staff be good for anything but heating ovens?

21. Oh you, the fogged timelessness!”

22… But here jumped out of the grove my pined acquaintance, the giant. Leaning, he gloomed over me…

23. Whistled in his fist and snapped fingers in front of my dumb nose.

24. And so I grabbed my meager belongings. Stormed away…

25. A big moon flew along torn clouds…

26. It seemed to me this night lasted years and before it stretched millenniums…

27. A lot imagined itself to me. Of many things I then first knew…

28. Before me, on a fogged horizon, a somber giant played with blue rainclouds.

29. He picked up a blue morsel of a cloud that shimmered with silver thunders.

30. Contorted his muscles, and roared like a beast…

31. His mad eyes were blinded by silver lightning.

32. Stone-pale face blazed and shimmered from sudden flares and bursts.

33. Just like that, he picked up morsels of blue clouds that cowered at his feet.

34. Just like that, he tore and scattered around the clouds, and my lips composed thundering songs…

35. And while I watched the giant’s massive toil, I wept empty tears.

36. But now he raised up with his mighty shoulders the whole of a raincloud blue and walked the blueing cloud along the wide horizon…

37. But here like a branch he snapped and crashed down, that somber titan, and the stone-pale face of his, a face blazed with lightnings, for the last time appeared in a gazing tear amidst the brooding clouds…

38. No more did I learn about the fallen giant… He was crushed by the blue clouds…

39. And when I wept and cried about the trampled giant, fisting away my tears, I was whispered to in the windy night: “It’s dreams… Only dreams…”

…”Only dreams”…

40. Defeated, I yet sensed how the ghost of timelessness devised to sing its sad songs, to entomb, to enshrine its mutinous giant.

41. The ghost devised, but never got to it, and instead froze in elderly impotence.

42. … And at last I heard what sounded like a stallion’s gallop…

43. Somebody charged at me from a distant hill, harboring with hooves the barren earth.

44. With amazement I learned that it was the centaur Bucentaur that flew toward me… open hands dancing, smiling a lightning smile… a smile just a morsel scary.

45. His ravened carcass harbored the tired earth, and his tail fluttered.

46. With a deep lyred voice the centaur screamed to me that from the hill he saw a roseate sky…

47. …That from there one can see the dawn…

48. Like so the centaur Bucentaur screamed to me in a lyred voice, rushing past like a hurricane.

49. …And dashed into the distant that mad centaur, screaming that from the hill he saw a roseate sky…

50. …That from there one can see the dawn.

- 1904