THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

Весь день по небу, но—
Под вечер, заглотав звезду,
Срывается оно.
И скоро звезд моих запас
Истрачу я, рыбак.
Эй, берегитесь! В этот час
Охватит землю мрак.
I bait my hook
With a flickering star.
The moon is my white bobber
Over the black water.
I sit, an old man, by the eternal waters
And quietly sing like this,
And the sun bites every day
At my line.
And I reel it in, I reel it
All day along the sky, but
As evening approaches, having swallowed the star,
It breaks away.
And soon my store of stars
I, the fisherman, will use up.
Hey, beware! At that moment
Darkness will envelop the world.
Khodasevich retains the basic plot line and much of the lexicon of Muni's inserted
skazka: each day an old fisherman 66 catches the sun on his star-baited hook and pulls it
across the surface until the sun swallows the star and falls back down into the water.
Both the song and the fairytale end with the threat of darkness—the fisherman senses that
he will eventually run out of hooks and stars. Khodasevich's poem, however, lacks the
psychological quality of Muni's tale. Muni's narrator, incapable of understanding much
of what he does, constantly questions himself, his actions and motivations. By contrast,
Khodasevich's lyric persona sings along quietly, providing no psychological or emotional
66 According to Andreeva, Muni's fisherman resembles Avvushka from Bely's "Северная Симфония."
Kissin, Legkoe bremia, 186.
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