CENTURY OF THE WOLF

In the name of the higher tribes of the future,
in the name of their foreboding nobility,
I have had to give up my drinking cup at the family feast,
my joy too and my honor.

This cutthroat wolf century has jumped on my shoulders,
but I don’t wear the hide of a wolf —
no, tuck me like a cap in the sleeve
of a sheepskin shipped to the steppes.

I do not want to eat the small dirt of the coward,
or wait for the bones to crack on the wheel.
I want to run with the shiny blue foxes
moving like dancers in the night.

There the Siberian river is glass,
there the fir tree touches a star,
because I don’t have the hide of a wolf
or slaver in the wolf trap’s steel jaw.

Osip Mandelstam