# Motherland

Эмиль Шарафутдинов

Перевод стихотворения М. Ю. Лермонтова "Родина".


Dedicated to Alexander Michailovich Pogorelko,

A teacher of English at the Romanic-German Faculty

of The BSU, Ufa, Russia


I love my motherland but with strange love!

My reason can"t defeat this sense.

The glory bought with bloody strife,

The calmness full of proud confidence,

The cherished legends of the olden days -

No pleasant dream in me all this can raise.

But I do love - for what, I do not know -

The chilly silence of her leas,

Her shoreless forests swaying in the breeze,

Her sea wide rivers when they overflow;

I love to journey on a cart along a country road

And, slowly gazing through the shade of night,

To meet, at times sighing for bed and board,

Flickering lights in gloomy villages on either side.

I love the smoke of scorched stubble,

Belated in the wild a wagon train

And on a hill a wedded couple

Of birches white amid a yellow plain.

Or with delight, unknown to others,

I see sometimes a threshing-floor,

A window decked with carved shutters,

A peasant"s cottage roofed with straw;

Till midnight in the festive evening

I can stay watching country folks

Dancing with trampling and singing

Accompanied by drunken talks.