Tell me, Comrade God, how can life, over this stretch,
go from tolerable to such a pain,
when everything is not as it should be,
weather, ecology, men.
And even the barking of dogs, it’s not the same dogs
that beethovenly, chopinly tickled the hearing.
The grass egged on the act of love
but that was grass, not senna leaflets.
My God, it’s like you’re not mine, because
finally even you went over to the khazars,
abandoned our side, for which—
and I’m speaking for the marketplace—
the deeper into the forest you go, the more the wolves howl.
Translated by Daniel Weissbort