To read only children's books

To read only children's books… (1908)
by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Dmitri Smirnov
Osip Mandelstam242036To read only children's books…1908Dmitri Smirnov

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To read only children's books,
To cherish only children's thoughts.
All grown-up things to disperse far away,
And to rise from a deep sorrow.

I am mortally tired of life,
I accept nothing of it,
But I love my poor earth,
Because I’ve seen no other.

I swung myself in a far-off garden
On the simple wooden swing,
Remembering tall dark fir trees
In an obscure delirium.


1908


 This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.

Original:

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.


The longest-living author of this work died in 1938, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 85 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse

Translation:

This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

The Terms of use of the Wikimedia Foundation require that GFDL-licensed text imported after November 2008 must also be dual-licensed with another compatible license. "Content available only under GFDL is not permissible" (§7.4). This does not apply to non-text media.

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See also

A. S. Kilne's translation