A bookseller
But glory was for You a substitution
Of pleasure of Your secret dreams:
You were sold out quickly, truly,
But a huge mass of authors keep
The dusty piles of their poems and proze
On bookshelves, seeking for a reader,
Who once will estimate the chosen.
Poet
Those are blessed, who hided in themselves
The highest creatures of their souls
From other peoples, as from graves,
And were not anxious of glory!
Those are blessed, who were inside them mute,
And did not wear thorny wreaths on heads,
Forgotten by the peoples rude,
Without any name forever left!
What's glory? A deceptive dream,
A hope's dream in a reader's whisper?
Or it may be the percecution of the people,
Who are ignoramus and foolish even?
A bookseller
Lord Byron had the same opinion;
Zhukovsky said such words a lot;
But world has learned them quiet quickly,
And their sweety works were sold.
And, say, Your fate is rare, rather,
And worth to have an envy deep,
The poet makes execution, crowns;
And villains with the lightnings kills
With the eternal bows of the rhymes;
And heroes by him are well consoled;
And as Korinna of the Kifer throne
He raises up his lovely girl.
All praises seem to him as mere toll;
But hearts of women seek for glory:
Write for them, their ears're going
To listen to the flattery of Anacreon;
In youth we like the pretty roses,
Which're dearer than laurels of Gelicon.