Буквальный перевод:
Я вскоре тебя забуду, дорогой,
так что возьми побольше от своего короткого дня,
короткого месяца, полугодия
прежде, чем я забуду, или умру, или уеду,
и мы расстанемся навсегда; мало-помалу
я забуду тебя, как уже сказала, но сейчас,
если ты будешь упрашивать меня,
прибегая к восхитительной лжи,
я поклянусь тебе своей любимой клятвой.
Я и правда хотела бы, чтобы любовь жила долго,
и чтобы клятвы не нарушались – как это бывает,
но таков уж порядок вещей, и природе удавалось
до сих пор делать свое дело исправно, –
найдем мы или нет то, что ищем, –
это праздный вопрос, с точки зрения биологии.
Комментарии на английском подчеркивают новый для женской поэзии «свободный» взгляд на любовь.
Тема сонета перекликается с содержанием других сонетов, написанных Эдной:
http://www.sonnets.org/millay.htm
http://www.whistlingshade.com/0804/relationship.html
Edna St. Vincent Millay, the ultimate realist, observed with her Byronic wit that you really don't need true, everlasting love to carry on the species…
She was an active suffragist and was considered bisexual at the time; she married Eugen Jan Boissevain on the condition that they have an open marriage. She and her husband had relationships outside their marriage but remained devoted to each other for 27 years until they died within a year of each other, in 1949 and 1950. Millay’s relationships with women included a love affair with British actress Wynne Matthison.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=4717
As a humorist and satirist, Millay expressed in Figs the postwar feelings of young people, their rebellion against tradition, and their mood of freedom symbolized for many women by bobbed hair. These sentiments found expression in the opening poem of the collection, "First Fig," beginning playfully with the line, "My candle burns at both ends." Prudence, respectability, and constancy were denigrated in other poems of the volume. The cavalier attitude revealed in sonnets through lines like "Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!" and "I shall forget you presently, my dear" was new, presenting the woman as player in the love game no less than the man and frankly accepting biological impulses in love affairs. "Rarely since [ancient Greek lyric poet] Sappho," wrote Carl Van Doren in Many Minds, had a woman "written as outspokenly as Millay."
http://whistlingshade.com/0303/millay.html
It was poems like "Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended" and "Paser Mortuus Est", with their marriage of traditionalist verse with jazz-age attitudes, that made Millay the poet of the Lost Generation, much as Fitzgerald was its novelist. Both were romantic by nature but cynical about romance itself. "I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear" cuts to the chase: it’s not the love, but the sex, that matters in the end.
I SHALL forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favourite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And oaths were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far, --
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.