Poetry Tuesday!: "Uznik" ("The Prisoner") by Aleksandr Pushkin

Here's "Узник" ("Uznik", "The Prisoner" or "The Captive") (1822) by Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837).

For the rest of my playlist, click here. Past poems are:

1. "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. "The Pulley" by George Herbert
3. "Harmonie du soir" by Charles Baudelaire
4. "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
5. "Clancy of the Overflow" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson
6. "Лотова жена" ("Lotova zhena", "Lot's wife") by Anna Akhmatova
7. "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear
8. "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan Poe
9. "Les Djinns" by Victor Hugo
10. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger
11. "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A.E. Housman

Comments

[Paladin_44]

Here’s a translation from the Schiller Institute:

I sit behind bars in the dankest of blocks.
A captive young eagle, the king of the hawks,
My sorry companion here, lifting his wings,
Pecks bloody food by the sill, pecks and flings,

And looks out the window, away, away off,
As if he, with me, fell to thinking one thought.
He summons me now with his look and his cry,
And wants to speak plainly, aloud: “Let us fly!

“We’re free birds in truth; it is time, brother, time!
To go, where o’er clouds, the high mountains are white,
To go, where the sea realm’s as blue as the sky,
To go, where the wind alone wanders… and I!”