Boris Pasternak: Swifts

At twilight the swifts have no power,

to hold back that pale blue coolness.

It bursts from throats, a clamour

an outpour that can’t grow less.

The swifts have no way, high

up there, overhead, of restraining

their clarion cries: ‘O, triumph,

see, see, how the earth’s receding!’

Like steam from a boiling kettle,

the furious flow rushes by –

‘See, see – no space for the earth

between the ravine and the sky.’

Tr. A.S. Kline. Published a century ago, in 1916; a rejection of the earthbound for the soaring or tumbling impulses of poetry. The translation does probably all that can be done to reproduce some of the original's tight form.