Nikolai Zabolotskii, Makers of Highways. August 16, 1949
I
The horn lifts up its sounds, monotonous and droning,
Reverberating gaily in my heart.
While lazily the sun takes time to waken,
Our TNT prepares to do its part.
Above the cliffs, precipitous and ancient,
Resounds the crackle of the Bickford fuse.
The blast goes off and thunders, birch trees shudder,
Earth’s rocky bowels groan-and hell breaks loose.
Under the force of atmospheric pressures
The shattered rocks spit out a brief white flame,
And howl and sing and chase it to the clouds.
The quarry, filled with smoke, will never be the same.
Awakened by the even roar of landslides,
All nature groans in ancient woods, and cries.
All nature, shaken, moans its mortal terror.
The moan grows weak and brittle, and it dies.
The horn is singing over distant mountains.
The sun is crawling out of sleep’s deep mire.
With crowbars raised, ranks madly broken,
We run to cut the path of thunder and of fire.
When sunlight banishes all fears and terrors,
And ghosts and shadows disappear with groans,
We scan the violated, phosphorescent,
The subterranean world of glowing stones.
With every moment blacker grow and fairer
Their moist, deformed, their sadly tortured rings.
O stones-gigantic, graceful bowls burst open!
O stars in segments, nursing broken wings!
Rectangles, diamonds, cubes and squares and circles,
And thunders hardened into silences again:
You lie before me helpless, rent asunder
By one slight effort of mates lucid brain.
The ancient chill still lingers in the quarry,
The dust still hovers over ravaged rocks,
But excavators are already busy
Discarding them into impatient trucks.
II
The jealous north kept frowning in resentment.
But, growing swifter with each day and breeze,
On towards the icepacks of the Straits of Bering
Came racing currents of the tropic seas.
To constant blasts of TNT explosions,
Lit up bewitchingly by rays of spring,
A butterfly, enormous as a rocket,
Soared on the full expanse of dazzling wings.
Imperious and pompous, the impostor,
The self-styled luminary, swam and soared,
And hosts of tiny creatures trailed behind him,
Each shining body like a winged sword.
The grasshopper, charged by the warmth of sunshine,
Kept ticking off the seconds like a clock.
The heavy beetle, leaping into sideslips,
Dragged its mustachios over grass and rock.
A million living creatures, singing, chirping,
Their music blending in one steady choir,
Were flying, jumping, crawling, eating, drinking,
Kept back from you by smoke alone and fire.
Beyond the multitudes of sun-crazed insects,
Defying swamps, their evil, mossy ban,
Surged to the tops of heat-cracked hills and mountains
A world of flowers yet unseen by man.
Competing with the blaze of dawns and sunsets,
Among abyss and rock and swamp and crest,
Here nature seems to have unleashed at heaven
The fury of all colors it possessed.
Above the mad confusions of the foliage,
Above delirious riots of the green,
Here blossomed forth the very soul of plant life
In giving birth to flowers yet unseen.
No man can hear the flower choir recitals:
The voice of lilies, tulips, is so slight
That maybe only butterflies and beetles
Can hear its fragrant magic in the night.
On such a night the sound-swept mountains revel.
Each crag and gorge keeps bursting with a song.
All living things are leaping with the music
As it erupts and storms and sweeps along
Until it drops to rest in caves primeval,
Repeating sleepily through time’s vast span
The melodies which rare and ever rarer
Brings back to memory inconstant man.
III
The horn droned on amid the changing mountains.
Along the river, railroad whistles swirled.
A likeness of cyclopean transformation
Has overwhelmed the ancient taiga world.
Here, in the temple of primeval nature,
Through thickets, woods resisting night and day,
Collapsing in the swamps, in waters sinking,
And losing hold of cliffs, we carved our way.
The winds of Amgun and Amur harassed us,
Moose crossed our path, wolves hunted us by night,
But all that hitherto lay dead and buried
We found, unlocked, and proudly brought to light.
The waves of Okhotsk Sea welled out to meet us.
The frightened birds took wing from cool green blades.
At highways edge we stood erect, triumphant,
All pointing at the sky our blazing spades.
Source: The Reporter, August 16, 1949.