Избранное. 875. I stepped from Plank to Plank

Я с осторожностью
По шатким доскам шла
Над Головой — мерцанье Звезд
У ног — Mорская гладь.

Не знав, что каждый дюйм
Мог стать бы роковым, —
Я шатко двигалась вперед
Лишь oпытом одним.


875

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch —
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

                Emily Dickinson
         

Прим. переводчика:

Стихотворение написано в 1864 году за 2 года до смерти.

<<Analysis (ai): Theme and Imagery: The poem portrays a speaker navigating an unstable path, symbolized by planks above the sea. Celestial and aquatic imagery underscores the tension between vastness and vulnerability.>>


<< "WALKING the PLANK" was a method of execution practised on special occasion by pirates, mutineers, and other rogue seafarers. For the amusement of the perpetrators and the psychological torture of the victims, captives were bound so they could not swim or tread water and forced to walk off a wooden plank or beam extended over the side of a ship.

The phrase appeared in a 1788 book on the slave trade, which recorded a 1779 incident in which slave-ship captains declared that if they ran out of water and food, they would save themselves by making their slaves jump overboard>>
                (From the Internet)


               
                Стихи.ру 20 ноября 2012 года