Dear Friends!

 

Dear Friends, 

I live without hope of ever communicating my gratitude to you, to any extent I might consider satisfactory.

But please do not think of me as a pessimist! Anguish might well interrupt me on most days I wake, including those meant to be celebrated, but without your support and kind wishes, I couldn't live in the hope of otherwise making myself understood... 

And so as lousy as things have been, it just so happens the date of my birth coincides with the beginning of Spring...

Last of the tempest-scattered clouds!

You alone charge upon the azure;

You alone cast a shadow, sad;

You alone temper the brightness of day.

Over time just passed, you covered the sky,

With lightning wound around you;

You thundered into the earth;

Pouring rain upon its perpetual thirst,

Enough! Disappear, that time has passed,

The earth is refreshed; the tempest flown away,

As gentle wind, caressing the leaves of trees,

Brings forth a heavenly repose. 

*Alexandr Pushkin, 1835

Isaac Levitan: Above Eternal Peace (1894)

 "De los seres que amamos su existencia nos basta."

 — 

Of the beings we love, their existence is enough for us.

— 

Yours,

SiBot

*I wasn't satisfied with the English versions already available, so I attempted to indirectly translate it myself. You may be surprised to know its a fairly common practice in the literary world for writers with very little knowledge of the original language to do this. The two versions I'd seen both tried to match the rhyming scheme (not strictly necessary considering the rhyming pairs in the original Russian alternated between genders) - obviously not possible to replicate in English. I also didn't pay too much attention to amphibrachic tetrameter, in favour of more closely replicating what the original actually said. E.g. the first of the below translations isn't sound English, and the second ignores the repetition of 'Одна ты'. 

http://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/pushkin/cloud.html
http://www.russianlegacy.com/en/go_to/culture/poetry/pushkin/storm_cloud.htm

Blue Monday

Dear Friends,

"You see, the trouble is that no devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life. It never was like a morning which gradually fills with light and colour and then turns, like other people's, into a blazing, hot day, when everything seethes and shimmers in the bright noonday sun, and then gradually grows paler and more subdued, fading naturally into the evening twilight. No! My life began by flickering out. It may sound strange but it is so. From the very first moment I became conscious of myself, I felt that I was already flickering out. I began to flicker out over the writing of official papers at the office; I went on flickering out when I read truths in books which I did not know how to apply in life, when I sat with friends listening to rumours, gossip, jeering, spiteful, cold, and empty chatter, and watching friendships kept up by meetings that were without aim or affection; I was flickering out and wasting my energies on those I imagined I loved; I was flickering out when I walked idly and dejectedly along Nevsky Avenue among people in raccoon coats and beaver collars - at parties on reception days, where I was welcomed with open arms as a fairly eligible young man; I was flickering out and wasting my life and mind on trifles moving from town to some country house, and from the country house to Gorokhovaya, fixing the arrival of spring by the fact that lobsters and oysters had appeared in the shops, of autumn and winter by the special visiting days, of summer by the fêtes, and in life in general by lazy and comfortable somnolence like the rest. ...Even ambition - what was it wasted on? To order clothes at a famous tailor's? To get an invitation to a famous house? To shake hands with Prince P.? And ambition is the salt of life! Where has it gone to? Either I have not understood this sort of life or it is utterly worthless; but I did not know of a better one. No one showed it to me. You appeared and disappeared like a bright and swiftly moving comet, and I forgot it all and went on flickering out. ...'
   You said just now that my face had lost its freshness and was flabby. Yes, I am an old shabby, worn-out coat, but not because of the climate or hard work, but because for years the light has been shut up within me and, unable to find an outlet, it merely consumed itself inside its prison house and was extinguished without breaking out into the open. And so years have passed. 
My dear friends: I do not want to wake up any more."

(Ilya Ilyich Oblomov).