Always freely I gave of my heart

Always freely I gave of my heart
To love, song, grief...
Forgive the distress
I am causing you, dear, but though we part,
Though I bleed,
this is happiness.
Fear consumes me, a terrible dread 
Of the trials to come, and the emptiness,
The shades of the past haunt me,
and yet I know
this is happiness.
I choke on tears, like trees in a storm
Your reproaches lash me.
Agony? Yes!
But don't be indifferent, forgiving or calm.
ove never forgives-
such is happiness.
Ruler supreme, love will taunt and destroy,
It seeks no compassion, itself pitiless.
Love while it lives is no plaything, no toy...
Love is both anguish and happiness!

OLGA BERGHOLTS (1910-1975).

Translated by Irina Zheleznova.

OLGA BERGHOLTS (1910-1975). Born and brought up in Leningrad, in 1930 she graduated from the philological department of Leningrad University and then worked as a correspondent of the newspaper Soviet Steppe in Alma-Ata, Central Asia. In the thirties she edited the Komsomol youth page of the factory newspaper at the Elektrosila works in Leningrad and was part-author of a book telling the story of that famous electrical engineering works. Her first book of verse, Poems, was published in Leningrad in 1934. She lived in that city throughout the 900-day wartime siege, during which her husband died of hunger. Despite the shelling and bombing of the city almost every day she spoke over the radio, at city plants and factories, at military units and aboard ships of the Baltic Fleet. The author of many volumes of lyric verse and longer poems, of a cycle of novellas Daytime Stars, as well as of essays and plays, she was awarded a USSR State Prize.