Forgive me! We shall not meet again,
We shall not shake hands again;
Forgive me! Your heart is free,
But it will not find happiness in another.
I know that with sudden suffering
It will...Read more

Forgive me! We shall not meet again,
We shall not shake hands again;
Forgive me! Your heart is free,
But it will not find happiness in another.
I know that with sudden suffering
It will tremble again,
When you hear the name
Of him who died so long ago!

There are sounds that mean nothing,
Sounds despised by the crowd;
But they are impossible to forget,
For as in life they are entwined with the soul.
As in a coffin, the past is buried
In the depth of those holy sounds;
Only two in the whole world will understand them,
And only two will shudder at them!

We were together but a moment,
But eternity is nothing before it;
We exhausted all our feelings all at once,
We burned them with a single kiss;
Forgive me! Don’t feel reckless regret,
Don’t regret our short-lived love:
It seemed difficult to say farewell,
But ’twould be far more difficult to meet again!

—translation by Igor Prokhorov

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