Sol 6.1

  1. Kuropatkin, your day is unlike yesterday;

    for I find solace in you amid your defeats.

  2. Both of us are bewildered: a foe makes you suffer,

    and one my soul chose as a friend makes me suffer.

  3. And you have been thwarted with arrow and shield,

    as I was thwarted with pen and page.

  4. And I did not fall short in literature and learning,

    and you did not fall short in resolve and valor.

  5. And the tyrant Tsar so roused you

    that you seemed to be standing in for him at a wedding.

  6. His good fortune hastened, so you passed around a cup,

    while the star revolved—if only you knew—ominously.

  7. So you spent the night embracing spears in swaggering pride,

    and delighting in keen swords—such delight!

  8. To seize the head of the Son of the Sun by force,

    and offer his crown to the lowliest head.

  9. Was it for a lofty palace in the lands of China

    that the Russians placed their hopes in you—or to build a tomb?

  10. And what could fire accomplish against that snow

    for a wrathful man, slow to pardon and ill-tempered?

  11. O Tsar, your people did not falter,

    nor were they without claw and tooth.

  12. But you drove them to war against their will,

    and they did not trust you amid famine and imprisonment.

  13. And what use is fighting without hope

    for a docile army, submissive to humiliation?

  14. And can an edifice defy the ages

    when you seek the sky with it, without a foundation?

  15. So taste the fruits of your rule over subjects

    among whom you have made the worst planting bear fruit.

  16. You distracted them from it with this war,

    treating a stubborn ailment with quintan fever.

  17. And what of a Tsar's tyranny over subjects

    who have wasted their lives from convalescence to relapse?

  18. O giants among the white tyrants, this

    is the greatest lesson from the short yellow men.

  19. Where, then, are the Cossack horsemen, before whom bow

    the horsemen of the Tatars and Persians?

  20. And where is your vaunted superiority,

    and your might over the baser neighbor?

  21. Will the valiant Tsar one day return

    saying, 'War is filth—utter filth'?

  22. Leave a land whose morning light leads you astray,

    and whose soil bites you with the cruelest bite.

  23. For the battalions do not know where they march,

    nor do the ships know where to anchor.

  24. You refused to let one in the right share equally with you;

    so you have returned without saving even a sixth.

Sol 6.1