We are sitting at an airport <br />in Copenhagen drinking a lot of coffee. <br />It was most elegant there, and comfortable, <br />and refined to the point of lassitude. <br />Then suddenly he appeared- that old man- <br />in a plain green parka with a hood, <br />his face deep tanned by salt and wind- <br />loomed up rather than appeared. <br />He walked, furrowing through a crowd of tourists, <br />as if he’d just been sailing a boat, <br />and like the sea foam his beard, <br />whitening it, fringed his face. <br />With grim victorious determination <br />he walked, generating a big wave, <br />that swept through the modernized antique, <br />through every sort of antiqued modernity. <br />And pulling open the coarse collar of his shirt, <br />he, rejecting a vermouth and a pernod, <br />ordered a glass of Russian vodka at the bar <br />and pushed back the tonic with his hand: 'No! ' <br />With rough-hewn hands, all scarred and dented, <br />in boots that made a mighty clatter, <br />in trousers indescribably stained and greasy, <br />he looked more spruce <br /> than anything nearby. <br />The earth seemed to bend beneath him- <br />so heavily did he tread upon it. <br />And one of us said to me with a smile: <br />'Just look! The very spit of Hemingway! ' <br />Expressed in each brief gesture, he strode off <br />with a fisherman’s ponderous gait, <br />all out of granite crudely hewn, <br />strode as men stride through gunfire, <br /> through the ages, <br />He strode as if stooping in a trench; <br />strode shoving chairs and men aside... <br />He resembled <br /> Hemingway so much! <br />Later I learned <br /> it was, indeed, Hemingway! <br /> <br /> <br />Translated by George Reavey<br /><br />Yevgeny Yevtushenko<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-meeting-in-copenhagen/
