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# To You, in a Hundred Years
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/tebe-cherez-sto-let-2/
- Published: 2025-09-18T19:06:11.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T09:48:00.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, People

To you, who are to be born  
A century hence, once I have breathed my last,  
From the very depths, like one condemned to death,  
I write with my own hand:

"Friend! Do not look for me! The fashion is different!  
Even the old men do not remember me.  
Out of reach of my lips! Across the waters of Lethe  
I stretch out my two hands.

I see your eyes like two bonfires,  
Blazing at me in my grave, in hell,  
Seeing her whom no hand moves,  
Dead a hundred years ago.

With me in my hand, almost a handful of dust,  
My poems! I see: in the wind  
You search for the house where I was born, or  
In which I shall die.

At the women you meet, those living and happy,  
I am proud of how you look, and I catch your words:  
"A gathering of impostors! You are all dead!  
She alone is alive!

I served her with a volunteer's service!  
I knew all her secrets, the whole stock of her rings!  
Robbers of the dead! These rings  
Were stolen from her!

O my hundred rings! It pulls at my sinews,  
For the first time I repent  
That I gave so many of them away, askew and aslant,  
That I did not wait for you!

And I am sad too that on this evening,  
This one, today, so long did I walk after  
The setting sun, and towards  
You, across a hundred years.

I bet you will hurl a curse  
At my friends into the gloom of the graves:  
"They all praised her! A pink dress  
No one gave her!

Who was more disinterested?" No, I am self-interested!  
Since you will not kill me, I have no interest in hiding  
That I begged everyone for letters  
To kiss at night.

Shall I tell you? I shall! Non-being is a convention.  
You are to me now the most passionate of guests,  
And you will refuse the pearl of all women lovers  
In the name of that one, of bones.

*Literal translation*

**Marina Tsvetaeva, August 1919**