Only a Man Could Write About Love Like That...

📜 Poem by Sergey Yesenin (1895–1925)

🎙️ Read in English by Anatoly Suprunyuk

✍️ Originally written in 1923

📝 Translated and recited with care to preserve the poetic voice of Yesenin — the iconic Russian poet of the Silver Age.

In this tender and confessional piece, Yesenin steps away from his image as a rebellious “hooligan poet” to explore vulnerability, love, and transformation. This English adaptation seeks to carry the emotional resonance of the original into a new language and context.

Lyrics:

Azure space is aflame up above,

I"ve forgotten my home destination...

For the first time I"m singing of love,

For the first time I give up contention.

I was all like a desolate garden,

I was greedy for women and potions.

Now, I don’t want to sing and to dance,

And to squander my life void of caution.

If I only could look at your cast

And your eyes’ golden-hazel vortex,

So that, out of love with the past,

You were able to go to none else.

Your light stature, your airy gait,

If you knew in your stubborn feeling

How a hooligan can venerate,

How a hooligan can be lenient.

All those pubs I would never attend,

And my poems would all be forgotten,

If you let me take hold of your hand

And your hair, the colour of autumn.

I would follow you ever, my dove,

Be it distant or close destination...

For the first time I"m singing of love,

For the first time I give up contention.

Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (sometimes spelled as Esenin) was a Russian lyric poet. He is one of the most popular and well-known Russian poets of the 20th century, known for "his lyrical evocations of and nostalgia for the village life of his childhood – no idyll, presented in all its rawness, with an implied curse on urbanisation and industrialisation"