Ogden Nash

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance
Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.

There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges,
Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies.
I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five…

Залезет быстренько в чехол
И не узнаешь её пол.
Не грех для дамы столь дородной,
В таком чехле быть плодородной.Перевод Валентина Савина

Beneath this slab
John Brown is stowed.
He watched the ads
And not the road.

Зачем же Господь наградил нас проворством?
Понятно зачем: убежать, когда надо, - просто.Перевод Виты Штивельман
Все переводы Виты Штивельман

The only people who should really sin
Are the people who can sin with a grin,
Because if sinning upsets you,
Why, nothing at all is that it gets you.…

One would be in less
From the wiles of a
If one's own kin and
Were more fun to be with.

People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different.
People look At them with eyes that wonder when… People watch with unshocked eyes;

Кого-то должны игнорировать дети,
на то и родители есть на свете.Перевод Виты Штивельман
Все переводы Виты Штивельман

Just imagine yourself seated on a shadowy terrace,
And beside you is a girl who stirs you more strangely than a heiress.
It is a summer evening at its most superb,
And the moonlight reminds you that To Love is an active verb,…

I find it very difficult to enthuse Over the current news.
Just when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens,
And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era…

Any hound a porcupine
Can't be blamed for harboring grudges.
I know one hound that laughed all winter At a porcupine that sat on a splinter.

Ну сколько же можно талантливых перьев ломать
Про то, что нет мальчику лучшего друга, чем мать!
И как не устали умильно плакать,
Отводя эту роль бессловесной собаке!

Is
But
Is quicker

In Baltimore there lived a boy.
He wasn't anybody's joy.
Although his name was Jabez Dawes,
His character was full of flaws.

Go hang yourself, you old M.
D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope

The rhino is a homely beast,
For human eyes he's not a feast.
Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,
I'll stare at something less prepoceros.

Senescence
And middle age
The day your
Outnumber your friends.

Consider the auk;
Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk.
Consider man, who may well become extinct
Because he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked.

I find it very hard to be
About people who go around being air-minded.
I just can't see any
In soaring up up up into the

Some singers sing of ladies’ eyes,
And some of ladies lips,
Refined ones praise their ladylike ways,
And course ones hymn their hips.…

There is a knocking in the skull,
An endless silent
Of something beating on a wall,
And crying, “Let me out!”That solitary

Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.

The trouble with the kitten
Is that
Eventually it becomes
A cat.