Моцарт: But he’s a genius, / Like you and I. And genius and villainy / Are incompatible. Is that not so?

Behind him, everywhere, the Horseman Bronze
Galloped with the grievous sound of pounding hooves.

Our best friend in this life / Is faith in Providence. / Benevolent is the Creator’s law: / Here, sadness is a dream full of deceit; / And happiness is when we wake from it.

This life is but the momentary gift of heaven; / So live it as serenely as you can, / And, with your pure soul, / Bless the blow of fate.

On that day when, above a new world, / God inclined his face, / The sun could be stopped with a word; / With a word, cities could be destroyed.

Learn from them — the oak tree and the birch. / Winter’s round about. O cruel season!

I, in darkness and in dust / Having dragged thus far the shackles on my feet, / Was raised high by the wings of love / Into the fatherland of fire and word.

Though less well-known, Pushkin’s poems inspired by the Quran clearly informed one of his most famous poems — “The Prophet.”

O Hagia Sophia — here did the Lord ordain / That nations and kings should stop in wonder!

Everything has been plundered, betrayed, sold / Black death’s wing has flashed past our eyes…

What sadness! The end of the tree-lined path /
Has vanished once again beneath a morning snow…

The night proceeds without delay, / And melts; and all the while, / Above a sleeping world, a pilot / Soars off into the clouds.

I came into this world to see the Sun / And the blue horizon.

Futile gift, accidental gift, / Life, why were you given to me?

There’s a melody in the waves of the sea, / A harmony in the clashing of the elements…

And their gaze is seized with horror. / One can understand their alarm. / The gardens are bursting their walls, / The very structure of the earth is shaken: / They are burying God.

But, friends, I do not wish to die; / I want to live, so I can think, and suffer…

A freedom-sower in a desert realm, / I set out early, before the morning star appeared…

Some of the incredibly haunting final poems of the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnóti.

When I die, I will see beneath the surface of the world. / The other side concealed behind the bird, the mountain, the sunset.