Introduction, verse translation from Avestan and comments by I. M. Steblin-Kamensky "Lord, grant me a good thought" From Bedtime prayers: 1st Prayer, St. John Chrysostom, 4 a.m. "...The light of the resurrection power dominates the earth..." Nikolai Gumilev. The Song of Zarathustra This issue of Vestnik is dedicated to the memory of Igor Mikhailovich Diakonov, not only a scholar - historian and orientalist, but also a poet-translator. Not just a translator, but a poet who was inspired directly by the original, who was imbued with the essence of the poetry that he undertook to translate. Igor Mikhailovich knew many languages, but he translated poems from those languages that he knew perfectly (in addition to the ancient Eastern languages, he also translated them from many Western ones). He himself explained the difference between a translation from a subscript and a poetic original, and quoted Goethe's words: "Wer den Dichter will verstehen, Muss in Dichters Lande gehen - Who wants to know the poet, Let him know his country, ..and the country means the language: what is the culture of the people that the poet speaks on behalf of, if not in their language? " (1). 1. Diakonov I. M. Perevodchiki [Translators] / / Izbrannye perevody, Moscow, 1985, p. 6. page 290 With his best translations, Igor Mikhailovich showed how you can get to this land of poetry of poetic translation - the land of poets and prophets. Who knows what will live longer after us: countless scientific articles and thick books-or inspired lines of poetic translations? Moreover, Igor Mikhailovich ruthlessly rejected some of his old hypotheses himself: "... I ask the reader to consider invalid everything I wrote about magicians and Zoroastrianism... " (2). Indeed, it seems impossible to enter the "land" of the initial Zoroastrianism, given the variety of hypotheses of its localization in time and space. It would probably be superfluous to preface the poetic translations of the prophecies of the ancient Ary ... Read more