I agree with David about "let tender life at play then teem" in the last stanza. I hadn't noticed it earlier, but it feels awkward and unpoetic.
As for the whole of it, of course it is impossible to make a Romantic poem's content (which includes some specific word choices) "contemporary" per se.
But that's not your or any translator's task. If it were, many good or (in Pushkin's case) great poets would be off-limits to translators. And there has probably never been another time more self-conscious about being "contemporary" than ours is anyway.
Translation is a two-way street. We translate the past into the present, but also, if the present is up to it, the present into the past. Time is a permeable membrane, and translation proves it.
As for this specific poem: Do people still have morbid thoughts about their own deaths? I reckon there isn't an adult who hasn't had them. I know I have. And Pushkin puts some of that into verse. I can relate to it.
Pushkin is a great poet and it is always enlightening to read what great poets thought about and wanted to say.
Editing back to add: Coincidentally, after writing the above, I was looking on Amazon at a poetry book I want to buy soon, by the North Carolina poet Morri Creech,
The Sentence, which came out a few months ago. Here's the book description:
Quote:
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In The Sentence, Morri Creech interrogates our daily lives and experiences to examine the anxieties and despair that often attend our awareness of mortality. Through a variety of subjects, and through styles ranging from rhyme and meter to prose poetry, he takes an unflinching look at what it means to live in the shadow of the end, the common fate to which each of us is sentenced.
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Creech no doubt takes a different tack from Pushkin, but there it is: the subject of this poem is one thing that never dies.