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Prologue: Dead Boy
Radiant evening, water rises
in the ditch, a woman with child walks in the field.
I remember you, Narcissus; you were
the color of the evening when the bells
tolled the knell.
I.) Returning to the Village
...
Midday chimes ring
festive in my village.
Yet what silence the bell
casts over the fields!
You haven’t changed, bell;
in awe I return to your voice.
“Time does not move:
behold the father’s smiles
in the children’s eyes
like rain on the branches.”
translation by Steven Sartarelli
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II.) The Day of My Death
In a city, [...]
along an avenue of lindens
when the leaves change
color in spring,
I shall fall down dead
under a sun burning
blond and high
and close my eyes,
leaving the sky to its light.
Under a linden warm with green
I shall fall into the black
of death, which the sun
and lindens will dispel.
Beautiful boys
will run in the light
that I’ve just left,
flying out of the schools,
curls falling onto their brows.
I shall be still young
in a bright shirt
my sweet hair streaming
in the bitter dust.
I shall be warm,
and a boy running down
the asphalt avenue
shall lay a hand upon
my crystal lap.
translation by Steven Sartarelli
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III.) 'I am a Force of the Past'
“…
I am a force of the Past.
My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned [...] where my brothers once lived.
I wander [...] like a dog without a master.
Or I see the twilights, the mornings, [...]
as the first acts of Posthistory
to which I bear witness, by arbitrary
birthright, from the outer edge
of some buried age. Monstrous is the man
born of a dead woman’s womb.
And I, a fetus now grown, roam about
more modern than any modern man,
in search of brothers no longer alive…”
translation by Steven Sartarelli
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IV.) 'These are the Last Days'
Survival: that too. It’s the old landscape, rediscovered
up here, where, for us, it’s more eternal.
These are the last days, or - which amounts to the same - the last years,
of plowed fields with tree trunks in rows over ditches,
of white mud around mulberry trees just pruned,
of embankments still green over dry canals.
Even here, where a pagan was once Christian, and with him
his land, his cultivated field…
A new age, with it dark years of barbarism,
its Romanesque Aprils, shall reduce all this
to nothingness, and so we may weep for it.
How can those who will not know this surviving earth
ever understand us? Or say who we once were?
Yet it is we who must understand them,
that they might be born, however lost to these bright days,
these magnificent winter stillnesses,
in the sweet, tempestuous South, the shadow-covered North…
Epilogue: Narcissus Dancing?
…
I arose amid violets
at the day’s first light,
sang a song forgotten
in the unchanging night.
I said to myself: “Narcissus!”
and a spirit with my face
darkened the grass
with the glow of his curls.
translation by Steven Sartarelli
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