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发表于 2005-1-29 20:22:24
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from Poems 1945-1955...
Where I Live
When I opened the window
fishes swam into the room,
herrings. A shoal
seemed to be passing.
Between the pear trees they too played.
But most of them
still keep to the forest,
above the sapling plantations and gravel pits.
They’re a nuisance. But more of a nuisance
are the sailors
(higher ranks, too, helmsmen, captains)
who keep on coming to the open window
to ask for a light for their cheap tobacco.
I want to move out.
The Afternoon
The afternoon touches you
with its invisible, weightless, terrible hand.
On the rooftiles moss grows in pads of green.
What is moving? A sparrow flies up. A column of smoke frays.
One more painful and poignant moment,
then the things you see will melt down. The quicksilver thread
shoots up and falls in noiselessly frenzied fits.
The aggregate states are changing.
Houses liquify, the smoke turns to stone.
Oh, merciless silence that roars in our ears!
The world dissolves in the long-sought equation.
Nor was your heartbeat rejected. Never doubt or fear
that just now it helped towards annihilation.
Translations Ó Michael Hamburger, 1991.
* * *
GUNTER EICH was born in 1907. He served in the German army in the Second World War and was interned in an American prisoner of war camp. In 1953 he married the writer Ilse Aichinger. An outstanding poet and playwright for radio, he was awarded the Buchner Prize. He died in 1972.
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