Summer
At evening the complaint of the cuckoo
Grows still in the wood.
The grain bends its head deeper,
The red poppy.
Darkening thunder drives
Over the hill.
The old song of the cricket
Dies in the field.
The leaves of the chestnut tree
Stir no more.
Your clothes rustle
On the winding stair.
The candle gleams silently
In the dark room;
A silver hand
Puts the light out;
Windless, starless night.
---Georg Trakl (+ 1914)
trans. Robert Bly
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4 comments:
ah, the ur-blood stirs
lascivious shivers
as summer dies
to the thudding boom-box
aus Nihilismus und Musik
What do you think is the "silver hand"?
Very evocative, very good poem.
I love how he drops in "red poppy" after the grain.
The Pennsylvania Dutch have a phrase, "outen the light." My mother had a black metal light switch cover plate with those words on it, etched in silver. She used it for the variable or rheostatic switch for the light above the dining room table. Her ancestors came from Germany in the middle of the 18th century. My dad's family immigrated in the middle of the 19th. His father, his grandfather and his great grandfather all still spoke fluent German when the silver hand outened their lights before they turned fifty.
Loschte sie aus
Erases you
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