BALLAD OF THE OUTER LIFE
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal (February 1,
1874 – July 15, 1929) was an Austrian prodigy, a novelist,
librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist. He wrote the
libretto for a number of Richard Strauss' operas. His poetry was
remarkable and written at a relatively early age. As Stefan Zweig
wrote of him: "The appearance of the
young Hofmannsthal is and remains notable as one of the greatest
miracles of accomplishment early in life; in world literature, except
for Keats and Rimbaud, I know no other youthful example of a similar
impeccability in the mastering of language, no such breadth of
spiritual buoyancy, nothing more permeated with poetic substance even
in the most casual lines, than in this magnificent genius, who
already in his sixteenth and seventeenth year had inscribed himself
in the eternal annals of the German language with unextinguishable
verses and prose which today has still not been surpassed. His sudden
beginning and simultaneous completion was a phenomenon that hardly
occurs more than once in a generation."
— Stefan Zweig,
Die Welt von Gestern, Frankfurt am Main 1986, 63-64
This English version was originally published in the
magazine Meanjin.
BALLAD OF THE OUTER LIFE
after the German of Hugo Von Hofmannsthal
And children develop, grow up with deep eyes
That know of nothing, they grow up and die,
And all mankind goes on upon its way.
And bitter fruits grow sweetened, hanging high,
And, like dead birds, fall down at night; and then
They lie a few days and they putrefy.
And ever blows the wind: and we take in
And speak again and again our words and phrases
And feel delight and weariness of limb.
And streets and roads run through the grass, and places
Are here and there; and filled with trees, lakes,
lights,
And menace us, and have deathly withered spaces...
What use to us is all of this, these games,
As we're still great and ever lonely ones,
Who wander never seeking any aims?
What use, likewise, to have seen much and roamed?
And yet he still says much who utters: "evening,"
A word, from which deep sense and sadness run
Like heavy honey from the hollow combs.
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