Trinity Journal of Literary Translation
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Online: Psalm 2nd version
dedicated to Karl Kraus1 There is a candle that the wind has blown out.
There is a tavern-on-the-heath that a drunk departs in the afternoon. There is a vineyard burnt and black with holes full of spiders. There is a room that they have whitewashed with milk.
The maniac is dead. There is an island in the South Seas To welcome the sun god. Someone is beating drums. The men perform war dances.
The women sway their hips in creeping vines and fire blossoms When the sea sings. O our lost paradise.
The nymphs have forsaken the golden woods.
Someone buries the stranger. Then a glittering rain commences. The son of Pan appears disguised as a ditch digger Sleeping through lunch on the burning asphalt.
In the courtyard there are little girls in little dresses ripe with heart-rending poverty. There is a room filled with chord runs and sonatas.
There are shadows that embrace themselves before a blind mirror. The patients warm themselves in the windows of the hospital. A white steamer brings blood plagues up the canal.
The strange sister reappears in someone’s bad dreams. Sleeping in the hazel bush she toys with his stars.
The student, maybe a double, gazes after her for a long time from the window. Behind him stands his dead brother, or he goes down the old spiral stairs. In the dark of brown chestnuts the figure of the young novitiate wanes. The garden is in dusk. Bats flutter about the cloister yard.
The caretaker’s children stop playing and search for the gold of heaven.
A quartet’s end-chords. The little blind girl runs unsteadily through the alley,
And later her shadow fingers away along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and saintly legends. 1
Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Austrian writer and cultural journalist.
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