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PARTISAN REVIEW
Laidion:
I can feel how they feel when I close my eyes in such a
way that the upper lid just trembles over the lower. Like you there
the men sit, very small, very far away. And in the trees hang the gods,
fearful, with wide-open eyes, but into those who have risen from the
clean mats nothing can instil fear. They are charmed. Everything–
fear, desire, all choice, all unquenchable restlessness--everything has
been transformed at the limits of their bodies. They are virgins and
have forgotten it; they are supposed to become women and mothers
and have forgotten it: to them everything is ineffable. And then they
dance.
She begins to sway from the hips. Somehow one feels that she is not
alone, that many of her kind are around her and that all are dancing
at once under the eyes of the gods. They dance and circle as dusk falls:
shadows loosen themselves from the trees and sink down into the crowd
of dancers, and out of the tree-tops rise great birds housing the departed
spirits, and join the circle, and beneath them all the island vibrates like
a boat filled with drunken people. And nothing on the island defies the
power of the dancers; at this moment they are as strong as the gods;
the arms and hips and shoulders of the gods are intermingled with their
movement; from nowhere can the blue net of death or the coral-red
sword of the gods fall upon them. They are givers of birth and the
newly-born of the island, they are the bearers of death and life.
At this moment Laidion hardly resembles herself any longer. Under
her tense features appears something terrifying, threatening, eternal:
the face of a barbarian deity. Her arms rise up and down in a frightening
rhythm, death threatening like clubs. And her eyes seem filled with a
hardly bearable tension of bliss. And there she lies already on the bed,
breathing hard and short, surrounded by the small empty room, reality
and Hymnis, who covers her with a small red rug. '
Laidion: (opens her eyes after a while, and sits up. She is very
pale ) :
Hymnis! Hymnis! Here I lie and know it-and I have noth–
ing! I want to scream and bite into my pillows, bite into my arm,
and see my blood flow, that such a thing exists in the world and I
have none of it! Like a glowing coal it will burn in me, that that man
had to come and tell me that somewhere there is such an island where
they dance and are happy without the thorn of hope! For that's it,
Hymnis, that's everything, Hymnis, to be happy without hope.
(Translated from the German by James Stern)
(This translation of "The Conversation of the Dancers" is published in
PARTISAN REVIEW
by arrangement with the editors of Bollingen Series,
who will bring out soon a two-volume edition of selected works by Hugo
von Hofmannsthal.)
