Miklos Radnoti
A
VAGUE ODE
How many ages is it since I first tried to reveal
the dark star-system of my tenderness,
ifbut an image or quintessence of the real.
But you, like Being itself, do so possess,
so swarm and flow in me, - and yet you're calm, eternal, as
a shell shut in the stone. Above, it seems,
night, with its sheen of moony nacre, rustling flies:
it's hunting after little flittering dreams.
Yet what it really means to me to feel your glance
guarding my hand at work, I still can't say.
Similes just won't do. Images have no chance.
They light up briefly; I throw them away
and start it
all
again tomorrow; they were wrong.
What worth a word has, I have, standing where
the poet sets it in the poem: you quicken me as long
as bones remain, and a few wisps of hair.
You're tired. Our day was filled with far too many things.
Dare I say more? Things catch each other's eye,
conspire to praise you : a half-cube of sugar rings
there on the table; a honey-drop nearby
glitters upon the cloth, a marble of pure gold;
all
by itself an empty glass will chime.
Happy to be with you. Perhaps it can be told,
how that glass waits for you, if I have time.
Dream's darknesses are brushing at your brow,
flutter away, and then return. Your eyes
are sleepy as their lids, which wave goodbye. And now
your hair undoes itself, spreads like a blaze,
and you're asleep. Your eyelash-shadow leaps. Your arm
falls on my pillow like a white birch bough.
But strange. You're not an
other
world: I'm sleeping in you now;
even this far away I
hear
them change:
the thin wise lines mysterious
of your cool palm.
Translated from the Hungarian
by
Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick Turner
