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Cyprian
Norwid
Berries. Wild berries. Their linen flowers
Fell and went puff puff, playing with the wind
In the soft distance, while the fruit
Blushed. A carpet gleamed from green.
Our horses trod it gently.
We didn't ask the road: we knew roads
And paths and slopes, and the flat stones
Thrown down for a bridge, water above them waving
A polished window pane . . .
we traipsed about
Purposely, faultlessly, Rosy and I,
Two other guests, only two, in attendance,
Casually, pleasantly - (we were all strangers) -
And Uncle Solomon would wait on us most ably
Either with luncheon
Or those juicy suppers we took in the garden
While a white moth looked everywhere for light, or a glow-
Worm flew through deep shadows in the alley
Alive with a spark . . .
the very air was blessed
In the lungs as they breathed, in the heart as it beat, in the spirit:
In order to feel that air you must know a Polish village,
A world half idyll And half a caprice of the monde,
Above history or, maybe, beyond it -
I couldn't say. It's a separate world,
Similar, perhaps to those Happy Isles of the ancients,
Full of the charm of history, but free from its strain, its continual effort.
It is there that the spirits so blissfully blessed
Allow a little politics, enough to season
Their weighty observations
In the alley which looks so serious under its immortal trees.
With a solemn kind of zest they deliver pronouncements,
With some sort of sacred pathos, a
Brutus-like shadow, the shadow of Cato utters words,
Words about Philippi . . .
It would seem that politics and history,
Urging to temporal tasks and duties, don't matter much ;
For temporal history doesn't
Turn to them. It doesn't turn to everyone, it would seem.
Only a Jew occasionally by the road,
Like an old obelisk, a remnant from the Pharaohs,
Reminds us of the ages. Then, too, it sometimes happens that
A peasant, cracking his plough against it,
Uncovers a piece of armor and throws it on a dyke: the small boys play
Music on it: or, maybe, it will happen that
In some castle hall or other
(Where fruit lies drying) a blackened portrait
Slips down, dragging its rust nail.
So much for history. As a phenomenon
It remembers its dignity here
In a series of near
Accidents.
Translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz and Burns Singer
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