Hofmannsthal’s ‘On the Transitory: I-IV’

By Scott Horton

Poems in Terza Rima

I

On the Transitory

I still feel her breath upon my cheeks

How can it be, that these close days

Are gone, gone for ever, completely passed?

This is a matter that no one fully comprehends,

And it’s far too grim for any complaint:

That everything slips and passes away.

And that my own Ego, limited by nothing,

Slips away from a small child

To me unearthly silent and alien like a dog.

Then: I existed a hundred years ago

And my ancestors, those in the shroud,

Are as related with me as my own hair.

Are as one with me as my own hair.

II

The hours! In which we stared into

The pale blue of the sea and understood death,

So simply and festively and without dread,

Like small girls, who appear very pale,

With big eyes, and who are always chilly

Silently gazing out into the evening

And know that life is silently flowing out

From their limps drunk with sleep

Into trees and grass garnished with faint smiles

Like a saint who pours out her blood.

III

We are made of the stuff of dreams,

And thus dreams open their eyes

Like small children under the cherry trees,

From whose crown the pale golden course

Of the full moon lifts up through the great night.

…Not otherwise appear our dreams,

They are there and live as a child, that laughs,

No less large in floating up and down

Than the full moon is, awakened by the crown of trees.

The innermost is open to her weavings;

Like the hands of ghosts in a locked room

They are within us and always have life.

And the three are One: a human, a thing and a dream.

IV

On occasion never-loved women appear

Before us in a dream as small girls

And are unspeakably touching to behold.

As if they had accompanied us on a distant path

Once on an evening

While the tree-tops moved, breathing

And scent descended, and night, and fear

And along the path, our path, the dark one,

By the evening’s light the silent ponds are resplendent

And, mirror of our desire, in dreamlike flashes,

And all softly-spoken words, all breezes

Of the evening air and the first starlight

The souls quake deeply and sisterly

And are sad and filled with the jostle of triumph

In the face of deep apprehension, which the great life

Comprehends, with its magnificence and strength.

–Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Terzinen I-IV: Über Vergänglichkeit (1894) (S.H. transl.)