MÖRNE, Arvid


Walk in Autumn

Autumn rides high in the leaden grey sky

wielding the lash of the storm without mercy,

and on the abandoned summer path

the wanderer meets the yellow whirlpools of the leaves.

Autumn rides high in the leaden grey sky.

The storm’s lash whistles without mercy.

The wanderer views the great, dark sea

writhing in agony, boiling, heaving

avalanches of waves over drowned rocks

until the day is spent in twilight, disappears.

But in the silent night Autumn gazes

helplessly down at the sea’s moonlit,

gentle swell against spume-covered shores,

while the earth’s wanderer, freed,

sees his world as it really is in the unchanging

starry heaven of eternity.


My Young Beloved

My young beloved, finally we’ve risen

To the cliffs that look out on the sea of age,

The grey, the sad. Against this lichened edge

The long swell of my yearning’s doomed to lessen.

O, don’t you see: I’m autumn, treacherous,

Aiming at your heart a lance that’s poisoned.

You young one, glowing, whose love’s unloosened

Your maiden’s breast to my inflamed caress?

O, don’t you sense it, when your dress is falling

In soft white eddies at your foot,

And you, like Aphrodite, smile to suit

Some paradise’s coral shore unrolling,

That I am broken at my being’s root?

The Immortal

The star I lived on is no more.

The sun in whose retinue

the star moved round the world

is no more.

The life I owned,

the life that was the blood’s delight and agony,

is no more.

That dead star among stars,

that dead sun among sun among suns,

that dead face among faces

which was mine,

I remember no more.

But I am.

Translation: David MCDUFF