Friday 3 February 2017

A few lines from Thomas Bernard


Some years ago I translated Thomas Bernhard's poem Unter dem Eisen des Mondes on Poet-in-Residence.

Here are some of the lines:

  we mow and bleat and know nothing of winter,
  we drink our cider and know nothing,
  and soon we'll be forgotten
  and the verses decayed like snow before the house

  . . . 

  we sleep while our dirty shoes 
  moulder before the door of the house. 

  . . . 

  The year is like the year a thousand years ago, 
  we know nothing,
  we know nothing of the end,
  of the sunken towns, of the flood in which the horses
  and people were drowned. 


Owed to joy?

6 comments:

  1. I read the Woodcutters after you once said my writing reminded you of Bernhard and you recommended it. He is difficult to get into but once in I could not wait to read on. He saw things in black and white with nothing in between.

    I couldn't open the link so didn't follow the collage.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry you couldn't open the link. It's the EU anthem Ode to Joy. Not what Beethoven had in mind, but they, the Eurocrats those who are serenading a EU candidate where Charles Darwin is banned from schools believe it is.
      The current bans and attacks on the democratically elected US president shows the level to which they, the undemocratically elected one size fits all mindsets of the EU have sunk.

      Delete
    2. I think you would enjoy Bernhard's novel The Old Masters. It is set mainly in the Kunsthistorischemuseum in Vienna.

      Delete
    3. I will look for it when I am out and about.

      As for the EU, they are nothing but two-faced hypocrites. Theresa May can hold her head high.

      Delete
    4. It gets worse by the day. The French are now to build a wall around the Eiffel Tower at a cost € 20 million, only it's a wall according to the Mayor of Paris. Is it a fence, then? No. It's an "aesthetic perimeter".

      Delete
    5. It's glass to replace the metal barriers. Things in this world are getting bad.

      Delete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.