looking for poems

[azara]

Oh, dear! All the paragraphs went wrong! How can one break a line and start a new one? How does this thing work? It's not for poets, definitely! I'll have to start anew!ATB, and I'm sorry. Alessandra

[azara]

I - We have come to the End. O holy herald, sound your trumpet:no more land, except that one, on high,which glitters in the middle of your shields,o Foot Companions, a floating and lonely land,inaccessible to man. From this last shoreyou see down there, mercenaries from Caria,the farthest Ocean river, with no wave.You, who came here from the Haimos and the Carmel,look, the earth shades off and sinksinto the twinkling darkness of the sky.IIO rivers I crossed! You carry the motionlessforests in your clear waters,you carry a deep murmur which remains.O mountains I passed! After I had passed,the view you opened before my eyeswas never so vast as what you had hidden from me before.Blue like the sky and like the sea,mountains! rivers! It would have been wiserto stay, to refrain from looking ahead, to dream:Dream is the infinite shadow of Truth.

[azara]

III
Haw happier I was, when in my future there was so long a way to go; so many ordeals,so many doubts, so much destiny! At Issus! When the camp at night blazed in the wind, with the thousand ranks and the dark wagons, and the countless herds. In Pella! When in those long sunsets you and I, o my BullGÇÖs Head, pursued the Sun, the Sun which, amidst the dark woods, farther and farther glared like a jewel.

[azara]

IV
Son of Amyntas! I did not know about endsThe day I left. Among the altars

Timotheus the flautist began to play a hymn:Powerful breath that urged me to my fatal way,beyond death; and I bear it in my heart as a shell bears the murmur of the sea.O sounding blast, o mighty spirit Who pass overhead and command me to seek you!But this is the End, the Ocean, the VoidGǪAnd the chant passes and vanishes past us.- V

And so he weeps, where he came in his eagerness. He weeps from the one eye, as black as death;He weeps from the other eye, as blue as sky. Because in his black eye (this is his fate)Hope always changes into despair; whilein the blue eye his wish burns more and more. He hears wild beasts quiver in the distance, He hears unknown, unceasing forces Storming the immense plain in front of him,Like tramping elephants.

[azara]

VIIn the meanwhile, on the rugged mountains of Epirus,His virgin sisters spin Milesian wool

For the dear one who is away.Late at night, with their industrious maids,They turn the spindles with their waxy fingers;And the wind passes, the stars pass along.Olympias, lost in a dream,Listens to the long babbling of a fountain,She listens, in that hollow dark infinity,To the big oaks that whisper on the hill.

[marcus]

That's so cool - thank you. Although I haven't read it properly yet, it looks as though you've done a very nice, poetic translation, too - not easy from Italian to English!So, what's the Italian like? (It's a nightmare to put on the forum, but if you then copy and paste it into Word it formats beautifully, by the way)All the bestMarcus

[amyntoros]

Alessandra, this is absolutely wonderful. Thanks so much for your time taken in translating the poem.All the best,Amyntoros