In San Lorenzo, ah, so long ago!
Grateful to me is sleep! More grateful now
Than it was then; for all my friends are dead;
And she is dead, the noblest of them all.
I saw her face, when the great sculptor Death, 15
Whom men should call Divine, had at a blow
Stricken her into marble; and I kissed
Her cold white hand. What was it held me back
From kissing her fair forehead, and those lips,
Those dead, dumb lips? Grateful to me is sleep!
Enter GIORGIO VASARI. 20
GIORGIO.
Good-evening, or good-morning, for I know not
Which of the two it is.
MICHAEL ANGELO.
How came you in?
GIORGIO.
Why, by the door, as all men do.
MICHAEL ANGELO.
Ascanio
Must have forgotten to bolt it.
GIORGIO.
Probably.
Am I a spirit, or so like a spirit, 25
That I could slip through bolted door or window?
As I was passing down the street, I saw
A glimmer of light, and heard the well-known chink
Of chisel upon marble. So I entered,
To see what keeps you from your bed so late. 30
MICHAEL ANGELO, coming forward with the lamp.
You have been revelling with your boon companions,
Giorgio Vasari, and you come to me
At an untimely hour.
GIORGIO.
The Pope hath sent me.
His Holiness desires to see again
The drawing you once showed him of the dome 35
Of the Basilica.
MICHAEL ANGELO.
We will look for it.
GIORGIO.
What is the marble group that glimmers there
Behind you?
MICHAEL ANGELO.
Nothing, and yet everything, —
As one may take it. It is my own tomb
That I am building.
GIORGIO.
Do not hide it from me. 40
By our long friendship and the love I bear you,
Refuse me not!
MICHAEL ANGELO, letting fall the lamp.
Life hath become to me
An empty theatre, — its lights extinguished,
The music silent, and the actors gone;
And I alone sit musing on the scenes 45
That once have been. I am so old that Death
Oft plucks me by the cloak, to come with him;
And some day, like this lamp, shall I fall down,
And my last spark of life will be extinguished.
Ah me! ah me! what darkness of despair! 50
So near to death, and yet so far from God.
FRAGMENTS
CONTENTS
Neglected Record of a Mind Neglected
O Faithful, Indefatigable Tides
Soft Through the Silent Air
So from the Bosom of Darkness
Neglected Record of a Mind Neglected
October 22, 1838.
NEGLECTED record of a mind neglected,
Unto what “lets and stops” art thou subjected!
The day with all its toils and occupations,
The night with its reflections and sensations
The future, and the present, and the past, — 5
All I remember, feel, and hope at last,
All shapes of joy and sorrow, as they pass, —
Find but a dusty image in this glass.
O Faithful, Indefatigable Tides
August 18, 1847.
O FAITHFUL, indefatigable tides,
That evermore upon God’s errands go, —
Now seaward bearing tidings of the land, —
Now landward bearing tidings of the sea, —
And filling every frith and estuary, 5
Each arm of the great sea, each little creek,
Each thread and filament of water-courses,
Full with your ministration of delight!
Under the rafters of this wooden bridge
I see you come and go; sometimes in haste 10
To reach your journey’s end, which being done
With feet unrested ye return again
And recommence the never-ending task;
Patient, whatever burdens ye may bear,
And fretted only by the impeding rocks. 15
Soft Through the Silent Air
December 18, 1847.
SOFT through the silent air descend the feathery snow-flakes;
White are the distant hills, white are the neighboring fields;
Only the marshes are brown, and the river rolling among them
Weareth the leaden hue seen in the eyes of the blind.
So from the Bosom of Darkness
August 4, 1856.
A lovely morning, without the glare of the sun, the sea in great commotion, chafing and foaming.
SO from the bosom of darkness our days come roaring and gleaming,
Chafe and break into foam, sink into darkness again.
But on the shores of Time each leaves some trace of its passage,
Though the succeeding wave washes it out from the sand.
TRANSLATIONS
CONTENTS
Introductory Note
Prelude
From the Spanish.
Coplas de Manrique
Sonnets.
The Good Shepherd
To-morrow
The Native Land
The Image of God
The Brook
Ancient Spanish Ballads
Rio Verde, Rio Verde
Don Nuno, Count of Lara
The peasant leaves his plough afield
Vida de San Millan
San Miguel, the Convent
Song: She is a maid of artless grace
Santa Teresa’s Book-Mark
From the Cancioneros.
Eyes so tristful, eyes so tristful
Some day, some day
Glove of black in white hand bare
From the Swedish and Danish.
Introductory Note
Passages from Frithiof’s Saga.
Frithiof’s Homestead
A Sledge-ride on the Ice
Frithiof’s Temptation
Frithiof’s Farewell
The Children of the Lord’s Supper
King Christian
The Elected Knight
Childhood
From the German.
The Happiest Land
The Wave
The Dead
The Bird and the Ship
Whither?
Beware!
Song of the Bell
The Castle by the Sea
The Black Knight
Song of the Silent Land
The Luck of Edenhall
The Two Locks of Hair
The Hemlock Tree
Annie of Tharaw
The Statue over the Cathedral Door
The Legend of the Crossbill
The Sea hath its Pearls
Poetic Aphorisms
Silent Love
Blessed are the Dead
Wanderer’s Night-Songs
Remorse
Forsaken
Allah
From the Anglo-Saxon.
The Grave
Beowulf’s Expedition to Heort
The Soul’s Complaint against the Body
From the French.
Song: Hark! Hark!
Song: And whither goest thou, gentle sigh
The Return of Spring
Spring
The Child Asleep
Death of Archbishop Turpin
The Blind Girl of Castèl Cuillè
A Christmas Carol
Consolation
To Cardinal Richelieu
The Angel and the Child
On the Terrace of the Aigalades
Barréges
Will ever the dear days come back again?
At La Chaudeau
A Quiet Life
The Wine of Jurançon
Friar Lubin
Rondel
My Secret
From the Italian.
The Celestial Pilot
The Terrestrial Paradise
Beatrice
To Italy
Seven Sonnets and a Canzone.
The Artist
Fire
Youth and Age
Old Age
To Vittoria Colonna
To Vittoria Colonna
Dante
Canzone
The Nature of Love
From the Portuguese.
Song: If thou art sleeping, maiden
From Eastern Sources.
The Fugitive
The Siege of Kazan
The Boy and the Brook
To the Stork
From the Latin
Virgil’s First Eclogue
Ovid in Exile
Uncollected Translations.
Let me go warm
The Nativity of Christ
The Assumption of the Virgin
The Disembodied Spirit
Ideal Beauty
The Lover’s Complaint
Art and Nature
The Two Harvests
Clear Honor of the Liquid Element
Praise of Little Women
Milagros de Nuestra Señora
Song of the Rhine
Elegy written in the Ruins of an Old Castle
The Stars
Rondel
The Banks of the Cher
To the Forest of Gastine
Fontenay
Pray for Me
Vire
A Florentine Song
A Neapolitan Canzonet
Christmas Carol
A Soldier’s Song
Tell me, tell me, thou pretty bee
Sicilian Canzonet
The Gleaner of Sapri
Introductory Note
IN accordance with the plan determined upon for this edition, the Translations are collected from the separate volumes put forth by Mr. Longfellow and re-arranged here. As shown in the Biographical Sketch, translating played an important part in the development of Mr. Longfellow’s powers. Before he had begun to write those poems which at once attested his poetic calling, and while he was busying himself with study and prose expression, he was finding an outlet for his metrical thought and emotion in the translation of lyrics and pastoral verse, and occasionally of epic and dramatic fragments. Tasks thus early begun passed easily into pleasant avocations, and to the end of his life he found an ever grateful occupation in recasting the foreign thought of other men in moulds of his own. It has been deemed most expedient to group these translations by the several literatures from which they are derived, following in each group a chronological order of composition, as far as possible. As the first most important work in this field by Mr. Longfellow was in a translation from the Spanish, the group from the literature of Spain takes precedence.
The successive publication of Coplas de Manrique indicates the importance attached to it by Mr. Longfellow, and both the treatment which it received at his hands and the formal statement of his theory of translation have an interest, for the contrast which they afford to his later judgment and practice.
The preface to the book, dated Bowdoin College, August 9, 1833, besides a brief notice of Don Jorge Manrique and some characterization of the poem which will be found in the notes, contained the following remarks on the translator’s task: — 3
“The object of this little work is to place in the hands of the lovers of Spanish literature the most beautiful moral poem of that language. The original is printed with the translation, that in the estimate of those at least who are versed in the Spanish tongue the author may not suffer for the imperfections of the translator.
“The great art of translating well lies in the power of rendering literally the words of a foreign author while at the same time we preserve the spirit of the original. But how far one of these requisites of a good translation may be sacrificed to the other — how far a translator is at liberty to embellish the original before him, while clothing it in a new language, is a question which has been decided differently by persons of different tastes. The sculptor, when he transfers to the inanimate marble the form and features of a living being, may be said not only to copy, but to translate. But the sculptor cannot represent in marble the beauty and expression of the human eye; and in order to remedy this defect as far as possible, he is forced to transgress the rigid truth of nature. By sinking the eye deeper, and making the brow more prominent above it, he produces a stronger light and shade, and thus gives to the statue more of the spirit and life of the original than he could have done by an exact copy. So, too, the translator. As there are certain beauties of thought and expression in a good original, which cannot be fully represented in the less flexible material of another language, he, too, at times may be permitted to transgress the rigid truth of language, and remedy the defect, as far as such a defect can be remedied, by slight and judicious embellishments.
“By this principle I have been guided in the following translations. I have rendered literally the words of the original, when it could be done without injuring their spirit; and when this could not be done, I have occasionally used the embellishment of an additional epithet, or a more forcible turn of expression. How far I have succeeded in my purpose, the reader shall determine.”
It may be added that the translator did not keep to the exact metre and rhyme of the Spanish original, but adopted what he regarded as an equivalent stanza. He afterward adopted a much stricter rule of translation, indicated by the couplet from Spenser prefixed to his version of Dante: —
“I follow here the footing of thy feete,
That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.”
Besides the translations preserved by Mr. Longfellow in successive volumes, there are several published in periodicals and elsewhere which are directly traceable to his pen, and are included in the Appendix to this volume, including one found among his manuscripts. As a fitting prelude to the entire series, the poem, not a translation, which was used for a similar purpose in the posthumous collection In the Harbor, is here given at the outset.
Prelude
As treasures that men seek,
Deep buried in sea-sands,
Vanish if they but speak,
And elude their eager hands, —
So ye escape and slip, 5
O songs, and fade away,
When the word is on my lip
To interpret what ye say.
Were it not better, then,
To let the treasures rest 10
Hid from the eyes of men
Locked in their iron chest?
I have but marked the place,
But half the secret told,
That, following this slight trace, 15
Others may find the gold.
From the Spanish.
Coplas de Manrique
OH let the soul her slumbers break,
Let thought be quickened, and awake;
Awake to see
How soon this life is past and gone,
And death comes softly stealing on, 5
How silently!
Swiftly our pleasures glide away,
Our hearts recall the distant day
With many sighs;
The moments that are speeding fast 10
We heed not, but the past, — the past,
More highly prize.
Onward its course the present keeps,
Onward the constant current sweeps,
Till life is done; 15
And, did we judge of time aright,
The past and future in their flight
Would be as one.
Let no one fondly dream again,
That Hope an
d all her shadowy train 20
Will not decay;
Fleeting as were the dreams of old,
Remembered like a tale that ‘s told,
They pass away.
Our lives are rivers, gliding free 25
To that unfathomed, boundless sea,
The silent grave!
Thither all earthly pomp and boast
Roll, to be swallowed up and lost
In one dark wave. 30
Thither the mighty torrents stray,
Thither the brook pursues its way,
And tinkling rill.
There all are equal; side by side
The poor man and the son of pride 35
Lie calm and still.
I will not here invoke the throng
Of orators and sons of song,
The deathless few;
Fiction entices and deceives, 40
And, sprinkled o’er her fragrant leaves,
Lies poisonous dew.
To One alone my thoughts arise,
The Eternal Truth, the Good and Wise,
To Him I cry, 45
Who shared on earth our common lot,
But the world comprehended not
His deity.
This world is but the rugged road
Which leads us to the bright abode 50
Of peace above;
So let us choose that narrow way,
Which leads no traveller’s foot astray
From realms of love.
Our cradle is the starting-place, 55
Life is the running of the race,
We reach the goal
When, in the mansions of the blest,
Death leaves to its eternal rest
The weary soul. 60
Did we but use it as we ought,
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 134
