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“Anif” by Georg Trakl 🇦🇹 (3 Feb 1887 – 3 Nov 1914)
Translated from the German by Jim Doss & Werner Schmitt
Memory: gulls, gliding over the dark sky
Of manly gloom.
Silently you dwell in the shadow of the autumnal ash tree,
Sunken into the hill’s righteous dimension;
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Always you walk down the green river,
When evening has come,
Sounding love; peacefully the dark deer encounters,
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A rosy man; drunk with bluish weather
The forehead stirs the dying leaves
And thinks the serious countenance of the mother;
O, how everything sinks into darkness;
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The austere rooms and the old utensils
Of the ancestors.
This shakes the breast of the stranger.
O, you signs and stars.
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Large is the guilt of the born. Woe, you golden shivers
Of death
When the soul dreams cooler blooms.
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Always the nocturnal bird cries in bare branches
Over the moony one’s steps,
An icy wind sounds by the walls of the village.