Translation:At a Friend's Burial
They gave him to the earth one awful afternoon
in the month of July, beneath the blazing sun.
A step from the open tomb,
there were roses with rotten petals,
between harshly fragrant geraniums
and red flowers. The sky
pure and blue. A strong
dry wind blew.
Heavily, with thick ropes
suspended, the two gravediggers
lowered the coffin
to the bottom of the grave...
And when laid to rest the thud sounded out
solemnly in the silence.
The thud of a coffin in the earth is something
entirely serious.
Over the black box dusty clumps
of earth crumbled.
The air rose from the
deep grave with a pale breath.
–And you, now without a shadow, sleep and rest,
a long peace to your bones...
For good,
sleep a tranquil and true sleep.
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.
| Original: |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929. The longest-living author of this work died in 1939, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 84 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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| Translation: |
This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed.
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