Translation:The Cricket
A poor little cricket,
Concealed in grass flower-strewn,
Watched in a thicket
A butterfly hover at noon.
The winged insect shone with the brightest of hues,
Purple, gold and blue its wings elaborate.
Young, handsome, little master, it hurries to choose
All the finest blooms to take and pollinate
"Ah!" said the cricket. "How his fate and my fate
Are different! Mother Nature did her best,
Did everything for him, but for me it's too late.
I have no great talent, beauty even less.
No-one takes notice of me. They resist.
I might as well just not exist."
As he was talking, down in the meadow
A troupe of children out of nowhere come
And right away they break into a run.
After the butterfly all want to follow.
Hat, hankies, bonnets serve to hold it fast.
The insect's attempts to escape do not last.
It soon their thirst for conquest slakes.
One grabs it by the wing, another by the thorax,
A third child comes up and by the head it takes.
It did not need an ax;
The tearing of it sates.
"Oh! Oh!" said the cricket. "By anger I'm not driven.
Making much of oneself's no easy requirement.
How much I'll enjoy my total retirement."
In order to live happily, live hidden.
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.
| Original: |
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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| Translation: |
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This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
The Terms of use of the Wikimedia Foundation require that GFDL-licensed text imported after November 2008 must also be dual-licensed with another compatible license. "Content available only under GFDL is not permissible" (§7.4). This does not apply to non-text media.
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