Welcome My Beloved Mountains

Welcome My Beloved Mountains (1916)
by Jan Kasprowicz, translated by Jarek Zawadzki
Jan Kasprowicz1500070Welcome My Beloved Mountains1916Jarek Zawadzki


Welcome my beloved mountains,
Welcome O my river dear!
I used to be so far away,
But now again I am so near.

Crowds of people stood between us,
And the hubbub of the street;
And the patience farcical
That oft in sacrifice we meet.

Those are all remote domains,
Wilderness, and sterile waste;
Ruptured only by the longings
That my soul to you still haste.

My grief has brought me back to you,
So I am standing by your side,
O mountains, and I’m listening to
The waters’ murmur deep and wide.

Yes! I am hiking, looking, listening...
How beautifully is all arranged!
And I am seeking to find out
If anything, since then, has changed.

Nothing, only in a roadside cabin
A friend of mine has died of age,
Withered are the willows two
That used to guard the springtide’s stage.

Upon our olden ash-trees though
New leaves again have densely grown,
Yellow buttercups are shining
Among the greening grass unmown.

And from the fields I feel now blowing
Eternity’s creative breeze
That into life transforms all death,
And puts my thoughts again at ease.

Welcome my beloved mountains,
Welcome O my river dear!
I used to be so far away,
But now again I am so near.

 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 1926, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 97 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.

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse

Translation:

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic 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—and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same license as this one.

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse