The little river twittering in the twilight, The wan, [wondering]1 look of the pale sky, This is almost bliss. And everything shut up and gone to sleep, All the troubles and anxieties and pain Gone under the twilight. Only the twilight now, and the soft `Sh!' of the river That will last for ever. And at last I know my love for you is here; I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight, It is large, so large, I could not see it before, Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions, Troubles, anxieties and pains. You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish, and I the fulfillment, You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete, You and I, What more - ? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!
Amores
Song Cycle by Olli Kortekangas (b. 1955)
Translated to:
German (Deutsch) — Lieben (Bertram Kottmann)
1. A love song  [sung text checked 1 time]
Authorship:
- by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885 - 1930), "Bei Hennef", written 1912-6, appears in Look! We Have Come Through!, first published 1917
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Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):
- GER German (Deutsch) (Bertram Kottmann) , "Ein Liebeslied", copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
1 Kortekangas: "wandering" (? recheck)
Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
2. The man of Tyre  [sung text checked 1 time]
The man of Tyre went down to the sea pondering, for he was Greek, that God is one and all alone and ever more shall be so. And a woman who had been washing clothes in the pool of rock where a stream came down to the gravel of the sea and sank in, who had spread the white washing on the gravel banked above the bay, who had lain in her shift on the shore, on the shingle slope, who had waded to the pale green sea of evening, out to a shoal, pouring sea-water over herself now turned, and came slowly back, with her back to the evening sky. Oh lovely, lovely with the dark hair piled up, as she went deeper, deeper down the channel, then rose shallower, shallower with the full thighs slowly lifting of the wader wading shorewards and the shoulders pallid with light from the silent sky behind both breasts dim and mysterious, with the glamorous kindness of twilight between them and the dim blotch of black maidenhair like an indicator giving a message to the man - So in the cane-brake he clasped his hands in delight that could only be god-given, and murmured: Lo! God is one god! But here in the twilight godly and lovely comes Aphrodite out of the sea towards me!
Authorship:
- by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885 - 1930), appears in Last Poems, (1929).
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Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):
- GER German (Deutsch) (Bertram Kottmann) , "Der Mann aus Tyros", copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
3. A flower and a gem  [sung text checked 1 time]
Fidelity and love are two different things, like a flower and a gem.
And love, like a flower, will fade, will change into something else
or it would not be flowery.
[ ... ]
And man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth flowers
in summer, and love, but underneath is rock.
Older than flowers, older than ferns, [older than foraminiferae]1
older than plasm altogether is the soul of a man underneath.
And when, throughout all the wild orgasms of love
slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten rocks
of two human hearts, [two ancient rocks,]1 a man's heart and a woman's,
that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of trust,
the sapphire of fidelity.
The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of love.
Authorship:
- by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885 - 1930), "Fidelity", appears in Pansies, first published 1928
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Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):
- GER German (Deutsch) (Bertram Kottmann) , "Eine Blüte und ein Edelstein", copyright © 2015, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
1 omitted by Kortekangas.
Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]