Klagelied | Wo du nicht bist

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by Elinor Wylie (1885 - 1928)

Translation © by Bertram Kottmann

Little elegy

Language: English

Our translations: GER

[Withouten]¹ you
No rose can grow;
No leaf be green
If never seen
Your sweetest face;
No bird have grace
Or [power]² to sing;
Or anything
Be kind, or fair,
And you nowhere.

Available sung texts: (what is this?)

• J. Duke • M. Howe • N. Rorem

View text without footnotes
¹ Rorem: "Without"
² Duke, Howe: "pow'r"

Text Authorship:

by Elinor Wylie (1885 - 1928), "Little elegy", appears in Angels and Earthly Creatures: A Sequence of Sonnets, first published 1929 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

by Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss, Sir (1891 - 1975), "Little elegy", 1940, published 1942, first performed 1941 [ low voice and piano ], from Seven American Poems, no. 4 [sung text not yet checked]
by John Woods Duke (1899 - 1984), "Little elegy", 1946, published 1959 [ soprano or tenor and piano ], from Two songs, no. 1, G. Schirmer [sung text checked 1 time]
by Mary (Carlisle) Howe (1882 - 1964), "Little elegy", published 1939 [ voice and piano ], San Antonio, TX: Southern Music Company [sung text checked 1 time]
by Sheena Phillips (b. 1958), "Little Elegy" [ tenor and piano ] [sung text not yet checked]
by Ned Rorem (1923 - 2022), "Little elegy", published 1952 [ medium voice and piano ], from Two songs, no. 1 [sung text checked 1 time]
by Anthony Strilko (b. 1931), "Little elegy", published 1962 [ high voice and piano ] [sung text not yet checked]

Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):

GER German (Deutsch) [singable] (Bertram Kottmann) , "Klagelied", copyright © 2011, (re)printed on this website with kind permission

Research team for this page: Ted Perry , Garrett Medlock [Guest Editor]

This text was added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.
Line count: 10
Word count: 35

Klagelied

Language: German (Deutsch) after the English

Wo du nicht bist,
kein' Ros' erblüht;
kein Blatt ergrünt,
erschaut es nicht
dein lieb Gesicht;
kein Vogel singt 
sein zierlich Lied;
und keine Lieb'
an keinem Ort,
und du bist fort.

Text Authorship:

Singable translation from English to German (Deutsch) copyright © 2011 by Bertram Kottmann, (re)printed on this website with kind permission. To reprint and distribute this author's work for concert programs, CD booklets, etc., you must ask the copyright-holder(s) directly for permission. If you receive no response, you must consider it a refusal.
Bertram Kottmann. Contact: BKottmann (AT) t-online.de
If you wish to commission a new translation, please contact: licenses@email.lieder.example.net

Based on:

a text in English by Elinor Wylie (1885 - 1928), "Little elegy", appears in Angels and Earthly Creatures: A Sequence of Sonnets, first published 1929
- Go to the text page.

This text was added to the website: 2011-06-20
Line count: 10
Word count: 32