Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse/The Magician's Flight
1. THE MAGICIAN'S FLIGHT.
The ocean's magic and its scent,
The salt and pearls of it,
They harried and hounded me on the shore darkling,
That I upraised my hands in despair,
To cling to the golden glimmer of starlight. . .
Into the giant shadow of the sun I plunged,
In the pallid mist I encountered the red moon,
That wept above an ocean teeming with dallying angels. . .
And flutteringly to us they upraised
Their hands and their pinions,
Through which a lily-light trickled,
That made me weep my rapture into the light. . .
Aloof from us the slopes were mutely in tumult,
In the dim unending depths,
Where time and creatures and eternity
Strove with black talons, hovering above abysses. . .
In wordless triumph I returned to the age-old land
Where once as a glow-worm I glowed in the green thicket. . .
Where I was all,
Water and metal,
Tree and the worm and the storm therein. . .
"Welcome, welcome!"
Cried unto me the time-mother from all sides
With her brown mouth,
And girded me with her warm arms:
"My well-beloved, eternal child!",
That I shrieked and melted with bliss
And ever again emerged
In the countenance of all things,
Till a silvery skiff from the sickle of the moon
Bore me away hovering above oceans
And I rocked and blissfully fared
From night into night
From time into time . . .
Drunken with lustre and soul of the All. . .
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 1961, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 62 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 |
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| Translation: |
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 1970, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 53 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 |
