LOVE SONG OF KING VACESLAW I.
103
LOVE SONG OF KING VACESLAW I.[1]
After adventures stern and great
Love doth to me her sweet estate[2]
Reveal and merit high.
Right heartily I mourn and sigh,
When thinking on the loveliness,
That causes thus my mind’s distress,
How brightly doth the maiden shine,
Of whom myself to boast is mine.
- ↑ This is a fragment of one of the three poems, on account of which Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia, (crowned 1228), was numbered among the German Minnesingers. If the German poems (Manessische Sammlung, Zurich, 1748) are originals, this Bohemian one must be a translation; but the conciseness of this and the diffuseness of the others induces rather the contrary inference. Probably some German at the court of Wenceslaus translated his Bohemian poems into German. The Manuscript, containing this fragment along with “The Stag,” which appears also in the Queen’s Court Manuscript, is a single octavo leaf of parchment, and is in the Bohemian Museum.
- ↑ Love (milost, Iáska,) is feminine in Slavonic.
