Translation: Roland Holst, Wanderer's Love

[de_eekhoorn]

Have a translation. Roland Holst was one of the poets in the Dutch Neoromantic movement of the first half of the twentieth century, of which some of the other notable names are Bloem and Slauerhoff. Characteristic of this movement is the combination of a masterfully controlled, almost precious usage of traditional poetic forms, and a Romantic yearning for the elsewhere and the unbound life.

Much of Holst's work uses a complicated and very personal code of symbolism, but the poem translated beneath is in a fairly direct style somewhat uncommon for him. It is among his better known.

I have slightly changed the sense in parts in order to keep the rhyme: most notably I have made ‘the wild wind’ out of ’the wind’. In Dutch, as in German, wind and child (kind) rhyme with each other, and these words and their rhyme repeat throughout the poem.

Link to the poem in Dutch.

Wanderer’s love

Let us be kind to one another, child -
For oh, the measurelessness that the wind
Blows over our travel-weary limbs
Under the stars of emptiness and wild.

Oh, let us be kind, and let us not
Pronounce the proud and mighty word of love,
For many hearts have had to break thereof
Under the wind with helpless grief distraught.

We are but as the leaves that in the wild
Wind rustle at the edge of the old wood,
And all things are uncertain, and how should
We know what but the wind knows, child -

And let us now because we are alone
Incline our heads towards each other, knowing
And share our silence while the wind is blowing
And within a last dream become one.

Much love has been lost when the wind blows wild
And what the wind wants we will never know;
And - before we forget one another - so,
Let us be kind to one another, child.

Comments

[larryhammer]

Nice, and nice translation.

I get a Yeats vibe from this. Which, yes, they are almost exact contemporaries, but still unexpected.

[de_eekhoorn]

Reading some more commentary on Roland Holst, I found out that he was in fact directly inspired by the Celtic Twilight movement... so you were right on the money.

[larryhammer]

Yeatsean by design, then!