Verses by Sophie Albrecht, translated by Julia Kalman
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It would be dreadful if you left me!
If you treated your beloved with tormenting scorn,
Tore yourself away from my loving heart,
And pushed me away with the bleeding wound
You inflicted! –
Oh, I would wander orphaned in the maternal valley. –
This beautiful earth
Would become the abode of misery for me.
The morning would bring me new tears
And in the nightly silence
My lament would grow louder.
But soon my strength would wane,
Soon sickness would appear to me
that sweet twilight
Of eternal night.
Its somber veil
Mercifully shrouds the dreadful objects
In soothing shadows;
And its companion, hope,
Whispers to the sinking one from realms
She knows beyond death,
Where lovers reunite.
But more dreadful it would be,
If they had fled,
The hours of existence,
Sweet through your love;
And I still staggered
In fervent delight at your side,
Through the realms of the earth
Adorned in their best for me. –
If morning woke me to joy
And evening sank me with golden dreams,
And the last grain
Of the hour of life fell.
He, the insensitive death,
Who spares no youth,
Knows no love,
Would reach with cold hand
For the pounding, trembling heart;
My failing eyes
Would dare the last glance
At you and the beautiful world –
And the dreadful thought,
The dreadful apprehension
Of eternal annihilation
Would envelop the hesitant soul.
I will never see him again,
This heart full of love must decay,
Memory and hope
Flee with life!
Who can fully describe
The terrors of the moment
Of separation? –
But death finally tears
The anxious, pounding heart
From the groaning chest,
And the sweat of the dying
Dissolves the images of his fear.
The grave, where no hope resides,
Knows no desires.
Where no joy exults,
There silence the pain.
Bitter is the cup of sorrow
By the grave. –
Terrible is the day of parting
Without hope.
But more dreadful if it vanished,
The deep sleep in the grave! –
When decay now
Loosens the last bond of earth.
From the free soul.
It now hastens to the fields of light.
Through the dawning valleys of awakening,
With immortal love for you,
In the imperishable heart,
With bright memory
Of the bliss in your arms; –
And — shuddering thought! –
Does not find you! –
For millennia it searches for you,
Where eternity banishes hope;
Weary of life,
Wandering from sun to sun,
Where no forgetting grave beckons.
Then, in the bosom of dawn,
It wishes itself into the night of the grave,
And in the gleam of the starry bower
It longs for the embrace of decay.
Give me, fate, give me
The cup of sorrow by the grave! –
Hasten to me, hour of death,
Without hope! –
God! Just let me not awaken without him,
Veil the gaze in eternal night
That shall not see him again.
Scatter this heart, you winds –
Destroy my soul, O God!
If separation knows eternity.
Sophie Albrecht (1756–1840) was a German actress and writer.
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Julia Kalman 