Excerpts from
Fables
By Sophus Claussen
Do not awaken the swans
My spring whistling was voted down by the duckpond claques.
Even the swan shook their swans' necks.
The suits of feathers rustled, while they hardly measured me
with sidelong glances pretending to suffer me.
A single one came gently sailing up:
Lie still and be quiet, if you are a friend of the swans ...
It is the swans' fate that everything must kill us,
life exists to persecute us.
Do not come with migratory birds' notes diverting
to the swan dreaming its ice-dream, the shivering ...
An offence is life, and we - we are the atoners,
only born to sing with death in our notes.
But if you fire us with the heat and the craving
- the double train of the migratory birds' cries -
and if we are not allowed to doze to the sunset bells,
we rise. Woe to the life-seducers!
We rise. Fervently then the suits of feathers swell.
If we are clipped - we must die in flame.
Ah, swans are only decoyed to be hauled
together in great heaps ... and then killed.
Until eternal winters have locked the oceans
and snowfall shuts up the mouths of the volcanoes -
do not awaken, with enthusiasm and warlike fighting
the wingfeather-rustling, the mightily strutting ones!
Let festival suits and games on the dreamtracks
entertain the sorrowful ones. Do not awaken the swans!
Translated by Poul Borum
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