Oh, don't say that! you have tons of lovely words as well.
I'm not so sure the poem is sad. It's the end of something, and there's lots of nostalgia for what has been and soon will be no more. Yet I find some sort of confidence in the future amid all that (to carry other worlds / a man of love can only come to life again / the moon, hovering over all that and answering questions / the 'you' - a lover? a daughter? a friend? the other side of yourself, the part that lives on when a part of you ceases to exist?).
And the structure is itself a question, it looks like an inverted sonnet. The answer to a sonnet normally is in the last two lines (so here, the two first); what should have been the last word is "Tausendschön" ("daisy", but the literal translation would be "a thousand times lovely" - so even if it's the last, there's still something to admire...). But as the structure is inverted, it sounds like a flashback afterwards, and the end of the flashback - what brings the present situation to what it is - is 'the days I met with hesitation, on tiptoes'. She doesn't know for sure where she's going to, there's shyness and restraint towards 'the days' that will come, but she's still 'going to' them - the German werb 'begehen' cannot be translated here. It means, literally, to meet, but there's the idea of movement in it as well - elle vient à sa rencontre en même temps.
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Date: 2005-10-25 12:03 pm (UTC)I'm not so sure the poem is sad. It's the end of something, and there's lots of nostalgia for what has been and soon will be no more. Yet I find some sort of confidence in the future amid all that (to carry other worlds / a man of love can only come to life again / the moon, hovering over all that and answering questions / the 'you' - a lover? a daughter? a friend? the other side of yourself, the part that lives on when a part of you ceases to exist?).
And the structure is itself a question, it looks like an inverted sonnet. The answer to a sonnet normally is in the last two lines (so here, the two first); what should have been the last word is "Tausendschön" ("daisy", but the literal translation would be "a thousand times lovely" - so even if it's the last, there's still something to admire...). But as the structure is inverted, it sounds like a flashback afterwards, and the end of the flashback - what brings the present situation to what it is - is 'the days I met with hesitation, on tiptoes'. She doesn't know for sure where she's going to, there's shyness and restraint towards 'the days' that will come, but she's still 'going to' them - the German werb 'begehen' cannot be translated here. It means, literally, to meet, but there's the idea of movement in it as well - elle vient à sa rencontre en même temps.
/ rant.