Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you should hold it in your hands";
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see."
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea.
"Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all."

 

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
"I am always sure that you understand
My feelings, always sure that you feel,
Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel.
You will go on, and when you have prevailed
You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey's end.

 

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends...."

 

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends
For what she has said to me?
You will see me any morning in the park
Reading the comics and the sporting page.
Particularly I remark

An English countess goes upon the stage.
A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,
Another bank defaulter has confessed.
I keep my countenance, I remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong ? 

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965), angleško-ameriški pesnik, dramatik in literarni kritik.

Eliot je bil eden najpomembnejših literatov 20. stoletja. Rojen Američan, ki se je leta 1914 preselil v Združeno kraljestvo in leta 1927 postal britanski državljan.

Uveljavil se je z Ljubezensko pesmijo za J. A. P. (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), ki jo štejejo za eno največjih mojstrovin modernizma. Nekatere od njegovih naslednjih pesmi so se uvrstile med najbolj poznane v angleškem jeziku. Znan je tudi po svojih sedmih igrah, posebej po Umoru v katedrali (Murder in the Cathedral, 1935). Leta 1948 je prejel Nobelovo nagrado za književnost.

 

/prevod IZ ŠOLSKIH ZVEZKOV, 1963/