Are your tired feet exhausted,
is your wings' momentum spent?
You creep sadly round the window
that once saw your joyful play.
Oh, the summer has now vanished,
and the bitter winter nears.

Just look at my wilted kneecaps,
see my face as pale as death,
see my eyes' courageous fire
by the ailment's whiff effaced:
Has my fall already conquered
Ere my summer has arrived?

---

Grillparzer - mainly and preferentially known for his classical plays - is included here with this poem for three reasons: His pessimism, his writing about autumn, and his being a compatriot of mine.

When an English chemist colleague (with liberal doses of liberal-arts training) read Grillparzer's lament, he suggested I have a look at Thomas Hardy's fin-de-siecle The Darkling Thrush. I could see his reasons and, in fact, translated Hardy's centenary poem into German (with much labour and little to show for).

The two poems have in common an - amply justified - pessimism (although Hardy allows at the end at least the possibility of "Hope"). But Hardy uses rhymes and Grillparzer does not. For this and other reasons, the translation cries out for a rhyming job.

Why I didn't I bestow the rhymes on the original German? I wouldn't have dared. I have been crucified often enough. But the English translation is another matter: English is my second language and my sensitivity and sense of propriety (as compared to German) are pleasurably dulled. In English I can literally get away with murder and feel good about it.

Yes, yes, I admit to having macerated at one time a beautiful and beloved (English) poem in the original. But then, English readers are restricted to the intact original (unless they read the German comments and follow an obscure link).

Similarly obscure to German (and particularly to Austrian) readers, the following translation presses into service rhymes that never were:

Franz Grillparzer:

To a spent fly in fall

Have your feet turned to molasses?
Do your wings abate and sway?
Sad you creep round window glasses
that once saw your youthful play.

Say goodbye to summer's splendor!
Now the cruel winter nears:
See, my knees wilt in surrender,
deathly pale my face appears.