Translated from the Italian by Alani Hicks-Bartlett 

The Elegy 

I will sing the elegy of the heart that never sleeps:
my rhythm is uniform, my voice monotonous.

It is the gathered nocturnal voice of she who keeps watch,
and who hears the song, by itself, pour forth, as if from an urn.

It is the lament that measures the tireless screeching of the woodworm,
the yearning to placate it, that only makes the torture greater.

I will sing the elegy of she who cannot find peace,
and nevertheless, always seeks it with new hope.

I will recount, without dissimulation, her good just like her evil
with the steadiest voice, and with the firmest breath.

And then when the song lifts every veil from the grieving heart,
I will sing in the sunlight the elegy that groans in the shadows.

Loneliness

We are alone in the world: everyone lives in the midst of a desert.
Nothing is certain for us except for this profound abyss.

And the adjoining circumstances of men, and the dreams, and all things
are like indistinct shadows vanishing above sinister, dying suns.

At times, love, like a go-between, brings two lonely people together.
It deceives them at first, then, oblivious and nameless, it casts them apart.

All those who love their pride, their truth, or their error,
are but mournful travelers clinging to life, at the top of a cliff.

At the first caresses of the waves and the wind, they deceive themselves,
but soon their fear of the vast expanse burdens them.

Nor is there anything sadder than the unbridgeable chasm,
than the shadow that somberly accumulates between those who live and those who live.

Insomnia

Insomnia destroys me this restless night,
the little, wrathful woodworm of anxiety keeping vigil over the immense darkness.

Insistent, and voracious, it almost consumes my flesh,
my ear almost doesn’t take in the never-ending clamor.

It seems to me that it fills the night with a long lament;
I feel it persist in the throbbing of my temples.

The darkness envelops me in maelstroms; I widen my eyes
it seems like the shadow touches me, that it surrounds me, wave by wave.

It is like a whirlpool or a lazy river that sweeps me away with it,
which in a blind silence carries me through the swirling foam.

Where to? To the sweet champions of sleep? Oh no, until dawn,
insomnia gnaws at me, ruthlessly, hour by hour.

One Evening

I let the new evening fall on my old evil
another evening equal to a hundred that have gone by, or even blacker.

I spent the day wrapped in my gloomy suffering,
even calling once again to a love without return.

Wrapped around myself, and, like a twisted serpent
as cold as a dead woman, coiled around my genuflecting soul.

And another night descends from the heavens, veiled in black,
and it wraps its gloomy bandages around my mind.

Its darkness thickens around my taciturn heart,
binding my intense soul with its grave nocturnal stupor.

And so the pain that eats away at me, is calmed by fraternal night,
pressing its soft palm over my eyes, merciful.

The Escape 

I was walking along a path that echoed like the ground of cemeteries.
Was it today? Yesterday? Have I been walking for a year, or for an hour?

I was completely without memory of time and place, undone
by agony, a base thing just thrown there, discarded remains, waste.

I had surpassed the farthest limit, beyond which the pain
endured is already greater than us, it is already detached from us.

I was walking along scorched by my unconscious desire for flight:
I was fleeing my wickedness, my mortal dread, and the lacerating terror.

I was walking with the unwitting movements of an automaton,
with all my volition destroyed, aside from the desire to keep moving.

And there was a tacit secret between me and my path
in that escape with no hope of relief, with no purpose.

Also, read a German poem by Martin Heidegger, translated into English by Eric v.d. Luft, and published in The Antonym.

Loneliness— A German Poem by Martin Heidegger

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