So as I told you, he translated Trakl.
Trakl was a poet who--
well, he was a little bit crazy like most of us poets,
but he was made more insane because he was a practicing
chemist pharmacist.
And he was put in charge during the First World
War of a medical tent, a sort of makeshift medical hospital
where there were 90 wounded soldiers,
and he was given no anesthesia and no medicines
to take care of them.
And it drove him mad.
Daniel translated him, and you'll hear a lot of Trakl
in here.
This is called "Elegy for an Unknown Poet."
Daniel was an unknown poet.
It's a beautiful thing to be.
He wouldn't send his poems anywhere.
He put them all in drawers.
He would never let me send them anywhere.
He worked as a librarian at the New York Public Library,
and he lived alone and wrote and translated.
And he didn't care about publishing and all of that,
and I really honor him for his purity, his soul,
his devotion to his art.
It had nothing to do with anything that was going
to happen in his lifetime.
"You who are apart, wanderer, stranger,
who bent down in winter for the lost glove of another,
you are ein Fremder on Earth as if you
had been written toward us.
Listen-- bells.
You are sheltered once again in the stillness of childhood,
where the slow river remains, rain singing
from a gutter-spout, wet bottles, misted grillwork.
Apartness gathers the music of solitude
as if it were a glass viola.
Bells ring that are and are not, and the soul
is left wandering in the blue night.
You are the one watching, the one dreaming this,
the homeless one left behind.
The soul has departed, thinking, alone
with your thoughts, the poverty of waking life,
here where it nears the eternal.
A man stood behind you holding a knife.
You walked into the lake until only your hat could be seen.
The dead began to wander quietly in the hall of stars.
Your sister took her life, and then you
couldn't bear the gaze of others.
What you could bear, and for long hours,
were the star-filled eyes of a toad.
I am your translator.
Pity me.
It is impossible to slip ein Fremder
into the mouth of another.
Last summer, I went with you to the crematorium.
We said poems and covered your body with gloves and roses.
I know that you are dead.
Why do you ask and ask what can be done?
Black is the color of footsteps, frost, stillness, and tears.
It modifies branches and wings.
Blue appears as cloud, flower, ice.
Deer stepping from the forest are also blue.
A river is green, but green as well
are flecks of decomposition.
Silver, the blossoming poppies, a wind's voice,
faces of the unborn, death is their province.
The living, you say, appear unreal to you,
as if they were on fire.
Yet the living gaze at the dead, imploring them to appear.
Why?
you ask.
The dead do not understand this.
The living are oblivious to what they
are, measuring time as a flickering of day and night.
Brown are the cesspools, rafters, and shadows,
golden the day, candles, and a tent of stars,
ivory the hands and limbs of lovers,
purple a night wind, nostrils, and snails.
A skiff is red, as are wolf and wound.
Yellow are the walls of summer.
Sleep is white, as is sickness, shirt, and revenant.
What is left us then but darkness?
Oneself is always dark and near."