Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

B o g d a n
C z a y k o w s k
Ad Dadam
It's so dark that only words are bright,
wrote Tristan, the sad swarthy Rumanian,
coddling his eye in the radiant clarity
of a crystal Iliad.
О Tristan, comic and cold,
your ways ran away like mercury;
look: a raised fist falls
by night, that had for you no beauty.
It's so dark that only words are shining,
and dying, О Tristan, and they die too.
translated from the Polish by Iain Higgins
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