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Note
on
Balkan
Sacrifice After
Andreas Gryphius’ Grabschrift Marianae Gryphiae.
I don’t know when exactly I wrote this, but before
Bosnia-Herzegovina was ‘settled’ in 1995–96. Perhaps only a recent experience of a baby in the family can
bring home the unspeakable tragedy of young lives destroyed by war.
The last lines (In mere hours / I am young, / but old if breath /
counts wrong) are cut from a German original which in full translates as
‘If you count the days, I was young when I passed away, but I was very
old if you consider what dread I had experienced.’1
Alan
Marshfield
1
Wo ihr die Tage zählt, so bin ich jung verschwunden,
Sehr
alt, wofern ihr schätzt, was ich für Angst empfunden.
The
Grabschrift is an epitaph for the daughter of Paul, the brother
of Andreas Gryphius (b. 1616). Here’s
my translation.
Grabschrift
Marianae Gryphiae,
Epitaph for Mariana,
seines Brudern Pauli
his Bother Paul’s
Töchterlein
Little Daughter
Geboren
in der Flucht,
Born in a column beset
umringt mit Schwert und Brand, by pyres and the sword’s edge,
Schier
in dem Rauch erstickt,
Half-stifled by the smoke,
der Mutter herbes Pfand, my mother’s painful pledge,
Des
Vatern höchste Furcht,
My father’s highest concern,
die an das Licht gedrungen, through to the light I pried
Als
die ergrimmte Glut
As the enraged inferno
mein Vaterland verschlungen: swallowed our countryside:
Ich
habe diese Welt
I looked out on the world
beschaut und bald gesegnet, and bade goodbye straightway,
Weil
mir auf Einen Tag
For all the world’s horrors
all’ Angst der Welt begegnet; I met that single day;
Wo
ihr die Tage zählt,
If only days you count
so bin ich jung verschwunden, I died when I was young,
Sehr
alt, wofern ihr schätzt,
but old if you assess
was
ich für Angst empfunden. the terrors I lived
among.
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