1. קטע העברית בסוף - לא מופיע כלל

2. איך מעבירים את הכל משמאל לימין?

Two Swans and a River / Abraham Regelson

תרגום המחבר לשירו העברי “שני ברבורים ונהר”

 

I.    🔗

 

In a hired loam hovel between Naas and Edenderry,    🔗

 

A drab abode, thatch cover above, and peeling whitewash within,    🔗

 

Yeats, the crown of Anglo-Irish poetry,    🔗

 

Rested on his couch at night. Springtime the days,    🔗

 

And in that green region in the vicinity of Liffey the River,    🔗

 

From Moon’s birth till her last conch-edge,    🔗

 

There he made it his task daily to roam in villages and pasture fields    🔗

 

And from the prattle of simple folk and aged women of wisdom not from books    🔗

 

To glean wonders and omens: about the Sheehy –    🔗

 

These in mist-robes float and wheel round mountain tops,    🔗

 

Endless their years and fadeless their beauty – and a foundling girl-child    🔗

 

Of loveliness unmatched by graces granted to mortal daughters    🔗

 

Assuredly is seed of their planting, and sealed in her lot is great slaughter among menfolk; about the Fairies    🔗

 

Their lives all song and dance and dream, and a youngling who strays after them    🔗

 

Is captured in their world forever – or for seven years; about the Souls of the Dead,    🔗

 

Like their garb in life is their raiment in death, and execration it were    🔗

 

To resew and abbreviate the skirt of a departed crone    🔗

 

For a little one of her granddaughters, lest the exposed shanks    🔗

 

Of that grandma be scorched by flames from Hell; about the Gleemen,    🔗

 

Chasers after poesy, strong drink and fantasies,    🔗

 

Contemptuous they of the yoke of common life –    🔗

 

And what is their punishment? They are reincarnated in the image of apes,    🔗

 

And instead of bread, it is moonstone, beryl and nacre beads    🔗

 

They get for their teeth’s grinding.    🔗

 

II.    🔗

 

Aslumber and not aslumber the Poet lay,    🔗

 

And in a dream-tinged haze, lo! He is sitting in a castle hall,    🔗

 

His heritance from generations of noblemen, and he had long since cleared therefrom    🔗

 

Musty portraits of knights and admirals, and adorned    🔗

 

Wall and shelf with fine works of his desire. Now he gazed    🔗

 

At the Virgin Mother by Crivelli, in her hand a rose    🔗

 

So fragile and spiritual – more like a thought than like a flower it seemed. His eyes fondled    🔗

 

Statuettes of wrought silver: Hermes in midflight on sandal-wings; Zeus    🔗

 

With curly locks on glory-brow; Athené, spear in hand; Demeter,    🔗

 

Wheat-ear wreath her ornament. And his spirit butted    🔗

 

Into favorite books, in precious skins bound and wrapt:    🔗

 

Dante in red, like his wrath; Shakespeare tomes in gay orange, and their innerness –    🔗

 

Human passions grandly ranging; Milton    🔗

 

Serious-sublime in azure striped with gray.    🔗

 

And he bless’d himself within his soul, saying: “How my fate    🔗

 

That Grecian Gods are my delight, yet I owe them no sacrificial rites;    🔗

 

That the curches of Rome and Byzantium yield me beauteous things,    🔗

 

But far from me are the terrors and fanaticism of the Cross-enslav’d.    🔗

 

All the Gods are my joy, for there is no God I serve.    🔗

 

Polished is my soul like a steel mirror, sensitive    🔗

 

To every fervor, yearning and anxiety, she receiving and reflecting them    🔗

 

But herself remaining ever whole, calm, apart,    🔗

 

Impervious to scratch of anger, never tarnished by brute desire.    🔗

 

These large peacocks in my ample door-curtains, gorgeous birds of Hera,    🔗

 

Blue and flamegold their embroidery – are they not    🔗

 

The guardians of my selfhood gates, eloquently proclaiming:    🔗

 

‘Naught shall enter here whose beauty is less than ours!’”…    🔗

 

III.    🔗

 

Awake and not awake, and wonderment enwraps him: “Surely, here in this hall    🔗

 

Times innumerable did I linger and reside,    🔗

 

And ever that same thought-sequence frequented my mind!    🔗

 

Is it a circling dream that haunts me    🔗

 

Or wide awake do I perceive and thus muse?    🔗

 

Whether waking or dreaming, more than once I sensed and ‘twas whispered to me:    🔗

 

In a Nature behind Nature, a Mystery beyond Mystery,    🔗

 

A certain Cherub voiced an alien theme, departing from the chant allotted him    🔗

 

In the praise-hymning of all the Creations. Straightway    🔗

 

He was ousted from his phalanx among the choir hosts of the Heavens,    🔗

 

Doomed thenceforth to be a lone wanderer in the Spheres. And whatever band of Shining Ones    🔗

 

He chances to meet in his exile-paths, before them he is constrained to tune    🔗

 

That one rejected theme; and wheresoever he betakes himself,    🔗

 

His sole companion is his wretched harp under his wing,    🔗

 

The theme – that’s the course of all my life’s happenings and emotional tremors,    🔗

 

Which runs its destined round, quits and vanishes,    🔗

 

Then again wells forth from its beginnings and bubbles and rushes to its demise;    🔗

 

The harp – that’s th’erratic pen which accompanies my fateful journey    🔗

 

With its thrumm’d syllables. As one beholds an incident in a dream    🔗

 

And is reminded of an episode in a romance, so I now remember:    🔗

 

When last I sat in this mansion, Michael Robartes, my fellow-rambler in our youthful days,    🔗

 

Of a sudden appeared before me.    🔗

 

Nor heavy double doors nor ban of peacock beauty    🔗

 

Stayed his entrance. Gums from the Orient he burned, and in the cloud of incense fragrance    🔗

 

Dimm’d were the candelabra lamps above, the burnished peacocks    🔗

 

Faded into bluish flame-tonguelets, dartling golden sparks.    🔗

 

Amid the vaporous blur, the voice of Robartes moved mellifluous    🔗

 

With incessant speech. Out of his word-shower    🔗

 

Vividly arose and passed before me the dread Deities    🔗

 

Of Mitzrayim, Kush and Ashur; The Monstrosities of Babel; Yahaveh,    🔗

 

The Mighty One of Israel’s childhood, He who rode on the wing of a whirlwind    🔗

 

And stood on a smoking mountain to carve a Law for his people; and lo!    🔗

 

Here are the Exalted and the Beautiful of Olympus, wrought of Nature and Passion,    🔗

 

Filing by me. And who are these? Vishnu, Shiva, the terrible Kali,    🔗

 

And Brahma the Mysterious – they within him are womb’d and He, within them dwells,    🔗

 

He sends forth his breath – and worlds fly off from him,    🔗

 

He inhales – and worlds are swllowed up in him.    🔗

 

Nor did my friend deny Miriam and her Son, the begotten in a cow-barn under a star:    🔗

 

He assigned them a place in the procession of the living Pantheon.    🔗

 

And unto these he added eternal Figures, revealed of old to loftiest bards:    🔗

 

Helena, Beatrice, Faustus, Hamlet, Lear… ‘These, too, (quoth Robartes)    🔗

 

Are of the true Gods, by the smile of whose lips, the frown of whose foreheads.    🔗

 

Human souls, as though moon-stricken, tread their ways, nations make policy,    🔗

 

In vain sharpwits averred their non-existence and poets bewept their decline…    🔗

 

Know, a school of Chosen Ones there is – in secret groups in world-cities they hold conclave. These    🔗

 

In rites of dance and song, in soul-exercises pure and daring,    🔗

 

From their human bounds are redeemed. While yet in this mouldering life    🔗

 

They abide in the Secrecy of the Gods. And thou, my worthy, (quoth the speaker to me)    🔗

 

Thee we have found fit to enter the covenant of the Gods’ initiates. Come thou with me;    🔗

 

Into their fellowship will I induct thee. Grandeurs    🔗

 

Now fleetingly to thy sight unveil’d,    🔗

 

As enduring Presences in thy soul will reside, and thine eyes of flesh    🔗

 

Shall become windows giving upon Mysteries supernal.’    🔗

 

I being whelm’d with incense fumes, nectareous words and shock of visions,    🔗

 

Robartes captivated me and I was caught, persuaded me and I was won.    🔗

 

But that I pitied the purity of my unfleck’d selfhood, and with supreme effort    🔗

 

I broke the bewitchment that bound me, and stood lone, apart, inviolate.    🔗

 

This was felt by Michael Robartes, and the Gods of this adoration,    🔗

 

As though stricken by the frost of my unbelief,    🔗

 

In a moment shrivelled to nothingness. The incense smoke subsided    🔗

 

And faded out. The lamps revived and flared with clear shine. The curtain peacocks    🔗

 

Winning back their prime, scintillated copperbright and blue    🔗

 

And the emeralds of their tails flashed.    🔗

 

Ere yet the last mist-fronds dispersed and their perfume utterly fled,    🔗

 

Robartes vanished even as he had appeared.    🔗

 

Thus it befell me then. And here once more I find me in this hall    🔗

 

Among my precious possessions, and the peacocks guarding my thresholds.    🔗

 

What is now in store for me? Will this hour    🔗

 

Again thrust upon me Robartes to try my soul with incense of spices,    🔗

 

Or mayhap a new confrontation this time awaits me?”    🔗

 

IV.    🔗

 

He in his night revery thus muses, when suddenly    🔗

 

Sans noise, sans rustle, off came the hall ceiling,    🔗

 

Together concavity and candelabra. Seemingly, also the castle roof    🔗

 

With its pointed turrets was utterly erased.    🔗

 

And the man found himself girt in darkness, exposed to a night vault    🔗

 

Dotted and spattered with numberless light-scrabblings,    🔗

 

A plentitude of constellations and starlets. Among their host he discerned    🔗

 

Cassiopeia to the right of the Pole Star with the Little Wain at its head,    🔗

 

Eastward – the twisting Dragon, and there long-neck’d Cameleopard    🔗

 

Spreads his legs; beneath Leo and Scorpion    🔗

 

Hydra the Sea-Serpent undulates, and here are the Pleiades and the Whale,    🔗

 

The Lyre, the Raven, the cuplike Crater –    🔗

 

Scattered brilliances, companies of glitter, also solitary ones    🔗

 

Torch-flaming in red and in aquamarine aflicker,    🔗

 

Some familiar but their names forgot, others new to his eyes as though freshly spawned.    🔗

 

And midhigh in the heavens the Milky Way, throbbing and frothing,    🔗

 

Girds them all from North’s end to South’s margin.    🔗

 

Into the gazer’s contemplation darted a saying of Basilus Valentinus:    🔗

 

“The blaze of Doomsday is most like unto an alchemist’s flame.    🔗

 

Truly, the entire Universe resembles an alchemic furnace:    🔗

 

Everything is bound to dissolve until the Divine Substance,    🔗

 

Be it material gold or be it spiritual ecstasy, emerge purified.”    🔗

 

Then the inner light which is behind the gazer’s eyes    🔗

 

Embraced the swarms of light-crystals on high, and his soul queried:    🔗

 

“Are not these tiny brightnesses    🔗

 

Innumerable, smelt-furnaces of celestial alchemists    🔗

 

Who labor unceasingly to convert lead into gold,    🔗

 

Bodies into souls, weariness into flame of sacred rapture?” –    🔗

 

And against the pure exertion of the heavenly bodies    🔗

 

He weighed the unworthiness of his own life, reckoned the sum of his endeavors:    🔗

 

“True, unencumbered I was with men’s common burdens, abstinent from uncouth cravings;    🔗

 

In sweets of song, broidered loveliness and carven ornaments    🔗

 

My soul luxuriated. But the supreme transport,    🔗

 

The upflaring of the spirit even unto absorption in the Divine Radiance,    🔗

 

This was withholden from me, I knew it not…”    🔗

 

And a grievous “Woe!” broke forth from his heart.    🔗

 

At his own anguish’d outcry he awoke, and behold!    🔗

 

No Upper Deep breeding legions of tremulous lights,    🔗

 

No nobleman’s hall and peacocks splendor-fraught –    🔗

 

Only the mean inside of a poor hovel, and he, its tenant    🔗

 

Limb-weary from pressure of a rough rug on a crippled bedstead;    🔗

 

And indoors night darkness with pre-dawn paleness is interfused.    🔗

 

The poet arose, wiped down-creeping tears of mist from the windowpane,    🔗

 

And peered outside: a sea of fog, in hue like muddy milk,    🔗

 

Melts all existence into formlessness. He stared, he looked, he harked:    🔗

 

Will not the morning conceive a breeze to furrow the mass of fog,    🔗

 

And will not a cock’s crow clarion from afar?    🔗

 

A marvel! There, silhouetted within the thick mist,    🔗

 

Looms a ghostly likeness, coming ever nearer, growing bigger and bigger,    🔗

 

Till it shapes itself into a dark gigantic beast,    🔗

 

A horse-body wherefrom, instead of neck-bow and head-oval,    🔗

 

Rises the half of a human figure from the hips up… A Centaur!    🔗

 

But no! It must be that the mist-chaos had deluded him,    🔗

 

For see! With a mighty leap man is parted from horse,    🔗

 

And the horse – a steed, the man – a stalwart.    🔗

 

Twin knocks at the door, removal of a doorbar within,    🔗

 

And Yeats recognized Gogarty, his brother in striving for the uplift of Eire’s horn    🔗

 

And his pupil in poetic craft.    🔗

 

V.    🔗

 

Over brew’d tea and broken bread, Gogarty unrolled    🔗

 

What moved him to arouse the dawn at his friend’s door. And thus his tale:    🔗

 

“Three years ago when the Royal Army unleashed a chase and raid    🔗

 

To crush the ardent and active for Eire’s freedom,    🔗

 

I found a hideout in a deserted shepherd’s lodge on a bank of the River Liffey.    🔗

 

Be it remember’d that that year’s winter lasted beyond its wont    🔗

 

And only in the sign of Gemini did the river-binding ice unfreeze;    🔗

 

And melting snows from all sides sent freshets and rivulets into the Liffey,    🔗

 

And the river swelled, waxed mighty and rushed in rage.    🔗

 

The lodge in which I sought shelter was merely a box of wooden boards    🔗

 

And ‘twas tipped to one side, being underburrow’d by the rising current.    🔗

 

There I meant to stay till from the Underground staff    🔗

 

I’ll be signalled: ‘Danger is past.’ Night advanced and between me and disaster    🔗

 

Stands only a thin wooden door, braced by a rusty key in a rusty lock.    🔗

 

And suddenly – a beating of a rifle butt from without and a command:    🔗

 

‘In the name of the King, open! And come out    🔗

 

With hands high up. Your box is surrounded on three sides.    🔗

 

Linger in it, and it together with you will be burnt down,    🔗

 

And if weapon’d you appear, that moment your body is a sieve!…’    🔗

 

Whence will come my help? I did not think – I acted.    🔗

 

In the river-facing wall of the lodge was a cobweb-draped transom.    🔗

 

With hands and nails I tore out the transom with its wooden frame,    🔗

 

And crawlingly, shoulders cramped and sides lacerated, I forced my body    🔗

 

Through the transom space, and splash! into the raging river…    🔗

 

For a moment my senses went dark. I awoke and there I was, clutch’d    🔗

 

In the press of icy waters and their roar, my teeth chattering, all my body –    🔗

 

Stabs of cold, and the tyrannical current carrying me like a chip of wood    🔗

 

Wherever it wills. And fire-streaks buzz above my head,    🔗

 

Bounce all around me, and hiss into the water and perish. For the King’s hunters,    🔗

 

Aware of their quarry’s escape, accompanied me with a hail of shots.    🔗

 

In my distress, a hankering for prayer beswept me. The heavens are far, and I am in the grip of the torrent.    🔗

 

So, voiceless, I implored the river: ‘Father Liffey,    🔗

 

If thou wilt bring me in safety to the farther shore,    🔗

 

Then, what time the light of freedom beams upon my Country,    🔗

 

I will surely remember thee, and on a springtime morning    🔗

 

I will visit thee with favor of a swan-pair of purest white,    🔗

 

A glory on thy waters.’ To conclude the saga:    🔗

 

The waters cast me up on the yonder shore of the river,    🔗

 

A goodly distance from where they at first received me; and a tent-camp of tinkers    🔗

 

At their bonfire, by chafing my limbs with cold and with hot and by ministry of strong drink,    🔗

 

Revived my soul. Now that the yoke is broken from off Eire’s neck,    🔗

 

(Though as yet uncompleted is the labor of freedom), I am come to honor my vow to the river,    🔗

 

And I shall deem it a kindness, my superior, if you will accompany me on this pious errand    🔗

 

And be witness that what my soul uttered in her dire need, I perform in my wellbeing.”    🔗

 

VI.    🔗

 

Together the two friends wended their way to the River Liffey,    🔗

 

Yeats afoot in boots and Gogarty aloft on his horse, with the swans – a male and his mate –    🔗

 

In a wicker cage behind the saddle.    🔗

 

Dark-red the horse’s back, and the redness as it descends on the sleek flanks    🔗

 

Gradually changes to fawn, to light yellow, till the belly beneath    🔗

 

Is all of a paleness. And he, an animal clever,    🔗

 

Paces slowly, now and then turning his head to peer    🔗

 

Lest with his sheer bulk he unwittingly buffet his master’s friend.    🔗

 

Warmth of a newborn morning caused the fog to lift.    🔗

 

Already the horse and the man walking beside him    🔗

 

Are in clear air, while the head of the rider    🔗

 

Is still swathed in wavily drifiting vapors.    🔗

 

Soft grass-hairs carpet the meadow-plain,    🔗

 

And the earth, rain-soaked and pitted with many a hidden puddle,    🔗

 

With sucking squelch sends up water into holes, glyph’d    🔗

 

By tread of boot and sinking hoof.    🔗

 

Gogarty, from his exalted seat, opened speech:    🔗

 

“A horse is the life of every true Irishman, and you,    🔗

 

Singer of our Land’s very soul, abstain from horsemanship.    🔗

 

Truth of Faith it is: Had our chief Poet mastered riding skill,    🔗

 

He would have enriched the Kingdom of Poesy with rhythmic modes    🔗

 

Unknown of yore, birthlings of gallop, canter, curvet, leap,    🔗

 

Dash, prance, caper… For your neglect of drill in this art    🔗

 

You will be called to account before the God of Chants.”    🔗

 

Rejoined Yeats: “I could have put you off with tale of a dream.    🔗

 

Out of the twilight of a nap, Pegasos appeared before me and beswore me with strict ban:    🔗

 

‘Never with earthly horses shalt thou have ado, though they dazzle like lightning in races.    🔗

 

Though hot their nostrils puff steam with lust of battle…    🔗

 

Only between my chaste wings shalt thou journey and thou wilt soar unto realms cerulean, serene,    🔗

 

And against all Chimeras wilt prevail…’    🔗

 

But, my brother, your logic is self-defeating. You set    🔗

 

Possession ahead of possessor, creature prior to creator.    🔗

 

Whence did Horse derive his prancing and all his motions of grace?    🔗

 

Is it not from Man who tamed him, trained him    🔗

 

And he who commands a horse that he gallop, dash or halt,    🔗

 

Has the power (if he be so gifted from the womb and by toil dedicated)    🔗

 

To command a rhyme that it gallop, a line that it frisk, a verse that it run wildly or gently pace.”    🔗

 

Here ended the chat of rider and walker; for meanwhile the fog-canopy above was frayed and torn,    🔗

 

And through its rents rays of the morning sun broke through in shape of slanting cylinders of light    🔗

 

And fans of radiance widening earthward.    🔗

 

And from a nearby wood to the south gushed forth a burst of song,    🔗

 

The welcome of a many-winged choir to daybreak, and on the friends was poured out    🔗

 

A rain of metallic clinks, a shower of myriad titters and cymbal tinklings,    🔗

 

Mingled with the jubilation of tiny flute-throats,    🔗

 

An anarchic order and harmonious confusion of voices of thrush, swift, redbreast,    🔗

 

Blackcap, linnet and chiffchaff, a cuckoo’s call    🔗

 

At moments interweaving with them, now from here, now from there, while a travelling swampfowl    🔗

 

Leaves behind him a wailful warble ending in a triumphant screech.    🔗

VII

 

On the marge of Liffey the River a low hill rounded itself    🔗

 

And upon it upsprang early flowers frail: daffodil, athanasia, daisy and pansy,    🔗

 

Their little heads trembling and flittering with every passing breeze.    🔗

 

By that hill Gogarty dismounted, bearing the swans’ cage on his arm,    🔗

 

And his steed he sent off to feed among the grasses till he be wanted.    🔗

 

The two friends unshoed themselves, and barefoot stood on a strand    🔗

 

Where ripples of shallow water lapped their soles.    🔗

 

And Gogarty unto the river intoned a verse:    🔗

 

These creatures, calm and fair, approve and claim    🔗

 

And upon thy clearest waters let them sail:    🔗

 

The one a Princess, right lovely and of noblest fame,    🔗

 

To this shape changed by wizard’s spell.    🔗

 

And her mate, this Swan of august might,    🔗

 

His feather boasts a more than royal stem;    🔗

 

His raiment – a kirtle whiter than white, –    🔗

 

In peace and perfection keep thou them!    🔗

 

Glorious like that sublime Bird, down flown from on high,    🔗

 

For love of Leda sore distraught,    🔗

 

And she, wonderstruck, bared to him breast and thigh,    🔗

 

And twin heroes she bore and begat.    🔗

 

A pink earthworm feeling her way in the dark,    🔗

 

Propelling through her pipe of rings soil-granules    🔗

 

Wherefrom she extracts her minim nourishment,    🔗

 

Meanwhile anointing them with sap of her own body, does she conceive    🔗

 

What share – by perforation and enrichment of clods –    🔗

 

She bears in the Design of rearing lordly forests    🔗

 

And dowering acres with fat yields of grain?    🔗

 

A gold-babonag floweret among his brothers on his stalk by a forsaken fence,    🔗

 

This meek Sun worshipper who molds his form in the image of his God.    🔗

 

Knows he what his guerdon is to the Luminary he adores    🔗

 

And thereby to the entire starry whirlpool? Be it believed    🔗

 

(Though the thumb of Science as yet is too gross to probe this) that every sunray    🔗

 

Visiting the tiniest of flowers is spun double-stranded,    🔗

 

One strand running to the flower to give it life and with color-joy to crown it,    🔗

 

The other strand returning to the Sun laden with the blessing of the elfin radiant one    🔗

 

To his great Benefactor.    🔗

 

Even so as a human soul kens not how – with all the turmoil of her passions,    🔗

 

Her high flights of learning, her torments and her battles – she is broidered    🔗

 

Into the ineffable weavement of Universes,    🔗

 

Nor what her mission is in the eternal genesis of Yah-Nature. None the less, it haps    🔗

 

That the Archangelic Music that ever sings itself in the heights of the human soul    🔗

 

And the Spirituality that animates each stir and weft in the cosmic arrays    🔗

 

Leap towards each other, meet in a mutual kiss    🔗

 

And as one stream flow in the plentitude of Divine Effulgence.    🔗

 

Then the cut-off soul, confined in the gaol of her own boundaries, catches    🔗

 

An inkling of the all-embracing Harmony, and it is confided to her    🔗

 

That, for all her flimsiness, she is a cherish’d strain in a vast creative adventure,    🔗

 

A rainbow filament in the becoming of all that be.    🔗

 

Gogarty honored his teacher-friend with opening of the cage.    🔗

 

Liberated, the pair of swans with a beating of wings leaped into the river.    🔗

 

The male uplifted a proud throat and sounded a great trumpet-note for their freedom,    🔗

 

And the couple promptly with web-legs oared into the heart of the lucid waters,    🔗

 

Turning their faces upstream. –    🔗

 

The mist melted spoorlessly away.    🔗

 

A pristine Sun rose above purple eastern hems    🔗

 

And grasses on the ground sparkled with myriadfold gems.    🔗

 

A fresh-water smell fondled fragrances of flower and green herb    🔗

 

And the soughing of the placid stream as it shuffled against its shores    🔗

 

Blended with the birds’ singing, now softened and sweetened,    🔗

 

Since they had concluded their morning Praise and turned to provision for their nests.    🔗

 

The wings of the swans with gold sundust were bestrewn    🔗

 

And their forms as they swam were doubled face up in the water-mirror.    🔗

 

Then the friends knew that Father Liffey welcomed the vow-offering and bless’d it,    🔗

 

And their souls in unison with the souls of companies of God-wrought beings, each in her native utterance,    🔗

 

Answered AMEN.    🔗

 

הערה לתרגום האנגלי    🔗