CRNJANSKI, Milos

A Story

I only remember that she was

Innocent and slender,

And that her hair was

Warm as black silk

In bosom bare.

And that before dawn the tender

Scent of the white locust imbued us.

All gloomy I recalled it by chance,

Because I love:

To close my eyes and keep silent.

Next year, when the locust spreads

Its scent, who knows where I will be.

In silence I feel

I will not be able to recall her name,

Ever again.

Translation by Ljiljana Parović

Sumatra

Now we are carefree, light and tender.

We just think: how quiet are the snowy

peaks of the Urals.

If a pale figure makes us sad,

the one we lost to an evening,

we also know that somewhere, instead of it a rivulet

flows and is all red.

Each love, each morning in a foreign land

envelops our soul closer by its hand

in an endless tranquility of blue seas,

in which red corals glitter

like the cherries of my homeland.

We wake at night and sweetly smile

at the Moon with its bent bow

and we caress those distant hills

and the icy mountains with our tender hand.

/////////////////////////////////////////

Say, if my smile would fade,

If it melted like a flower

half dream and half ice,

Once more if

I could love …

Would it feel good wherever,

and life, would it be less mad?

Or would I then as much as now

have to smile and fall sick,

and die?