Ingeborg Bachmann
Gedichte 1945-1956
Aengste

Ingeborg Bachmann
The Collected Poems
Poems 1945-1956
Anxieties
What then will remain?
I sigh, suffer, search,
and my wanderings
will never end.
The dark shadow
which I have followed from the start
leads me into the deep loneliness of winter.
There I stand still.
The frost coats my my hair
and the cold burns through my limbs.
Melodies of dead silence play a dance,
endlessly turning round each other.
Blue spirits leap into the room —
the departed who wandered off before me
desiring, like lords, an ancient right.
Now they will be paid with blossoms
which many summers saw
and which break and fall this winter.
The trees exude the cold from within,
and tears, which the moonlight draws out,
hang as thin cones coated in ice.
Over there, above the glacier,
the long departed pour out their blood,
and so I follow their example and do the same to them.
I listen close to the centuries,
though I don't want to be swallowed up by them.
Into the shadow which wants to stretch this far
I try to press a vestige of myself,
despite the idle fear of wasting my life.

transl. by Peter Filkins