Poem of the Day: 'Before Breughel the Elder' by Aleksander Wat

Before Breughel the Elder

Work is a blessing.
I tell you that, I -- professional sluggard!
Who slobbered in so many prisons! Fourteen!
And in so many hospitals! Ten! And innumerable inns!
Work is a blessing.
How else could we deal with the lava of fratricidal love
        towards fellow men?
With those storms of extermination of all by all?
With brutality, bottomless and measureless?
With the black and white era which does not want to
        end
endlessly repeating itself da capo like a record
forgotten on a turntable
spinning by itself?
Or perhaps someone invisible watches over the phono-
        graph? Horror!
How, if not for work, could we live in the paradise of
        social hygienists
who never soak their hands in blood without aseptic gloves?
Horror!
How else could we cope with death?
That Siamese sister of life who grows together with it -- in us, and is extinguished
       with it
and surely for that reason is ineffective.
And so we have to live without end,
without end. Horror!
How, if not for work, could we cope with ineffective
        death
(Do not scoff!)
which is like a sea,
where everyone is an Icarus, one of nearly three billion,
while besides, so many things happen
and everything is equally unimportant, precisely,
        unimportant
although so difficult, so inhumanly difficult, so painful!
How then could we cope with all that?
Work is our rescue.
I tell you that -- I, Breughel, the Elder (and I, for one,
your modest servant, Wat, Aleksander) -- work is our
        rescue.

Comments

[Clinton Grey]

Thank you for this. I really need the translation now. :) I'm using this for educational purposes anyway.

[Jubal]

Ahh, Wat, one of my favourite poets. Whose translation us that?