The New Orpheus - Part One (《新俄耳甫斯》 - 第一部)

Orpheus makes autumnal music,

Drunk on fermented stars.

Does mot the creak of the earth’s rotation sound more dreadful tonight?

The axis of the world is ancient and rusty.

Morning and evening see the larks soar up to

Heaven, seeking in vain the eternal.

Lions lie around and are bored.

Streams grow older and the forget-me-nots contemplate suicide.

Nature seems exhausted with life.

In the forest the oxygen dwindles.

On the peaks the ozone depleted.

Rain in torrents descends into mud.

Man reverts to his natural self.

Euridice’s fate is with us for ever,

The woman, her incomprehensible existence.

All of us are Orpheus.

Orpheus – we all know him: one metre eighty-seven tall, sixty-seven kilos.

Eyes: brown; low brow; felt hat.

Believer.

A man of feelings.

For democracy. And by profession a musician.

He did not remember Greece at all: not the kingfishers morning song, and not the shade of the cedars,

the wedding of the flowers or all the many childish streams of friendship.

And what does he care about Gentian and Chamois?

Those people are ruined and imprisoned in the darkest zone of hell,

In towns built of rubble, of cardboard and tin.

He has to release them, these creatures of moon, of wind and seabirds.

Oh, contemporaries! Gentlemen, give an ear.

Orpheus has come amongst you,

Orpheus from the hills of the ancients,

Orpheus has come amongst you.

In the suburban, ev’ryday street, the latest up-to-date poet has landed.

You find him ev’rywhere where lips are kissing, where hearts are hungry, he spreads the soothing balm of music on all your anguish, all your pain.