Ljubav

Ljubav

Od naše ljubavi i sreće,

Gle, zvijezde su večeras veće;

A šum što dopire iz grada,

Nije l' ko pjesma vodopada?

O, to je polet u visinu!

Srca nam zamiru i ginu.

U ljubavi bih s tobom, draga,

Nestati htio ja bez traga.

Love

Because of our love, also delight,

Behold, the stars are brighter tonight

And hearing the city clamoring:

Isn't it the waterfall singing?

Lo!, to soar up into the ether!

Our hearts, they petrify; they quiver.

Into love with you would I, my dear, 

Wish simply, sans trace, to disappear.

(Aodhán Bulger,Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 08/08/2016)

Note from the translator:

This poem in its native Croatian has a very strict meter, the scansion of which I did my best to retain, and where not possible, I did my best to retain the metric flavour without sacrificing rhyme. In any case, the reader will find that the syllable count was retained (nine syllables per line throughout its entirety).

Additionally, where possible it was translated literally, but doing this does not always an excellent poem make. Wherefore I chose something very close and conveying the same, but with, for example, a different tense, or switching a noun to a verb. This was especially important, in my opinion, because the poem is very romantic not only in its literal meaning, but in its approach to the meaning. In any translation effort, there is usually a middle ground one tries to find which will satisfy the faithfulness aspect as well as the feeling aspect.

Cesarić casts the experience of loving someone in the sublime; this is to say that he is showing it almost as one might picture oneself kneeling before a god, at once in utter awe, speechless, amazed and entranced with the heart singing highly and yet truly terrified at its greatness and import and bearing. In short, the sublime is a poetic attempt to describe the indescribable. My diction in this translation emphasises that without being terse; to do less would be to utterly destroy the poem.