Ferdinand Gregorovius was one of the great German historians of the 19th century, and in addition a poet of no small capacity. He was born in Neidenburg in East Prussia in 1821, and studied at the University of Koenigsberg. His first important work was a study of the social elements of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, published in 1849. In 1851 he published a historical work The History of Emperor Hadrian and His Times, and a verse tragedy, The Death of Tiberius. His interest in Italy and the Mediterranean in general sent him to that country in 1852; there he spent twenty-two years traveling about and studying, not returning to Germany until 1874. In 1880 he visited Greece, in 1882, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. From then on his residence alternated between Rome and Munich; he died in 1891.

It is the general opinion that Gregorovius’ greatest work is his thirteen-volume history of the City of Rome during the Middle Ages. He also wrote a history of Athens during the Middle Ages, and published many smaller studies, descriptions of travel in Italy, his Roman journals, and a volume of poems.

The poem published here below was written in 1855 while Gregorovius was working on his history of Rome. It is translated by the American poet Randall Jarrell and will be published shortly—together with an essay by Gregorovius, “The Ghetto and the Jews of Rome,” which appeared in expanded form in his Wande jahre in Italien (1888-1892)—in Volume 12 of the Schocken Library. The poem appears here in its present translation by permission of Schocken Books.—Ed.

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Very bitter were the sorrows
of our fathers, who in exile
Hung their harps upon the weeping
Willows of the flat Euphrates:
But beside the Tiber’s flood,
Pressed behind these stifling gratings,
We hang up our wailing’s zither;
Judah’s children, we—in Rome.

We last children of those slaves
The Romans led here, once, from Canaan,
In their triumph over Zion—
Those who sank waist-deep in shame;
We orphans of the Holy City
Build forever, stone on stone,
Our own pyramid of sorrow
Here above the Roman rubble.

For two thousand years we mourned
Beside this stream, whose yellow waves
Rush savagely, in wild confusion,
Past the ghetto’s dreary walls;
With our fathers’ wailing courage,
One in grief, we have endured:
We weep, as they have wept,
Eternally, to this same stream.

Nation after nation fell;
But we cling, like the undying
Green ivy to these ruins—cling
To Octavia’s shattered halls,
The witnesses of our dishonor
When our motherland’s despoiler,
When Jerusalem’s destroyer
Stood to judge the seed of Judah.

Ach! for us, in narrow alleys,
In rooms the sunlight could not reach—
Not even fit to hold our anguish—
Pharaoh piled another Goshen;
And there came to gape upon us,
To mock our bitter agony
Sneering Brothers, haughty Fathers,
In their glances hate and death.

Like the Messenger who passes
Through the streets, to chalk the marks
Of death upon the houses: Here
And here they die; so fever wanders—
Plague on plague, in their full power,
Dread and toil at every hour,
And our shame—all bound together
With the gnawing ache of hunger.

In the street outside, the laughing
Crowds surge, packed from wall to wall,
And the gay floats roll among
The masked and glittering throngs;
In its gold-embroidered silk
Each house is dressed for holiday—
From balcony and window, Joy
Strews, as spring strews, flowers, flowers.

Then the roses—ach! of Sharon
We remember: how they withered,
How the blossoms fell in clusters
From the almond-wand of Aaron.
Zion’s daughter, stripped of jewels,
Maid of Rome: into the ashes
You must bow your head, in silence—
In a silence full of tears.

We think of our abandoned daughters.
We remember how the lashes
Scourged our fathers to their judgment
Through the people’s mocking laughter.
We think how the blood of Judah
Stained the threshold of St. Peter’s.
We see, still, the livid frightful
Glare of the flames about the stake.

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Now, in the sweat of our faces,
Day after day, we sit before
Our doorsteps; and all our toil
Lengthens with our bitter zeal—
And from every hole and comer
We hunt out our rags and patches,
For with loathing hands, the world
Throws us its refuse, only.

Alas, the rags make us remember
Solomon: all earthly glory
Breaks to pieces—and at last,
Like these rags here, falls to nothing.
Oh, the bracelets that adorned you,
Zion’s daughters! All are gone,
All your glittering dress is tarnished,
All that was is rags and tatters.

So we sigh, and sew the tatters
On this rubbish of the Romans,
And we think: As this has shattered,
So Rome must also—and must perish.
But we still, in mockery,
Cling fast, like the undying
Green ivy to the ruins—
For, alas, it is a ruin!

No more, from the arch of Titus,
Can the marble pictures grieve us:
Candlesticks, the Temple’s tablets,
And the Jordan’s holy waters;
Long ago, in filth and dust,
Thy gods, O Rome, have perished—
But Jehovah’s holy emblems
Shine forth after a thousand years.

The grass springs above the rubble
Of the temple of the Father, Jove;
And down into the dust have fallen
The palaces of every Caesar:
But here, in spite of Time and Death,
To Thine everlasting glory
Thine old altars rise unbroken—
Lord of Times, of Life, Jehovah!

By the waters of the Tiber
We set up, with silent weeping,
Poorly, and with unhewn stones,
The sanctuary of Thy temple;
And we traced upon the walls
Thine emblems, Lord, that we might still
Remember, when they met our gaze,
Thy house’s old magnificence.

And we sons of Abraham,
The faithful brotherhood, have met
Once more, before the holy ark,
In the Sabbath’s quiet hour;
And we bear before the face
Of Elohim, the seven-fold
Light of the seven-fold lamp—
The unchanged, undying light.

Then we chorus, with the tongues
Of our fathers, to the harps,
In harmonies our sorrow sharpens,
David’s psalms, still unforgotten:
Till the tears begin to flow—
And once more, from our hearts,
The pain of a thousand years
Melts into hope for the Messiah.

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