Translation is by Sholom J. Kahn.
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Autumn has—its polished brass. The rising wave—its frosty pride.
And the never-to-be-forgotten books
their light that’s left unnamed.
I remember the candle burning over battles in the volume
and on the silence of its women, window-framed.
In this very light, this very night, its city was bared to me,
and my city it was in sadnesses, my city in healthless strife.
Heedlessly, my comrades, as if I were crossing a pavement,
I passed into its lives, beyond the bounds of life.
I swear. This can be in libraries, there too one can love unto death.
The life of the scrolls, and their thought—is their mummy-queen.
And on the walls of ruins and graveyards, still fresh with dew,
like the lips of Chamutal, their ancient moss is green.
And when in the land of the living the stormy-combed rooster crows,
his voice reaches the land of the books, to the moons and houses there.
There clamor grows into crystal, precision is pregnant with doom—
there silences hang by a hair.
Yet let but the sign be given, let but the sword be brandished,
and, to the hunt, the hound-pack,
in their chains baying,
flows.
Candles and voices are lifted high, summers and snows do battle,
and prisons and doors unclose—
—Thus the books from their nothingness flame again on our tables,
predestination renewed. Without a page failing,
without skipping a heartbeat, without calling for mercy in woe,
we accept the toilsomeness of the roads, and the infants’ wailing.
Primitive is the power of the books. In them, none is idle.
Brothers are they to the masons, to the three sons of God’s grace:
to seasons of cold-and-heat, to pride of the wind, and to waters—
to the sculptors of the world’s face.
They beat out the terraced flint, raise up its wrathful ranges,
rock the cradled nations to the snoring of its clock.
When night falls on the world their candlelight pierces its shutters,
a ruddy candle that has not slept.
How I have lusted to terrify them, uprooting their confession,
to chase the cunning thoughts
in their circles sent.
Lo, lo the lovely one, appears like a hind from the thicket,
as she was at the moment of Genesis, trembling and intent.
For strong is the wind in the mountains, and none like the corn-ears are pure,
and nothing is as bright as the good dew
in the meadows:
their distances and glories are their heritage from God,
but their soul, my brothers, is taken from books.
And in the name of the wind in the mountains, of my life of sackcloth
and ashes,
of Chamutal, my brothers, and her dewy eyes glancing,
whose mother cares not, whether she be in books or in villages,
who is pure to the one who bore her, whether in parchment or dancing.—
—May God preserve the scrolls, their greatness in desecration,
from dampness and moths and the conqueror’s vengeful ire,
may the Lord preserve them from fools and from their folly,
and from a booby’s wisdom as from fire.
Now my song is spoken. Perhaps I have said it in vain.
Perhaps its love is foreign. And strange to you its need.
But among your songs, among the nine, I wanted thus to hammer it.
May it go with them as brother to the land that is decreed.
Their faces dark, the brothers said:
You are our brother, our brother indeed.
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