Tarjei Vesaas
The Footprints
On the secluded beach
there’s no one now.
The mountains above are scorched.
An arc of sand, bitterly abandoned,
covered by one person’s tracks! abandoned,
deserted after a harrowing wait.
The mountains above are scorched.
Someone has been here
and paced and paced
– but no one came across this lake.
The sand was completely closed off by strange mountains.
The yellow sand
with its last, lonely tracks.
Hurried footprints, caved in.
Just countless depressions in the sand.
The trail of your young foot in a frenzy,
your soft steps, in thirst, before you fled.
Your best dream, for no one.
Your golden form, wasted.
Splendid powers, for no one, no one
– while the black cliffs looked on
with streaks down their features
from previous lives.
Translated from the Norwegian by Roger Greenwald
Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970), eldest son of a farming family in Telemark, became one of the giants of Norwegian and Scandinavian fiction. He won the Venice Prize in 1952 for a volume of stories, and the Nordic Council Prize in 1963 for
the novel Is-Slottet (The Ice Palace). His work has been widely translated; eight novels have been published in English. Five volumes of his poetry were published in his lifetime and a sixth posthumously in 1970.
Roger Greenwald grew up in New York, attended The City College and the St. Marks in the Bouwerie Poetry Project workshop, and then took graduate degrees at the University of Toronto. He has won the Norma Epstein National Competition and the CBC Radio/Saturday Night Literary Award for his poetry, as well as numerous awards for his translations. He has published one book of poems, Connecting Flight (1993) and several volumes of poetry in translation, most recently Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas (2000), which was a finalist in the U.S. for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (2002). http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~roger
Translated by Roger Greenwald
Page(s) 195-196
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The