Daily Lament

How hard it is not to be strong,

how hard it is to be alone,

and to be old, yet to be young!

and to be weak, and powerless,

alone, with no one anywhere,

dissatisfied, and desperate.

And trudge bleak highways endlessly,

and to be trampled in the mud,

with no star shining in the sky.

Without your star of destiny

to play its twinklings on your crib

with rainbows and false prophecies.

– Oh God, oh God, remember all

the glittering fair promises

with which you have afflicted me.

Oh God, oh God, remember all

the great loves, the great victories,

the wreaths of laurel and the gifts.

And know you have a son who walks

the weary valleys of the world

among sharp thorns, and rocks and stones,

through unkindness and unconcern,

with his feet bloodied under him,

and with his heart an open wound

First published in English and Croatian

in the United Kingdom in 2013 by

Shearsman Books, 50 Westons Hill Drive, Emersons Green

BRISTOL BS16 7DF

Shearsman Books Ltd Registered Office

30–31 St. James Place, Mangotsfield, Bristol BS16 9JB

(this address not for correspondence)

www.shearsman.com

ISBN 978-1-84861-316-4

English translations ~ prijevod na engleski jezik

© Richard Berengarten and Daša Marić 2013

Introduction ~ uvod © Richard Berengarten 2013

Cover design ~ dizajn naslovnice © Arijana Mišić-Burns 2013

The rights of Richard Berengarten and Daša Marić to be identified as the

translators of this work in English have been asserted by them in accordance

with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Richard Berengarten i Daša Marić smatraju se prevoditeljima-autorima ovog

djela na engleskom jeziku prema Glavi 77. Zakona o autorskim pravima,

dizajnu i patentima iz 1988.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editors of the following journals and websites, in/on which some

of these translations have appeared: ‘Listen how in this perfumed dark’,

Celtic

Dawn

(

Yeats Club Review

,

“special distinction”), No. 5, 1990; ‘Daily Lament’,

‘Frailty’, ‘Star on High’, and

The Necklace

XXV, XXXI and XXXII,

North Dakota

Quarterly

(

Out of Yugoslavia,

special issue), Winter 1993; ‘Blessed morning’ and

‘Daily Lament’,

Borut’s Literature Collection

,

http://www.borut.com/library/

texts/tin/poetry_u.htm; ‘Tonight my forehead gleams’, http://www.ezgeetacom/

notturno.html;

The Necklace

XI, XX, XXI (‘Nocturne’), XXXII, ‘Star on High’

and ‘Frailty’,

Mediterranean Poetry

: http://www.Mediterranean.nu/?p=1713.

The present selection of translations was first published in the online journal

[sic]

(no. 3, yr. 2), 2011; and the introduction to this selection is extracted (and slightly

adapted) from an essay which appeared in the same issue, entitled ‘A Nimble

Footing on the Coals, Tin Ujević, Lyricist: Some English Perspectives’. http://

www.sicjournal.org/en/contents. Special thanks go to Tomislav Kuzmanović,

the translation editor of

[sic]

, for his valuable critical comments on that essay

and for his support in the preparation of this book, and to Anne Stevenson, for

an improvement in nuance to the translation of

The Necklace

XXI.

Twelve Poems

by Tin Ujević