fredag 26 mars 2010

Bruegel och Auden-



Musée des Beaux Arts - av Wystan Hugh Auden



About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster;

the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
(Målning "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus av Pieter Bruegel d. ä.)

2 kommentarer:

agnes i Lund sa...

Finns Musée des Beaux Arts kvar? Hittade det inte när vi var i Paris sist. vet att jag var där på 70-talet. Har alltid gillat Bruegel!

Ingrid sa...

Tror att det finns kvar- men det är många år sedan jag var i Paris. Bruegel tycker jag också om- det går alltid att hitta något nytt i hans tavlor.