Beauty

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I am lovely, o mortals, a stone-fashioned dream,
And my breast, where you bruise yourselves all in your turn,
Is made so that love will be born in the poet -
Eternal, and silent as matter is timeless.

I reign in the air like a puzzling sphinx;
My heart is of snow and is pure as the swans.
I hate only impulse, the breaking of line,
And I never will cry, nor will ever show smile.

The poets, in view of my lofty design -
The style, as it seems, of the finest of statues -
Will spend all their days in their painstaking studies

Since I have a charm for these suppliant suitors:
Pure mirrors, which transform to beauty all things -
My eyes, my wide eyes, c1ear as air, c1ear as time.


Přeložil James McGowan