Promenade under the lime trees

Two young men who have recently known their destinies are discussing about some truths they have been recently made aware of in the world. This excerpt is about 987 words. The full translation of this short story is 1625 words.

Friedrich Schiller:        Promenade under the lime trees

A translation by J Marc Rakotolahy

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Wollmar and Edwin two friends who lived together in a peaceful hermitage in which they have retreated from the tumult of the busy world, here, discuss about the remarkable destinies of their lives in full philosophical leisure. Edwin, the fortunate one, embraced the world with a joyful tenderness which put the gloomier Wollmar into a miserable mood because of his misfortune.

 

An alley of lime trees were the favourite place of their debates. At one time, they walked again there on a lovely day in Mai; I remember the following discussions:

 

Edwin: The weather is so beautiful – the whole nature is cheering up and you are so thoughtful, Wollmar?

Wollmar Alone me, please. You know this is my way to corrupt your mood.

 

Edwin: But is it then possible to be so much disgusted by the cup of joy?

 

Wollmar: If one finds a spin in it – why not? You see, Nature depicts itself to you, now, as a young lady with red cheek on her wedding day.  To me it seems like an old matron, with red make-up on her yellow green cheeks and with inherited diamonds in her hair. How she ridicules herself in this Sunday attire!

These are just old clothes worn already a thousand times. Even this green flowing dress train, she wore already before Deucalion, just as perfumed and just as colourfully dressed. For thousand years, she has fed herself only with proceeds from death bulletin, made artifice from the bones of her own children and lightened the decay with blinding tinsel. She is an indecent monster which is a thousand times warmed up from her own death, fattens herself, patches together her rags and makes them well into new fabric, carries them to the market and again pulls them together into nasty rags.

 

Young man, do you know very well in what kind of society you are maybe now walking? Did you think, indeed, that this endless circle is the tomb of your forefathers, that the winds which bring you the scents of the lime trees, maybe blow to your nose the dispersed force of Arminius, that in the refreshing source you maybe tasting the crushing bones of our great Henry?

Pfff! Pfff! The conquerors of Rome who divided the majestic world into three parts, just the same way as young boys share a bouquet among them and put them afterwards on their hats, should, maybe, be extorting from the throat of their weakened descent a moaning opera aria. – The atom which shook with divine thoughts Plato’s mind, which trembled of pity in the heart of Titus, shudders maybe, now, with the ardour of an animal in the veins of Sardanapale or will be dispersed by the ravens in the carrion of a hanged local thief.

Disgraceful! Disgraceful! We have assembled our Harlequin masks from the sanctified ashes of our fathers; we have fed our bell hood with the wisdom of the ancient times. You seem to find that amusing, Erwin?

 

Edwin: Forgive me. Your observations remind me of comical scenes. How? When our bodies, according to the laws, wandered from our spirits, as people affirm? When they must, after the death of the machine, still keep on the administration under the command of the soul; the same way as the spirits of the deceased repeat the occupations of their previous life, quae cura fuit vivis, eadem sequitur tellure repostos.

 

Wollmar:Hence, the ashes of the Lykurgus may still lie until now and for eternity in the ocean!

 

Edwin:. Hear, there, the tender Philomele complaining? How? As if she were the urn of Tibull’s ashes, which could sing so tenderly as she does? Maybe the sublime Pindar should ascend every nobleman to the blue ceiling of horizon? Vibrates, maybe, in every courting Zephyr an atom of Anacreon? Who can know, if it is not the bodies of the seducers which fly in tender little flocks of powder into the hair locks of their mistresses? If it is not the remains of the usurer which are captured within the hundred year rust on the buried coins?

If it is not the bodies of the Polygraphs which are damned to be melted into letters or turned into paper, to groan, now, eternally under the pressure of the printing machine and to help eternalize the nonsense of their colleagues? Who can prove to me that the painful kidney stone of our neighbour is not the rest of an unskilled doctor, who, now, as punishment guards as an uninvited doorman the formerly mistreated bladder, condemned to this dishonourable jail, until the consecrated hand of a doctor dissolves the cursed Prince? Do you see, Wollmar! From precisely the cup, from which you create the bitter angers, my mood creates merry jokes.

 

Wollmar.: Edwin! Edwin! How you diffuse earnestness again with a laughing joke! People say such things about our princes who believe to have a destructive effect with a wink. People say that about our beauties who want to make a fool of our wisdom with a colourful landscape painted on their faces. People say that about the sweet little gentlemen who make of a handful of blond hair into their God. May they care about how the shovels of the grave digger stroke so roughly the skull of Yorik! What good is a woman with all her beauty if the great Cesar repairs a fissuring wall to protect himself from the wind?

 

Edwin.: But what is the meaning of all this?

 

Wollmar:. Miserable catastrophe of a miserable farce!

 

– Do you see, Edwin? The destiny of the soul is written in the matter. Now, make for yourself the happy conclusion.

 

Edwin:. Calm down, Wollmar! You are getting all excited. You know how well you were, there, not careful.

Wollmar: Let me go on. Good thing have nothing to shy away from inspection.

Author's Note

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