Lovely girl, where are you going?
Who calls you, far
from your loved ones?
Do you abandon your father’s house
so soon, wandering off, alone? Will you
return to this threshold? Will you ever make
those who mourn you today, happy again?

      Your eyes are dry, and your attitude brave,
but you still seem unhappy. It would be hard
to tell from your serious aspect,
whether your road is pleasant
or sorrowful, joyful or sad
the place you travel to. Alas, I could never
decide myself, nor perhaps has
the world decided, whether
you should be called hated by heaven,
or beloved: wretched or fortunate.

      Death calls: at the dawn of day,
comes the final moment. You’ll not return
to the nest you left. You’ve left
the sight of your sweet
parents forever. The place
you go to lies underground:
there’s your dwelling for all time.
Perhaps you’re blessed: but he who gazes,
thoughtfully, at your fate, must sigh.

      I think that never to see
the light is best. But, being born,
to vanish at that time when beauty
first displays her limbs and face,
and the world begins
to bow down before her from afar:
when every hope is flowering,
long before truth has flashed its gloomy
rays against her joyful brow:
and like mist condensing
to a fleeing cloud-form on the horizon,
as if she had not been,
renounce the future
for the tomb’s dark silence,
this, though to our intellect
it seems best, strikes the heart
deeply, in profound pity.

      Mother Nature, bewailed and feared,
by those of the animal kingdom,
you marvel, not worth our praise,
who bear and nourish to kill,
if it’s a mortal ill
to die before our time, why
bring it on innocent heads?
If it’s a good, why make this parting
more gloomy, inconsolable,
than every other ill,
for those who go, and those who live?

      Wretched, wherever they gaze,
wretched, where they turn or run,
this sensitive species!
It pleased you that youthful
hopes of life
should be illusions: trouble-filled
the tide of their years: Death their only
shield against evil: the inevitable goal,
the immutable law
ruling human life. Ah, after
the sad journey why not at least
make the ending happy? Rather
than this certain future,
the living keep before their eyes,
the sole comfort
for our miseries,
clothed in black robes,
veiled with sad shade,
why make the harbour more fearful
a sight than ever the waves were?

      Given the harsh fate of dying
to which you destine us,
we whom you abandon, in our innocence,
unknowingly, unwillingly, to life,
then he who dies is more enviable
than he who witnesses the death
of those he loves. Yet though it’s true,
as I fervently believe,
that life is pain,
and death a gift, who could wish,
as indeed he should
for the death of those he cares for,
himself to still remain
behind, diminished:
to see the beloved one
with whom he’s spent so many years
carried from the threshold,
a farewell with no hope of ever
meeting again
on this world’s roads:
then left alone, abandoned on earth,
to gaze around, and in familiar places
remember the lost companion?
O Nature, how, ah how, can your heart allow
such embraces to be loosened,
friend from friend,
brother from brother,
child from father,
lover from lover: one dying,
the other granted life? How can
you make such grief
our fate, that mortals
survive a mortal love? But Nature
bestows its care on other things,
than our good or ill.