… In lovely blueness
In lovely blue
the steeple blossoms with its metal roof...
Around which drift swallow cries
… the crying of swallows hovers
around which lies most loving blue.
… most moving blueness surrounds it.
Take the stairs down from the belfry…
… come down beneath the bell
The windows the bells ring through are as gates to beauty.
… bells ringing are like gates in beauty.
They resemble the forest trees.
…trees of the wood.
Yet so simple, these images, so very holy, one fears to describe them...
Would I like to be a comet? I think so…
They are swift as birds
… For they possess the swiftness of birds
they flower
… they blossom
With fire …
This is the work of the sun
… The beautiful sun does that
It leads young men along their course, charmed by rays like roses...
… with the allurements of its beams as though with roses.
...
~ Text: Lines from Hölderlin's fragment In Lovely Blue, two separate translations placed side by side.
~ Images: Passage de Venus devant le Soleil, Divers and Study of a Horse, Leonardo da Vinci
~ Note on Leonardo's Study of a Horse:
“Leonardo sought to represent substances that scarcely have a material form, such as shadows, clouds, vapor, or hair; he studied liminality, which he called the ‘termine’ or the ‘essere de nulla’: something made of nothingness, as in the boundary between a wave and air, or the mixing of water with other water.”
