Unsterblich duften die Linden

It’s twenty to three in the afternoon, the tail end of an early siesta. I just opened the window of my loft again that I had closed when I came up here two hours ago. The sun has moved around and is now gazing in, a hot mid-summer sun: temperatures are in the upper twenties. Right now traffic noise obscures the bird song, but later in the evening, just like this morning when I woke up for the second time, around 4, the sweet voices of song birds sound from all around. 

Yesterday, when I dropped off Johann at a friend of ours just north of Frankfurt, we went for a walk to the eighteenth-century castle where her husband has his office, taking a short cut through the park. We had just crossed a slow moving little river wending its way dreamily through tall grass and reeds, weeping willows dipping their branches into its murky waters, when I was stopped in my tracks by a scent, well-known, but from a different lifetime, it seemed, and not immediately identifiable. This scent embraced me, filled me with a sweet melancholy, made me think of poems by Eichendorff or one of the other German Romantic poets. What was it? 

         

The line of a poem slipped into my mind ... “Unsterblich duften die Linden ...”  I looked around, found maple, willow and oak. Hmmm ... no. It wasn’t any of them. Had my senses, my memory, deceived me after all? After a few more steps we rounded the corner of one of the castle’s outbuildings, and there it was: a huge linden tree, its trunk greenish with age, its densely leafed branches forming a thick canopy, with clusters of blossoms, two-flagged sails with fuzzy greenish-white little tufts at their centers. I stood transfixed, eyes closed, and breathed deeply. There is nothing that can quite compare to this scent.

It is not Eichendorff, but the poet Ina Seidel (1885-1974) who wrote the poem I remembered. Here it is, along with my attempt at a translation:

 

                                TROST

Unsterblich duften die Linden –

was bangst du nur?

Du wirst vergehn und deiner Füße Spur

Wird bald kein Auge mehr im Staube finden.

Doch blau und leuchtend wird der Sommer stehn

und wird mit seinem süßen Atemwehn

gelind die arme Menschenbrust entbinden.

Wo kommst du her? Wie lang bist du noch hier?

Was liegt an dir?

Unsterblich duften die Linden.

 
                   CONSOLATION
  

Immortal, the scent of the linden –

What do you fear?

You will fade away, and soon

no one will find your traces in the dust.

But summer will stand glorious and blue

and will with its sweet breath

gently deliver the poor human breast.

Where do you come from? How much longer will you stay?

What do you matter?

Immortal, the scent of the linden.

                     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Linden trees are in bloom everywhere now, along roadsides, in parks, in the old, beautifully restored graveyards here in Korbach, their crowns buzzing with bees and bumble bees. They are joined by a multitude of flowers, both wild and carefully tended to in gardens. In short: it is beautiful wherever I turn.