Daremne żale - próżny trud,
Bezsilne złorzeczenia!
Przeżytych kształtów żaden cud
Nie wróci do istnienia.
Świat wam nie odda, idąc wstecz,
Znikomych mar szeregu -
Nie zdoła ogień ani miecz
Powstrzymać myśli w biegu.
Trzeba z żywymi naprzód iść,
Po życie sięgać nowe...
A nie w uwiędłych laurów liść
Z uporem stroić głowę.
Wy nie cofniecie życia fal!
Nic skargi nie pomogą -
Bezsilne gniewy, próżny żal!
Świat pójdzie swoją drogą.
I love the rhytm of this poem. My rough translation.
Useless remorses, toil in vain
Impotent spells and curses.
Outlived shapes won't be back.
There will be no miracles.
World won't return you,
going back,
translucent ghosts and spirits.
Neither with sword nor with fire
you'll stop a thought that's running.
You're to go forward with alive ones
You're to reach for a new life.
Instead of wearing stubbornly
withered crown of laurels.
You won't turn back the waves of life
Complains won't be of help.
Impotent angers, remorse in vain
World will go its own way.
Also Jacek Kaczmarski songs are great. And I loved the poems in Stanisław Lem "Cyberiad". Translated by Michael Kandel.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!
