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This selection published in Penguin Classics 2015
Translation copyright © Avi Sharon, 2008
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-39747-4
Desires
Candles
Dangerous Things
Very Seldom
Painted Things
Morning Sea
The Café Entrance
One Night
Return
Far Away
He Vows
I Left
Chandelier
Since Nine O’Clock
Insight
When They Come Alive
Pleasure
I Have Gazed So Much
In The Street
The Tobacconist’s Window
The Passage
In the Evening
Grey
Beside the House
The Next Table
Remember, Body …
Days of 1903
The Afternoon Sun
To Live
On the Ship
That They May Come
Their Beginning
In an Old Book
In Despair
Before Time Could Change Them
He Came to Read
In the Twenty-fifth Year of His Life
The Dreary Village
In the Bars
Days of 1896
Two Young Men, Twenty-three to Twenty-four Years Old
Days of 1901
Days of 1908
A Young Writer – in His Twenty-fourth Year
Picture of a Young Man of Twenty-three, Painted by His Friend of the Same Age, an Amateur
Days of 1909, 1910 and 1911
Lovely Flowers, White Ones, That Matched So Well
In the Same Space
The Mirror in the Entrance Hall
He Asked About the Quality
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Like the beautiful bodies of those who died young,
tearfully interred in a grand mausoleum
with roses by their heads and jasmine at their feet –
so seem those desires that have passed
without fulfilment; without a single night
of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.
The days of the future stand before us
like a line of burning candles –
golden candles, warm with life.
Behind them stand the days of our past,
a pitiful row of candles extinguished,
the nearest still sending up their smoke:
cold and melted, withered sticks.