When I Saw You, Verena Poem by Peter Mamara

by M. Eminescu (1850-1889)

When I saw you, Verena, then I've said to myself:
I shall lock my feelings, and I shall lock up my mind,
So your fleeting sweet smile may not cross
— The doorsill of my thoughts, the room of my sad heart.

Since I didn't want the spirit of my thoughts
— To burn on the pyre of pleasures.
I didn't want you to wreck my life's fantasy
With your eye, which had a sweet ploy.

Queen you, are you puzzled that when you smile I don't say a word?
Your gentle snake eyes of a proud idol, I gouge them out in my mind.
My thoughts are blank at what you say.
In my mind, I bare your jaws of your white fleshy tissue.

And I cut into the top skin, and into your lips
— Your hideous skull with no curls.
It is gruesomely drained of phlegm and blood
Oh, what was left of you in my mind?

You didn't surround my thought process with your thick hair.
Idol you, didn't you get sometimes into my mind?
You seem to be the onset of a corpse,
As, you carried a waxy cheek on your bones.

Doesn't matter how supple you are, or how your dress is,
And how sweet you are. Even if you have sung the psalms,
Or if oh, call girl you, were dancing and clapping your hands,
I would have looked at you all the same, with unmoving eye.

I looked to one side, taking shelter from your sweet inquisitive stare.
Forever I tried to stir up my inside anger.
So the world and its appearance might look to me an ephemeral trance
Made up of women's words, and untrustworthy advice.

I said that the lust for nice looks could beat me without a hitch,
— And a gaze from her eyebrows' arch
Teaches me cruelly, the pain of an earthly being
And it puts the worm of this life into my heart.

Venom is in the kiss of the unfaithful Goddess Venus,
She let fly the arrows of happiness into our heart.
She weakens my mind with a veil of deceit,
So in vain my eye is young and my mouth is beautiful.

Instead of stretching my gaze, like hands without a body,
And seek with it the sweet delight of your eye,
Over those gates I shall place my hand as guard.
If not, then I better pluck my eyes out.
(1876)

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