I Do Not Renounce — Rose Ausländer

Rose Ausländer Albanian version by Eda Zari

I Do Not Renounce

I do not renounce flowers and music, my anger at the hunger of thousands, a human being’s smile, harsh and tender words, being here in an incomprehensible world.

Gladly, I renounce death that does not renounce me.

Rose Ausländer’s poetry embraces the universal and the particular alike: time and transience, dream and cosmos, criticism of the present, landscapes, objects, human beings, atmosphere and language — all may become motifs, as the poet wrote in 1976 in the afterword to her collected poems.

Photo: Yates’s Wine Lodge, Liverpool, 1983 / Martin Parr / Magnum Photos.