english prose translation of Ludy's dutch dizain*
My Existence Flattens
How do I pull myself up from my darkness, where can I find light, will my eye see a hold?
My cold hand, that is but searching, yearning so much to fit in another, it slides down into shade and it searches, just finds the emptiness that I wear, uncertainty, my being a question.
How much is left of me, who am I?
The night is long, seconds are ticking slowly, my existence flattens with each hollow stroke.
* a dizain is a poetic stanza used mainly by French (early) Renaissance poets. It consists of 10 lines of each 10 syllables in a ababbccdcd rhyme scheme. Besides François Villon's work, the most famous dizains were written by Lyon's great master Maurice Scève who published his DÉLIE in 1544, a dark and allegedly very obscure Petrarcan ode to his idealized love spread over 449 dizains with an eight line dedication added.
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