Growing Old - George Mayer-Marton (présenté par Robert Waterhouse)

Robert Waterhouse propose un poème de circonstance, inédit, de George Mayer-Marton (1897-1960), en anglais.

Growing Old

by George Mayer-Marton

Let me see:

is anything amiss?

Have I grown too old

for dreaming of new work and love?

Or have I merely aged

 like one of those forgotten hillside woods,

unfenced and unencaged,

pathless with many a fallen tree

and felled ones, grey like slate,

studded with leafcrowned stumps,

aureolate in the gathering autumn-cold?

I am no longer forest-dense enough

for hiding maze-born myths,

but through the thinning foliage

more light may penetrate

deep down to the nameless roots.

George Mayer-Marton (1897-1960) was a Hungarian-born artist and art teacher who moved to London from Vienna with his wife Grete in September 1938 following the Anschluss. In September 1940 their North London studio-home was fire-bombed during an early Blitz raid. They had taken shelter, but most of the work Mayer-Marton brought with him was destroyed and Grete never fully recovered from the incident. George went on to work for the Arts Council and in 1953 became a senior lecturer at Liverpool College of Art. This poem, dating from the late 1950s, was written in English, a language George barely spoke in 1938. He was also an accomplished violinist.