ΣΑΝ ΣΗΜΕΡΑ. ΣΤΕΦΑΝ ΓΚΕΟΡΓΚΕ

Stefan George (12/7/1868 – 4/12/1933)
Ποιητής, Γερμανία
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George's most passionate, most ill-fated and poetically most fruitful love affair began in 1902, when he approached a boy in a street of Munich: Max Kronberger, a 14-year-old grammar-school student, felt flattered when a man he had noted before asked his permission to sketch his 'interesting' head. On the next day George succeeded in taking a photograph of the boy, but it seems that thereupon George's courage failed him, as he did not try to meet the boy again for almost a year. At the time of their next accidental meeting in the street, Kronberger found out that George was a poet and, since his respectable parents agreed, they saw each other regularly from then on, in a relationship not always free from tension. However, Kronberger died of an acute disease on the day after his sixteenth birthday. What followed was a poetical glorification which was sometimes compared to the literary monument erected by Dante for Beatrice, but resembles rather the deification bestowed by Hadrian on Antinous, in a somewhat different way owing to the difference of times and circumstances, of course.

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Your eyes were dim with distant dreams, you tended
No more with care the holy fief and knew
in every space the breath of living ended –
Now lift your head for joy has come to you.
The cold and dragging year that was your share,

A vernal tide of dawning wonders bore,
With blooming hand, with shimmers in his hair
A god appeared and stepped within your door.
Unite in gladness, now no longer darkened
and blushing for an age whose gold is flown:
The calling of a god you too have hearkened,
It was a god whose mouth has kissed your own.
You also were elect – no longer mourn
For all your days in unfulfilment sheathed...
Praise to your city where a god was born!
Praise to your age in which a god has breathed!