From the forest wrapt in darkness,
From behind the green-clad garden,
Darkened clouds a-black with warnings
Of chill rain-showers, frosts that chill one
In that time and in that season
The daughter journeyed to her mother,
Journeyed through the great big forest,
Thought her thought to the nightingales,
Told her tale with her young champions:
"Nightingale, my nightingale,
Flit away, my nightingale,
To my homeland swiftly flutter.
To my mother, oh, my nightingale,
Do a reverential curtsey,
Bend your brow before my brothers.
Might not they have wept and sorrowed,
When they plight me in my girlhood
To that strange and foreign country,
To some great and mighty noble,
Or unto the ruffian Tatar?
In the morn they'll rouse me early,
They will send me in my girlhood
On the rushing river's waters,
They will send me barefoot, naked,
They will send me, freezing, hungry.
And I reached the rushing river
Streaming downwards rapidly.
There they perched, the gray-clad goslings
Eddying the crystal waters.
For one whole hour I stayed there,
Another whole hour I wept there,
And during the third I lapped the water,
And in the fourth hour I came homeward.
Father-in-law he curses and scolds,
Mother-in-law bids me be slain.
I besought my husband's sister:
She replied so stupidly:
"You little bride, you innocent,
You still are a little ninny!
If it had been any water,
You'd have lapped it all the same."
Whence, O Sorrow, is thy origin?
She was born, was Sorrow, from gray earth,
From under the briars, the clay-clods,
And Sorrow shod her in shoes of bast,
And Sorrow clad her in clothes of rushes,
Appareled her in a thin bast waist-band,
And Sorrow approached the goodly champion.
He saw her, the champion, and must escape her,
And fled from Sorrow to the open meadow,
To the open meadow like a gray-clad hare,
And Sorrow followed him.
She tracked him out and stretched her meshes,
Stretching her meshes her silken fetters.
"Stand and deliver, avaunt not, champion!"
He saw her, the youth, and must escape her,
And from Sorrow he fled to the swift-flowing river.
To the rushing river like the pike-fish,
And Sorrow followed him.
She tracked him out, her nets she cast,
Stretching her nets the silken fetters.
"Stand and deliver, avaunt not, champion!"
He saw her, the youth, and must escape her.
From Sorrow he fled to the coffin-box,
To the coffin-lid, to his little grave-mound,
Into his grave, into gray mother earth.
And they sing the fame of the goodly youth.
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