Fragments of Empedocles

 

FRAGMENTS OF EMPEDOCLES

 

Translated by Brett Rutherford

 

11

Fools, whose thoughts run fast and false,
who fancy that from Nothing, Something comes,
or that, with wave of hand, What Is, is Not,
as if a thing once seen, can be unseen.

 

12

From Nothingness a bring can never come;
if so, What Is could just as well be all destroyed,
by what Force by what name no one has heard —
for What Is rests forever where it sits.

The All contains no void, nor has it more
than what itself encompasses.

17

I will report a truth two-fold: I see
the One from Many come to be, and
as the One dissolves, the Many come again:
Earth and Fire, Water and the sky of Air;
and held apart from them, conflicting Force
in balance held, and Love upon them all,
in all her being everywhere the same.

Focus your mind on Love, sit not
like a novice astonished. She exists
inborn in every human cell and not
to be denied. Through her, the yearning comes
of created things for one another; through her
we call a well-done thing a beauty, and know
Delight or even love a thing for its own sake.