(1903-1950)
POESÍA
Eres la compañía con quien hablo
de pronto, a solas.
te forman las palabras
que salen del silencio
y del tanque de sueño en que me ahogo
libre hasta despertar.
Tu mano metálica
endurece la prisa de mi mano
y conduce la pluma
que traza en el papel su litoral.
Tu voz, hoz de eco
es el rebote de mi voz en el muro,
y en tu piel de espejo
me estoy mirando mirarme por mil Argos,
por mí largos segundos.
Pero el menor ruido te ahuyenta
y te veo salir
por la puerta del libro
o por el atlas del techo,
por el tablero del piso,
o la página del espejo,
y me dejas
sin más pulso ni voz y sin más cara,
sin máscara como un hombre desnudo
en medio de una calle de miradas.
Reflejos, 1926
NOCTURNO SUEÑO
A Jules Supervielle
Abría las salas
profundas el sueño
y voces delgadas
corrientes de aire
entraban
Del barco del cielo
del papel pautado
caía la escala
por donde mi cuerpo
bajaba
El cielo en el suelo
como en un espejo
la calle azogada
dobló mis palabras
Me robó mi sombra
la sombra cerrada
Quieto de silencio
oí que mis pasos
pasaban
El frío de acero
a mi mano ciega
armó con su daga
Para darme muerte
la muerte esperaba
Y al doblar la esquina
un segundo largo
mi mano acerada
encontró mi espalda
Sin gota de sangre
sin ruido ni peso
a mis pies clavados
vino a dar mi cuerpo
Lo tomé en los brazos
lo llevé a mi lecho
Cerraba las alas
profundas el sueño
Nostalgia de la muerte, 1938
NOCTURNO ETERNO
Cuando los hombres alzan los hombros y pasan
o cuando dejan caer sus nombres
hasta que la sombra se asombra
cuando un polvo más fino aún que el humo
se adhiere a los cristales de la voz
y a la piel de los rostros y las cosas
cuando los ojos cierran sus ventanas
al rayo del sol pródigo y prefieren
la ceguera al perdón y el silencio al sollozo
cuando la vida o lo que así llamamos inútilmente
y que no llega sino con un nombre innombrable
se desnuda para saltar al lecho
y ahogarse en el alcohol o quemarse en la nieve
cuando la vi cuando la vid cuando la vida
quiere entregarse cobardemente y a oscuras
sin decirnos siquiera el precio de su nombre
cuando en la soledad de un cielo muerto
brillan unas estrellas olvidadas
y es tan grande el silencio del silencio
que de pronto quisiéramos que hablara
o cuando de una boca que no existe
sale un grito inaudito
que nos echa a la cara su luz viva
y se apaga y nos deja una ciega sordera
o cuando todo ha muerto
tan dura y lentamente que da miedo
alzar la voz y preguntar "quién vive"
dudo si responder
a la muda pregunta con un grito
por temor de saber que ya no existo
porque acaso la voz tampoco vive
sino como un recuerdo en la garganta
y no es la noche sino la ceguera
lo que llena de sombra nuestros ojos
y porque acaso el grito es la presencia
de una palabra antigua
opaca y muda que de pronto grita
porque vida silencio piel y boca
y soledad recuerdo cielo y humo
nada son sino sombras de palabras
que nos salen al paso de la noche
Nostalgia de la muerte, 1938
NOCTURNO MUERTO
Primero un aire tibio y lento que me ciña
como la venda al brazo enfermo de un enfermo
y que me invada luego como el silencio frío
al cuerpo desvalido y muerto de algún muerto.
Después un ruido sordo, azul y numeroso,
preso en el caracol de mi oreja dormida
y mi voz que se ahogue en ese mar de miedo
cada vez más delgada y más enardecida.
¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento
en que se funda el hielo de mi cuerpo y consuma
el corazón inmóvil como la llama fría?
La tierra hecha impalpable silencioso silencio,
la soledad opaca y la sombra ceniza
caerán sobre mis ojos y afrentarán mi frente.
Nostalgia de la muerte, 1938
DÉCIMA MUERTE
A Ricardo de Alcázar
I
¡Qué prueba de la existencia
habrá mayor que la suerte
de estar viviendo sin verte
y muriendo en tu presencia!
Esta lúcida conciencia
de amar a lo nunca visto
y de esperar lo imprevisto;
este caer sin llegar
es la angustia de pensar
que puesto que muero existo.
II
Si en todas partes estás,
en el agua y en la tierra,
en el aire que me encierra
y en el incendio voraz;
y si a todas partes vas
conmigo en el pensamiento,
en el soplo de mi aliento
y en mi sangre confundida,
¿no serás, Muerte, en mi vida,
agua, fuego, polvo y viento?
III
si tienes manos, que sean
de un tacto sutil y blando,
apenas sensible cuando
anestesiado me crean;
y que tus ojos me vean
sin mirarme, de tal suerte
que nada me desconcierte
ni tu vista ni tu roce,
para no sentir un goce
ni un dolor contigo, Muerte.
IV
Por caminos ignorados,
por hendiduras secretas,
por las misteriosas vetas
de troncos recién cortados,
te ven mis ojos cerrados
entrar en mi alcoba oscura
a convertir mi envoltura
opaca, febril, cambiante,
en materia de diamante
luminosa, eterna y pura.
V
No duermo para que al verte
llegar lenta y apagada,
para que al oír pausada
tu voz que silencios vierte,
para que al tocar la nada
que envuelve tu cuerpo yerto,
para que a tu olor desierto
pueda, sin sombra de sueño,
saber que de ti me adueño,
sentir que muero despierto.
VI
La aguja del instantero
recorrerá su cuadrante,
todo cabrá en un instante
del espacio verdadero
que, ancho, profundo y señero,
será elástico a tu paso
de modo que el tiempo cierto
prolongará nuestro abrazo
y será posible, acaso,
vivir después de haber muerto.
VII
En el roce, en el contacto,
en la inefable delicia
de la suprema caricia
que desemboca en el acto,
hay un misterioso pacto
del espasmo delirante
en que un cielo alucinante
y un infierno de agonía
se funden cuando eres mía
y soy tuyo en un instante.
VIII
¡Hasta en la ausencia estás viva!
Porque te encuentro en el hueco
de una forma y en el eco
de una nota fugitiva;
porque en mi propia saliva
fundes tu sabor sombrío,
y a cambio de lo que es mío
me dejas sólo el temor
de hallar hasta en el sabor
la presencia del vacío.
IX
Si te llevo en mí prendida
y te acaricio y escondo,
si te alimento en el fondo
de mi más secreta herida;
si mi muerte te da vida
y goce mi frenesí,
¡qué será, Muerte, de ti
cuando al salir yo del mundo,
deshecho el nudo profundo,
tengas que salir de mí?
X
En vano amenazas, Muerte,
cerrar la boca a mi herida
y poner fin a mi vida
con una palabra inerte.
¡Qué puedo pensar al verte,
si en mi angustia verdadera
tuve que violar la espera;
si en vista de tu tardanza
para llenar mi esperanza
no hay hora en que yo no muera!
Décima muerte y otros poemas no coleccionados, 1941
AMOR CONDUSSE NOI AD UNA MORTE
Amar es una angustia, una pregunta,
una suspensa y luminosa duda;
es un querer saber todo lo tuyo
y a la vez un temor de al fin saberlo.
Amar es reconstruir, cuando te alejas,
tus pasos, tus silencios, tus palabras,
y pretender seguir tu pensamiento
cuando a mi lado, al fin inmóvil, callas.
Amar es una cólera secreta,
una helada y diabólica soberbia.
Amar es no dormir cuando en mi lecho
sueñas entre mis brazos que te ciñen,
y odiar el sueño en que, bajo tu frente,
acaso en otros brazos te abandonas.
Amar es escuchar sobre tu pecho,
hasta colmar la oreja codiciosa,
el rumor de tu sangre y la marea
de tu respiración acompasada.
Amar es absorber tu joven savia
y juntar nuestras bocas en un cauce
hasta que de la brisa de tu aliento
se impregnen para siempre mis entrañas.
Amar es una envidia verde y muda,
una sutil y lúcida avaricia.
Amar es provocar el dulce instante
en que tu piel busca mi piel despierta;
saciar a un tiempo la avidez nocturna
y morir otra vez la misma muerte
provisional, desgarradora, oscura.
Amar es una sed, la de la llaga
que arde sin consumirse ni cerrarse,
y el hambre de una boca atormentada
que pide más y más y no se sacia.
Amar es una insólita lujuria
y una gula voraz, siempre desierta.
Pero amar es también cerrar los ojos,
dejar que el sueño invada nuestro cuerpo
como un río de olvido y de tinieblas,
y navegar sin rumbo, a la deriva:
porque amar es, al fin, una indolencia.
Canto a la primavera y otros poemas, 1948
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Anne Carson
FATHER'S OLD BLUE CARDIGAN
Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.
I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.
I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes from paring down from the moonbone in the sky.
His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.
He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way
to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon
but the look on his face—
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip
on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers
over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.
Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.
I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.
I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes from paring down from the moonbone in the sky.
His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.
He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way
to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon
but the look on his face—
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip
on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers
over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Leopardi
L'infinito
Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle
E questa siepe che da tanta parte
De'l ultimo orrizonte il guarde esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando interminati
Spazi di la da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete,
Io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando; e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e'l suon di lei. Cosi tra questa
Immensita s'annega il pensier mio:
E'l naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare.
THE INFINITE
It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea.
Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle
E questa siepe che da tanta parte
De'l ultimo orrizonte il guarde esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando interminati
Spazi di la da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete,
Io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando; e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e'l suon di lei. Cosi tra questa
Immensita s'annega il pensier mio:
E'l naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare.
THE INFINITE
It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Romance Sonámbulo
By Federico García Lorca
Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
Con la sombra en la cintura
ella sueña en su baranda,
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Bajo la luna gitana,
las cosas la están mirando
y ella no puede mirarlas.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Grandes estrellas de escarcha
vienen con el pez de sombra
que abre el camino del alba.
La higuera frota su viento
con la lija de sus ramas,
y el monte, gato garduño,
eriza sus pitas agrias.
¿Pero quién vendra? ¿Y por dónde...?
Ella sigue en su baranda,
Verde came, pelo verde,
soñando en la mar amarga.
--Compadre, quiero cambiar
mi caballo por su casa,
mi montura por su espejo,
mi cuchillo per su manta.
Compadre, vengo sangrando,
desde los puertos de Cabra.
--Si yo pudiera, mocito,
este trato se cerraba.
Pero yo ya no soy yo,
ni mi casa es ya mi casa.
--Compadre, quiero morir
decentemente en mi cama.
De acero, si puede ser,
con las sábanas de holanda.
¿No ves la herida que tengo
desde el pecho a la garganta?
--Trescientas rosas morenas
lleva tu pechera blanca.
Tu sangre rezuma y huele
alrededor de tu faja.
Pero yo ya no soy yo,
ni mi casa es ya mi casa.
--Dejadme subir al menos
hasta las altas barandas;
¡dejadme subir!, dejadme,
hasta las verdes barandas.
Barandales de la luna
por donde retumba el agua.
Ya suben los dos compadres
hacia las altas barandas.
Dejando un rastro de sangre.
Dejando un rastro de lágrimas.
Temblaban en los tejados
farolillos de hojalata.
Mil panderos de cristal
herían la madrugada.
Verde que te quiero verde,
verde viento, verdes ramas.
Los dos compadres subieron.
El largo viento dejaba
en la boca un raro gusto
de hiel, de menta y de albahaca.
¡Compadre! ¿Donde está, díme?
¿Donde está tu niña amarga?
¡Cuántas veces te esperó!
¡Cuántas veces te esperara,
cara fresca, negro pelo,
en esta verde baranda!
Sobre el rostro del aljibe
se mecía la gitana.
Verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Un carámbano de luna
la sostiene sobre el agua.
La noche se puso íntima
como una pequeña plaza.
Guardias civiles borrachos
en la puerta golpeaban.
Verde que te qinero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar.
Y el caballo en la montaña.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.
Green, how I want you green.
Big hoarfrost stars
come with the fish of shadow
that opens the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the forest, cunning cat,
bristles its brittle fibers.
But who will come? And from where?
She is still on her balcony
green flesh, her hair green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.
--My friend, I want to trade
my horse for her house,
my saddle for her mirror,
my knife for her blanket.
My friend, I come bleeding
from the gates of Cabra.
--If it were possible, my boy,
I'd help you fix that trade.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
--My friend, I want to die
decently in my bed.
Of iron, if that's possible,
with blankets of fine chambray.
Don't you see the wound I have
from my chest up to my throat?
--Your white shirt has grown
thirsy dark brown roses.
Your blood oozes and flees a
round the corners of your sash.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
--Let me climb up, at least,
up to the high balconies;
Let me climb up! Let me,
up to the green balconies.
Railings of the moon
through which the water rumbles.
Now the two friends climb up,
up to the high balconies.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of teardrops.
Tin bell vines
were trembling on the roofs.
A thousand crystal tambourines
struck at the dawn light.
Green, how I want you green,
green wind, green branches.
The two friends climbed up.
The stiff wind left
in their mouths, a strange taste
of bile, of mint, and of basil
My friend, where is she--tell me--
where is your bitter girl?
How many times she waited for you!
How many times would she wait for you,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony!
Over the mouth of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swinging,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moon
holds her up above the water.
The night became intimate
like a little plaza.
Drunken "Guardias Civiles"
were pounding on the door.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea.
And the horse on the mountain.
From The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, translated by William Logan. Published by New Directions, 1955.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
Con la sombra en la cintura
ella sueña en su baranda,
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Bajo la luna gitana,
las cosas la están mirando
y ella no puede mirarlas.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Grandes estrellas de escarcha
vienen con el pez de sombra
que abre el camino del alba.
La higuera frota su viento
con la lija de sus ramas,
y el monte, gato garduño,
eriza sus pitas agrias.
¿Pero quién vendra? ¿Y por dónde...?
Ella sigue en su baranda,
Verde came, pelo verde,
soñando en la mar amarga.
--Compadre, quiero cambiar
mi caballo por su casa,
mi montura por su espejo,
mi cuchillo per su manta.
Compadre, vengo sangrando,
desde los puertos de Cabra.
--Si yo pudiera, mocito,
este trato se cerraba.
Pero yo ya no soy yo,
ni mi casa es ya mi casa.
--Compadre, quiero morir
decentemente en mi cama.
De acero, si puede ser,
con las sábanas de holanda.
¿No ves la herida que tengo
desde el pecho a la garganta?
--Trescientas rosas morenas
lleva tu pechera blanca.
Tu sangre rezuma y huele
alrededor de tu faja.
Pero yo ya no soy yo,
ni mi casa es ya mi casa.
--Dejadme subir al menos
hasta las altas barandas;
¡dejadme subir!, dejadme,
hasta las verdes barandas.
Barandales de la luna
por donde retumba el agua.
Ya suben los dos compadres
hacia las altas barandas.
Dejando un rastro de sangre.
Dejando un rastro de lágrimas.
Temblaban en los tejados
farolillos de hojalata.
Mil panderos de cristal
herían la madrugada.
Verde que te quiero verde,
verde viento, verdes ramas.
Los dos compadres subieron.
El largo viento dejaba
en la boca un raro gusto
de hiel, de menta y de albahaca.
¡Compadre! ¿Donde está, díme?
¿Donde está tu niña amarga?
¡Cuántas veces te esperó!
¡Cuántas veces te esperara,
cara fresca, negro pelo,
en esta verde baranda!
Sobre el rostro del aljibe
se mecía la gitana.
Verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Un carámbano de luna
la sostiene sobre el agua.
La noche se puso íntima
como una pequeña plaza.
Guardias civiles borrachos
en la puerta golpeaban.
Verde que te qinero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar.
Y el caballo en la montaña.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.
Green, how I want you green.
Big hoarfrost stars
come with the fish of shadow
that opens the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the forest, cunning cat,
bristles its brittle fibers.
But who will come? And from where?
She is still on her balcony
green flesh, her hair green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.
--My friend, I want to trade
my horse for her house,
my saddle for her mirror,
my knife for her blanket.
My friend, I come bleeding
from the gates of Cabra.
--If it were possible, my boy,
I'd help you fix that trade.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
--My friend, I want to die
decently in my bed.
Of iron, if that's possible,
with blankets of fine chambray.
Don't you see the wound I have
from my chest up to my throat?
--Your white shirt has grown
thirsy dark brown roses.
Your blood oozes and flees a
round the corners of your sash.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
--Let me climb up, at least,
up to the high balconies;
Let me climb up! Let me,
up to the green balconies.
Railings of the moon
through which the water rumbles.
Now the two friends climb up,
up to the high balconies.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of teardrops.
Tin bell vines
were trembling on the roofs.
A thousand crystal tambourines
struck at the dawn light.
Green, how I want you green,
green wind, green branches.
The two friends climbed up.
The stiff wind left
in their mouths, a strange taste
of bile, of mint, and of basil
My friend, where is she--tell me--
where is your bitter girl?
How many times she waited for you!
How many times would she wait for you,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony!
Over the mouth of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swinging,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moon
holds her up above the water.
The night became intimate
like a little plaza.
Drunken "Guardias Civiles"
were pounding on the door.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea.
And the horse on the mountain.
From The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, translated by William Logan. Published by New Directions, 1955.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
XENIA (1964-1966)
By Eugenio Montale, Translated from the Italian by Camillo Pennati, Frank Kermode
To My Wife
Dear little insect
whom for some reason they called fly[1]
this evening almost at dark
while I was reading the Deuteroisaiah
you reappeared beside me,
but without your glasses
you could not see me
nor could I without their glitter
recognize you in the dusk.
Without either glasses or antennae,
poor insect with wings
only in imagination,
a broken-backed bible but not all that
reliable either, the black of the night,
lightning, thunder and then
no storm. Or was it that
you had left so soon without
speaking? But it is ridiculous
to think you still had lips.
At the Saint James in Paris I shall have to ask
for a "single" room. (They do not like
unpaired guests.) So too
in the false Byzantium of your Venice
hotel; then at once to seek out
the telephone girls at their switchboard,
ever your friends; and off again,
the clockwork spring run down,
the longing to have you again, even if only
in a single gesture or habit.
We had planned a whistle
for the hereafter, a sign of recognition.
I try it out in the hope
that we are all dead already without knowing it.
I never understood if it were I who was
your faithful and distempered dog
or whether you were mine.
You weren't like that to others—rather a myopic insect
not at home amid the chatter
of high society. How naïve
those smart ones were—not knowing
that it was they who were your laughing-stock
nor that they were seen in the dark and detected
by an unerring sense of yours, by your
bat-like radar.
You never thought of leaving any trace
of yourself by writing prose or verse. It was
your charm—and then my self-disgust.
It was my dread as well: to be afterwards
pushed back by you into the croaking
slime of the neoterics.
The self-pity, the endless grief and anguish
of him who worships the down here yet hopes for and despairs
of another…. (Who dares say of another world?)
"Strange pity…." (Azucena, second act).[2]
Your speech so scanted, so unwary,
remains the only one I am satisfied with.
But its accent is changed, its color different.
I shall get used to hearing or deciphering you
in the ticking of the teleprinter,
in the coiling smoke of my Brissago
cigars.
Listening was your only way of seeing.
The telephone bill is next to nothing now.
"Used she to pray?" "Yes, she prayed to St. Anthony
because he helps one find
lost umbrellas and other items
of St. Hermes' wardrobe."
"Only for that?" "For her own dead too,
and for me." "That is enough," said the priest.
The memory of your weeping (mine was double)
is not enough to extinguish your bursts of laughter.
They were, so to speak, a foretaste of your private
Judgment Day, never, alas, to happen.
Spring comes out with its mole-like pace.
I shall no longer hear you talk of poisonous
antibiotics, of the ache in your thighbone,
or of your goods and chattels that a crafty legalism
fleeced you of.
Spring comes on with its fat mists,
with its long daylight, its unbearable hours.
I shall no longer hear you struggle with the gushing back
of time, of phantasms, of the logistical problems
of Summer.
Your brother died young; you were
the unkempt little girl staring at me
posed in the portrait's oval.
He wrote music, never published or performed,
now buried in a trunk or gone
for pulp. Perhaps someone is unconsciously
re-creating it, if what is written is written.
I loved him though I never knew him.
Except for you nobody remembered him.
I made no enquiries: now there is no point.
After you I was the only one left
for whom he ever existed. But we are able,
shadows ourselves—as you know—to love a shadow.
They say mine
is a poetry of unpertainingness.
But if it was yours it was someone's:
yours, who are no longer form but essence.
They say that poetry at its highest
praises the Whole in its flight;
they deny that the tortoise
can be faster than lightning.
You alone knew that motion
is not different from stillness,
that the void is fullness and the clear sky
the most diffused of clouds.
Thus I understand better your long journey
imprisoned in your bandages and plasters,
Yet it gives me no rest
to know that apart or together we are but one thing.
Notes
[1] Montale's wife was known to close friends as "La Mosca," the fly.
[2] The reference is to a character in Verdi's "Il Trovatore ."
To My Wife
Dear little insect
whom for some reason they called fly[1]
this evening almost at dark
while I was reading the Deuteroisaiah
you reappeared beside me,
but without your glasses
you could not see me
nor could I without their glitter
recognize you in the dusk.
Without either glasses or antennae,
poor insect with wings
only in imagination,
a broken-backed bible but not all that
reliable either, the black of the night,
lightning, thunder and then
no storm. Or was it that
you had left so soon without
speaking? But it is ridiculous
to think you still had lips.
At the Saint James in Paris I shall have to ask
for a "single" room. (They do not like
unpaired guests.) So too
in the false Byzantium of your Venice
hotel; then at once to seek out
the telephone girls at their switchboard,
ever your friends; and off again,
the clockwork spring run down,
the longing to have you again, even if only
in a single gesture or habit.
We had planned a whistle
for the hereafter, a sign of recognition.
I try it out in the hope
that we are all dead already without knowing it.
I never understood if it were I who was
your faithful and distempered dog
or whether you were mine.
You weren't like that to others—rather a myopic insect
not at home amid the chatter
of high society. How naïve
those smart ones were—not knowing
that it was they who were your laughing-stock
nor that they were seen in the dark and detected
by an unerring sense of yours, by your
bat-like radar.
You never thought of leaving any trace
of yourself by writing prose or verse. It was
your charm—and then my self-disgust.
It was my dread as well: to be afterwards
pushed back by you into the croaking
slime of the neoterics.
The self-pity, the endless grief and anguish
of him who worships the down here yet hopes for and despairs
of another…. (Who dares say of another world?)
"Strange pity…." (Azucena, second act).[2]
Your speech so scanted, so unwary,
remains the only one I am satisfied with.
But its accent is changed, its color different.
I shall get used to hearing or deciphering you
in the ticking of the teleprinter,
in the coiling smoke of my Brissago
cigars.
Listening was your only way of seeing.
The telephone bill is next to nothing now.
"Used she to pray?" "Yes, she prayed to St. Anthony
because he helps one find
lost umbrellas and other items
of St. Hermes' wardrobe."
"Only for that?" "For her own dead too,
and for me." "That is enough," said the priest.
The memory of your weeping (mine was double)
is not enough to extinguish your bursts of laughter.
They were, so to speak, a foretaste of your private
Judgment Day, never, alas, to happen.
Spring comes out with its mole-like pace.
I shall no longer hear you talk of poisonous
antibiotics, of the ache in your thighbone,
or of your goods and chattels that a crafty legalism
fleeced you of.
Spring comes on with its fat mists,
with its long daylight, its unbearable hours.
I shall no longer hear you struggle with the gushing back
of time, of phantasms, of the logistical problems
of Summer.
Your brother died young; you were
the unkempt little girl staring at me
posed in the portrait's oval.
He wrote music, never published or performed,
now buried in a trunk or gone
for pulp. Perhaps someone is unconsciously
re-creating it, if what is written is written.
I loved him though I never knew him.
Except for you nobody remembered him.
I made no enquiries: now there is no point.
After you I was the only one left
for whom he ever existed. But we are able,
shadows ourselves—as you know—to love a shadow.
They say mine
is a poetry of unpertainingness.
But if it was yours it was someone's:
yours, who are no longer form but essence.
They say that poetry at its highest
praises the Whole in its flight;
they deny that the tortoise
can be faster than lightning.
You alone knew that motion
is not different from stillness,
that the void is fullness and the clear sky
the most diffused of clouds.
Thus I understand better your long journey
imprisoned in your bandages and plasters,
Yet it gives me no rest
to know that apart or together we are but one thing.
Notes
[1] Montale's wife was known to close friends as "La Mosca," the fly.
[2] The reference is to a character in Verdi's "Il Trovatore ."
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Eugenio Montale
LA BUFERA
"Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grands merveilles Leurs mains ne servent plus qu'à nous persecuter…."
AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE: "A Dieu"
La bufera che sgronda sulle foglie
dure della magnolia i lunghi tuoni
marzolini e la grandine,
(i suoni di cristallo nel tuo nido
notturno ti sorprendono, dell'oro
che s'è spento sui mógani, sul taglio
dei libri rilegati, brucia ancora
una grana di zucchero nel guscio
delle tue palpebre)
il lampo che candisce
alberi e muri e li sorprende in quella
eternità d'istante—marmo manna
e distruzione—ch'entro te scolpita
porti per tua condanna e che ti lega
piú che l'amore a me, strana sorella,—
e poi lo schianto rude, i sistri, il fremere
dei tamburelli sulla fossa fuia,
lo scalpicciare del fandango, e sopra
qualche gesto che annaspa…
Come quando
ti rivolgesti e con la mano, sgombra
la fronte dalla nube dei capelli,
mi salutasti—per entrar nel buio.
"Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grands merveilles Leurs mains ne servent plus qu'à nous persecuter…."
AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE: "A Dieu"
La bufera che sgronda sulle foglie
dure della magnolia i lunghi tuoni
marzolini e la grandine,
(i suoni di cristallo nel tuo nido
notturno ti sorprendono, dell'oro
che s'è spento sui mógani, sul taglio
dei libri rilegati, brucia ancora
una grana di zucchero nel guscio
delle tue palpebre)
il lampo che candisce
alberi e muri e li sorprende in quella
eternità d'istante—marmo manna
e distruzione—ch'entro te scolpita
porti per tua condanna e che ti lega
piú che l'amore a me, strana sorella,—
e poi lo schianto rude, i sistri, il fremere
dei tamburelli sulla fossa fuia,
lo scalpicciare del fandango, e sopra
qualche gesto che annaspa…
Come quando
ti rivolgesti e con la mano, sgombra
la fronte dalla nube dei capelli,
mi salutasti—per entrar nel buio.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Conrad Aiken
From Time in the Rock, or Preludes to Definition
XI
Mysticism, but let us have no words,
angels, but let us have no fantasies,
churches, but let us have no creeds,
no dead gods hung in crosses in shop,
nor beads nor prayers nor faith nor sin nor penance:
and yet, let us believe, let us believe.
Let it be the flower
seen by the child for the first time, plucked without
thought
broken for love and as soon forgotten:
and the angels, let them be our friends,
used for our needs with selfish simplicity,
broken for love and as soon forgotten;
and let the churches be our houses
defiled daily, loud with discord,–
where the dead gods that were our selves may hang,
our outgrown gods on every wall;
Christ on the mantelpiece, with downcast eyes;
Buddha above the stove;
the Holy Ghost by the hatrack, and God himself
staring like Narcissus from the mirror,
clad in a raincoat, and with hat and gloves.
Mysticism, but let it be a flower,
let it be the hand that reaches for the flower,
let it be the flower that imagined the first hand,
let it be the space that removed itself to give place
for the hand that reaches, the flower to be reached–
let it be self displacing self
as quietly as a child lifts a pebble,
as softly as a flower decides to fall,–
self replacing self
as seed follows flower to earth.
XI
Mysticism, but let us have no words,
angels, but let us have no fantasies,
churches, but let us have no creeds,
no dead gods hung in crosses in shop,
nor beads nor prayers nor faith nor sin nor penance:
and yet, let us believe, let us believe.
Let it be the flower
seen by the child for the first time, plucked without
thought
broken for love and as soon forgotten:
and the angels, let them be our friends,
used for our needs with selfish simplicity,
broken for love and as soon forgotten;
and let the churches be our houses
defiled daily, loud with discord,–
where the dead gods that were our selves may hang,
our outgrown gods on every wall;
Christ on the mantelpiece, with downcast eyes;
Buddha above the stove;
the Holy Ghost by the hatrack, and God himself
staring like Narcissus from the mirror,
clad in a raincoat, and with hat and gloves.
Mysticism, but let it be a flower,
let it be the hand that reaches for the flower,
let it be the flower that imagined the first hand,
let it be the space that removed itself to give place
for the hand that reaches, the flower to be reached–
let it be self displacing self
as quietly as a child lifts a pebble,
as softly as a flower decides to fall,–
self replacing self
as seed follows flower to earth.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Hsi Muren (2 poems)
An Invitation
Should we go see the fireworks?
Let’s go
go see how
Fiery blossoms generate ever more fiery blossoms
Dreams procreate ever more dreams.
Together let’s walk along the desolate shore,
looking up at the night sky.
The wild ecstasy and piercing pains of life
All at this fleeting instant.
Like fireworks.
Seven Miles of Fragrance
["Seven miles of fragrance" is known in China as a plant with petite yellowish flowers of lingering fragrance.]
The rivers rush into sea.
The tides yearn for land.
By the fence of green trees and white flowers
We have so carelessly waved our good-byes.
Yet
twenty rough years afterward
Our spirits return here every night
When fanned by a gentle breeze
transfigured into a garden of rich aroma.
From Across the Darkness of the River, Green Integer 38
Monday, June 26, 2006
Portrait
A child draws the outline of a body.
She draws what she can, but it is white all through,
she cannot fill in what she knows is there.
Within the unsupported line, she knows
that life is missing; she has cut
one background from another. Like a child,
she turns to her mother.
And you draw the heart
against the emptiness she has created.
–LOUISE GLÜCK
She draws what she can, but it is white all through,
she cannot fill in what she knows is there.
Within the unsupported line, she knows
that life is missing; she has cut
one background from another. Like a child,
she turns to her mother.
And you draw the heart
against the emptiness she has created.
–LOUISE GLÜCK
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Galway Kinnell
When One has Lived a Long Time Alone
When one has lived a long time alone,
one refrains from swatting the fly
and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike
the mosquito, though more than willing to slap
the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad
from the pit too deep to hop out of
and carries him to the grass, without minding
the poisoned urine he slicks his body with,
and one envelops, in a towel, the swift
who fell down the chimney and knocks herself
against window glass and releases her outside
and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,
when one has lived a ling time alone.
When one has lived a long time alone,
one refrains from swatting the fly
and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike
the mosquito, though more than willing to slap
the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad
from the pit too deep to hop out of
and carries him to the grass, without minding
the poisoned urine he slicks his body with,
and one envelops, in a towel, the swift
who fell down the chimney and knocks herself
against window glass and releases her outside
and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,
when one has lived a ling time alone.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Wallace Stevens
RE-STATEMENT OF ROMANCE
The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,
That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Carl Sandburg
Four Preludes On Playthings Of The Wind
The past is a bucket of ashes
1
The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.
2
The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
3
It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
and paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
...and the only listeners left now
...are...the rats...and the lizards.
And there are black crows
crying, "Caw, caw,"
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
The only singers now are crows crying, "Caw, caw,"
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are...the rats...and the lizards.
4
The feet of the rats
scribble on the doorsills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.
And the wind shifts
and the dust on a doorsill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.
The Simple Line
By Laura Riding
The secrets of the mind convene splendidly,
Though the mind is meek.
To be aware inwardly
of brain and beauty
Is dark too recognizable.
Thought looking out on thought
Makes one an eye:
Which it shall be, both decide.
One is with the mind alone,
The other is with other thoughts gone
To be seen from afar and not known.
When openly these inmost sights
Flash and speak fully,
Each head at home shakes hopelessly
Of being never ready to see self
And sees a universe too soon.
The immense surmise swims round and round
And heads grow wise
With their own bigness beatified
In cosmos, and the idiot size
Of skulls spells Nature on the ground,
While ears listening the wrong way report
Echoes first and hear words before sounds
Because the mind, being quiet, seems late.
By ears words are copied into books,
By letters minds are taught self-ignorance.
From mouths spring forth vocabularies
To the assemblage of strange objects
Grown foreign to the faithful countryside
Of one king, poverty,
Of one line, humbleness.
Unavowed and false horizons claim pride
For spaces in the head
The native head sees outside.
The flood of wonder rushing from the eyes
Returns lesson by lesson.
The mind, shrunken of time,
Overflows too soon.
The complete vision is the same
As when the world-wideness began
Worlds to describe
The excessiveness of man.
But man's right portion rejects
The surplus in the whole.
This much, made secret first,
Now makes
The knowable, which was
Thought's previous flesh,
And gives instruction of substance to its intelligence
As far as flesh itself,
As bodies upon themselves to where
Understanding is the head
And the identity of breath and breathing are established
And the voice opening to cry: I know,
Closes around the entire declaration
With this evidence of immortality--
The total silence to say:
I am dead.
For death is all ugly, all lovely,
Forbids mysteries to make
Science of splendor, or any separate disclosing
Of beauty to the mind out of body's book
That page by page flutters a world in fragments,
Permits no scribbling in of more
Where spaces are,
Only to look.
Body as Body lies more than still.
The rest seems nothing and nothing is
If nothing need be.
But if need be,
Thought not divided anyway
Answers itself, thinking
All open and everything.
Dead is the mind that parted each head.
But now the secrets of the mind convene
Without pride, without pain
To any onlookers.
What they ordain alone
Cannot be known
The ordinary way of eyes and ears
But only prophesied
If an unnatural mind, refusing to divide,
Dies immediately
Of too plain beauty
Foreseen within too suddenly,
And lips break open of astonishment
Upon the living mouth and rehearse
Death, that seems a simple verse
And, of all ways to know,
Dead or alive, easiest.
The secrets of the mind convene splendidly,
Though the mind is meek.
To be aware inwardly
of brain and beauty
Is dark too recognizable.
Thought looking out on thought
Makes one an eye:
Which it shall be, both decide.
One is with the mind alone,
The other is with other thoughts gone
To be seen from afar and not known.
When openly these inmost sights
Flash and speak fully,
Each head at home shakes hopelessly
Of being never ready to see self
And sees a universe too soon.
The immense surmise swims round and round
And heads grow wise
With their own bigness beatified
In cosmos, and the idiot size
Of skulls spells Nature on the ground,
While ears listening the wrong way report
Echoes first and hear words before sounds
Because the mind, being quiet, seems late.
By ears words are copied into books,
By letters minds are taught self-ignorance.
From mouths spring forth vocabularies
To the assemblage of strange objects
Grown foreign to the faithful countryside
Of one king, poverty,
Of one line, humbleness.
Unavowed and false horizons claim pride
For spaces in the head
The native head sees outside.
The flood of wonder rushing from the eyes
Returns lesson by lesson.
The mind, shrunken of time,
Overflows too soon.
The complete vision is the same
As when the world-wideness began
Worlds to describe
The excessiveness of man.
But man's right portion rejects
The surplus in the whole.
This much, made secret first,
Now makes
The knowable, which was
Thought's previous flesh,
And gives instruction of substance to its intelligence
As far as flesh itself,
As bodies upon themselves to where
Understanding is the head
And the identity of breath and breathing are established
And the voice opening to cry: I know,
Closes around the entire declaration
With this evidence of immortality--
The total silence to say:
I am dead.
For death is all ugly, all lovely,
Forbids mysteries to make
Science of splendor, or any separate disclosing
Of beauty to the mind out of body's book
That page by page flutters a world in fragments,
Permits no scribbling in of more
Where spaces are,
Only to look.
Body as Body lies more than still.
The rest seems nothing and nothing is
If nothing need be.
But if need be,
Thought not divided anyway
Answers itself, thinking
All open and everything.
Dead is the mind that parted each head.
But now the secrets of the mind convene
Without pride, without pain
To any onlookers.
What they ordain alone
Cannot be known
The ordinary way of eyes and ears
But only prophesied
If an unnatural mind, refusing to divide,
Dies immediately
Of too plain beauty
Foreseen within too suddenly,
And lips break open of astonishment
Upon the living mouth and rehearse
Death, that seems a simple verse
And, of all ways to know,
Dead or alive, easiest.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Oda a los Calcetines / Ode to Socks
by Pablo Neruda
Me trajo Mara Mori
un par de calcetines,
que tejió con sus manos de pastora,
dos calcetines suaves como liebres.
En ellos metí los pies
como en dos estuches
tejidos con hebras del
crepúsculo y pellejos de ovejas.
Violentos calcetines,
mis pies fueron dos pescados de lana,
dos largos tiburones
de ázul ultramarino
atravesados por una trenza de oro,
dos gigantescos mirlos,
dos cañones;
mis pies fueron honrados de este modo
por estos celestiales calcetines.
Eran tan hermosos que por primera vez
mis pies me parecieron inaceptables,
como dos decrépitos bomberos,
bomberos indignos de aquél fuego bordado,
de aquellos luminosos calcetines.
Sin embargo, resistí la tentación
aguda de guardarlos como los colegiales
preservan las luciernagas,
como los heruditos coleccionan
documentos sagrados,
resisti el impulso furioso de ponerlas
en una jaula de oro y darle cada
día alpiste y pulpa de melón rosado.
Como descubridores que en la selva
entragan el rarísimo venado verde
al asador y se lo comen con remordimiento,
estire los pies y me enfunde
los bellos calcetines, y luego los zapatos.
Y es esta la moral de mi Oda:
Dos veces es belleza la belleza,
y lo que es bueno es doblemente bueno,
cuando se trata de dos calcetines
de lana en el invierno.
Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd's hands.
Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.
I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin.
My feet were
two woolen
fish
in those outrageous socks,
two gangly,
navy-blue sharks
impaled
on a golden thread,
two giant blackbirds,
two cannons:
thus
were my feet
honored
by
those
heavenly
socks.
They were
so beautiful
I found my feet
unlovable
for the very first time,
like two crusty old
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
those incandescent
socks.
Nevertheless
I fought
the sharp temptation
to put them away
the way schoolboys
put
fireflies in a bottle,
the way scholars
hoard
holy writ.
I fought
the mad urge
to lock them
in a golden
cage
and feed them birdseed
and morsels of pink melon
every day.
Like jungle
explorers
who deliver a young deer
of the rarest species
to the roasting spit
then wolf it down
in shame,
I stretched
my feet forward
and pulled on
those
gorgeous
socks,
and over them
my shoes.
So this is
the moral of my ode:
beauty is beauty
twice over
and good things are doubly
good
when you're talking about a pair of wool
socks
in the dead of winter.
Me trajo Mara Mori
un par de calcetines,
que tejió con sus manos de pastora,
dos calcetines suaves como liebres.
En ellos metí los pies
como en dos estuches
tejidos con hebras del
crepúsculo y pellejos de ovejas.
Violentos calcetines,
mis pies fueron dos pescados de lana,
dos largos tiburones
de ázul ultramarino
atravesados por una trenza de oro,
dos gigantescos mirlos,
dos cañones;
mis pies fueron honrados de este modo
por estos celestiales calcetines.
Eran tan hermosos que por primera vez
mis pies me parecieron inaceptables,
como dos decrépitos bomberos,
bomberos indignos de aquél fuego bordado,
de aquellos luminosos calcetines.
Sin embargo, resistí la tentación
aguda de guardarlos como los colegiales
preservan las luciernagas,
como los heruditos coleccionan
documentos sagrados,
resisti el impulso furioso de ponerlas
en una jaula de oro y darle cada
día alpiste y pulpa de melón rosado.
Como descubridores que en la selva
entragan el rarísimo venado verde
al asador y se lo comen con remordimiento,
estire los pies y me enfunde
los bellos calcetines, y luego los zapatos.
Y es esta la moral de mi Oda:
Dos veces es belleza la belleza,
y lo que es bueno es doblemente bueno,
cuando se trata de dos calcetines
de lana en el invierno.
Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd's hands.
Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.
I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin.
My feet were
two woolen
fish
in those outrageous socks,
two gangly,
navy-blue sharks
impaled
on a golden thread,
two giant blackbirds,
two cannons:
thus
were my feet
honored
by
those
heavenly
socks.
They were
so beautiful
I found my feet
unlovable
for the very first time,
like two crusty old
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
those incandescent
socks.
Nevertheless
I fought
the sharp temptation
to put them away
the way schoolboys
put
fireflies in a bottle,
the way scholars
hoard
holy writ.
I fought
the mad urge
to lock them
in a golden
cage
and feed them birdseed
and morsels of pink melon
every day.
Like jungle
explorers
who deliver a young deer
of the rarest species
to the roasting spit
then wolf it down
in shame,
I stretched
my feet forward
and pulled on
those
gorgeous
socks,
and over them
my shoes.
So this is
the moral of my ode:
beauty is beauty
twice over
and good things are doubly
good
when you're talking about a pair of wool
socks
in the dead of winter.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Louise Glück
CELESTIAL MUSIC
I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
across the road.
My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains
my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness—
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person—
In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height—
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth—
In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering—
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.
I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
across the road.
My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains
my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness—
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person—
In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height—
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth—
In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering—
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
John Tobias (poem)
Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity
During that summer
When unicorns were still possible;
When the purpose of knees
Was to be skinned;
When shiny horse chestnuts
(Hollowed out
fitted with straws
crammed with tobacco
stolen from butts
In family ashtrays)
Were puffed in green lizard silence
While straddling thick branches
Far above and away
From the softening effects
of civilization;
During that summer--
Which may never have been at all;
But which has become more real
Than the one that was---
Watermelons ruled.
Thick pink imperial slices
Melting frigidly on sun-parched tongues
Dribbling from chin;
leaving the best part,
The black bullet seeds,
To be spit out in rapid fire
Against the wall
Against the wind
Against each other;
And when the ammunition was spent,
There was always another bite;
It was a summer of limitless bites,
Of hungers quickly felt
And quickly forgotten
With the next careless gorging.
The bites are fewer now.
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.
But in a jar put up by Felicity,
The summer which maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue;
Unicorns become possible again.
During that summer
When unicorns were still possible;
When the purpose of knees
Was to be skinned;
When shiny horse chestnuts
(Hollowed out
fitted with straws
crammed with tobacco
stolen from butts
In family ashtrays)
Were puffed in green lizard silence
While straddling thick branches
Far above and away
From the softening effects
of civilization;
During that summer--
Which may never have been at all;
But which has become more real
Than the one that was---
Watermelons ruled.
Thick pink imperial slices
Melting frigidly on sun-parched tongues
Dribbling from chin;
leaving the best part,
The black bullet seeds,
To be spit out in rapid fire
Against the wall
Against the wind
Against each other;
And when the ammunition was spent,
There was always another bite;
It was a summer of limitless bites,
Of hungers quickly felt
And quickly forgotten
With the next careless gorging.
The bites are fewer now.
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.
But in a jar put up by Felicity,
The summer which maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue;
Unicorns become possible again.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
THE ROOM
By W. S. Merwin
I think all this is somewhere in myself
The cold room unlit before dawn
Containing a stillness such as attends death
And from a corner the sounds of a small bird trying
From time to time to fly a few beats in the dark
You would say it was dying it is immortal
I think all this is somewhere in myself
The cold room unlit before dawn
Containing a stillness such as attends death
And from a corner the sounds of a small bird trying
From time to time to fly a few beats in the dark
You would say it was dying it is immortal
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Laura Riding
The Last Covenant
Roses are buds, and beautiful,
One petal leaning toward adventure.
Roses are full, all petals forward,
Beauty and power indistinguishable.
Roses are blown, startled with life,
Death young in their faces.
Shall they Die?
Then comes the halt, and recumbence, and failing.
But none says, 'A rose is dead.'
But men die: it is said, it is seen,
For man is a long, late adventure;
His budding is a purpose,
His fullness more purpose,
His blowing a renewal,
His death a cramped spilling
Of rash measures and miles.
To the rose no tears:
Which flee before the race is called.
And to man no mercy but his will
That he has had his will, and is done.
The mercy of truth—it is to be truth.
Roses are buds, and beautiful,
One petal leaning toward adventure.
Roses are full, all petals forward,
Beauty and power indistinguishable.
Roses are blown, startled with life,
Death young in their faces.
Shall they Die?
Then comes the halt, and recumbence, and failing.
But none says, 'A rose is dead.'
But men die: it is said, it is seen,
For man is a long, late adventure;
His budding is a purpose,
His fullness more purpose,
His blowing a renewal,
His death a cramped spilling
Of rash measures and miles.
To the rose no tears:
Which flee before the race is called.
And to man no mercy but his will
That he has had his will, and is done.
The mercy of truth—it is to be truth.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
The Sick Man
by Wallace Stevens
Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the south, bands of thousands of black men,
Playing mouth-organs in the night or, now, guitars
Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.
And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals, waits for it and imagines
The words of winter in which these two will come together,
In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies,
The listener, listening to the shadows, seeing them,
Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him,
Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail,
The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken.
Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the south, bands of thousands of black men,
Playing mouth-organs in the night or, now, guitars
Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.
And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals, waits for it and imagines
The words of winter in which these two will come together,
In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies,
The listener, listening to the shadows, seeing them,
Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him,
Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail,
The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Poem By Derek Walcott
XXVI
The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta.
I wear this cast from his kiln all over the house.
But I cherish its cracks like those of blue, wrinkled water.
A furnace has curled the knives of the oleander,
gnats drill little holes around a saw-toothed cactus,
and a branch of the logwood blurs with wild characters.
A small stone house waits on the steps. Its white porch blazes.
I will write down a secret being passed to me by the surf:
You shall see transparent Helen pass like a candle
flame in sunlight, weightless as woodsmoke that hazes
the sand with no shadow, if you wait long enough.
The skin that peels from my knuckles is like the scurf
on dry shoal, my palms have been sliced by the twine
of the lines I have pulled at for more than forty years.
My Ionia is the smell of burnt grass, the scorched handle
of a cistern in August squeaking to rusty islands,
the lines I love now have all their knots left in.
I leave my house open to a wind that has no shoes.
Through the stunned afternoon, when it's too hot to think,
and the muse of this inland ocean still waits for a name,
from the salt, dark room, the tight horizon-line
catches nothing. I wait. Chairs sweat. Paper crumples the floor.
A lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc.
Then, in the door light, not Nike loosening her sandal,
a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.
The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta.
I wear this cast from his kiln all over the house.
But I cherish its cracks like those of blue, wrinkled water.
A furnace has curled the knives of the oleander,
gnats drill little holes around a saw-toothed cactus,
and a branch of the logwood blurs with wild characters.
A small stone house waits on the steps. Its white porch blazes.
I will write down a secret being passed to me by the surf:
You shall see transparent Helen pass like a candle
flame in sunlight, weightless as woodsmoke that hazes
the sand with no shadow, if you wait long enough.
The skin that peels from my knuckles is like the scurf
on dry shoal, my palms have been sliced by the twine
of the lines I have pulled at for more than forty years.
My Ionia is the smell of burnt grass, the scorched handle
of a cistern in August squeaking to rusty islands,
the lines I love now have all their knots left in.
I leave my house open to a wind that has no shoes.
Through the stunned afternoon, when it's too hot to think,
and the muse of this inland ocean still waits for a name,
from the salt, dark room, the tight horizon-line
catches nothing. I wait. Chairs sweat. Paper crumples the floor.
A lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc.
Then, in the door light, not Nike loosening her sandal,
a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
W. S. Merwin
Yesterday
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me
oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me
oh yes I say
but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here
I say nothing
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you
I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know
though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do
From Opening the Hand, by W. S. Merwin, published by Atheneum. Copyright © 1983 by W. S. Merwin.
Friday, May 26, 2006
John Berryman TWO POEMS
HENRY'S FATE
All projects failed, in the August afternoon
he lay & cursed himself & cursed his lot
like Housman's lad forsooth.
A breeze sometimes came by. His sunburn itcht.
His wife was out on errands. He sighed & scratcht.
The little girls were fiddling with the telephone.
They wanted candy, the which he gave them.
His entire soul contorted with the phlegm.
The sun burned down.
Photos of him in despair flooded the town
or city. Mourned his many friends, or so.
The little girls were fiddling with the piano.
He crusht a cigarette out. Crusht him out
surprising God, at last, in a wink of time.
His soul was forwarded.
Adressat unbekannt. The little girls with a shout
welcomed the dazzling package. In official rime
the official verdict was: dead.
WE WERE IN THE 8th GRADE
Quiet his loves lay, at the bottom of his mind.
Now & then, O now & then, at intervals,
he took one out & inspected it.
Like a clown, or a dog trainer, or a strong kind
of man, he placed it under the waterfalls
& expected it to submit.
They did him homage. Which he did repay
with memory. One in the end wrote to him,
saying are you the same one?
He was the same one, & she published his un-
book, long since lost, about a trip to Neptune
in two volumes, let's say,
in hard brown paper, in her Spenserian hand,
with the title (forgotten) & his then name
& the important date.
O she was a golden one, higher than Henry
by a head, called Helen Justice, and
then, until now, she disappeared.
Copyright © 1976 Kate Berryman
All projects failed, in the August afternoon
he lay & cursed himself & cursed his lot
like Housman's lad forsooth.
A breeze sometimes came by. His sunburn itcht.
His wife was out on errands. He sighed & scratcht.
The little girls were fiddling with the telephone.
They wanted candy, the which he gave them.
His entire soul contorted with the phlegm.
The sun burned down.
Photos of him in despair flooded the town
or city. Mourned his many friends, or so.
The little girls were fiddling with the piano.
He crusht a cigarette out. Crusht him out
surprising God, at last, in a wink of time.
His soul was forwarded.
Adressat unbekannt. The little girls with a shout
welcomed the dazzling package. In official rime
the official verdict was: dead.
WE WERE IN THE 8th GRADE
Quiet his loves lay, at the bottom of his mind.
Now & then, O now & then, at intervals,
he took one out & inspected it.
Like a clown, or a dog trainer, or a strong kind
of man, he placed it under the waterfalls
& expected it to submit.
They did him homage. Which he did repay
with memory. One in the end wrote to him,
saying are you the same one?
He was the same one, & she published his un-
book, long since lost, about a trip to Neptune
in two volumes, let's say,
in hard brown paper, in her Spenserian hand,
with the title (forgotten) & his then name
& the important date.
O she was a golden one, higher than Henry
by a head, called Helen Justice, and
then, until now, she disappeared.
Copyright © 1976 Kate Berryman
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Amedeo Modigliani
By Anna Akhmatova, Translated by Djemma Bider
I believe those who describe him didn't know him as I did, and here's why. First, I could know only one side of his being—the radiant side. After all I was just a stranger, probably a not easily understood twenty-year-old woman, a foreigner. Secondly, I myself noticed a big change in him when we met in 1911. Somehow, he had grown dark and haggard.
In 1910 I saw him extremely seldom: only a few times. Nevertheless he wrote to me all winter long.[1] He didn't tell me that he composed verses.
As I understand it now, what he must have found astonishing in me was my ability to guess rightly his thoughts, to know his dreams and other small things—others who knew me had become accustomed to this a long time before. He kept repeating: "On communique." Often he said: "Iln'y a que vous pour réaliser cela."
Probably, we both did not understand one important thing: everything that happened was for both of us a prehistory of our future lives: his very short one, my very long one. The breathing of art still had not charred or transformed the two existences; this must have been the light, radiant hour before dawn.
But the future, which as we know throws its shadow long before it enters, knocked at the window, hid itself behind lanterns, crossed dreams, and frightened us with horrible Baudelairean Paris, which concealed itself someplace near by.
And everything divine in Modigliani only sparkled through a kind of darkness. He was different from any other person in the world. His voice somehow always remained in my memory. I knew him as a beggar and it was impossible to understand how he existed—as an artist he didn't have a shadow of recognition.
At that time (1911) he lived at Impasse Falguière. He was so poor that when we sat in the Luxembourg Gardens we always sat on the bench, not on the paid chairs, as was the custom. On the whole he did not complain, not about his completely evident indigence, nor about his equally evident nonrecognition.
Only once in 1911 did he say that during the last winter he felt so bad that he couldn't even think about the thing most precious to him.
He seemed to me encircled with a dense ring of loneliness. I don't remember him exchanging greetings in the Luxembourg Gardens or in the Latin Quarter where everybody more or less knows each other. I never heard him tell a joke. I never saw him drunk nor did I smell wine on him. Apparently, he started to drink later, but hashish already somehow figured in his stories. He didn't seem to have a special girl friend at that time. He never told stories about previous romances (as, alas, everybody does). With me he didn't talk about anything that was worldly. He was courteous, but this wasn't a result of his upbringing but the result of his elevated spirit.
At that time he was occupied with sculpture; he worked in a little courtyard near his studio. One heard the knock of his small hammer in a deserted blind alley. The walls of his studio were hung with portraits of fantastic length (as it seems to me now—from the floor to the ceiling). I never saw their reproductions—did they survive? He called his sculpture "la chose"—it was exhibited, I believe, at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911. He asked me to look at it, but did not approach me at the exhibition, because I was not alone, but with friends. During my great losses, a photograph of this work, which he gave to me, disappeared also.
At this time Modigliani was crazy about Egypt. He took me to the Louvre to look at the Egyptian section; he assured me that everything else, "tout le reste," didn't deserve any attention. He drew my head in the attire of Egyptian queens and dancers, and he seemed completely carried away by the great Egyptian art. Obviously Egypt was his last passion. Very soon after that he became so original that looking at his canvases you didn't care to remember anything. This period of Modigliani's is now called la période nègre.
* * *
He used to say: "les bijoux doivent être sauvages" (in regard to my African beads), and he would draw me with them on.
He led me to look at le vieux Paris derrière le Panthéon at night, by moonlight. He knew the city well, but still we lost our way once. He said: "J'ai oublié qu'il y a une île au milieu [l'île St-Louis]." It was he who showed me the real Paris.
Of the Venus of Milo he said that the beautifully built women who are worth being sculptured and painted always look awkward in dresses.
When it was drizzling (it very often rains in Paris), Modigliani walked with an enormous and very old black umbrella. We sat sometimes under this umbrella on the bench in the Luxembourg Gardens. There was a warm summer rain; nearby dozed le vieux palais à l'italien, while we in two voices recited from Verlaine, whom we knew well by heart, and we rejoiced that we both remembered the same work of his.
I have read in some American monograph that Beatrice X may have exerted a big influence upon Modigliani—she is the one who called him "perle et pourceau." I can testify, and I consider it necessary that I do so, that Modigliani was exactly the same enlightened man long before his acquaintance with Beatrice X—that is, in 1910. And a lady who calls a great painter a suckling pig can hardly enlighten anyone.
People who were older than we were would point out on which avenue of the Luxembourg Gardens Verlaine used to walk—with a crowd of admirers—when he went from "his café," where he made orations every day, to "his restaurant" to dine. But in 1911 it was not Verlaine going along this avenue, but a tall gentleman in an impeccable frock coat wearing a top hat, with a Legion of Honor ribbon—and the neighbors whispered: "Henri de Régnier." This name meant nothing to us. Modigliani didn't want to hear about Anatole France (nor, incidentally, did other enlightened Parisians). He was glad that I didn't like him either. As for Verlaine he existed in the Luxembourg Gardens only in the form of a monument which was unveiled in the same year. Yes. About Hugo, Modigliani said simply: "Mais Hugo c'est déclamatoire."
* * *
One day there was a misunderstanding about our appointment and when I called for Modigliani, I found him out—but I decided to wait for him for a few minutes. I held an armful of red roses. The window, which was above the locked gates of the studio, was open. To while away the time, I started to throw the flowers into the studio. Modigliani didn't come and I left.
When I met him, he expressed his surprise about my getting into the locked room while he had the key. I explained how it happened. "It's impossible—they lay so beautifully."
Modigliani liked to wander about Paris at night and often when I heard his steps in the sleepy silence of the streets, I came to the window and through the blinds watched his shadow, which lingered under my windows….
The Paris of that time was already in the early Twenties being called "vieux Paris et Paris d'avant guerre." Fiacres still flourished in great numbers. The coachmen had their taverns, which were called "Rendez-vous des cochers." My young contemporaries were still alive—shortly afterward they were killed on the Marne and at Verdun. All the left-wing artists, except Modigliani, were called up. Picasso was as famous then as he is now, but then the people said: "Picasso and Braque." Ida Rubinstein acted Salome. Diaghilev's Ballet Russe grew to become a cultural tradition (Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina, Bakst).
We now know that Stravinsky's destiny also didn't remain chained to the 1910s, that his work became the highest expression of the twentieth century's spirit. We didn't know this then. On June 20, 1911, The Firebird was produced. Petrushka was staged by Fokine for Diaghilev on July 13, 1911.
The building of the new boulevards on the living body of Paris (which was described by Zola) was not yet completely finished (Boulevard Raspail). In the Taverne de Panthéon, Verner, who was Edison's friend, showed me two tables and told me: "These are your social-democrats, here Bolsheviks and there Mensheviks." With varying success women sometimes tried to wear trousers (jupes-culottes), sometimes they almost swaddled their legs (jupes entravées). Verse was in complete desolation at that time, and poems were purchased only because of vignettes which were done by more or less well known painters. At that time, I already understood that Parisian painting was devouring French poetry.
René Gille preached "scientific poetry" and his so-called pupils visited their maître with a very great reluctance. The Catholic church canonized Jeanne d'Arc.
Où est Jeanne la bonne Lorraine
Qu'Anglais brulèrent à Rouen?
(Villon)
I remembered these lines of the immortal ballad when I was looking at the statuettes of the new saint. They were in very questionable taste. They started to be sold in the same shops where church plates were sold.
* * *
An Italian worker had stolen Leonardo's Gioconda to return her to her homeland, and it seemed to me later, when I was back in Russia, that I was the last one to see her.
Modigliani was very sorry that he couldn't understand my poetry. He suspected that some miracles were concealed in it, but these were only my first timid attempts. (For example in Apollo, 1911). As for the reproductions of the paintings which appeared in Apollo ("The World of Art") Modigliani laughed openly at them.
I was surprised when Modigliani found a man, who was definitely unattractive, to be handsome. He persisted in his opinion. I was thinking then: he probably sees everything differently from the way we see things. In any case, that which in Paris was said to be in vogue, and which was described with splendid epithets, Modigliani didn't notice at all.
He drew me not in his studio, from nature, but at his home, from memory. He gave these drawings to me—there were sixteen of them. He asked me to frame them in passe-partout and hang them in my room at Tsarskoye Selo. In the first years of revolution they perished in that house at Tsarskoye Selo. Only one survived, in which there was less presentiment of his future "nu" than in the others.
Most of all we used to talk about poetry. We both knew a great many French verses: by Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Baudelaire.
I noticed that in general painters don't like poetry and even somehow are afraid of it.
He never read Dante to me, possibly because at that time I didn't yet know Italian.
Once he told me: "J'ai oublié de vous dire que je suis Juif." That he was born in the environs of Livorno and that he was twenty-four years old he told me immediately—but at that time he really was twenty-six.
Once he told me that he was interested in aviators (nowadays we say pilots) but once, when he met one of them, he was disappointed: they turned out to be simply sportsmen (what did he expect?).
At this time light airplanes (which were—as everybody knows—like shelves) were circling around over my rusty and somewhat curved contemporary (1889) Eiffel Tower. It seemed to me to resemble a gigantic candlestick, which was lost by a giant in the middle of a city of dwarfs. But that's something Gulliverish.
* * *
And all around raged the newly triumphant cubism, which remained alien to Modigliani.
Marc Chagall had already brought his magic Vitebsk to Paris and Charlie Chaplin—not yet a rising luminary, but an unknown young man—roamed the Parisian boulevards ("The Great Mute"—as cinematography then was called—still remained eloquently silent).
* * *
"And a great distance away in the north…" in Russia died Leo Tolstoy, Vrubel', Vera Komissarzhevskaia; symbolists declared themselves in a state of crisis and Aleksandr Blok prophesied:
Oh, if You children only knew
About coldness and darkness
Of the days to come….
The three whales, on which the Twenties now rest—Proust, Joyce, and Kafka—didn't yet exist as myths, though they were alive as people.
* * *
I was firmly convinced that such a man as Modigliani would start to shine, but when in coming years I asked people who came from Paris about him, the reply was always the same: we don't know, never heard of him.[2]
Only once N. S. Gumilev, when we went together for the last time to see our son in Bezhetsk (in May 1918), and I mentioned the name Modigliani, called him "a drunken monster" or something of the kind. He told me that they had had a clash because Gumilev had spoken in some company in Russian; Modigliani protested this. Only about three years remained for both of them and a great posthumous fame awaited both.
Modigliani regarded travelers with disdain. He considered journeys as a substitute for real action. He always had Les chants de Maldoror in his pocket; this book at that time was a bibliographical rarity. He told me that once he went to a Russian church to the Easter matins—he went to see the religious procession with cross and banners—he liked magnificent ceremonies—and that "probably a very important gentleman" (I should think from the embassy) came up to him and kissed him three times. It seems to me Modigliani didn't clearly understand the meaning of this.
For a long time I thought that I would never hear anything about him. But I did and quite a lot.
* * *
In the beginning of NEP,[3] when I was on the board of the Writer's Union of those days, we usually had our meetings in A. N. Tikhonov's office.[4] At that time correspondence with foreign countries began to return to normal, and Tikhonov used to receive many books and periodicals. It happened that once during the conference someone passed an issue of a French art magazine to me. I opened it—a photograph of Modigliani…. Small cross…. There was a big article—a kind of obituary—and from this article I learned that Modigliani was a great artist of the twentieth century (as I remember he was compared with Botticelli) and that there were already monographs about him in English and in Italian. Later on in the Thirties Ehrenburg, who dedicated his verses[5] to Modigliani and who knew him in Paris later than I did, told me much about him. I also read about Modigliani in a book, From Montmartre to the Latin Quarter, by Carco, and in a cheap novel, whose author coupled him with Utrillo. I can say firmly that the hybrid, which is pictured in this book, does not bear any resemblance to Modigliani in 1910-1911, and that what the author did belongs to the category of the impermissible.
And even quite recently Modigliani became a hero of a pretty vulgar French film, Montparnasse 19. That's extremely distressing!
Bol'shevo 1958-Moscow 1964
—translated by Djemma Bider
Notes
[1] I remember a few sentences from his letters. Here is one of them: "Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise."
[2] He was not known to A. Ekster (the artist, from whose school came all Kiev's left-wing artists), or to Anrep (well-known mosaic artist), or to N. Al'tman, who in the years 1914-1915 painted my portrait.
[3] The New Economic Policy.
[4] At the World Literature Publishing House, 36 Mokhovaia Street, Leningrad.
[5] They were printed in a book, The Poetry about Eves.
I believe those who describe him didn't know him as I did, and here's why. First, I could know only one side of his being—the radiant side. After all I was just a stranger, probably a not easily understood twenty-year-old woman, a foreigner. Secondly, I myself noticed a big change in him when we met in 1911. Somehow, he had grown dark and haggard.
In 1910 I saw him extremely seldom: only a few times. Nevertheless he wrote to me all winter long.[1] He didn't tell me that he composed verses.
As I understand it now, what he must have found astonishing in me was my ability to guess rightly his thoughts, to know his dreams and other small things—others who knew me had become accustomed to this a long time before. He kept repeating: "On communique." Often he said: "Iln'y a que vous pour réaliser cela."
Probably, we both did not understand one important thing: everything that happened was for both of us a prehistory of our future lives: his very short one, my very long one. The breathing of art still had not charred or transformed the two existences; this must have been the light, radiant hour before dawn.
But the future, which as we know throws its shadow long before it enters, knocked at the window, hid itself behind lanterns, crossed dreams, and frightened us with horrible Baudelairean Paris, which concealed itself someplace near by.
And everything divine in Modigliani only sparkled through a kind of darkness. He was different from any other person in the world. His voice somehow always remained in my memory. I knew him as a beggar and it was impossible to understand how he existed—as an artist he didn't have a shadow of recognition.
At that time (1911) he lived at Impasse Falguière. He was so poor that when we sat in the Luxembourg Gardens we always sat on the bench, not on the paid chairs, as was the custom. On the whole he did not complain, not about his completely evident indigence, nor about his equally evident nonrecognition.
Only once in 1911 did he say that during the last winter he felt so bad that he couldn't even think about the thing most precious to him.
He seemed to me encircled with a dense ring of loneliness. I don't remember him exchanging greetings in the Luxembourg Gardens or in the Latin Quarter where everybody more or less knows each other. I never heard him tell a joke. I never saw him drunk nor did I smell wine on him. Apparently, he started to drink later, but hashish already somehow figured in his stories. He didn't seem to have a special girl friend at that time. He never told stories about previous romances (as, alas, everybody does). With me he didn't talk about anything that was worldly. He was courteous, but this wasn't a result of his upbringing but the result of his elevated spirit.
At that time he was occupied with sculpture; he worked in a little courtyard near his studio. One heard the knock of his small hammer in a deserted blind alley. The walls of his studio were hung with portraits of fantastic length (as it seems to me now—from the floor to the ceiling). I never saw their reproductions—did they survive? He called his sculpture "la chose"—it was exhibited, I believe, at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911. He asked me to look at it, but did not approach me at the exhibition, because I was not alone, but with friends. During my great losses, a photograph of this work, which he gave to me, disappeared also.
At this time Modigliani was crazy about Egypt. He took me to the Louvre to look at the Egyptian section; he assured me that everything else, "tout le reste," didn't deserve any attention. He drew my head in the attire of Egyptian queens and dancers, and he seemed completely carried away by the great Egyptian art. Obviously Egypt was his last passion. Very soon after that he became so original that looking at his canvases you didn't care to remember anything. This period of Modigliani's is now called la période nègre.
* * *
He used to say: "les bijoux doivent être sauvages" (in regard to my African beads), and he would draw me with them on.
He led me to look at le vieux Paris derrière le Panthéon at night, by moonlight. He knew the city well, but still we lost our way once. He said: "J'ai oublié qu'il y a une île au milieu [l'île St-Louis]." It was he who showed me the real Paris.
Of the Venus of Milo he said that the beautifully built women who are worth being sculptured and painted always look awkward in dresses.
When it was drizzling (it very often rains in Paris), Modigliani walked with an enormous and very old black umbrella. We sat sometimes under this umbrella on the bench in the Luxembourg Gardens. There was a warm summer rain; nearby dozed le vieux palais à l'italien, while we in two voices recited from Verlaine, whom we knew well by heart, and we rejoiced that we both remembered the same work of his.
I have read in some American monograph that Beatrice X may have exerted a big influence upon Modigliani—she is the one who called him "perle et pourceau." I can testify, and I consider it necessary that I do so, that Modigliani was exactly the same enlightened man long before his acquaintance with Beatrice X—that is, in 1910. And a lady who calls a great painter a suckling pig can hardly enlighten anyone.
People who were older than we were would point out on which avenue of the Luxembourg Gardens Verlaine used to walk—with a crowd of admirers—when he went from "his café," where he made orations every day, to "his restaurant" to dine. But in 1911 it was not Verlaine going along this avenue, but a tall gentleman in an impeccable frock coat wearing a top hat, with a Legion of Honor ribbon—and the neighbors whispered: "Henri de Régnier." This name meant nothing to us. Modigliani didn't want to hear about Anatole France (nor, incidentally, did other enlightened Parisians). He was glad that I didn't like him either. As for Verlaine he existed in the Luxembourg Gardens only in the form of a monument which was unveiled in the same year. Yes. About Hugo, Modigliani said simply: "Mais Hugo c'est déclamatoire."
* * *
One day there was a misunderstanding about our appointment and when I called for Modigliani, I found him out—but I decided to wait for him for a few minutes. I held an armful of red roses. The window, which was above the locked gates of the studio, was open. To while away the time, I started to throw the flowers into the studio. Modigliani didn't come and I left.
When I met him, he expressed his surprise about my getting into the locked room while he had the key. I explained how it happened. "It's impossible—they lay so beautifully."
Modigliani liked to wander about Paris at night and often when I heard his steps in the sleepy silence of the streets, I came to the window and through the blinds watched his shadow, which lingered under my windows….
The Paris of that time was already in the early Twenties being called "vieux Paris et Paris d'avant guerre." Fiacres still flourished in great numbers. The coachmen had their taverns, which were called "Rendez-vous des cochers." My young contemporaries were still alive—shortly afterward they were killed on the Marne and at Verdun. All the left-wing artists, except Modigliani, were called up. Picasso was as famous then as he is now, but then the people said: "Picasso and Braque." Ida Rubinstein acted Salome. Diaghilev's Ballet Russe grew to become a cultural tradition (Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina, Bakst).
We now know that Stravinsky's destiny also didn't remain chained to the 1910s, that his work became the highest expression of the twentieth century's spirit. We didn't know this then. On June 20, 1911, The Firebird was produced. Petrushka was staged by Fokine for Diaghilev on July 13, 1911.
The building of the new boulevards on the living body of Paris (which was described by Zola) was not yet completely finished (Boulevard Raspail). In the Taverne de Panthéon, Verner, who was Edison's friend, showed me two tables and told me: "These are your social-democrats, here Bolsheviks and there Mensheviks." With varying success women sometimes tried to wear trousers (jupes-culottes), sometimes they almost swaddled their legs (jupes entravées). Verse was in complete desolation at that time, and poems were purchased only because of vignettes which were done by more or less well known painters. At that time, I already understood that Parisian painting was devouring French poetry.
René Gille preached "scientific poetry" and his so-called pupils visited their maître with a very great reluctance. The Catholic church canonized Jeanne d'Arc.
Où est Jeanne la bonne Lorraine
Qu'Anglais brulèrent à Rouen?
(Villon)
I remembered these lines of the immortal ballad when I was looking at the statuettes of the new saint. They were in very questionable taste. They started to be sold in the same shops where church plates were sold.
* * *
An Italian worker had stolen Leonardo's Gioconda to return her to her homeland, and it seemed to me later, when I was back in Russia, that I was the last one to see her.
Modigliani was very sorry that he couldn't understand my poetry. He suspected that some miracles were concealed in it, but these were only my first timid attempts. (For example in Apollo, 1911). As for the reproductions of the paintings which appeared in Apollo ("The World of Art") Modigliani laughed openly at them.
I was surprised when Modigliani found a man, who was definitely unattractive, to be handsome. He persisted in his opinion. I was thinking then: he probably sees everything differently from the way we see things. In any case, that which in Paris was said to be in vogue, and which was described with splendid epithets, Modigliani didn't notice at all.
He drew me not in his studio, from nature, but at his home, from memory. He gave these drawings to me—there were sixteen of them. He asked me to frame them in passe-partout and hang them in my room at Tsarskoye Selo. In the first years of revolution they perished in that house at Tsarskoye Selo. Only one survived, in which there was less presentiment of his future "nu" than in the others.
Most of all we used to talk about poetry. We both knew a great many French verses: by Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Baudelaire.
I noticed that in general painters don't like poetry and even somehow are afraid of it.
He never read Dante to me, possibly because at that time I didn't yet know Italian.
Once he told me: "J'ai oublié de vous dire que je suis Juif." That he was born in the environs of Livorno and that he was twenty-four years old he told me immediately—but at that time he really was twenty-six.
Once he told me that he was interested in aviators (nowadays we say pilots) but once, when he met one of them, he was disappointed: they turned out to be simply sportsmen (what did he expect?).
At this time light airplanes (which were—as everybody knows—like shelves) were circling around over my rusty and somewhat curved contemporary (1889) Eiffel Tower. It seemed to me to resemble a gigantic candlestick, which was lost by a giant in the middle of a city of dwarfs. But that's something Gulliverish.
* * *
And all around raged the newly triumphant cubism, which remained alien to Modigliani.
Marc Chagall had already brought his magic Vitebsk to Paris and Charlie Chaplin—not yet a rising luminary, but an unknown young man—roamed the Parisian boulevards ("The Great Mute"—as cinematography then was called—still remained eloquently silent).
* * *
"And a great distance away in the north…" in Russia died Leo Tolstoy, Vrubel', Vera Komissarzhevskaia; symbolists declared themselves in a state of crisis and Aleksandr Blok prophesied:
Oh, if You children only knew
About coldness and darkness
Of the days to come….
The three whales, on which the Twenties now rest—Proust, Joyce, and Kafka—didn't yet exist as myths, though they were alive as people.
* * *
I was firmly convinced that such a man as Modigliani would start to shine, but when in coming years I asked people who came from Paris about him, the reply was always the same: we don't know, never heard of him.[2]
Only once N. S. Gumilev, when we went together for the last time to see our son in Bezhetsk (in May 1918), and I mentioned the name Modigliani, called him "a drunken monster" or something of the kind. He told me that they had had a clash because Gumilev had spoken in some company in Russian; Modigliani protested this. Only about three years remained for both of them and a great posthumous fame awaited both.
Modigliani regarded travelers with disdain. He considered journeys as a substitute for real action. He always had Les chants de Maldoror in his pocket; this book at that time was a bibliographical rarity. He told me that once he went to a Russian church to the Easter matins—he went to see the religious procession with cross and banners—he liked magnificent ceremonies—and that "probably a very important gentleman" (I should think from the embassy) came up to him and kissed him three times. It seems to me Modigliani didn't clearly understand the meaning of this.
For a long time I thought that I would never hear anything about him. But I did and quite a lot.
* * *
In the beginning of NEP,[3] when I was on the board of the Writer's Union of those days, we usually had our meetings in A. N. Tikhonov's office.[4] At that time correspondence with foreign countries began to return to normal, and Tikhonov used to receive many books and periodicals. It happened that once during the conference someone passed an issue of a French art magazine to me. I opened it—a photograph of Modigliani…. Small cross…. There was a big article—a kind of obituary—and from this article I learned that Modigliani was a great artist of the twentieth century (as I remember he was compared with Botticelli) and that there were already monographs about him in English and in Italian. Later on in the Thirties Ehrenburg, who dedicated his verses[5] to Modigliani and who knew him in Paris later than I did, told me much about him. I also read about Modigliani in a book, From Montmartre to the Latin Quarter, by Carco, and in a cheap novel, whose author coupled him with Utrillo. I can say firmly that the hybrid, which is pictured in this book, does not bear any resemblance to Modigliani in 1910-1911, and that what the author did belongs to the category of the impermissible.
And even quite recently Modigliani became a hero of a pretty vulgar French film, Montparnasse 19. That's extremely distressing!
Bol'shevo 1958-Moscow 1964
—translated by Djemma Bider
Notes
[1] I remember a few sentences from his letters. Here is one of them: "Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise."
[2] He was not known to A. Ekster (the artist, from whose school came all Kiev's left-wing artists), or to Anrep (well-known mosaic artist), or to N. Al'tman, who in the years 1914-1915 painted my portrait.
[3] The New Economic Policy.
[4] At the World Literature Publishing House, 36 Mokhovaia Street, Leningrad.
[5] They were printed in a book, The Poetry about Eves.
W. H. Auden
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden.
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Constantine Cavafy
PHILHELLENE
Take care the engraving's artistically done.
Expression grave and majestic.
The diadem better rather narrow;
I don't care for those wide ones, the Parthian kind.
The inscription, as usual, in Greek:
nothing excessive, nothing grandiose—
the proconsul mustn't get the wrong idea,
he sniffs out everything and reports it back to Rome—
but of course it should still do me credit.
Something really choice on the other side:
some lovely discus-thrower lad.
Above all, I urge you, see to it
(Sithaspes, by the god, don't let them forget)
that after the "King" and the "Savior"
the engraving should say, in elegant letters, "Philhellene."
Now don't start in on me with your quips,
your "where are the Greeks?" and "what's Greek
here, behind the Zágros, beyond Phráata?"
Many, many others, more oriental than ourselves,
write it, and so we'll write it too.
And after all, don't forget that now and then
sophists come to us from Syria,
and versifiers, and other devotees of puffery.
Hence unhellenized we are not, I rather think.
Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn
Take care the engraving's artistically done.
Expression grave and majestic.
The diadem better rather narrow;
I don't care for those wide ones, the Parthian kind.
The inscription, as usual, in Greek:
nothing excessive, nothing grandiose—
the proconsul mustn't get the wrong idea,
he sniffs out everything and reports it back to Rome—
but of course it should still do me credit.
Something really choice on the other side:
some lovely discus-thrower lad.
Above all, I urge you, see to it
(Sithaspes, by the god, don't let them forget)
that after the "King" and the "Savior"
the engraving should say, in elegant letters, "Philhellene."
Now don't start in on me with your quips,
your "where are the Greeks?" and "what's Greek
here, behind the Zágros, beyond Phráata?"
Many, many others, more oriental than ourselves,
write it, and so we'll write it too.
And after all, don't forget that now and then
sophists come to us from Syria,
and versifiers, and other devotees of puffery.
Hence unhellenized we are not, I rather think.
Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Anna Akhmatova (poem)
THE GUEST
Nothing is changed: against the dining-room windows
hard grains of whirling snow still beat.
I am what I was,
but a man came to me.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"To be with you in hell," he said.
I laughed. "It's plain you mean
to have us both destroyed."
He lifted his thin hand
and lightly stroked the flowers:
"Tell me how men kiss you,
tell me how you kiss."
His torpid eyes were fixed
unblinking on my ring.
Not a single muscle stirred
in his clear, sardonic face.
Oh, I see: his game is that he knows
intimately, ardently,
there's nothing from me he wants,
I have nothing to refuse.
Translated by Max Hayward, Stanley Kunitz
Nothing is changed: against the dining-room windows
hard grains of whirling snow still beat.
I am what I was,
but a man came to me.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"To be with you in hell," he said.
I laughed. "It's plain you mean
to have us both destroyed."
He lifted his thin hand
and lightly stroked the flowers:
"Tell me how men kiss you,
tell me how you kiss."
His torpid eyes were fixed
unblinking on my ring.
Not a single muscle stirred
in his clear, sardonic face.
Oh, I see: his game is that he knows
intimately, ardently,
there's nothing from me he wants,
I have nothing to refuse.
Translated by Max Hayward, Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz
The Round
Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed . . .”
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed . . .”
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Ezra Pound
III
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Of the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme.
From Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Giant Toad
By Elizabeth Bishop
I am too big, too big by far. Pity me.
My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even so. They see too much, above, below, and yet there is not much to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin in drops. The drops run down my back, run from the corners of my downturned mouth, run down my sides and drip beneath my belly. Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty, like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill me through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pigments gradually shudder and shift over.
Now I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop. Two or three times more, silently. That was too far. I’m standing up. The lichen’s gray, and rough to my front feet. Get down. Turn facing out, it’s safer. Don’t breath until the snail gets by. But we go travelling the same weathers.
Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give voice, just once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound, angelic bell I rang!
I live, I breathe, by swallowing. Once some naughty children picked me up, me and two brothers. They set us down again somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes. We could not help but smoke them, to the end. I thought it was the death of me, but when I was entirely filled with smoke, when my slack mouth was burning, and all my tripes were hot and dry, they let us go. But I was sick for days.
I have big shoulders, like a boxer. They are not muscle, however, and their color is dark. They are my sacs of poison, the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my great responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my back. Beware, I am an angel in disguise; my wings are evil, but not deadly. If I will it, the poison could break through, blue-black, and dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the air. Beware, you frivolous crab.
I am too big, too big by far. Pity me.
My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even so. They see too much, above, below, and yet there is not much to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin in drops. The drops run down my back, run from the corners of my downturned mouth, run down my sides and drip beneath my belly. Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty, like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill me through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pigments gradually shudder and shift over.
Now I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop. Two or three times more, silently. That was too far. I’m standing up. The lichen’s gray, and rough to my front feet. Get down. Turn facing out, it’s safer. Don’t breath until the snail gets by. But we go travelling the same weathers.
Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give voice, just once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound, angelic bell I rang!
I live, I breathe, by swallowing. Once some naughty children picked me up, me and two brothers. They set us down again somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes. We could not help but smoke them, to the end. I thought it was the death of me, but when I was entirely filled with smoke, when my slack mouth was burning, and all my tripes were hot and dry, they let us go. But I was sick for days.
I have big shoulders, like a boxer. They are not muscle, however, and their color is dark. They are my sacs of poison, the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my great responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my back. Beware, I am an angel in disguise; my wings are evil, but not deadly. If I will it, the poison could break through, blue-black, and dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the air. Beware, you frivolous crab.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Zbigniew Herbert: Our Fear
Our fear
does not wear a night shirt
does not have owl’s eyes
does not lift a casket lid
does not extinguish a candle
does not have a dead man’s face either
our fear
is a scrap of paper
found in a pocket
‘warn Wójcik
the place on Dluga Street is hot’
our fear
does not rise on the wings of the tempest
does not sit on a church tower
it is down-to-earth
it has the shape
of a bundle made in haste
with warm clothing
provisions
and arms
our fear
does not have the face of a dead man
the dead are gentle to us
we carry them on our shoulders
sleep under the same blanket
close their eyes
adjust their lips
pick a dry spot
and bury them
not too deep
not too shallow
Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz
does not wear a night shirt
does not have owl’s eyes
does not lift a casket lid
does not extinguish a candle
does not have a dead man’s face either
our fear
is a scrap of paper
found in a pocket
‘warn Wójcik
the place on Dluga Street is hot’
our fear
does not rise on the wings of the tempest
does not sit on a church tower
it is down-to-earth
it has the shape
of a bundle made in haste
with warm clothing
provisions
and arms
our fear
does not have the face of a dead man
the dead are gentle to us
we carry them on our shoulders
sleep under the same blanket
close their eyes
adjust their lips
pick a dry spot
and bury them
not too deep
not too shallow
Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Anna Świrszczyńska : poem
I’ve Been Waiting These Thirty Years
That young beanpole was maybe six feet tall,
that light-hearted worker from Powiśle
who fought
in the hell of Zielna Street, in the telephone building.
When I changed the bandage on
his leg that was torn open
he winced, he laughed.
‘When the war’s over
we’ll go dancing, miss.
It’s on me’.
I’ve been waiting for him
these thirty years.
Translated from the Polish by Magnus Jan Keynski and Robert A. Maguire
That young beanpole was maybe six feet tall,
that light-hearted worker from Powiśle
who fought
in the hell of Zielna Street, in the telephone building.
When I changed the bandage on
his leg that was torn open
he winced, he laughed.
‘When the war’s over
we’ll go dancing, miss.
It’s on me’.
I’ve been waiting for him
these thirty years.
Translated from the Polish by Magnus Jan Keynski and Robert A. Maguire
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Jane Hirshfield : poem
THIS WAS ONCE A LOVE POEM
This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.
It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.
Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.
Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the fair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.
IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.
The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.
Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.
From Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2001 by Jane Hirshfield. Reprinted by permission of the author.
This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.
It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.
Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.
Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the fair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.
IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.
The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.
Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.
From Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2001 by Jane Hirshfield. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Stanislaw Baranczak (poem)
THE THREE MAGI
To Leo Dymarski
A grim modern version of the visit of the Magi [during Communist rule in Poland]. –Helen Vendler
They will probably come just after the New Year.
As usual, early in the morning.
The forceps of the doorbell will pull you out by the head
from under the bedclothes; dazed as a newborn baby,
you’ll open the door. The star of an ID
will flash before your eyes.
Three men. In one of them you’ll recognize
with sheepish amazement (isn’t this a small
world) your schoolmate of years ago.
Since that time he’ll hardly have changed,
only grown a moustache,
perhaps gained a little weight.
They’ll enter. The gold of their watches will glitter (isn’t
this a gray dawn), the smoke from their cigarettes
will fill the room with a fragrance like incense.
All that’s missing is myrrh, you’ll think half-unconsciously–
while with your heel you’re shoving under the couch the book they
mustn’t find–
what is this myrrh, anyway,
you’d have to finally look it up
someday. You’ll come
with us, sir. You’ll go
with them. Isn’t this a white snow.
Isn’t this a black Fiat.
Wasn’t this a vast world.
From Spoiling Cannibals' Fun, Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule; Northwestern University Press; 1991
To Leo Dymarski
A grim modern version of the visit of the Magi [during Communist rule in Poland]. –Helen Vendler
They will probably come just after the New Year.
As usual, early in the morning.
The forceps of the doorbell will pull you out by the head
from under the bedclothes; dazed as a newborn baby,
you’ll open the door. The star of an ID
will flash before your eyes.
Three men. In one of them you’ll recognize
with sheepish amazement (isn’t this a small
world) your schoolmate of years ago.
Since that time he’ll hardly have changed,
only grown a moustache,
perhaps gained a little weight.
They’ll enter. The gold of their watches will glitter (isn’t
this a gray dawn), the smoke from their cigarettes
will fill the room with a fragrance like incense.
All that’s missing is myrrh, you’ll think half-unconsciously–
while with your heel you’re shoving under the couch the book they
mustn’t find–
what is this myrrh, anyway,
you’d have to finally look it up
someday. You’ll come
with us, sir. You’ll go
with them. Isn’t this a white snow.
Isn’t this a black Fiat.
Wasn’t this a vast world.
From Spoiling Cannibals' Fun, Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule; Northwestern University Press; 1991
Friday, April 28, 2006
YORICK
Uncovering the bones of a grandmother’s past.
by TATYANA TOLSTAYA
On the windowsill of my childhood stood a dust-colored round tin with black letters printed on it: “Dorset. Stewed Pork.” The tin served as a communal grave for all single buttons. Every now and then, a button would fall off a cuff, roll under the bed—and that was it. Grope as you might or run the broom under the bed, it was gone forever. Then the contents of “Dorset” would be shaken out on the table and picked over with one finger, like grains of buckwheat, in search of a pair, but of course nothing matching could ever be found. After a bit of hesitation, the other button would be snipped off—what can you do?—the orphan would be thrown into the pile, and a half-dozen new buttons wrapped in muddy, tea-colored waxed paper would be purchased at the variety store.
The tram ran outside the window, the glass rattled, the windowsill shook, and the minute population of “Dorset” jangled faintly, as though living its own cantankerous life. In addition to buttons, there were some old-timers in the tin: for instance, a set of needles from the foot-pedal Singer sewing machine that no one had used in so long that it gradually began to dissolve into the air of the room, thinning down into its own shadow before it finally vanished, though it had been a real beauty—black, with a ravishingly slender waist, a clear-cut gold sphinx printed on its shoulder, a gold wheel, a black rawhide drive belt, and a dangerous steel-toothed crevasse that plunged down into mysterious depths, where, shuddering, the shuttle went back and forth and did who knows what. Or there might be a crumbling scrap of paper in the tin, on which hooks and loops sat like black insects; as the paper died, the hooks fell to the bottom of the grave with a gentle clink. Or some metallic thingamabob resembling a dentist’s instrument; no one knew what it was, because there were no dentists in our family. We’d fish out this cold, sharp object with two fingers: “Papa, what is this?” Papa would put on the spectacles that sat on his forehead, take it carefully, and inspect it. “Hard to say . . . It’s . . . something.”
The corpses of tiny objects, shells of sunken islands. One that constantly surfaced, fell to the bottom, and then surfaced again was a dull-white, bony blade, good for nothing. Of course, like everything else, no one ever threw it away. Then one time someone said, “That’s whalebone, a whale whisker.”
Whalebone! Whale whiskers! Instantly, monster whale-fishes came to mind, smooth black mountains in the gray, silvery-slow ocean sea. In the middle of the whale—a fountain like the ones at Petrodvorets, foamy water spouting on both sides. On the monster’s face—small, attentive eyes and a long, fluffy mustache, totally Maupassant. But the encyclopedic dictionary writes, “Teeth are found only in so-called ‘toothed-W.’ (dolphins, narwhals, sperm W., and bottle-nosed W.), which feed mostly on fish; the whiskered, or baleen W. (gray W., right W., rorquals), has horny formations on the roof of the mouth, plates mistakenly called ‘bones’ or ‘whiskers,’ which serve to filter plankton.” Not true, that is, they’re not only for filtering. As late as 1914, a seamstress sewing a stylish dress for Grandmother reproached my absent-minded, happy-go-lucky ancestor, “Nowadays, Natalya Vasilevna, one can’t circulate in society without a busk”; Grandmother was shamed and agreed to a straight busk. The seamstress grabbed a handful of “bones” that came from the mouth of a gray W., or perhaps it was a right W., or maybe even a rorqual, and sewed them into Grandmother’s corset, and Grandmother circulated with great success, wearing under her bust, or at her waist, slivers of the seas, small pieces of those tender, pinkish-gray palates, and she passed through suites of rooms, slim and petite, a decadent Aphrodite with a heavy knot of dark-gold hair, rustling her silks, fragrant with French perfumes and fashionable Norwegian mists; heads turned to watch her, hearts pounded. She loved, rashly and dangerously, and married; then the war began, then the revolution, and she gave birth to Papa—on a day when a machine gun strafed through the fog—and she was anxious and barricaded the frosted window of the bathroom; she fled south, and ate grapes, and then the machine gun began blazing again, and again she fled, on the last steamship out of grapevined, bohemian Odessa, making her way to Marseilles, then to Paris. And she was hungry, poor, and humbled; now she herself sewed for the rich, crawled on her knees around their skirts, her mouth pursed to hold pins; she pinned hems and linings and despaired, and again she fled south (this time the South of France), imagining that she could not only eat grapes but make wine herself—you only have to stomp on them with your feet, it’s called vendange—and then everyone would get rich again and everything would be like it used to be, absent-minded, lighthearted, carefree. But again she came to ruin most shamefully, ridiculously, and in August, 1923, she returned to Petrograd, her hair bobbed, wearing a new, stylishly short skirt and a mushroom-shaped cap, holding a much grown, frightened Papa by the hand. By that time, you could circulate in society without a busk, under different conditions. A lot of things circulated then.
To retell a life you need an entire life. We’ll skip it. Later, perhaps, sometime or another.
I’m really thinking about the whale: how he dove into the cold Norwegian waters suspecting nothing, not a thought for the red-bearded northern fishermen; how he wasn’t on his guard when he rose up to the gray surface of the sea, to the unextinguished yellow sunsets in the overflow of the northern waters, fair-haired girls, pines, stones, Grieg sonatas, to that sea sung by fashionable writers in the modern’s minor key. He didn’t need those baleens, those horny formations on his palate, those so-called whiskers or bones intended as an instrument for filtering plankton; the northern girls found a better use for them. A slender waist; luxuriant hair; a difficult love; a long life; children dragged by the hand across seas and continents. And then the end of war, then the victor’s roar, and the Allies sent us tins of good stewed pork; we ate it and spat the bones, teeth, and whiskers into the empty containers. But it’s the bottle-nosed whales that have the teeth, while ours, our very own, personal, gray, right, rorqual, our poor Yorick, didn’t even eat fish, he didn’t wrong any fishermen, he lived a radiant, short life—no, no, a long, long life, it continues even now and will continue as long as someone’s uncertain, pensive fingers keep fishing out and tossing back, fishing out and tossing back into the tin on the shaking windowsill these hushed, stunning skull shards of time. Clench a fragment of Yorick in your fist—milky and chill—and the heart grows younger, pounds faster, and strains; the suitor wants to snatch the young lady, and water spouts like a fountain to all ends of the sea, and the world circulates, whirling, spinning, wanting to fall; it stands on three whales, and splits away from them into the head-spinning abyss of time.
(Translated, from the Russian, by Jamey Gambrell; New Yorker; Issue of 2005-12-26 and 2006-01-02)
by TATYANA TOLSTAYA
On the windowsill of my childhood stood a dust-colored round tin with black letters printed on it: “Dorset. Stewed Pork.” The tin served as a communal grave for all single buttons. Every now and then, a button would fall off a cuff, roll under the bed—and that was it. Grope as you might or run the broom under the bed, it was gone forever. Then the contents of “Dorset” would be shaken out on the table and picked over with one finger, like grains of buckwheat, in search of a pair, but of course nothing matching could ever be found. After a bit of hesitation, the other button would be snipped off—what can you do?—the orphan would be thrown into the pile, and a half-dozen new buttons wrapped in muddy, tea-colored waxed paper would be purchased at the variety store.
The tram ran outside the window, the glass rattled, the windowsill shook, and the minute population of “Dorset” jangled faintly, as though living its own cantankerous life. In addition to buttons, there were some old-timers in the tin: for instance, a set of needles from the foot-pedal Singer sewing machine that no one had used in so long that it gradually began to dissolve into the air of the room, thinning down into its own shadow before it finally vanished, though it had been a real beauty—black, with a ravishingly slender waist, a clear-cut gold sphinx printed on its shoulder, a gold wheel, a black rawhide drive belt, and a dangerous steel-toothed crevasse that plunged down into mysterious depths, where, shuddering, the shuttle went back and forth and did who knows what. Or there might be a crumbling scrap of paper in the tin, on which hooks and loops sat like black insects; as the paper died, the hooks fell to the bottom of the grave with a gentle clink. Or some metallic thingamabob resembling a dentist’s instrument; no one knew what it was, because there were no dentists in our family. We’d fish out this cold, sharp object with two fingers: “Papa, what is this?” Papa would put on the spectacles that sat on his forehead, take it carefully, and inspect it. “Hard to say . . . It’s . . . something.”
The corpses of tiny objects, shells of sunken islands. One that constantly surfaced, fell to the bottom, and then surfaced again was a dull-white, bony blade, good for nothing. Of course, like everything else, no one ever threw it away. Then one time someone said, “That’s whalebone, a whale whisker.”
Whalebone! Whale whiskers! Instantly, monster whale-fishes came to mind, smooth black mountains in the gray, silvery-slow ocean sea. In the middle of the whale—a fountain like the ones at Petrodvorets, foamy water spouting on both sides. On the monster’s face—small, attentive eyes and a long, fluffy mustache, totally Maupassant. But the encyclopedic dictionary writes, “Teeth are found only in so-called ‘toothed-W.’ (dolphins, narwhals, sperm W., and bottle-nosed W.), which feed mostly on fish; the whiskered, or baleen W. (gray W., right W., rorquals), has horny formations on the roof of the mouth, plates mistakenly called ‘bones’ or ‘whiskers,’ which serve to filter plankton.” Not true, that is, they’re not only for filtering. As late as 1914, a seamstress sewing a stylish dress for Grandmother reproached my absent-minded, happy-go-lucky ancestor, “Nowadays, Natalya Vasilevna, one can’t circulate in society without a busk”; Grandmother was shamed and agreed to a straight busk. The seamstress grabbed a handful of “bones” that came from the mouth of a gray W., or perhaps it was a right W., or maybe even a rorqual, and sewed them into Grandmother’s corset, and Grandmother circulated with great success, wearing under her bust, or at her waist, slivers of the seas, small pieces of those tender, pinkish-gray palates, and she passed through suites of rooms, slim and petite, a decadent Aphrodite with a heavy knot of dark-gold hair, rustling her silks, fragrant with French perfumes and fashionable Norwegian mists; heads turned to watch her, hearts pounded. She loved, rashly and dangerously, and married; then the war began, then the revolution, and she gave birth to Papa—on a day when a machine gun strafed through the fog—and she was anxious and barricaded the frosted window of the bathroom; she fled south, and ate grapes, and then the machine gun began blazing again, and again she fled, on the last steamship out of grapevined, bohemian Odessa, making her way to Marseilles, then to Paris. And she was hungry, poor, and humbled; now she herself sewed for the rich, crawled on her knees around their skirts, her mouth pursed to hold pins; she pinned hems and linings and despaired, and again she fled south (this time the South of France), imagining that she could not only eat grapes but make wine herself—you only have to stomp on them with your feet, it’s called vendange—and then everyone would get rich again and everything would be like it used to be, absent-minded, lighthearted, carefree. But again she came to ruin most shamefully, ridiculously, and in August, 1923, she returned to Petrograd, her hair bobbed, wearing a new, stylishly short skirt and a mushroom-shaped cap, holding a much grown, frightened Papa by the hand. By that time, you could circulate in society without a busk, under different conditions. A lot of things circulated then.
To retell a life you need an entire life. We’ll skip it. Later, perhaps, sometime or another.
I’m really thinking about the whale: how he dove into the cold Norwegian waters suspecting nothing, not a thought for the red-bearded northern fishermen; how he wasn’t on his guard when he rose up to the gray surface of the sea, to the unextinguished yellow sunsets in the overflow of the northern waters, fair-haired girls, pines, stones, Grieg sonatas, to that sea sung by fashionable writers in the modern’s minor key. He didn’t need those baleens, those horny formations on his palate, those so-called whiskers or bones intended as an instrument for filtering plankton; the northern girls found a better use for them. A slender waist; luxuriant hair; a difficult love; a long life; children dragged by the hand across seas and continents. And then the end of war, then the victor’s roar, and the Allies sent us tins of good stewed pork; we ate it and spat the bones, teeth, and whiskers into the empty containers. But it’s the bottle-nosed whales that have the teeth, while ours, our very own, personal, gray, right, rorqual, our poor Yorick, didn’t even eat fish, he didn’t wrong any fishermen, he lived a radiant, short life—no, no, a long, long life, it continues even now and will continue as long as someone’s uncertain, pensive fingers keep fishing out and tossing back, fishing out and tossing back into the tin on the shaking windowsill these hushed, stunning skull shards of time. Clench a fragment of Yorick in your fist—milky and chill—and the heart grows younger, pounds faster, and strains; the suitor wants to snatch the young lady, and water spouts like a fountain to all ends of the sea, and the world circulates, whirling, spinning, wanting to fall; it stands on three whales, and splits away from them into the head-spinning abyss of time.
(Translated, from the Russian, by Jamey Gambrell; New Yorker; Issue of 2005-12-26 and 2006-01-02)
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Muriel Rukeyser
BOY WITH HIS HAIR CUT SHORT
Sunday shuts down on the twentieth-century evening.
The El passes. Twilight and bulb define
the brown room, the overstuffed plum sofa,
the boy, and the girl’s thin hands above his head.
A neighbor radio sings stocks, news, serenade.
He sits at the table, head down, the young clear neck
exposed,
watching the drugstore sign from the tail of his eye;
tattoo, neon, until the eye blears, while his
solicitous tall sister, simple in blue, bending
behind him, cuts his hair with her cheap shears.
The arrow’s electric red always reaches its mark,
successful neon! He coughs, impressed by that precision.
His child’s forehead, forever protected by his cap,
is bleached against the lamplight as he turns head
and steadies to let the snippets drop.
Erasing the failure of weeks with level fingers,
she sleeks the fine hair, combing: “You’ll look fine
tomorrow!
You’ll surely find something, they can’t keep turning you
down;
the finest gentleman’s not so trim as you!” Smiling, he
raises
the adolescent forehead wrinkling ironic now.
Sunday shuts down on the twentieth-century evening.
The El passes. Twilight and bulb define
the brown room, the overstuffed plum sofa,
the boy, and the girl’s thin hands above his head.
A neighbor radio sings stocks, news, serenade.
He sits at the table, head down, the young clear neck
exposed,
watching the drugstore sign from the tail of his eye;
tattoo, neon, until the eye blears, while his
solicitous tall sister, simple in blue, bending
behind him, cuts his hair with her cheap shears.
The arrow’s electric red always reaches its mark,
successful neon! He coughs, impressed by that precision.
His child’s forehead, forever protected by his cap,
is bleached against the lamplight as he turns head
and steadies to let the snippets drop.
Erasing the failure of weeks with level fingers,
she sleeks the fine hair, combing: “You’ll look fine
tomorrow!
You’ll surely find something, they can’t keep turning you
down;
the finest gentleman’s not so trim as you!” Smiling, he
raises
the adolescent forehead wrinkling ironic now.
Sharon Olds (3 poems)
WEST
The hair I pull, out of my comb,
drifts off, from the rail of the porch.
It is curled on itself, it folds, kneels,
bows and buckles over onto our earth.
This is the soil I came from, sour
tang of resin and baked dust.
I saw my father's ashes down
into the dirt, except for the portion I
put on my tongue like the Host and swallowed and ate.
I have always wanted to cross over
into the other person, draw the
other person over into me. Fast are the naked palms to the breasts
from behind, at the porch rail, fast
is a look. Slow is the knowing where I come from,
who I might be, like a dream of matter
looking for spirit. Now the hair
rises on an updraft, wobbling, reddish,
in a half-circle, it wavers higher--
the jelly head of the follicle has the tail of the hair in its mouth, it rolls back
up, toward me, through the morning, as if
someone, somewhere, were saying, to me, we are one now.
HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR
For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
--this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say "college," but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever--I try to see
this house without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak's
wing, but I can't. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young
for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me--no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.
1954
Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt
he had put on her face. And her training bra
scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening,
kept saying it, training bra,
as if the cups of it had been calling
the breasts up—he buried her in it,
perhaps he had never bothered to take it
off. They found her underpants
in a garbage can. And I feared the word
eczema, like my acne and like
the X in the paper which marked her body,
as if he had killed her for not being flawless.
I feared his name, Burton Abbott,
the first name that was a last name,
as if he were not someone specific.
It was nothing one could learn from his face.
His face was dull and ordinary,
it took away what I’d thought I could count on
about evil. He looked thin and lonely,
it was horrifying, he looked almost humble.
I felt awe that dirt was so impersonal,
and pity for the training bra,
pity and terror of eczema.
And I could not sit on my mother’s electric
blanket anymore, I began to have a
fear of electricity—
the good people, the parents, were going to
fry him to death. This was what
his parents had been telling us:
Burton Abbott, Burton Abbott,
death to the person, death to the home planet.
The worst thing was to think of her,
of what it had been to be her, alive,
to be walked, alive, into that cabin,
to look into those eyes, and see the human
The hair I pull, out of my comb,
drifts off, from the rail of the porch.
It is curled on itself, it folds, kneels,
bows and buckles over onto our earth.
This is the soil I came from, sour
tang of resin and baked dust.
I saw my father's ashes down
into the dirt, except for the portion I
put on my tongue like the Host and swallowed and ate.
I have always wanted to cross over
into the other person, draw the
other person over into me. Fast are the naked palms to the breasts
from behind, at the porch rail, fast
is a look. Slow is the knowing where I come from,
who I might be, like a dream of matter
looking for spirit. Now the hair
rises on an updraft, wobbling, reddish,
in a half-circle, it wavers higher--
the jelly head of the follicle has the tail of the hair in its mouth, it rolls back
up, toward me, through the morning, as if
someone, somewhere, were saying, to me, we are one now.
HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR
For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
--this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say "college," but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever--I try to see
this house without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak's
wing, but I can't. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young
for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me--no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.
1954
Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt
he had put on her face. And her training bra
scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening,
kept saying it, training bra,
as if the cups of it had been calling
the breasts up—he buried her in it,
perhaps he had never bothered to take it
off. They found her underpants
in a garbage can. And I feared the word
eczema, like my acne and like
the X in the paper which marked her body,
as if he had killed her for not being flawless.
I feared his name, Burton Abbott,
the first name that was a last name,
as if he were not someone specific.
It was nothing one could learn from his face.
His face was dull and ordinary,
it took away what I’d thought I could count on
about evil. He looked thin and lonely,
it was horrifying, he looked almost humble.
I felt awe that dirt was so impersonal,
and pity for the training bra,
pity and terror of eczema.
And I could not sit on my mother’s electric
blanket anymore, I began to have a
fear of electricity—
the good people, the parents, were going to
fry him to death. This was what
his parents had been telling us:
Burton Abbott, Burton Abbott,
death to the person, death to the home planet.
The worst thing was to think of her,
of what it had been to be her, alive,
to be walked, alive, into that cabin,
to look into those eyes, and see the human
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Ana Paula Inácio
O QUE TENS PARA DIZER
o que tens para dizer
senão a tua presença imperfeita,
o teu rosto de areia,
atravessaste Séneca a pé?
o que dizes está gravado
sobre a mesa tens copo, tens vinho.
o que poderás dizer
que não se dissolva em pó?
Atira antes pedras
margas, basalto, xisto.
what do you have to say
besides your imperfect presence,
your face of sand,
did you cross through Seneca on foot?
what you say is recorded
on the table you have a glass, you have wine.
what can you say
that won’t turn to dust?
Throw stones instead,
marl, basalt, schist.
o que tens para dizer
senão a tua presença imperfeita,
o teu rosto de areia,
atravessaste Séneca a pé?
o que dizes está gravado
sobre a mesa tens copo, tens vinho.
o que poderás dizer
que não se dissolva em pó?
Atira antes pedras
margas, basalto, xisto.
what do you have to say
besides your imperfect presence,
your face of sand,
did you cross through Seneca on foot?
what you say is recorded
on the table you have a glass, you have wine.
what can you say
that won’t turn to dust?
Throw stones instead,
marl, basalt, schist.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Julia Hartwig
OLD FASHIONS
I remember an old, meticulously executed print.
Swallowed by a whale, a small man with a frock coat sits inside its belly at a small table, lit by an oil lamp.
But from time to time the whale gets hungry. And here is the second print.
A powerful wave of seawater rushes through the throat to the belly, with a shoal of swallowed small fish.
The table with the lamp is knocked down; the small man, diving, nestles against the slick wall of the whale's massive bulk.
After the wave's retreat he sets up his table, hangs the lamp, and begins to work.
Perhaps he is studying the Old Testament? Perhaps he is studying maps?
What else could be of interest to a traveler miraculously saved from a shipwreck?
I often think of this print as I lay books down on my table for work, after tightly closing windows and doors.
(Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)
I remember an old, meticulously executed print.
Swallowed by a whale, a small man with a frock coat sits inside its belly at a small table, lit by an oil lamp.
But from time to time the whale gets hungry. And here is the second print.
A powerful wave of seawater rushes through the throat to the belly, with a shoal of swallowed small fish.
The table with the lamp is knocked down; the small man, diving, nestles against the slick wall of the whale's massive bulk.
After the wave's retreat he sets up his table, hangs the lamp, and begins to work.
Perhaps he is studying the Old Testament? Perhaps he is studying maps?
What else could be of interest to a traveler miraculously saved from a shipwreck?
I often think of this print as I lay books down on my table for work, after tightly closing windows and doors.
(Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)
Thursday, April 20, 2006
The Parade Ends
Paseos por las calles que revientan,
pues las cañerías ya no dan más
por entre edificios que hay que esquivar,
pues se nos vienen encima,
por entre hoscos rostros que nos escrutan y sentencian,
por entre establecimientos cerrados,
mercados cerrados,
cines cerrados,
parques cerrados,
cafeterías cerradas.
Exhibiendo a veces carteles (justificaciones) ya polvorientos,
Cerrado por reformas,
cerrado por reparación.
¿Qué tipo de reparación?
¿Cuándo termina dicha reparación, dicha reforma?
¿Cuándo, por lo menos,
empezará?
Cerrado...cerrado...cerrado...
todo cerrado...
Llego, abro los innumerables candados, subo corriendo la improvisada escalera.
Ahí está, ella, aguardándome.
La descubro, retiro la lona y contemplo sus polvorientas y frías dimensiones.
Le quito el polvo y vuelvo a pasarle la mano.
Con pequeñas palmadas limpio su lomo, su base, sus costados.
Me siento, desesperado, feliz, a su lado, frente a ella,
paso las manos por su teclado, y, rápidamente, todo se pone en marcha.
El ta ta, el tintineo, la música comienza, poco a poco, ya más rápido
ahora, a toda velocidad.
Paredes, árboles, calles,
catedrales, rostros y playas,
celdas, mini celdas,
grandes celdas,
noche estrellada, pies
desnudos, pinares, nubes,
centenares, miles,
un millón de cotorras
taburetes y una enredadera.
Todo acude, todo llega, todos vienen.
Los muros se ensanchan, el techo desaparece y, naturalmente, flotas,
flotas, flotas arrancado, arrastrado,
elevado,
llevado, transportado, eternizado,
salvado, en aras, y,
por esa minúscula y constante cadencia,
por esa música,
por ese ta ta incesante.
–Reinaldo Arenas
pues las cañerías ya no dan más
por entre edificios que hay que esquivar,
pues se nos vienen encima,
por entre hoscos rostros que nos escrutan y sentencian,
por entre establecimientos cerrados,
mercados cerrados,
cines cerrados,
parques cerrados,
cafeterías cerradas.
Exhibiendo a veces carteles (justificaciones) ya polvorientos,
Cerrado por reformas,
cerrado por reparación.
¿Qué tipo de reparación?
¿Cuándo termina dicha reparación, dicha reforma?
¿Cuándo, por lo menos,
empezará?
Cerrado...cerrado...cerrado...
todo cerrado...
Llego, abro los innumerables candados, subo corriendo la improvisada escalera.
Ahí está, ella, aguardándome.
La descubro, retiro la lona y contemplo sus polvorientas y frías dimensiones.
Le quito el polvo y vuelvo a pasarle la mano.
Con pequeñas palmadas limpio su lomo, su base, sus costados.
Me siento, desesperado, feliz, a su lado, frente a ella,
paso las manos por su teclado, y, rápidamente, todo se pone en marcha.
El ta ta, el tintineo, la música comienza, poco a poco, ya más rápido
ahora, a toda velocidad.
Paredes, árboles, calles,
catedrales, rostros y playas,
celdas, mini celdas,
grandes celdas,
noche estrellada, pies
desnudos, pinares, nubes,
centenares, miles,
un millón de cotorras
taburetes y una enredadera.
Todo acude, todo llega, todos vienen.
Los muros se ensanchan, el techo desaparece y, naturalmente, flotas,
flotas, flotas arrancado, arrastrado,
elevado,
llevado, transportado, eternizado,
salvado, en aras, y,
por esa minúscula y constante cadencia,
por esa música,
por ese ta ta incesante.
–Reinaldo Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas [excerpt]
"Esa tarde me fui para mi casa caminando, llegué al cuarto, y seguí escribiendo un poema. Era un poema largo que se titulaba "Morir en junio y con la lengua fuera". A los pocos días tuve que interrumpir mi poema, pues alguien me había entrado por la ventana del cuarto y me había robado la máquina de escribir. Fue un robo serio, porque para mí aquella máquina de escribir era no sólo la única pertenencia de valor que tenía en aquel cuarto, sino el objeto más preciado con el que yo podía contar. Sentarme a escribir era, y aún lo sigue siendo, algo extraordinario; yo me inspiraba (como un pianista) en el ritmo de aquellas teclas y ellas mismas me llevaban. Los párrafos se sucedían unos a otros como el oleaje del mar; una veces más intensos y otras menos; otras veces como ondas gigantescas que cubrían páginas y páginas sin llegar a un punto y aparte. Mi máquina era una Underwood vieja y de hierro, pero constituía para mí un instrumento mágico"
TO A HAZEL TREE
You do not recognize me, but it’s me all the same,
The one who used to make my bows by cutting your brown
branches,
So straight and so swift in their reaching for the sun.
You grew large, your shade is huge, you send up new shoots.
It’s a pity I’m not a boy anymore.
Now I could cut for myself only a stick, for, as you see, I walk with a
cane.
I loved your brown bark with its whitish tinge, its true hazel color.
I’m glad that some oaks and ashes have survived,
But I rejoice at seeing you, magical as always, with the pearls of your
nuts
With the generations of squirrels that have danced in you.
This is something of a Heraclitean meditation: I stand here
Remembering my bygone self and life as it was but also as it could
have been.
Nothing lasts, but everything lasts: a great stability,
And I try to locate my destiny in it.
Which, in truth, I did not want to accept.
I was happy with my bow stalking at the edge of a fairy tale.
What happened to me later deserves no more than a shrug;
It is only biography, i.e., fiction.
POSTSCRIPTUM
Biography or fiction or a long dream.
Layers of white clouds on a fragment of sky between the brightness of
the birches.
A vineyard, yellow and rusty in the approaching dusk.
For a short time I was a servant and a wanderer.
Released, I come back by a never-taken road.
–Czeslaw Milosz; This, 2000
The one who used to make my bows by cutting your brown
branches,
So straight and so swift in their reaching for the sun.
You grew large, your shade is huge, you send up new shoots.
It’s a pity I’m not a boy anymore.
Now I could cut for myself only a stick, for, as you see, I walk with a
cane.
I loved your brown bark with its whitish tinge, its true hazel color.
I’m glad that some oaks and ashes have survived,
But I rejoice at seeing you, magical as always, with the pearls of your
nuts
With the generations of squirrels that have danced in you.
This is something of a Heraclitean meditation: I stand here
Remembering my bygone self and life as it was but also as it could
have been.
Nothing lasts, but everything lasts: a great stability,
And I try to locate my destiny in it.
Which, in truth, I did not want to accept.
I was happy with my bow stalking at the edge of a fairy tale.
What happened to me later deserves no more than a shrug;
It is only biography, i.e., fiction.
POSTSCRIPTUM
Biography or fiction or a long dream.
Layers of white clouds on a fragment of sky between the brightness of
the birches.
A vineyard, yellow and rusty in the approaching dusk.
For a short time I was a servant and a wanderer.
Released, I come back by a never-taken road.
–Czeslaw Milosz; This, 2000
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