Антология - Поети N-S - T-Z - A - B-D - E-I - J-L
Manuel Rivas
THE BLACK EARTH
If I speak, I will speak to the earth.
The real earth,
the black earth
where the root takes.
The earth that is trodden on.
The earth that is burnt and nailed.
That huge canvas where man draws his caprice.
Where man is lost and writhes in shadows.
The black earth,
that body of an old whore with tobacco-stained teeth
and bags so blue they’re black.
If I speak, I will speak only to her
and I’ll speak with my hands,
gently with my nails,
with a lover’s passion,
the way wounded boars speak when they glimpse death.
If I speak, I will speak to the earth.
To the earth, that black earth
that spits up springs like blood.
tr. Jonathan Dunne
Rosalía de Castro
BLACK SHADOW
When I think that you have gone,
black shadow who amaze me,
you come again to my bedside
and there you make fun of me.
When I sense that you’re not here,
you are revealed in the sun,
and you are the star that shines,
and you are the wind that hums.
A song, it is you who sing;
a cry, it is you who mourn;
and you’re the murmuring river,
and you’re the night and the dawn.
You are all and are in everything,
you live for and stay with me,
you will never let me go,
shadow hanging over me.
tr. Jonathan Dunne
Marcelo Pellegrini
THE LINE
That four-year-old—
she was born singing this song:
Ayayayay canta y no llores
porque cantando se alegran
cielito lindo los corazones
Eyes of the storm
here on the border:
Peuple de Tijuana,
no pasarán
But she won’t sing, she’s crying
on a bridge over the dry river
like us all and like you.
Trooping through the Revolución
I never met my love.
light within light
tracing the line.
tr. John Felstiner
Rubén Darío
SONATINA
The princess is sad… what’s wrong with the princess?
From strawberry mouth come her sighs of distress.
She’s lost her gay smiles, they’ve lost their sweet blushes,
the princess is pale on her throne of pure gold.
The keyboard is mute on her dear harpsichord;
in vase forgotten, a limp flower hushes.
With triumph of peacocks the garden is full,
Parlancha, the duenna, says things that are dull,
and, dressed in scarlet, the lithe jesters parade.
The princess won’t laugh, the princess feels nothing.
Through orient skies, the princess is hunting
the vague dragonfly of illusion so vague.
By chance does she muse the bright prince of Carthage,
or the one who halts his argentine carriage
to see her eyes fill with the sweetness of light?
Or is it the king of the Isle of Corals,
maybe the sovereign of the dazzling opals,
perchance the proud lord of the Burmese jadeite?
Oh! The poor princess, her red pout so feeble,
wants to be a lark, wants to be an eagle,
to feel her wings light, and soar beneath the sky,
to fly to the sun, scale a luminous ray,
greet all the lilies with the verses of May,
and vanish in winds o’er the sea’s thund’ring cry.
She no longer wants the palace nor treasures,
nor magic falcons, nor crimson-clad jesters,
nor unanimous swans on indigo lake.
The flowers are sad for the court’s sweetest flow’r;
orient jasmine, the northern sunflower,
occident dahlia and the southern mandrake.
Poor little princess with clear eyes of sapphires!
Imprisoned in gold, she’s a prisoner of lyres
in the ivory cage of a royal palace,
the haughty castle that guards watch ever more,
that one hundred slaves tend with one hundred swords,
with greyhound alert and dragon of malice.
If only she’d hatch from this stiff chrysalis.
(The princess is sad. The princess is whitish.)
Oh, adored vision of gold, rose and marble!
If only she’d fly to lands with a gallant
(The princess is sad. The princess is pallid.)
more brilliant than dawn, more handsome than April!
‘Hush, princess, hush,’ her fairy godmother says,
‘already on great, winged horse he approaches.
With sword at his hip, goshawk ready on glove,
he knows you not, yet the glad knight adores you;
he comes from afar and has vanquished Death too,
to burnish your lips with his fire-kiss of love!’
tr. Sarah Moody
María do Cebreiro
LOVE POEM
Love in Galician is Amor, the name of a small group of asteroids travelling at less than 1.3 au from the Sun. There are around 500 of them. The likelihood of a collision with the Earth is 0.001 per million years.
How does the stain spread?
Same as love.
To deny blue is not just to name it.
Impossible now to talk of the sea.
Old and young linger over the furrows.
Skin then erases skin
to hide its vulnerable parts
or drops blanks here and there.
Away from land time embraces time.
When ships burst, the universe hesitates.
Footprints warm the moonlight.
Galaxies expand.
A few black holes learn to talk.
The conquest of space can be reversed.
Empires have no interior.
Only outside time does blue occur.
tr. Jonathan Dunne
José Watanabe
THE ICE GUARDIAN
We met in the dust bowl,
the ice man with his faulty trolley
and I chasing the birds
fleeing from the harvest fire.
The sun was there as well.
In such circumstances I couldn’t refuse his simple request
to look after his transient ice.
How to look after what runs in the sun?
The ice began to melt
in my desperate, ineffectual
shadow.
As it dissolved,
it drew slender, primordial figures
firm as quartz glass
for a second,
at once pure forms
as of a mountain or
devastated planet.
You cannot love what runs away so quickly.
‘Do it quickly,’ said the sun.
And so I learnt in his perverse, burning kingdom
to comply with life:
I am the ice guardian.
tr. Jonathan Dunne
María Negroni
XIII
(diavolo in musica)
¡Oh Noche amable más que la alborada!
San Juan de la Cruz
I—me—more—far
God—night—sea—die
what’s that?
Emily Dickinson’s favorite
words
and what’s the meaning of
corpus paradissum?
to throw yourself in a river
with a pocketful of stones
that’s how it goes
poetry can lead you
just about anywhere
I do what I can—said death
once there was
an image
instead of hands it had night
instead of a face a bridge
from nowhere to nowhere
my love it’s not easy
to open your legs
different to say
I love you you love me he loves me
I don’t get it
what?
this little eternity
in sheep’s clothing
oh Strange Strange Desire
how do you say in English
only my death will never leave me?
here’s
the absolute music
one two three
here I come ready or not
and what if there is no wolf?
not even a winding
road
a somersault
a queen?
ANYTHING?
you go girl—said death
keep at it and you’ll write
the tenth canto of Paradiso?
no silly
postcards
from the foreign city
oh Socrates
this is how it ends
expelled into the world
variations on never
like saying the river
of time and its opposite
and then listening to stones
I me
more die
so that not-being comes to be
tr. Anne Twitty
Susana Thénon
NUPTIAL SONG
I have
married
I have married myself
I’ve said yes
a yes that took years to arrive
years of unspeakable suffering
of crying with the rain
of shutting myself in my room
because I—the great love of my existence—
did not call myself
did not write myself
did not visit myself
and at times
when I’d get up the courage to call myself
to say ‘hello, am I well?’
I wouldn’t come to the phone
I even
put myself
on a list of pains-in-the-neck
I didn’t want to talk with
because they drove me nuts
because they wouldn’t let me alone
because they backed me into corners
because I couldn’t stand them
in the end I didn’t even pretend
when I asked if I was there
I let myself know
tactfully
that I was fed up with myself
and one day I stopped calling myself
and stopped calling myself
and so much time
went by that I missed me
so I said
how long has it been since I called?
ages
it must be ages
and I called myself and I answered
and I couldn’t believe it
because though it’s hard to believe
I hadn’t healed
I’d only been bleeding
then I said ‘hello, is that me?’
It’s me, I said, and added:
It’s been a long time since we heard
I of myself or myself of me
would I
like to come over?
yes, I said
and we
met again
in peace
and I felt good
with myself
and myself as well
felt good with me
and so
day after day
I married and I married
and I am together
and not even Death can me part
tr. María Negroni & Anne Twitty
Marilyn Hacker
GLOSE
Blood’s risks, its hollows, its flames
Exchanged for the pull of that song
Bone-colored road, bone-colored sky
Through the white days of the storm.
Claire Malroux
Once out of the grip of desire
or, if you prefer, its embrace,
free to do nothing more than admire
the sculptural planes of a face
(are you gay, straight or bi, are you queer?),
you still tell your old chaplet of names
which were numinous once, you replace
them with adjectives: witty, severe,
trilingual; abstracting blood’s claims,
blood’s risks, its hollows, its flames.
No craving, no yearning, no doubt,
no repulsion that follows release,
no presence you can’t do without,
no absence an hour can’t erase:
the conviction no reason could rout
of being essentially wrong
is dispelled. What feels oddly like peace
now fills space you had blathered about
where the nights were too short or too long,
exchanged for the pull of that song.
But peace requires more than one creature
released from the habit of craving
on a planet that’s mortgaged its future
to the lot who are plotting and raving.
There are rifts which no surgeon can suture
overhead, in the street, undersea.
The bleak plain from which you are waving,
mapped by no wise, benevolent teacher,
is not a delight to the eye:
bone-colored road, bone-colored sky.
You know that the weather has changed,
yet do not know what to expect,
with relevant figures expunged
and predictions at best incorrect.
Who knows on what line you’ll be ranged
and who, in what cause, you will harm?
What cabal or junta or sect
has doctored the headlines, arranged
for perpetual cries of alarm
through the white days of the storm?
Claire Malroux
STORM
Through the white days of the storm
Bone-colored road, bone-colored sky
High vessels, swaying in place
With flanks open wide to the foe
The perfidious Piper—the same
One who drew young leaves out with his flute
From their seeping, motherly jail
In his wake, flowers and fruits,
Blackbirds, canticles, prophecies
Duets and duels of the sun and moon
The snow’s caress, fur of forgetfulness
And the children circling the masts
Plunging entranced toward the routs
Blood’s risks, its hollows, its flames
Exchanged for the pull of that song
Bone-colored road, bone-colored sky
Through the white days of the storm.
tr. Marilyn Hacker
Marko Vešović
IN THE EVENING YOU LIE DOWN IN BED
and you know you are lying down in vain: tomorrow you will get up still more enervated than when you lay down. In the morning you get up from bed and you know that you are getting up in vain: yesterday’s day is awaiting you, with yesterday’s stress.
With the humiliations of the day before yesterday. With the despair of the day before that.
This siege has been going on not for two years but for a single day that has no end.
From this I could find rest, it seems to me,
Only by the sea. And who knows if we will ever see it again?
Will I ever again be able to stand on those cliffs
Where the air currents are so strong they
Return the cap you threw?!
But I do not long, this time, for the sea with the fleshy
Leaves of agaves in which the names
Of love are carved. For the olive trees feverishly
Twisted like green Laocoons. For the hats of jellyfish
That look like silken tents from Oriental
Tales. I do not long for the monotony of waves which the poet compares
To Homer’s metrics. I do not long for that ink
With which one could write billions and billions of
Iliads and Odysseys.
I long for that sadness that
Comes over you when, looking at the eternal blueness,
You listen to the murmur of that eternity.
For the sadness that tells you that you have a soul again.
Maybe not even for that sadness, but I long for that magnificent
And balmy emptiness.
To plunge the soul into the emptiness that relaxes.
That heals and rejuvenates. To stare for hours not even at the open seas,
Nor above the open seas, but—just so! The Bosnian way. Until you
forget
Both what you are and where you are and where you’re from and what your name is.
The only thing you know is that within you are—miles and miles of emptiness.
And that the sea’s vastness has sucked out of you
All the centuries, all the way to Adam. The blue emptiness stretches
To the end of the world and, backwards, to its beginning.
And you grasp—actually, you don’t grasp, you feel it on your palate—
The sweetness that will take over after Judgment Day!
Everything will be obliterated, like a child’s scribble on a blackboard,
And only pure rapture will remain!
So you taste ahead of time, albeit with a teaspoon only,
The bliss the world will explode in!
tr. Omer Hadžiselimović
W. H. Auden, MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS
IMPLICATIONS FOR MODERN LIFE
The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets in the blood-red road. I’ll put the calves in coats so the ravens can’t gore them, bandage up the cut gate & when the wind rustles its muscles, I’ll gather the seeds and burn them. But then I see a horse lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you fresh hay.
Tomas Tranströmer
SUMMER MEADOW
There’s so much we must be witness to.
Reality wears us so thin
but here is summer at last: