Антология - Поети A - B-D - E-I - J-L - M - N-S
Tadeusz Pióro
SOME METHODS OF CROWD CONTROL
The bells are ringing, shouldn’t we kneel?
As for me, I’m all for a pint,
let the children be taken shopping.
They need trousseaus, one and all,
before the war goes bust, said the minister,
making me blush and squirm
for an hour in front of the telly.
The landlady asked about dreams
and I told my first lie involving
three dogs and a swarm of bees.
My parents are very poor, they wrapped my body
in straw, then who knows what bliss
as long as we kill the mayor
who thinks we know nothing.
I spoke of my murky life and her eyes
responded in kind, as if there were no choice
between innocence and experience.
A hundred feelings pressed upon my heart.
So often is the enemy politically neutral
due to natural faithlessness and boredom
en route. Twice two makes death
and you talk of some route.
Impress your fellow travellers, dress smart,
don’t get wet, all the children will wave
and frighten flies away with their hats.
I spoke of death to the children
with an ease granted by profound conviction.
They did their best to go somewhere
and we all fit into the pantry
after a suitable interval.
That’s where only sinful books are read.
For fear of police raids, poets follow politicians,
making their lives into well-managed works of art,
encoded and hidden in any old glove. Couriers come
from the city regardless, men hang their rifles
on trees, young people play a game of flowers
trendy in the Dark Ages. I could have shot you like a fairy
princess in Venice, where Liszt
had his gloves chewed up by groupies,
and his shins, and trouser legs.
An Englishman salvaged the cufflinks,
but we are unsure what that means.
A handsome secretary with a cigarette
might know, but is sure never to tell
my father-in-law how attractive you are,
sleepless in suburban areas or large
plots of land known as graveyards,
where the dead are frequently buried
and village churches stand proximate.
So how is it a lover of Paris
ran for the boondocks?
Was it her mother or our last kiss?
Will it be fair, my son?
The road is bad and wet.
All drink together, curse and patrol.
There is silence behind closed doors.
No smoking, no soft radio moans,
no drumming of fingers on sills,
no Ronsard. Scare or wipe out.
Both our cannons are in danger.
The barmaid’s eyes dispatched me
to a small town ignored by novelists.
We arrived by train in moonlight,
emitting moral hints from spike-tips,
ashamed of the hour and that beastly bliss.
My second-in-command, a modest man
of seven acres, burdened by contraband
family, bombarded by things and allegories,
grew impatient with Homer as I read him.
Who are we reading for? Let’s meet
the actresses and pay their expenses.
Please, not today, they are too much moved,
they’d think we’re sleepwalking
and choose a gypsy life in New York City.
Harder to know why there is so much gold
underground, if you would just dig a little,
encouraging the young ones with your fingers?
Where do the police find their brains?
Blink three times if they suit you.
Privates and NCOs are to masturbate
in such situations, but we lack
the manpower to make sure they do
unflinchingly, and the buffeted, lip-smacking squirrels
making eyes at wild strawberries
never leave their sights.
Very funny, as long as we don’t leave
the graveyard, for there is nothing like nature
if you stay single and don’t panic.
A saner man would simply go to Paris.
Her dad played the guitar,
delivered flowers to police stations,
which is partly true, but some vases
were needlessly annihilated
in a matter of hours.
tr. the author
William Shakespeare
SONNET 106
When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
Tamás Prágai
AN EMPTY MONTH
This is an empty month, between February and March,
something is out of joint
again and, all the time, something leaves me, red letter
calendar pages fall
out of it and bloody tampons, between February and March, it almost
steams of haste, to be back on the stage—
I remember the taste of your skin on my tongue, but a crying
man falls out of me, his back and shoulders burning,
might be a stuntman on escape practice
out of a house on fire that would collapse and be mud;
I still cannot wish you get off with someone else,
but that time is coming. Taste of blackberry and salted almonds,
the gutter is dripping, like our cry
under the excited, ticking roofs, that little snow
melts, smoked, disappeared
and fading away between February and March,
through the emptiest month, we are due to lack
all things, temperature rising, wet springtime—
the burning eyesight keeps on falling,
the eyesight that before was pure poetry, exaggerated vision,
now crashes on the pavement and turns out, empty
it is and always has been, bursts the transparent bubble with the ivy veins…
in and out is the same. You peel the dark bulb of the heart
in an empty room, among white tiles. A kind of freedom.
tr. the author
Attila Végh
I AM THE EVENING
I live among you, but I don’t care about you,
a ghost: swinging in your rooms,
I fall, hair in your soups,
I twist your trained words,
the world twists anywhere I go,
grinning I give the start signal
on the kitchen ski-slope,
I am the guard at all accidents,
I cry from all taps,
you pour out all babies with me,
my faint shade disappears wobbling
in the room of hopelessness,
and I never leave,
but neither come back in the evening,
because I am the evening,
burn all lights,
you won’t be eaten up by the furnished dawn,
pay all the electricity bills,
I will bring the bill of the night,
I leek out of the cracks of stories,
I melt through the walls of the obtained holiday,
because I am the evening,
a furious, faithless, strange dead body,
bells toll when I air the rooms,
the soul tolls that time,
when I watch TV, the fingers of
a garden oak knock on the window quietly,
yes, things still keep on changing a bit,
but calm down, my beloved ones,
the time is coming soon
when all things will be the same.
tr. Barbara Bércesi & Tamás Prágai
Tariel Chanturia
A DISAPPOINTED THOUGHT
A poem needs a heart. A poem needs a liver.
A poem needs a tear, and plenty of your blood.
A poem needs a leg. A poem needs a hand.
A poem needs a brain and a forehead as well.
A poem needs dollars. Roubles are also needed.
True poetry needs sex. And a poem comes next.
A poem needs fury. A poem needs a fist.
A poem needs Barbie for a granddaughter’s smile.
A poem needs wine, fruits and vitamins as well.
Plenty of sleepless nights and from time to time a nap.
A poem needs anger. A poem needs poison.
Centuries (a lot), and a couple of seconds.
Surely, at night—surely, at noon,
Devotion of somebody’s, devotion of yours.
A poem needs poetry. A poem needs candies.
A poem needs honesty.
A poem needs cedar. A poem needs oak.
A poem needs a heart and a bullet in that heart.
A poem needs a mountain. A poem needs a valley.
A poem needs a wife (sometimes a second wife).
A poem needs a breast and a dagger through that breast.
A long and quiet sleep. A dead mom’s lullaby—so sweet.
A poem needs sheep and a shepherd for that sheep.
I know what a poem needs,
Have no idea who needs a poem.
tr. Manana Dumbadze
Emily Dickinson
I DIED FOR BEAUTY, BUT WAS SCARCE
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
‘For beauty,’ I replied.
‘And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethren are,’ he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
Timothy Donnelly
TO HIS DEBT
Where would I be without you, massive shadow
dressed in numbers, when without you there
behind me, I wouldn’t be myself. What wealth
could ever offer loyalty like yours, my measurement,
my history, my backdrop against which every
coffee and kerplunk, when all the giddy whoring
around abroad and after the more money money
wants is among the first things you prevent.
My phantom, my crevasse—my emphatically
unfunny hippopotamus, you take my last red cent
and drag it down into the muck of you, my
sassafras, my Timbuktu, you who put the kibosh
on fine dining and home theater, dentistry and work
my head into a lather, throw my ever-beaten
back against a mattress of intractable topography
and chew. Make death with me: my sugar
boat set loose on caustic indigo, my circumstance
dissolving, even then—how could solvency
hope to come between us, when even when I dream
I awaken in an unmarked pocket of the earth
without you there—there you are, supernaturally
redoubling over my shoulder like the living
wage I never make, but whose image I will always
cling to in the negative, hanged up by the feet
among the mineral about me famished like a bat
whose custom it is to make much of my neck.
Thomas Campion
THE CYPRESS CURTAIN OF THE NIGHT
The
Cypress curtain of the night is spread,
And over all a silent dew is cast.
The weaker cares by sleep are conquered;
But I alone, with hideous grief, aghast,
In spite of Morpheus’ charms, a watch do keep
Over mine eyes, to banish careless sleep.
Yet oft my trembling eyes through faintness close,
And then the Map of hell before me stands,
Which Ghosts do see, and I am one of those
Ordained to pine in sorrow’s endless bands,
Since from my wretched soul all hopes are reft,
And now no cause of life to me is left.
Grief, seize my soul, for that will still endure
When my crazed body is consumed and gone,
Bear it to thy black den, there keep it sure,
Where thou ten thousand souls dost tire upon.
But all do not afford such food to thee
As this poor one, the worser part of me.
THE WOUNDS OF FREEDOM
Some buy leather leads for dogs of a definite length. Others prefer automatic leads with a reel. You let the dog run at will but you decide when to retrieve it. I set mine free. But two or three times it ran away and came back covered in wounds, so now I set it free but only in my yard. My dog howls at the squirrels, in the evening at the moon. And when we pile firewood next to the fence it climbs up and jumps over it. And again comes back with wounds. After that I decided to keep it on a chain. For my dog to be free of wounds.
tr. Jonathan Dunne
C. P. Cavafy
ITHAKA
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
tr. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard
Tua Forsström
THE SNOW WHIRLS OVER TENALA CHURCHYARD
The snow whirls over
Tenala churchyard
We light candles so that
the dead will be less
lonely, we believe they are
subject to the same laws
as ourselves. The lights twinkle restlessly:
perhaps the dead are longing for
company, we know nothing of
their doings, the snow whirls
The dead are silent as cotton.
A flock of thin children who
inaudibly take one step nearer
They look at us closely for a
moment: is it because they’ve
forgotten, or remember? The snow
whirls over Tenala churchyard
As when you fly in
over a city at night at
low altitude: the lights become
motorways, the headlamps of
the traffic, you arrive
from somewhere
Soon you are driving along a
road, one of the twinkling
lights in the whirling snow
tr. David McDuff
Jane Hirshfield
IT WAS LIKE THIS: YOU WERE HAPPY
It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.
It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.
At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?
Now it is almost over.
Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.
It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.
Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.
It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.
Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.
Uwe Kolbe
INGREDIENTS OF SLEEPLESSNESS
It was the gnat, I heard it.
And it was—didn’t the grass grow there
between two wars?
It was similar to the reason why I seriously left the city
for the first time.
And it was that love refused
to be as simple as a flick of the wrist,
beautiful like a word game,
funny and inexplicable, like the attacking
cat which, after the attack, continues
to walk elegantly, at a moderate pace, or
to clean itself, licking its paw with its tongue,
then stroking the back of its head with its wet paw,
with this inimitable care.
It was that the noise of my city
destroys the remains of the old plaster,
tips the last grey-brown
of the fire wall on to the monstrous lorry
that nearly ran me over yesterday.
It was that remnants of the former certainty
decomposed each other, the new one
remains private, the heavily pounding heart
—in our part of the world this is the result
of excessive consumption.