The Best American Poetry

Arthur Rainbow Salutes the Dawn

Ed. note: Wayne Terwilliger, our Paris correspondent, passed along Jacques Martin's translation of a sonnet by Arthur Rainbow, the pseudonym of a Franco-American poet keeping a low profile on the Ile St Louis. Art by Albert York, second cousin of the poet's last living relative, the Duchess of York.

Rimbaud, According to Rambo 

Stop those drugs from reaching American soil.
Clean up San Francisco and let Tony Bennett sing.
Let freedom ring. I have nothing to offer but toil,
blood, sweat, and tears. What goes up, must come down.

Poetry is like Africa but less exciting.
I don't see the point of writing poems or going to town
where the cafes, teeming with tits, try their best to fling
their gadgets in your face. The principles are the frown

on the face of the portrait of a poker player
who learned church Latin in the provinces of France.
Nevertheless the queen couldn't tell off the mayor

because neither of them learned to dance
because they abolished the dance in all its elegance
because life was a game contrived by chance.

-- Arthur Rainbow

"God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children" [by Yehuda Amichai]

God has Pity on Kindergarten Children

God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first–aid station
covered with blood.

But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.

Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of charity
that Mother handed down to us
so that their happiness may protect us
now and on other days.

-- Yehuda Amichai

This is a grand and famous poem. Does anyone know whose translation I have reproduced here? This is not a quiz. I have found several versions, but in none of them are the translators credited.

-- DL

Two Translations of Rabelais: Required Reading

<<When the Feat of the Loose-Coat Skirmish happeneth to be done underhand and privily, between two well-disposed, athwart the Steps of a Pair of Stairs, lurkingly, and in covert, behind a Suit of Hangings, or close hid and trussed upon an unbound Faggot, it is more pleasing to the Cyprian Goddess, (and to me also, I speak this without prejudice to any better or more sound Opinion) than to perform the Culbusting Art, after the Cynick manner, in the view of the clear Sunshine— >> -- trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart 

<<
The little business [la chosette] performed on the sly, between two closed doors, across the stairs, behind the tapestry, on a pile of loose kindling, is more pleasing to the Cyprian goddess (and that’s where I stand, without prejudice to higher authority), than performed in view of the sun, Cynic style—

trans. Donald Frame
>>

<<“You’ll be a cuckold, my fine fellow, I assure you, you’ll have beautiful horns. Heh, heh, heh, our own Master de Cornibus, God preserve you! . . .” “The other way around” said Panurge, “my dream presages that in my marriage I’ll have all goods in plenty together with the horn of abundance. You’ll say they’ll be satyr’s horns. Amen [to that]! . . . Thus I’d eternally have my gimlet at the ready and indefatigable, as the satyrs have. . . . In consequence, a cuckold never, for the lack of that is the cause sine qua non, the sole cause of making husbands cuckolds.”

trans. Donald Frame
>>

<< “Thou wilt be a cuckold, an honest one, I warrant thee; O the brave horns that will be born by thee! Ha, ha, ha. Our good Master de Cornibus, God save thee and shield thee . . .” “You are (quoth Panurge) very far mistaken in your Interpretation; for the matter is quite contrary to your sence thereof; my Dream presageth, that I shall by Marriage be stored with plenty of all manner of Goods, the hornifying of me shewing, that I will possess a Cornucopia, that Amalthean Horn, which is called, The Horn of Abundance . . . You possibly will say, that they are rather like to be Satyrs Horns; Amen, Amen . . . Thus I shall have my Touch-her-home still ready; my Staff of Love sempiternally in a good case, will, Satyr-like, be never toyled out . . . Hence doth it follow by a consequence as clear as the Sun-beams, that I will never be in the danger of being made a Cuckold, for the defect hereof is, Causa sine qua non; yea, the sole cause (as many think) of making Husbands Cuckolds.”>> -- trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart 

See "Pantagruelism for our Time" by D. S. Carne Ross

On Yehuda Amichai, as translated by Chana Bloch [by Joshua November]

 “And I Will Dwell Amongst Them, Amongst Each One:” The Individual Life as a Sanctuary in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

A personal tribute to Chana Bloch, key translator of Amichai’s poems

Author’s note: The following essay was inspired by my recent participation in an AWP panel honoring Chana Bloch. Panelists were invited to consider Chana Bloch’s influence on their own poetry.

--By Yehoshua November

As an undergraduate at SUNY Binghamton, I studied under the poet Ruth Stone. During my first workshop turn, she announced to the class that my poem sounded like a translation, albeit not a bad one.  Confused and embarrassed, I returned to my college apartment.  On my desk, I spied a copy of the first poetry collection I had ever purchased, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the second section of the book composed of Chana Bloch’s translations of Israel’s leading poet.   This was 1999.  Amichai would pass away one year later, a few short months after the publication of Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation of his final volume, Open Closed Open. I had just entered a relationship with—and began writing poems devoted to—a dark-haired young woman with a space between her front teeth, the woman I would marry less than two years later.

This is to say, from the outset, even when I was unaware of it, my poetry and personal life have been significantly shaped by Chana Bloch’s translation work.  Perhaps, as a side note, I should admit that, despite my Jewish day-school upbringing, I had managed to spend enough time on baseball cards, reruns of MacGyver, and other unspecified pursuits to manage not mastering modern Hebrew. Certainly not well enough, at the time, to read Amichai’s poetry in its original language. Thus, for me, like so many, Bloch served as the access point to one of the greatest poets of the last century. 

Several years ago, I attended a poetry reading by the recently deceased Polish poet Adam Zagajewksi.  When asked what was lost in reading his poems as translations, he said, “Nothing. I feel, even as they are rendered in English, these are my poems.”  As a devoted non-Polish speaking fan of Zagajewski, this answer felt like a fantasy fulfilled.  According to Bloch and her co-translator Chana Kronfeld, the same may not hold true in the case of Amichai translations.  As Bloch and Kronfed point out in an essay on translating Amichai’s final poetry collection[1], much of Amichai’s puns and word associations go unrepresented when rendered in other languages.  They add that modern Hebrew is a kind of “echo chamber” of its Biblical precursor so that everyday contemporary speech resounds with meanings rooted in antiquity.  They point, for example, to the Hebrew word shem, which translates as name. The plural form of the word, Shemos (names), serves as the Hebrew title of the second book of the Torah (referred to in English as the book of Exodus). Shem also brings to mind Hashem, an informal title for the Divine, a way to refer to God without mentioning one of the sacred, un-erasable names.

Given the absence of the rich diction that flavors Amichai’s original Hebrew, Bloch and Kronfeld wonder at Amichai’s popularity amongst his non-Hebrew speaking readers. [2]They conclude that he “crosses the language barrier” because “[h]is images make poetry out of the non-poetic things of ordinary life” and because he “makes a virtue of accessibility.”  In introducing one of my poems included in The New York Times Magazine—the one time I enjoyed this distinction--Matthew Zapruder noted that my poetry is characterized by “radical clarity.” As a Chassidic Jew, being called radical in the largely secular poetry world did not come as a surprise to me; however, I never imagined the accessibility of my poetics would be the reason.  Is my poetry really radically clear?  And if so, how did I arrive at this atypical aesthetic?   Is Amichai’s work—exceedingly accessible poetry further simplified when translation strips it of association and word play—also radically clear?  Perhaps Ruth Stone’s observation about my student poetry as a kind of translation has remained largely applicable.  If it’s true my poetry is more accessible than that of many of my contemporaries, perhaps, at least in part, this is due to many years of reading Bloch’s translations of Amichai. It’s strange and pleasurable to think this may be the case.    Interestingly, in a tribute to his mother, Jonathan Bloch writes[3], “When I was a child, [my mother] wrote the word ‘clarity’ in black marker on an index card and taped it to the wall above her typewriter, where she would see it when she looked up from writing. I remember seeing that index card with the word clarity, in fading marker, hanging there for many years. I think that clarity was her lifeline, to the end.”

Looking back, it’s not hard to trace a number of my poems’ rhetorical underpinnings to Bloch’s translations of Amichai.  Employing the language of negation in “When I Banged My Head on the Door, Amichai writes[4], and Bloch translates, “…and I didn’t scream ‘Mama’ and I didn’t scream ‘God.’/ And I didn’t prophesy a world at the end of Days/ where there will be no more heads and doors.”  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it’s more than likely this same language of negation, and particularly negation of spiritual idealism, that sparked or pushed along my poem “I Made a Decision,” which reads:

Once, before either of us was twenty,

in the cafeteria, I watched your mouth

enclose itself around a plum.

Because I was young and you were beautiful,

I did not say, This is just a physical body nourishing itself.

And I did not say, Perhaps this is the other half of my soul.

I made a decision with a young man’s body,

and my soul continues to thank me.

Aside from questions of craft, a recent tribute to Bloch I participated in asked its panelists to consider Bloch’s exploration of her Jewish faith and her desire to examine what she called “the inner life.” Here, too, I think it’s instructive to return to Bloch’s translations of Amichai. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, Amichai departed from a life of tradition as an adult. One finds no shortage of poems doubting the Divine in his body of work. In this spirit, Bloch and Kronfeld note[5], “Amichai’s reception outside Israel has tended to oversimplify the meaning of his work, blunt his irony, and even—so help us!—present him as a poet of fuzzy feel good religiosity.”

Yet, I think a traditional Jew, especially a Chasidic Jew such as myself, can find Amichai relevant and compelling, even without overlooking or distorting his iconoclast streak.   This is because Amichai’s work echoes a central Jewish theology relevant to notions of the inner world and Jewish faith. Or at least his work offers a secular iteration of that theology.  [6]As Chassidic and Midrashic teachings point out, the Divine instruction to build the Tabernacle, and by extension the Holy Temple, reads[7], “Make a sanctuary for Me, and I will dwell in them.”  In the verse, the Divine voice does not note, “I will dwell in it,” as grammar would dictate. Rather, it states, “I will dwell in them,” in each one, implying that true construction of a Sanctuary entails each individual sanctifying the ordinary moments of his or her life, locating holiness in the mundane.   For this reason, and in contrast to ascetic religions, traditional Jewish practices engage the body and the world.  According to the Jewish mystics, each time a Divine command is performed with a physical object—and Judaism abounds with such commands—divine light, Or Ein Sof, is drawn down to, and absorbed by, the item in use.  Surprisingly, in this theology, one’s body and its daily undertakings constitute a kind of Divine Temple, especially when acts are carried out with Divine purpose.  And, in a sense, the Temple the individual creates proves more central to daily life than the larger structure of the communal Holy Temple.  

The ambition to sanctify the quotidian is present in much of contemporary poetry, but few poets seem to see the body and the individual life as a kind of sanctuary to the extent that Amichai does. Or in Amichai’s secular iteration, the interior world of memory seems just as important as larger real-world history and geography.  In this sense, the personal and historical, the interior and outer worlds, compete, coalesce, and get conflated, recalling the Jewish theology of the literal communal temple structure and the idiosyncratic temple of each individual life. Given Bloch’s focus on the inner world and Jewish faith, it’s not surprising she was drawn to and served as a leading translator of Amichai’s poetry.  Let me close with a Bloch translation of an Amichai poem which appears to best represent the individual-life-as-temple ethos.  Significantly, in the poem, Amichai refers to David’s Citadel, a Herodian tower in Jerusalem whose name calls to mind the Holy Temple, which, in the Song of Songs, another work Bloch co-translated, is also referred to as David’s Citadel. Here, quite literally, Amichai, like the Midrashic-Chassidic teachings, prioritizes the individual human temple of daily life over the larger historical structures: 

A prose poem from "Tourists,"[8] by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch 

2

Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down

my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their 

guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with

the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman 

period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said 

to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch 

over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the 

left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables 

for his family."

Photos: Amichai above; Chana Bloch below

On Apollinaire's Birthday [by David Lehman]

In the heady days leading up to and including the catastrophe of World War I, when Paris was the capital of modern art, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) stood at the vital center of a gang of writers and artists who embraced the future with such tremendous energy that avant-garde became an adjective of glamour and prestige. Apollinaire—whose circle included painters (Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck) and composers (Satie, Poulenc) as well as poets (Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy)—was a superb activist and agitator. He championed Cubism and gave Surrealism its name. In 1917, his edition of Charles Baudelaire’s poems linked the two men as kindred spirits, city poets who doubled as art critics; Baudelaire prefigured Apollinaire as the latter prefigures Frank O’Hara. Also in 1917, Apollinaire issued his manifesto, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” making the case for innovation as a transcendent value. Poetry had to keep up with the technological advances of the day—the cinema, the radio, the motorcar, the flying machine. Driving with a friend from Deauville to Paris in “La Petite Auto,” Apollinaire writes that “the little car had driven us into a New epoch / and though both of us were grown men / it was as if we had just been born.”

Apollinaire experimented with audacious techniques for generating verse. On occasion he would sit in a café and weave overheard phrases into the composition. For his book Calligrammes, he made shaped poems—poems that looked like a mirror, a heart, the rainfall, a pocket-watch. In his most ambitious discursive poems, he wins over the reader by modifying his self-pity with his wit and ebullience. There is a rare combination of enthusiasm and melancholy in Apollinaire’s self-presentation. A line from his poem “Les Collines” (“The Hills”) is etched into his tombstone at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris: “Je peux mourir en souriant”—“I can die with a smile on my face.” 

“Zone,” the central poem in Apollinaire’s career, prefaces his collection Alcools, the title of which translates literally as “Spirits” in the alcoholic sense though I would argue for “Cocktails.” Alcools is in any case an apt title for one who likes to boast that he has “drunk the universe” and chanted “songs of universal drunkenness.” Published in 1913, the year Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had its Paris premiere, “Zone” is chronologically the last poem in the collection to have been written. The poet was thirty-three years old, the age of Dante embarking on his tour of the afterlife. The poem doesn’t so much praise its objects of futurist desire—the Eiffel Tower, airplanes, a railway terminal—as treat them like pastoral motifs. The heart of the poem is not in the future at all but in a past recollected in anxiety and sadness.

“Zone” heralds a striking new direction in Apollinaire’s work. He discards punctuation to good effect. He refers to himself sometimes as I, sometimes as you (both tu and vous in French), a habit that held a special appeal for O’Hara and other New York poets. The poem’s title embraces (or blends) the meanings of neighborhood, frontier, slum (and slumming), and the female erogenous zone, all of which come into play. (“And I smoke ZONE tobacco,” Apollinaire wrote in a later poem.) Organized around a walk in Paris from one sunrise to another—and from one time zone to another—“Zone” is in loosely rhymed couplets, which presents a difficulty that translators tend to evade. A notable exception is Samuel Beckett in perhaps the most impressive parts of his translation. For example, Beckett renders “C’est le beau lys que tous nous cultivons / C’est la torch aux cheveux roux que n’eteint pas le vent” as “It is the fair lily that we all revere / It is the torch burning in the wind its auburn hair.” In addition to the near-rhyme, Beckett gives us the echo of “burn” in “auburn,” a move that Apollinaire would have appreciated. Kenneth Koch appropriates Apollinaire’s rambling couplets in a nostalgic poem whose title is itself a nod to his influence: “A Time Zone.”

“Zone” has been translated many times, a testament to how well-loved it is among Anglo-Saxon Francophiles. It begins, “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien.” Roger Shattuck translates the line as “You are tired at last of this old world”; Ron Padgett improves on this with “You’re tired of this old world at last.” I cast my vote with Beckett, Charlotte Mandell, and William Meredith, in opting for “In the end” as the poem’s first words, not only because this is the literal sense of the French “A la fin,” but because it lays proper stress on Apollinaire’s audacity in starting with “the end.” It also gives a hint of the poem’s ultimate circularity. Given the iterations of ancien that immediately follow—antiquité, anciennes, and antique all appear in the next six lines—I felt that “the ancient world” came nearer to Apollinaire’s meaning than “this old world.”

A line about refugee families gathered at a train station can stand for many others in the challenge they present to the translator. For “Ils espèrent gagner de l’argent dans l’Argentine,” Oliver Bernard offers the prosaic “They hope to make money in the Argentine.” Anne Hyde Greet goes for the more idiomatic “Hoping to strike it rich in Argentina.” But I wanted to preserve the repeated sound of argent (the French word for money rooted in the word for silver), so I chose the alliterative “They’re hoping to gain some argent in the Argentine.”

The celebrated last line of “Zone,” “soleil cou coupé,” contains a brilliant piece of wordplay that resists the translator’s craft. It’s as if cou (meaning “neck”) is an abbreviated form of coupé (meaning “cut”). The relation between the two words can be said to suggest the action of the sun rising at dawn and appearing as if beheaded by the horizon. The verse has been variously translated as “Decapitated sun—” (William Meredith), “The sun a severed neck” (Roger Shattuck), “Sun corseless head” (Samuel Beckett), “Sun     slit throat” (Anne Hyde Greet), “Sun neck cut” (Charlotte Mandell). Ron Padgett’s “Sun cut throat” cleverly divides the word cutthroat in two. I have opted for “Let the sun beheaded be,” mainly because of the repetition of sounds in the last words. I felt that the relation of “be” to “beheaded” approximated the action in “côu coupé.” 

I discovered “Zone” in my junior year of college and studied it closely when, as a graduate student at Cambridge University, I attended Douglas Parmée’s lectures on French literature and spent a few seasons in Paris. This was in 1971 and 1972. In Paris I lived with this peripatetic poem on such intimate terms that I felt I could hear it in my own voice as I walked from Notre Dame to the Luxembourg Gardens and from there to the cafés of Montparnasse. I made a special trip to the Gare St. Lazare with Apollinaire’s stanza about “ces pauvres émigrants” in my brain. Nevertheless I did not type up a complete draft of my translation until January 1978 when I taught a course at Hamilton College that called for it. After presenting it at a public reading, I let it lie fallow. I worked on the poem often and carefully, if at long intervals, until three years ago when, as a professor at the New School’s graduate writing program, I supervised MFA candidate Ashleigh Allen’s thesis, which focused on Apollinaire and “Zone.” This happy task spurred me to revise my translation yet again. Encouraged by friends, I worked on it some more in summer 2011 and fall 2012. These things take time. The love of the work sustains the effort. 

Apollinaire had too little time. Within a few years of publishing “Zone,” he suffered head wounds at the front in World War I and died of Spanish flu on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice that ended the war. 

Click here for David Lehman's translation of "Zone" in Virginia Quarterly Review.

Attention Internet Editors: Please Credit Your Sources Correctly! [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Last September, our guest author Susan Morrow posted here her translations of Egyptian poetry ancient (Invocation to a Scribe) and modern (The Song of Baramhat) . 

Soon thereafter the site 100 Best Poems picked up Morrow's translation of the Ancient Egyptian poem Invocation to a Scribe and presented it as a contemporary Egyptian poem by the 20th Century Egyptian poet Salah Jahin. This is a mistake and a misattribution, and as the site has not responded to our requests for a correction, we are correcting it here.

On page 276-277 of The Dawning Moon of the Mind (Susan Brind Morrow, The Dawning Moon of The Mind, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) Morrow published her translations of these two Egyptian poems.

The first is an excerpt from her translation of Song of Baramhat by Salah Jahin, the uncle of an old friend of Morrow's, Egyptian novelist Hossam Fahr, who recently retired as head of Arabic translation at the United Nations. Hossam brought Jahin’s work to Morrow's attention in the 1980s, and she published her translation of his poem, Song(s) of Baramhat, in The Seneca Review in 1986. You can find here translations in her post here.

The second poem is Morrow's translation of the well known secular Egyptian New Kingdom poem Invocation to a Scribe. The original hieroglyphic poem is on Chester Beatty Papyrus IV in the British Museum. This hieroglyphic poem has also been translated elsewhere (by Miriam Lichtheim in Ancient Egyptian Literature V. II The New Kingdom, p.175-178, P. Chester Beatty IV = P. British Museum 10684; Sir Alan Gardiner, Hieratic Papyri, 1. p. 38-39; Schott, Liebeslieder p. 155-157;  John Wilson, ANET, 431-432).

Morrow's original work on this hieroglyphic translation is with her papers in the Sowell Collection.

-- sdh

PS. I have shared this post with the editors of 100 Best Poems. Fingers crossed that this time they'll make the correction. 

From "The Cloud in Trousers" (on Mayakovsky's birthday) [trans. by David Lehman]

from Part Four of "The Cloud in Trousers"

Maria! Maria! Maria!
Open up.
It’s cold out here, and the streets are scary.

No? Would you rather see me freeze,
whipped by the wind, stripped,
my skull devoid of my teeth?

Maria, look! I’m shivering! I’m shaking!
and the rain is pelting the pavement,
pelting all of us,
beggars, junkies, winos, bums,
like tears
from the eyes of the drainpipe waterfall.

And thus the rain licked our feet
all of us except for the fatsos
stuffed with goose liver
and with an apple in their mouths
riding in the back seats of expensive carriages.

*

Maria!
Open up.
The mob is breathing down my neck.
Look, they’re attacking my eyes with hatpins!

I’m in.

Maria, I want you
to ignore whatever they say about me
I may have kissed a thousand girls
but you’re this madman’s favorite,
for I’ll gladly admit I’m a mad man,
mad about you.

Maria, I’d love it if you
and I took off all our clothes
and lay, naked and shameless,
or scared, if you prefer,
in bed.

Let me kiss you on the mouth.
On this May day come live with me
in the April of my heart.

Maria!
Poets write sonnets
to the souls of their lovers,
but I am every inch a man
and I want your body as much as
a devout Christian beseeches the Lord
to “give us this day our daily bread.”

Maria,
I confess I’m afraid I’ll forget your name
as a poet is afraid he’ll forget le mot juste
which he has looked for all his life,
the word born in a night to perish in a night,
while the soul glowed in rays of light.

Maria,
I promise you I will love your body
as much as a wounded veteran loves
his one remaining leg.

No? Why no?
But you say no.

Damn.

So once again I’ll have to carry my heart away
as a dog nurses the paw that was crushed by a train.

-- English version by David Lehman

[click here for a section from part II of "The Cloud in Trousers"]

"Thank You for Your Service" [by Thikasa Postz, trans. Alexander Nimrod]

Thank You for Your Service

 

I don't know if I ever tol' you this, but back in the day I went on a t-ball trip to Vietnam with the USO to entertain the troops.  I traveled with some Hollywood stars, comedians, other entertainers like Henry Kissinger.  Anyway, my group included Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda, and a hologram of Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday, Mister President."  We called ourselves the Tit Offensive—well, the women did.  If I called us that, Susan and Jane "fixed my tie."  I think you know what that means.  We had a heavy metal band touring with us—the boys were really into heavy metal over there—called 'Led Museum,' maybe you've heard of them.  Sort of a 'Led Zeppelin' on steroids.  I'm still deaf in one ear after all these years.  You might remember their biggest album, 'Flabby Road,' which was a bunch of anti-war songs about old fat white men sending their sons into battle.  Maybe you've heard their biggest hit, 'In Arms Way'?  About trying to charge the enemy but tripping over all the blown-off arms in the way?  A classic.  Anyway, I would set my pole up on the stage and give a half-hour clinic on t-ball moves.  The GI's loved it!  They were waiting for "the tits," of course, so I was kind of like foreplay for 3000 randy doughboys while they got all hot and bothered.  They really enjoyed the joke.  They'd yell and throw things—rotten fruit, fresh fruit, batteries.  All in good fun, of course.  Anyway, all this came back to me today because I got a letter from the DOD thanking me for my service.  The weird part is, it was sent to my family because the DOD thinks I'm dead.  According to 'the Gummint' (troops from Alabama pronounced 'government' that way, usually because they were lacking several front teeth), I'd died at Dien Bien Phu when a t-ball pole fell on my head and cracked my skull open.  (You know the military—$30M for a fighter plane but they can't set up a decent t-ball pole!)  Anyway, all that was true, but I recovered quite nicely at Walter Mitty Hospital when we got back stateside.  In fact, that was precisely when I started to write poetry.  One morning while convalescing I had the epiphany that poetry was exactly like t-ball!  (Maybe you've read my essay on the subject.)  I don't remember much about the accident, but evidently the pole crashed into my frontal lobe and they'd had to put a plate in my head—which seemed to liberate the flow of words from my mind to my pen!  Or word processor.  (I call it my "hot plate" for heating up poems.)  But here's the kicker: they've awarded me a Purple Heart AND added my name to The Wall in Washington!  So my question is, can you be prosecuted for impersonating a soldier after you're dead, even if you're still alive?  Also, can you pawn a Purple Heart?  Maybe Antiques Roadshow would be interested in this?  I still have the pole.  What about a Hallmark movie?

 

-- Thikasa  Postz, translated by  Alexander Nimrod.

 

About the author, Nimrod  writes: "A poet-immigrant from Moravia who was born a biological male but is transitioning for better publishing opportunities in the West, Postz divides his time between Outlook, Kasnsas, and Lamncaster, Maine. His former (cis-genered male) name was "Thikasz."  Distantly related, on his mother's side, to Czeslaw Milosz, and heavily influenced by postwar Polish poetry, Postz's first book of poems, "A Rozewicz is a Rozewicz is a Rozewicz," was a runaway best-seller in Moravia, selling more than 50 copies.  But he is probably best known for his first book, a critical work titled "A Rozewicz By Any Other Name," which sought to prove that "Tadeusz Rozewicz" was one of the hundred or so "characters" invented by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.  Pessoa, himself one of Portugal's greatest poets, was a "heteronym" though many of his inventions were "homonymuals." Postz's newest book of poems, "Eastern Europeonies," will be released sometime this summer by De Flowers Press.":

 

Alexander Nimrod regards himself as pre-post-modern in taste and post-op in outlook.  He has translated two novels by Bomba Ginn, Fallen Angels and The Parricides. The painting above, "Fallen Angels" by Girodano Luicas, was the source of the cover art for Fallen Angels.

"Sperm Heaven" [by Henri Michaux, trans. David Lehman]

Sperm Heaven

                             -- a translation of Henri Michaux's “Le Ciel du Spermatozoide”

A man’s sperm bears a curious resemblance to the man himself – to his character, I should say.

A woman’s egg bears an astounding resemblance to that woman’s character.

Both sperm and egg are tiny. The sperm is very long and totally single-minded. The egg expresses ennui and harmony in one stroke. Its shape is nearly that of a sphere.

Not all sperm are like a man’s. The sperm of a crab and even more so that of a crayfish resemble the corolla of a flower. The supple radiant arms seem to reach out not to a female but to heaven.

Given the regularity of crab reproduction, you might well suppose that these decapod crustaceans know what they’re doing. 

In fact, we know nothing about the heaven of the crab, although there are people who catch crabs and dangle them by the tentacles, the better to observe them. We know even less about the heaven of the sperm of the crab.

(trans. David Lehman, who notes that Michaux, born in Belgium (1891-1984) , celebrated his birthday on May 24th. )

Violoncello [Dovid Hofshteyn - Trans. by Lera Auerbach]

Dovid Hofshteyn (1889-1952) left Russia during the years of war and revolution and was a pioneer of modernist literature in Yiddish after the First World War. He returned to the USSR in the mid-1920s and became involved in Soviet cultural activities in Yiddish. Like other Yiddish writers, Hofshteyn participated in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In 1948, as part of the process of eliminating Yiddish culture in the USSR, he was arrested and tried alongside other Jewish authors. On August 12, 1952, he was executed by the Soviet government in what has come to be known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.

 

Violoncello

 

Vos boygstu zikh, mayn zel?
Vos brumstu brustik tif?
Un s’tsitern di vent,
di zayln fun mayn zayn,
un hekher, hekher shtaygt 
di shtil fun ere dayner,
un nider vert bagrobt
mit shtoyb fun dayne fis.

 

Vos boygstu zikh, mayn zel?
Vos brumstu brustik tif?
Vos bodstu zikh in shtoyb,
vos vashstu zikh in ash,
vi foyglen in a hits,
vos hobm furkht far vaser 
un kiln zikh mit erd un frishn zikh in mist?..

 

Vos boygstu zikh, mayn zel?
Vos brumstu brustik tif,
vi zod fun frishn blut
af shtumen roytn shteyn,
vi zod, vos vert nit shtil
fun umshuld zoyber-reynem,
biz gloybik heyses blut
mit tsiter im bagist.

 

Nu, boyg zhe zikh, mayn zel,
nu, brum zhe brustik tif,
un ver fun ashn klor,
fun blutn ver shoyn reyn,
un ver fun tsiter mild,
ver loyter shoyn fun veynen,
un zol tsu likht dir zayn
dayn groyser brokh, dayn ris!

 

 

Violoncello

Why do you vibrate, my soul,
rumbling deeply in my chest?
The walls of my core are trembling.
Higher, still higher, soars
your quiet honour.
Then, falling, it buries itself
under the dust of your feet.

 

Why do you vibrate, my soul,
rumbling deeply in my chest?
Why do you bathe in the dust,
and wash yourself in the ashes?
So are birds in the smouldering heat,
thirsty for water – can cool
themselves in the earth,
and get refreshed in the sand.

Why do you vibrate, my soul,
from the depth of my chest,
boiling like fresh blood
spilt on the mute stones?
The boiling will not subside
from its pure innocence,
nor from its hot devotion –
it is trembling, spilling over.

Oh, bend to me, my soul,
sing heartfully within my depth,
cleansed by ashes
purified by blood,
your strings tremble gentler,
enlightened by the sobbing …
Let the grief and sorrow
illuminate the way!

 

— “Violoncello” by Dovid Hofshteyn (Translation by Lera Auerbach)

Last Love [by Nikolay Zabolotsky, trans. Boris Dralyuk]

The car rumbled and came to a stop.
Two emerged into the space of evening,
and the driver, exhausted by work,|
slumped down wearily onto the wheel. 

Constellations of lights, far away,
trembled gently through the windshield.
The aged passenger lingered a while
with his lady beside the flowerbed.

And the driver, through sleepy eyelids,
suddenly noticed two faces,
turned to each other for eternity,
completely forgetting themselves.

Two hazy and delicate lights
shone from them, and all around
the passing summer’s beauty
embraced them with hundreds of arms.

Here there were fire-like cannas,
like glasses of bloody wine,
and the grey plumes of aquilegias,
and daisies in golden crowns.

Awaiting autumnal minutes,
and grief’s unavoidable taste,
the lovers were surrounded
by a fleeting ocean of bliss.

And leaning close to each other,
like homeless children of the night,
they strolled silently through the flowers
in the electric glow of the light.

While the car stood in the darkness,
and the engine rumbled to a start,
and the driver gave a weary smirk,
rolling down the window at his side. 

He knew that the summer was ending,
that soon there’d be rain and snow,
that their little song had been sung –
but they, they didn’t know.

(1957)

source: The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Lullaby [Itzik Manger - Trans. by Lera Auerbach]

Itzik Manger (1901-1969) was widely considered as a poet with a unique style among his peers. In the 1930s, he moved to Warsaw and later to Paris, escaping Nazi persecution. After the war, he continued to reflect on the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust. In his final years, he lived in Israel.

“LULLABY”

Ikh vel dikh nisht ufvekn,
saydn a foygl,
vos veyst, du host goldene oygn.
Er vet zikh shteln af dayn bet:
er hot zikh mit a yuni-nakht farvet
(zi iz sheyn un gayvedik on a shir),
az du bist toyznt mol shener fun ir.

Ikh vel dikh nisht ufvekn,
saydn a vint,
vos vet arayn durkh а shpare geshvind.
Тu epes a vint,
vos vil visn, tsi s’iz shener faran 
fun volkns, shtern un hint.

Ikh vel dikh nisht ufvekn,
saydn a boym,
vos vet royshn tsu shtark in dayn troym.
Der boym iz der eltster boym in vald,
a kayme-lon fun toyznt yor alt.
Tu epes a boym,
vos vil visn, tsi s’iz sheners faran
fun zayn roysh, fun zayn bli, fun zayn troym.

Ikh vel dikh nisht ufvekn,
saydn a regn,
vos vet kumen a groyer fun vegn un shtegn
un klapm in shtub mit di finger.
Der regn is nokh a yunger.
Ersht nekhtn iz er a prints geven,
haynt iz er farkisheft: eyn shmeykhl fun dir — 
un er vert tsurik vos geven.

Ikh vel dikh nisht ufvekn,
saydn a malekh,
vos vet kumen tsu flien fun a mehalekh 
af a vaysn levone-shtral 
un knien ba dayn geleger 
un zingen: “Shvester, shvesterl mayn!
Vos ken nokh shener un shener zayn 
fun dir un fun mir”.

. . . . . .

Sha, ikh vel mit a goldenem rigl 
farriglen di tir.

— “Lullaby” by Itzik Manger

 

“LULLABY”

I will not wake you up.
Perhaps, only a bird,
who knows your golden eyes,
will stand on your bed-post.
The bird had made a bet with June’s Night
(which is beautiful and maddeningly arrogant)
that you are still a thousand times more beautiful.

I will not wake you up.
Perhaps, only the wind
may quickly penetrate the cracks.
What will you do with the wind –
it wants to know if there is anything more beautiful
than clouds, stars, and dogs.

I will not wake you up.
Perhaps, only a tree
will rustle noisily in your dreams.
The tree – most ancient in the forest –
may be a thousand years old.
What will you do with the tree –
it wants to know if there is anything more beautiful
than its noises, its blossoms, its dreams.

I will not wake you up.
Perhaps only the rain,
will come, all gray from its travels.
It will tap on the house with its fingers.
The rain is still young.
Only yesterday it was a prince,
today it is enchanted. Just one of your smiles —
and it will become himself again.

I will not wake you up,
Perhaps only an angel
flying from far away
on a white moonbeam
will kneel at your bedside
and sing: “Sister, my little sister,
what could be more beautiful
than you and I.”

. . . . . .

Hush, with a golden bolt   
I’ll lock the door.

— “Lullaby” by Itzik Manger (Translation by Lera Auerbach)

Catullus, Sappho, and Jackie DeShannon [by Susan Brind Morrow]

Catullus (above left) is the best translator of Sappho (right), managing to create both a sense of the original and something that stands as an original poem on its own.

Catullus was (according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary) “doctus,” learned, “but he used doctrina in his own way.” He was an original mind, and a real wit who knew how to insult people. Intelligence and skill are the soul of wit, and one marvels at the crystalline economy of words at which Catullus is truly unsurpassed.

Take Catullus 85,

Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior

I hate and I love, why do I do this you may ask.
I don't know but I feel it and am on the cross

Catullus uses the technique of elision, running words together for effect, to merge the words hate and love into one, creating an implicit sense of the tension between two opposing forces that are tearing one apart. He then runs the sound of senti-et excrucior together, as though feeling and pain were inextricably linked.He ends the couplet with a word he has made up excrucior/excruciate (a word that is so apt it has been used ever since). Catullus uses it as sort of a joke, a word-play that describes what he is doing: He is not merely complaining about suffering in love. He is creating a classic Greek poetic structure and a word that points to what it is: ex crux, a cross, a chiasmus.

That Catullus was a highly trained and brilliant writer first, and a lover second, is indicated by the fact that he called his girlfriend Lesbia in a nod to Sappho, a famous poet who had lived on the island of Lesbos six hundred years before he was born.

In his memoir Speak Memory Nabokov describes the desired amorata of a young man from an aristocratic family as a rich older woman whose husband is preoccupied with affairs of state. Lesbia was just such a person, and she was only available to Catullus, one of her many lovers, from time to time.

Thus Catullus writes,

Caeli, Lesbia nostra,
Lesbia illa, illa Lesbia
Quam Catullus unam plus quam se atque suos amavit,
Nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
Glubit magnanimis Remi nepotis

Caelus, our Lesbia,
Lesbia this, this Lesbia,
Whom Catullus loved more than himself and his own,
Now in alleys and doorways
Strips for the rich descendants of Rome

(There is much scholarly speculation about Catullus’s intended meaning of glubit- which means to peel)

That Sappho was sapphic would have been news to Catullus. Sappho wrote songs to be performed at weddings, in which the focus was naturally the bride who moved like the moon among stars, or was like the first hyacinth of spring, smashed into the snow by the shepherds with their feet.

Catullus was not a professional writer like Sappho. He was an intellectual who belonged to the urban society of his day. He came from a rich family. His father entertained Caesar. He had, as he says more than once, too much free time. Until he died at the age of thirty (apparently by his own hand), he wrote for himself. Catullus begins his little book, which contains some of the finest poetry ever written in any language, with the phrase

To whom shall I give this charming little book...

It is difficult to capture the sense, beauty and complexity of these two great masters in another language, (although Ben Johnson’s 'tis with us perpetual night is a good call for perpetua una dormienda). Catullus (51) is the best translator of Sappho (31), managing to create both a sense of the original and something that stands as an original poem on its own. Both poems are filled with tactile words and phrases that closely capture the physical response of falling in love. Catullus, typically making up words, uses: tintin/tinnitus- my ear’s ring, for Sappho’s epirrombeisi (as though the ears were full of bees). Sappho has wonderful lines like greener than grass am I. She uses the Greek words sick, cold, and troma, trembling. Catullus has flamma demanat- flame descends my limbs, for Sappho’s lepton d’autika xro pur, a slender flame runs under my skin. Sappho has glossa eage (my tongue breaks), Catullus, lingua sed torpet (my tongue stiffens).

The best translation of this poem around today was written by 21 year old Jackie DeShannon in 1963 and recorded by Bruce Springsteen in 1975, Every Time That You Walk in the Room. Deshannon (one of the great songwriters of her time, who wrote Needles and Pins in her teens) unknowingly captures the classic verses, and the force, delight and excitement of the actual writing of Catullus and Sappho. DeShannon (singing it in this YouTube clip) may have been around Sappho's age when Sappho wrote the original:

Three Poems from the Ukraine [by Slava Konoval]

The Ukrainian poet Vyacheslav ("Slava") Konoval sent us these three poems for publication. A member of the Geer Poetry Group (Wales) and a member of the Federation of Scottish Writers, Slava lives in Kyiv and is determined to weather the Russian military storm. He tells me he has devoted much energy to address "acute social problems, such as overcoming poverty, ecology issues, the relationship of people with the government." I mean to ask him whether he wrote these three poems in English or translated them. Do they not read like translations? On the theory that there is a certain charm in poetry as a second language, and in respect of the embattled nation for whom Konoval would speak, I present them here even before I find out more.

Now I have found out more:

<<< Yea, I am writing in English to promote my compatriots and show the thick skin of the Ukranian soul.

Translation of anything cannot guarantee the precisely, especially in art activity, so I do original form writing in non-my native language.

Yea, I live in Kyiv and haven't leave my city from time of the overwhelming Russian invasion till nowadays. >>>

Don’t be a freak

I can’t be a freak,
I can’t play it,
I have nothing to speak.
From thought about it
I want only to spit.

I’m not a freak,
I haven’t millions on account,
I’m not strong as beek,
which stands firmly on the ground or on the mount.

I was brought up with my mother’s milk,
it is precious like silk,
hey, artificial behavior is bilk.

Richard’s Castle

On the sprawling mountain of Usypalnytsia,
the neo-Gothic wind built
a castle for the Lion Heart,
below St. Andrew's Church.
The castle's a marvel of art!

An unknown architect
loved the pages of Walter Scott,
having built pointed Spires,
laid his heart.

Moody mountain, sharp descent,
she let the towers in
through philanthropic help, maybe cent,
neither royal funds, no sin.

The royal castle shines,
in yellow colors,
in the graceful contours and lines.

Night Singer

Where missile strikes hit,
where the borders with Belarus are close,
I am asking for Your consent, please, permit
to tell about the Ukrainian company,
I honor her, raise a glass, and toast.

In days of turmoil, in stormy days,
IKOC like a weapon took a thread and a needle,
IKOC has will, courage and actions,
not empty phrases.

Weavers, mechanics, accountants,
they are bees, buzzing in workshops,
IKOC flaunts its image and patents
sewn shoes and uniforms for the military,
sketches in laptops.

With style, taste, and quality
IKOC cares about defenders,
who grind the enemy in a meat grinder,
and like blenders.

May the company prosper
that IKOC had a pre-war profit,
an investor is waiting for him in line, a sponsor.

Ed: Re "Night Singer": Diligent Internet searches of IKOC turn up many a cul de sac. Other poems of his are posted here. Other of Slava's Engish-language poems, such as "Painful condition," can be found here.

Painful condition

Once on Thursday, I woke up weak,
having been covered with a warm quilt,
with a merciless temperature,
I am dying, and I am bleak.
Like a pendulum,
hearing the run of strikes in the clock’s click.
Laying in bed, I had exhausted from the undead,
I am similar to a sickly chick.
Contemplate on the white pills,
that had become the color of capitulation.
Please, God, stop all human ills,
overcome the pains, and be a healthy nation.

Or click here.

In the new "Southern Review": Poems by Terence Winch

Fallen World 

You never cry anymore. The trees don’t make
you weep. The baseball season has almost
gone missing, but you aren’t really concerned.
You can’t go anywhere. There is a world of free
love, grocery stores, off-track betting shops,
and farmers markets. But that world has
slipped into another dimension, like when
you hang a jacket you got as a kid in your
closet and it turns into an old man’s
three-piece suit a half century later.

I am an absentee voter. I am an absentee
drunk. I assault my senses on a daily basis,
but nothing can open up the sky
again for me and you, no one can tell
us we are free to go. We get carry-out.
We get lonely and scared. No one can
open up the past and let it flow right
into the present the way it’s always
done before. Instead, it’s stuck back there
in the good old days. I blow a kiss to
the priests and rabbis, I genuflect to
the babies and bathing beauties. We will
see you soon, I hope, when the trees
remember the names of every fallen leaf.

-- Terence Winch

Two other poems by Terence Winch appear in the journal's Autumn 2022 issue (edited by Jessica Faust). The issue also includes a translation of Friedrich Hölderlin's magnifcent "Bread and Wine,"  which begins with this stanza:

The city’s asleep; on streets lit by lamplight,
      Carriages glide stealthily, with torches ablaze.
Men return from work, reflect on the day’s doings --
      Who’s in, who’s out, who’s leading, who’s losing --
Happy to be home; gone are the grapes and flowers
      Of the midday market; the craftsmen’s work is done;
But from distant gardens comes the sound of strings;
      Perhaps lovers are at play, or a man alone dreams
Of friends in distant places, or his own boyhood. Fresh
      Water flows freely and bathes the fragrant flower beds.
In the dimming light of evening, bells ring
      And the dutiful watchman calls out the hours.
Now wafts a breeze that touches the crest of the grove --
      And look! The shadow of our earth, the moon,
Rises without fanfare; the phantoms of the night come,
          The sky full of stars indifferent to human kind,
The astounding glow of night, a stranger among us,
          High over mountain peaks, with sad glamour.  

Egyptian Poetry [translated by Susan Brind Morrow]

Editor's note:  Susan Brind Morrow published a translation of The Song of Baramhat by Salah Jahin in The Seneca Review, Vol XVI, 1; p.93in 1986.

Morrow included her translation of Salah Jahin’s The Song of Baramhat immediately followed by her translation of the Egyptian New Kingdom hieroglyphic poem The Invocation to a Scribe her book The Dawning Moon of the Mind, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015, p.278-79)

1970s

Songs of Baramhat (

Salah Jahin

Baramhat is the first month of spring in the Coptic calendar, the calendar of ancient Egypt still in use today, along with the Islamic and the Gregorian. The most notorious months are Amshir (February/March) which is characterized by inescapable sandstorms, and Tuba (January) which is bitterly cold. The poem follows the progression of the year from midsummer (Abib, Melaoon) during which time it is often too hot to go around in the day time. Tut (toot) is September.

Sucked through the ribs 
Like milk from the breast
Unceasing, but not by a child-
Tears give way to blood
Give way to fire
Give way to words-
Red, resounding, terrible…
So the strength of the sun in summer burns out sweat.
And I-
My breast
Is a bronze fortress
That scorches the eyes
The heat increases
And melts its lock
And passes.

                  *

Malaun in all the books is silence,
Malaun in all the books is dumb.
The silence of branches webbed tight by spiders
Though horses trip through them.
Bright delicate birds sing,
They chirrup out their lives.
And I…
My heart is another bird
And if it doesn’t sing it dies.

                     *

Oh sweet wind, the month of Tut,
The lock of summer is melted and gone.
Fly away over the roofs, my heart,
To the house without ivy or jasmine,
To the mother of the eyes 
The eyes with hard words and sad smiles
And say to her,
“Oh friend to those who wander
Your friend who has loved you 
year after year has returned.
And by life- a night of longing,
By dawn and those who cannot sleep
By morning and those who hope
By noon and those who sweat
By evening and those who are tired
By Maghreb- and what is it
But a punishment for madmen?
Do not abandon a friend
Who was never false
And never- though love was lost
Cried out-
And never said, “But I…”
May the earth and sky be my witness.”

And around the shanties and the hovels,
Heart,when you go
Don’t go as a nightingale or as a bat-
Go as what you are,
A heart
With a thousand eyes 
and a thousand ears
And a thousand thousand tongues.
Crawl on your belly on the pavement in the dust
And if it is the cowardly month of Tuba, the brutal,
Listen and see what rises in the wind,
Oh heart, oh million,
Say to those in the house of tin,
“Wake up!
Your lost friend returns.
Your friend who wandered too far, forgive him.
Oh you who live in a house of tin,
Come out, rejoice!
I am not Christ,
But I’ll tell you something,
And I swear it to you,
I swear to you-
The world is lie upon lie
And you alone are true.”

                             *

Sucked through the ribs
The heat of noon unbuttons my breast,
My breast, still full of sighs,
Sighs and clanging iron and songs.
Oh come Baramhat- Spring, perfume,
Greenness, sparrows, silkworm.
Come here and see me without a mask.
For after Amshir, the father of wind,
And Tuba, the father of frost,
You come Baramhat, you gem,
You father of sun,
And my heart
Doesn’t know how to whisper.

The Falcon

Amal Donqal
Go round, winged falcon, go round
The year passes and the end will come
And when my death comes
It comes around, like the ravenous falcon.

The Pyramid Texts

2500 B.C.

The sword of Orion opens the doors of the sky.
Before the doors close the gate to the path 
through the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark,
As the falcon flies as the falcon flies
May Unis rise into the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark.
They make a path for Unis.
Unis takes the path.
Unis becomes the falcon.

 

1200 B.C. (?)

The Song of the Harper

Death is before me today
Like the smell of myrrh
Like sitting under sails in the wind
Death is before me today
Like the smell of lilies 
Like sitting on the shore of a drunken land
Death is before me today

Invocation to a Scribe

If you learn this profession 
You will become a writer
Think of the writers of the past
Their names have become immortal
Even though they are dead
And their descendants are gone.
They didn’t make themselves tombs out of copper
With tombstones of iron from heaven
They didn’t think about leaving heirs
In order to perpetuate their names.
They made heirs out of books
They had written themselves.
People they will never know are their children
For a writer is a teacher to all.
Their houses are buried, 
their servants are gone,
Their graves are forgotten, 
But their names live on 
In the books they made
While they were alive.
Be a writer. Take this to heart.
And your name will be like theirs.
Writing is better than something made of stone
Than a solid tomb
For it lives in the heart.
A man decays,
His corpse is dust
His family dies,
But his books live on.

The Eastern Forest [Susan Brind Morrow]

 

The horns of a deer are still soft in September
An owls face is mostly ear

 

Fire in the trees at the end of winter
When red tongues of color run under their skin

 

The season of death begins with strokes of red
Its cold breath pours over the hill that swallowed the sun

 

Beeswax and fruit
And honey that tastes like raspberries thick with crystal in the comb
The full to bursting days of leaves on East Lake Road
A map of color in the fall between the fields and lake,
Sharp prickling smell of winter-
Pale blues, crushed powder snow,
The early green of winter wheat
In upturned earth; and summer’s riches
Seaweed and fish slime and stones baked on the shore,
And wreathes of rainbowed gasoline that flow
Under the dock where the carp spawn at night
In the shallow water-
The good things about Geneva
Almost make me forget its gloom,
And how my heart was broken there-
Torn into a blossoming wound,
The rose grows out of the wound

                                *

Unsheathed deer gut by the stream
A black living rust licks it down to the soft stones
Soaked in green light.
A leopard frog froze in the water last night

 

Dozens of snails in rose translucent shells
And yellow
Plastered like closing flowers on the dead stems of reeds

Now in cinders
Cedar has leaves 
Like the skin of a salamander

 

Her hair was like the fur of a winter animal
And her hands were webbed like stars

 

Scraps of color in the forest
the head of the red-bellied woodpecker
satin against the dead wood

 

She made a pillow out of the dress
Dragonflies settled around it with a light papery scratch
Throbbing salamander bodies- and glossy prismed eyes
Funny how insects prefer certain colors

 

And beyond them the mirrory river
Full of forming stars

 

Soft as a newborn, milk fed fawn
Left in the woods by its horned mother and afraid

 

Black vultures shadowing each other around the white rock

 

Pale blue bone white days of winter
When the sun is warm and the wind is bitter

 

David found a luna moth- or had my mother found it for him
Pressed against the screen door of the kitchen, a left-over from the night.
It’s huge delicate wings were the most deliciously cool shade of green I had ever seen,
Such a fine unusual shade of green I could taste it in my mouth,
Feel it’s delicate tissue on the tips of my fingers.
How could I draw such a rare color into myself?
I could only do this, taste and feel the color, as I looked at the moth

 

Clouds closed the sky like a fist

 

The silver light has retreated onto the branch tips, silvering now only the shells of the trees.
It is November. The air is cold, and there is still a burning color to things
The red squirrels are whistling in the maples by the road.

 

On the dry stoney side of the creekbed in spring were efts the color of cinnabar flecked with gold, their eyed skin as soft as wet sand. The solitary stalk of a cardinal flower, its rare deep red the true scarlet of nature, would stand in the fresh green light of the wet wood like a hidden flag.

 

Would oh would I were a kingfisher
That flies among the halcyons
Along the breaking waves, 
With a fearless heart, that holy bird
The deep blue of the sea

Kingfisher detail, Nelson Shanks

-- Alcman; Susan Brind Morrow trans.

Dante, Near and Far [by Robert P. Baird]

There is much strange in La Vita Nuova, the libello or “little book” that Dante composed fifteen or so years before starting in on the Divine Comedy. Take, for starters, the form of the book, an alternation of prose and poetry that produces effects as dizzying as any in Williams's Spring and All. Or take the central narrative, which describes a love—young Dante’s, for the slightly younger Beatrice—so intense that it causes the poet to faint in public and forces him, poor lad, to write lying love poems to the donne dello schermo, the “screen ladies” he uses to hide the real object of his affection. Take even Beatrice herself, who begins the book as a girl in a girdled dress only to reveal herself not long after as a miracle made flesh.

All of this is strange for us to read, or should be, even if, grinning behind our commentaries, we spot in the donna dello schermo an unacknowledged ancestor of the celebrity beard. After all, when Dante says that Beatrice is a miracle, he isn’t indulging mere hyperbole, the way Roxette did in that song I remember too well from seventh grade. Nor does he mean it less merely in the manner of an established trope, as John Donne did at the end of “The Relic.” Uniquely for the time and all but blasphemously, Dante meant that his beloved’s appearance on earth was a miracle that repeated (and maybe even competed with) Christ’s Incarnation itself. In the young poet’s eyes, Beatrice was the agent of his religious salvation and the summit of all Creation, the radiant filament that binds together heaven and earth. 

Dante’s strangeness, his distance from us in time and cultural space, is the reason Eugenio Montale took T.S. Eliot gently to task for suggesting that the Commedia was “extremely easy to read…for a foreigner who does not know Italian very well.” It’s not that Montale felt any need to defend the reluctant intricacies of his native tongue. His point was to insist that “Dante is not a modern poet…and that the instruments of modern culture are not ideally suited to understanding him.”

And yet even if we accept Montale’s reminder as well warranted, and I do, I don’t think it’s careless or unfair to say that there are times when Dante can feel close to us, “strangely close,” as Montale admitted. Graduate school is far enough behind me that I won’t bother you with theories of transhistorical subjective affiliation. My effort here is only to point out, a little like a finger before the moon, a single small moment that I love in the Vita Nuova.

The moment I mean happens early in the libello. At the start of the third chapter, Dante is describing his second encounter with Beatrice. (The first occurred nine years earlier.) The meeting is brief and profound: eighteen-year-old Dante sees Beatrice in the street, she waves hello, and her greeting causes the young poet so much giddy distress that he decides he can only go home and put himself to bed. 

That night Dante has a dream, and—perhaps predictably, dreams being dreams—this is where things get weird. In his sleep the poet sees uno segnore di pauroso aspetto emerge from a fiery cloud. Despite his fearful aspect the lord is happy, very possibly because he is carrying in his arms a naked woman asleep beneath a crimson drape. After Dante realizes that the woman is Beatrice, the lord holds up a burning object and tells the dreaming poet, in Latin, Behold your heart. At that moment the lord wakes Beatrice and starts to force-feed her Dante’s flaming heart. With understandable reluctance, Beatrice eats the thing until the lord’s happiness mysteriously turns to grief and he carries her away, presumably to heaven. 

As I said: weird. 

It was weird for Dante, too. So weird, he tells us, that he woke immediately afterward and decided to write a sonnet about what he saw. Not only did he write a sonnet but he told his readers, in the poem's second and third lines, that “these words I have composed are sent for your elucidation in reply.” And not only did Dante include this request (which I like to think of as the thirteenth-century equivalent of a self-addressed stamped envelope) he also decided to send the sonnet to molti li quali erano famosi trovatori in quello tempo, “many of the famous poets of that time.”

And here, finally, we get to the moment I love, the slender moon my finger’s been wagging after all this time. Here we see Dante—newly a poet, desperately in love—appealing to the judgment of his literary betters. Ostensibly, of course, the point was to ask about the dream, but who could doubt that what Dante really wanted was a judgment on his poem? What writer, what person of any ambition whatsoever, can’t remember that feeling of wanting to know—wanting to test—the quality of her nascent talent? 

It’s in this way that Dante comes to occupy, in my mind, anyway, the head of a secret history of such events, the benedictions or baptisms that link one poetic generation to the next. This is the history in which a young Walter Whitman sends Ralph Waldo Emerson an unsigned and unattributed copy of Leaves of Grass. This is Emily Dickinson asking T. W. Higginson, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” This is Paul Muldoon sending Seamus Heaney a sheaf of poems topped with the question “What's wrong with these?” (“Nothing,” the older poet responded, or so the story goes.) 

Among those who responded to Dante, the Vita Nuova acknowledges only Guido Cavalcanti, whose response “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore” marked the start of the poets’ friendship. On the reading of his future primo amico, Dante’s dream was a vision of “all value, every joy and goodness that one can feel.” Cavalcanti suggests that the lord “who rules the world of honor” wanted to bring Beatrice back from near-death with the flaming food of Dante’s love.

It’s no surprise that Dante would choose this response to quote in his Vita Nuova, even while he would insist, as well, that “the true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then.” As scholars have argued, Cavalcanti’s interpretation of the dream, while not strictly coincident with Dante’s own, was nevertheless close enough to buttress the latter’s dramatic sense of his love’s significance. 

Not all of Dante’s respondents, however, were so encouraging. Of the three reply-sonnets that survive, one, by the Tuscan poet Dante da Maiano, is about as far from Cavalcanti in spirit and tone as we can imagine. In so many words da Maiano tells Dante that it’s simple love-sickness that’s got him bothered, and probably bad hygiene besides. If Dante really wants to heal himself he needs to get rid of the noxious vapors infecting his brain. And the only way to do that, da Maiano says, smirking down the centuries, is for the young poet to go and give his testicles a good washing.

Here, too, we get the chance to meet Dante at his most queasily familiar: not as a prodigy reveling in the warm validation of his peers, but as a callow poetaster hearing harsh words from a poet he respects. It’s probably too easy to admire da Maiano’s sonnet for its precocious snark, but I appreciate his poem even more for the rare gift it affords: the chance for once to meet Dante outside the glare of his own genius.

"Fairy Tale" [by Robert Desnos]

Fairy Tale

Once upon many a time
A man loved a woman
A woman loved a man
A man and a woman
Didn’t love
The ones who loved them
Once upon many a time.

Once and maybe only once
A man and a woman
Loved each other.

-– Robert Desnos (1900-1945)
(trans. from the French by David Lehman)

from the archive; first posted February 13, 2009

Nomads [poem by Charles Baudelaire tr. Sandra Simonds]

Portrait of a 23-year-old Baudelaire, painted in 1844 by Émile Deroy (1820–1846)

Nomads

A tribe of prophets
moves through the mist
carrying a bit of money
and little kids on their backs,
kids with enormous appetites.
The men are barefoot, Felix,
just like me and their weapons
are long, just like mine.
The mist pulls their wagons
as they pass me, singing,
breaking the desert stones
open with their notes.
They move beyond
the stones full of water.
Our futures, so familiar.

 

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books books of poetry, most recently: Triptychs (forthcoming Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), and Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, 2009). Her poems and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Enemy (L'Ennemi) by Charles Baudelaire [trans. Sandra Simonds]

The Enemy 

My youth was so full of rage
that only the most brilliant of suns
could puncture it. Thunder and rain
ravaged me until my garden filled
with venom. But now my mind
has come to the autumn of its ideas
and one must rearrange this earth
with a shovel and rake. Flowers
are holes as big as graves. What are
these new futures I dream of?
Futures that burst from a soil
of grief. What mystical alignment
gives them such vigor?
Oh, sweet things! Time is a strange
enemy that gnaws at my heart.
It is blood and blood
alone that fortifies it.

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books books of poetry, most recently : Triptychs (forthcoming Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), and Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, 2009). Her poems and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.