Poetry in Translation/International Poetry

[Angeline]

Literotica is an international community. The poetry forum alone has writers from all over the world. Yet many of us who are educated--either formally or self--in literature tend to be familiar with a pretty narrow margin of poets, most of whom are either English, Irish, or American. True, there are writers here--like jthserra and senna jawa--who are very familiar with and write in Asian forms (haiku and such), but I think most of us (me included) are fairly limited in the communities of poets we know.

I recently discovered a site Words Without Borders, which is devoted to international literature, much of it in translation. There's great stuff there, both poetry and prose. I'll post a smattering of it in this thread.

I encourage all of you to post or link us to your favorite poems from outside the standard Western tradition. Teach us about your favorite poets who didn't/don't typically write in English or do write in English but are less well known.

If you want to post versions of poems in both English and the writer's native language (for those who would be able to read both versions), please do. However unlike Lauren Hynde who speaks and reads 4,000 languages, my reading abilities will be limited to some Spanish, less French, and a whole lotta Pig Latin.

 

[Angeline]

Poland

Bronislaw Maj

Born in 1953, Bronislaw Maj is the author of seven volumes of poetry which have won him prestigious literary prizes, a reputation as one of the finest poets of his generation, and a place in many anthologies of contemporary poetry published both in Poland and abroad. Maj is also the author of a book about Tadeusz Gajcy, a poet who died during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. He writes newspaper columns and has edited the literary quarterly Na Glos for many years. He lives in Kraków and teaches at the Jagiellonian University and the School of Creative Writing.

Two Poems
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

I lie with my face low
in the grass, a lark
high above us. An ant drags
a dry stalk across my hand. I see
what it sees: precipitous
pores, a forest of grass, the treacherous
peaks of sand.
Salty sweat floods its eyes
and mine. The lark is already there,
where we
peer from, clinging to the earth: the ant,
the yellow flowers, and I. It soars
still higher, moving toward
the truth. Or farther from it. And if
there are two truths: the ant’s
and the lark’s, the sky’s and the furrowed
hand’s, the truths of song and crawling.
Standing aside—where
am I. Which of them will
take me. With my thirst
for contradictions, for generating useless questions,
with this cowardly “between,” my
shaky
truth.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Why don’t I have
You? Why
don’t I see the trace of Your hand
in the inhumanly rational construction
of a blade of grass. The blackbirds’
song for me is only
ownerless, I can’t hear Your
hearing. I don’t hear the voice
piercing the day’s clamor. And at night,
drowned in its enormous
breath, I feel how everything
takes place from me: between
me and the blind star runs
a frosty road of terror, my measure
of infinity, which ends
with me. I can’t see
further. I can’t see, since
I believe too little that I see? Or perhaps this
is simply the thirst
to see and there’s nothing
beyond this thirst to pierce
suddenly into the day’s clamor, the cathedral
of the grass, beneath a star’s
dead eye.

 

[Angeline]

Albania

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Luljeta Lleshanaku is one of Albania’s foremost younger poets. Born in Elbasan in 1968, she grew up under virtual house arrest because of her family’s opposition to the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. She was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the Communist regime in the early 1990s. She is among the first generation of poets to emerge out of the cultural wasteland of enforced socialist realism in the arts, reinventing Albanian poetry almost entirely from scratch. Her published books include The Sleepwalker's Eyes, 1992; Sunday Bells, 1994; Half-Cubism, 1996; and Antipastoral, 1999).

Shadows on the Snow
Translated from the Albanian by Shpresa Qatipi and Henry Israeli

The snow comes late this year. Violet shadows
doze like shepherds round
a white fire.
The swaying shadow of a fence looks like a woman's clavicle-
a woman who dreams of her lover's snowy journey home,
his late return.

Thin trails lead to the doorway.
A car parked for hours
compresses black earth.
Radio signals float just out of earshot.
A boat with its eel fishers
in luminous raincoats skims by.
A child-his little hand trembling-
casts slanting trees across the table.

The choir kneels.
The moment has come to speak
in a voice I have never known before.

I raise my head and see a single star in the night sky,
shapeless and fearful like the shard of a broken bottleneck,
a star I have for years foolishly followed.
Perhaps the shadow of our infinite persistence
looks to someone else like a large hump
on the Moon
a camel bent over a puddle
preparing for a new stretch of thirst.

 

[Angeline]

Iraq

Saadi Youssef

Saadi Youssef was born in 1934 in Basra, Iraq. He has published thirty volumes of poetry, seven books of prose, and has rendered into Arabic major works by such writers as Walt Whitman, Constantine Cavafy, Federico García Lorca, George Orwell, Nuruddin Farah, and Wole Soyinka. He left Iraq in 1979, and after many detours, working as a journalist, publisher, and political activist, he has recently settled in London.

Silence
Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

Winds that do not blow in the evening,
and winds that do not blow at dawn
have burdened me with a book of boughs.
I see my cry in the silence.

Night descends, blue, between staircases and stars. I see
blue trees, abandoned streets, and a country
of sand. I had a home and lost it. I had a home
and left it. How close the stars are!
They cling to my steps. O blue trees, blue
woods, night! we have ended up in a world
collapsing or beginning or dying.

Trees for severed hands. Trees for the eyes
that were gouged. Trees for the hearts turned to stone.
In the city, in the cemetery, trees sway in their blueness.
The severed hands do not wave, the gouged eyes
do not waver, the hearts turned to stone
do not move. Will they come,
the strange winds? The gardens are inhabited by silence.
The minarets have the color of old waters, people have the color
of old horses. And the Tartar books are branded
with the stamp of censorship.
Which country have you come to now? Here, you will open
a door to a torture chamber. And one day in a garden
you will see your arms, your eyes, or your speeding heart.
But you are strong today, say your word. Say it,
for after tomorrow you will begin to die.

The winds that do not blow in the evening,
the winds that do not blow at dawn.

I am beautified with the book of boughs;
and I see my cry in others' eyes.

November 3, 1974

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bird's Last Flight
Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

When I enter the earth's nest
contented
and glad,
my wings resting,
I will free my eyelids so not to see
the trees swaying nearer.
Do not cry over me.
I said do not cry.
If you wish, remember that my wings
are water
and there is no water without waves
and no waves without a shore where they crash.

I rest here
contented
and glad
to have reached the last shore.
Do not cry.
Even the sound of my breathing cannot reach me .

Damascus, February 8, 1995

 

[thenry]

Too Much Heat, Too Much Work
By Tu Fu (translated by Carolyn Kizer)

It's the fourteenth of August, and I'm too hot
To endure food, or bed. Steam and the fear of scorpions
Keep me awake. I'm told the heat won't fade with Autumn.

Swarms of flies arrive. I'm roped into my clothes.
In another moment I'll scream down the office
As the paper mountains rise higher on my desk.

O those real mountains to the south of here!
I gaze at the ravines kept cool by pines.
If I could walk on ice, with my feet bare!

 

[thenry]

Six Years Later
By Joseph Brodsky (translated by Richard Wilbur)

So long had life together been that now
The second of January fell again
On Tuesday, making her astonished brow
Lift like a windshield wiper in the rain,
So that her misty sadness cleared, and showed
A cloudless distance waiting up the road.

So long had life together been that once
The snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
That, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,
I'd shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
Not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
Would beat against my palm like butterflies.

So alien had all novelty become
That sleep's entanglements would put to shame
Whatever depths the analysts might plumb;
That when my lips blew out the candle flame,
Her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
To join my own, without another thought.

So long had life together been that all
That tattered brood of papered roses went,
And a whole birch grove grewupon the wall,
And we had money, by some accident,
And tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days,
The sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze.

So long had life together been without
Books, chairs, utensils--only that ancient bed--
That the triangle, before it came about,
Had been a perpendicular, the head
Of some acquaintance hovering above
Two points which had been coalesced by love.

So long had life together been that she
And I, with our joint shadows, had composed
A double door, a door which even if we
Were lost in work or sleep, was always closed:
Somehow, it would appear, we drifted right
On through it into the future, into the night.

 

[Angeline]

Scotland

Christine De Luca (All poems here translated by her from the original Shetlandic)

Christine De Luca (née Pearson) was born and brought up in Shetland, spending her formative years in Waas (Walls) on the west side of the mainland. She now lives in the Edinburgh area. In 1996 she won the Shetland Literary Prize (now discontinued) with her first poetry collection, Voes & Sounds, and won again in 1999 for Wast Wi Da Valkyries. A third collection, Plain Song, was launched in Shetland and Edinburgh in 2002. It is accompanied by a CD of the poems, read by the author.

Some of her poems have been translated into Italian, Swedish, Polish, Danish, and Welsh. She has read her poems at over one hundred thirty events, including book and poetry festivals in Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Inverness, Wigtown, Shetland, and, further afield, in Helsinki.

Her work is also found in numerous literary journals, both national and international, and anthologies, including the recent multicultural Wish I Was Here from Pocket Books.


Head over Heels

From different vantage points, the island sharpens
from old man laid out dead upon the skyline
to three proud peaks upon the world’s edge.

And seen at different times, headlands looming
closely after rain, distance themselves
through hazy veils. We lift our eyes

from weathered end-of-season sights. Autumn,
with fingers soft and lingering, lightens both
land and heart; bright glints of newness.

And all the pointless fights that come
from thinking we can only see one way, fade
into nothingness. A glow of light upon

the drabbest land, a glimpse of love around
embittered hearts, and everything turns
somersaults. We must un-self ourselves,

untangle all that wearies one another,
journey with our difference, and savor
all the common wonders of our world.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Chance of a Lifetime

From the airplane, streaks of light pick out
a little town, plumped down there by chance:
an accidence of streams and slopes,
heads and tails of nature’s providence.

For us--no more, no less-–the time,
and place and fortune of our birth
is happenchance; yours and mine,
my love, as random as the rest.

Had this fine braiding of our stream not come
--this blessèd odds-–I would have pined long
for it. When you’re around, your fun
and cheerfulness send every penny spinning
in the air, to land the right way up,
heads or tails, whichever one is called.

-----------------------------------------------------------


Star Sign

Vidlin, Shetland 21.10.1914

Nor heaven nor earth has been at peace tonight.
War’s trenches barely cut, still lines on maps.
But life goes on: a little girl is born.

Birth’s struggle done, the midwife sets off home
down Neegirt’s fields, with lit peat held for light.
And in the firmament, a comet’s flight records
the moment, outstrips a harvest moon that rides
the sky. The heavens themselves blaze forth nativity,
wrap a blessing round a little one whose first breath
reincarnates the dust of galaxies, obscures,
reveals: links death with life and love and power.


reference to excerpts from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2

-----------------------------------------------------------


O for the Wings

To the unnamed builder of Woowick dovecote, Orkney

Your dovecote stands, a chapel now;
no crooning coo, no flutter
of frightened wings, nor stink of doves.

Smooth, dark slabs; floor to roof boxed
with stone shelfs like doorless cupboards.
And every stone set so that every ledge
is to the wall and to the building
as every filament is to the feather
and to the dove; every bit a work of art.

Did you build it, in the mind, a library
for books of air, with winged servitors
to reach to topmost shelves; to house
the silence of a thousand vellum scrolls,
the latch raised only by a holy hand?

When at last you laid the final stone
you must have stepped back, upon the seventh day
and, with the searching eye of one who knows
the human heart, you must have seen that what
you’d made, this testament, was good.

 

[Angeline]

Africa

Fado Singer for Amalia Roderinguez
Wole Soyinka (don't know a lot about him but he is a Nobel Prize winner and is Yoruba.)

My skin is pemiced to fault
I am down to hair-roots, down to fibre filters
Of the raw tobacco nerve

Your net is spun of sitar strings
To hold the griefs of gods: I wander long
In tear vaults of the sublime


Quen of night torments, you strain
Sutures of song to bear imposition of the rites
Of living and of death. You


Pluck strange dirges from the storm
Sift rare stones from ashes of the moon, and rise
Night errands to the throne of anguish


Oh there is too much crush of petals
For perfume, too heavy tread of air on mothwing
For a cup of rainbow dust


Too much pain, oh midwife at the cry
Of severance, fingers at the cosmic cord, too vast
The pains of easters for a hint of the eternal.


I wiould be free of your tyranny, free
From sudden plunges of the flesh in earthquake
Beyond all subsidence of sense


I would be free from headlong rides
In rock seams and volcanic veins, drawn by dark steeds
On grey melodic reins.

 

[foehn]

Jaime Sabines (1926 - 1999)

Jaime Sabines was born in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas in 1926, and died in Mexico City in 1999.

"In a daring contemporary idiom, the poems of Jaime Sabines consider the sense and nonsense of existence. Their silky musicality plays against the abruptness of their perceptions. Like the poets of the "impure" poetry he admires, Sabines is a skillful and intellectual writer who seems to enjoy violating taboos. Like the confessional poets, Sabines is also a writer of rapt emotional clarity. That combination of intellectual skepticism and clear emotion has made Sabines one of the most important poets of his generation."

(From Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Stephen Tapscott, University of Texas Press, 1996)

The translations here are mine. Other translations by W. S. Merwin are here and two of these poems in the original Spanish can be found here. The other, “When You Feel Like Dying,” can be found here.



(Cuando tienes ganas de morirte)

When You Feel Like Dying
-- Jaime Sabines

hide your head under the pillow
and count four thousand sheep.
Remain two days without food
and you will see how beautiful life is:
meat, beans, bread.
Remain without a woman: you will see.

When you feel like dying
don’t stir things up so much: die
and be done.

~~

(Te Quiero a las diez de la mañana )

I Love You at Ten in the Morning
– Jaime Sabines

I love you at ten in the morning
and at eleven and at twelve noon.

I love you with all my soul
and all my body at times in afternoons of rain.

But at two in the afternoon
or at three…
when I begin to think of us two,
and you think of meals or daily work,
or of enjoyments you don’t have,
I begin to hate you mutely
with half the hate I reserve for myself.

Then I come back to loving you,
when we lie down and I feel that you are made for me,
that somehow your knee and abdomen tell me so,
that my hands convince me of it,
and that there is no other place I could come,
where I might go, better than to your body.

You come wholly to meet me,
and the two of us disappear in an instant,
we enter the mouth of God,
until I tell you I am hungry or sleepy.

Every day I love you and hate you without remedy,
and there are also days, hours in which I do not know you,
in which you are a stranger, like another’s woman.

The men worry me,
I worry myself, my troubles distract me,
it’s probable I don’t think of you for very long.

See? Who could love you except me,
my love?


~~

(Los amorosos)

The Amorous Ones
-- Jaime Sabines


The amorous become silent.
Love is the finest silence,
the most tremulous, the most insufferable.
The amorous search,
the amorous are those who abandon,
they are those who change, who forget.
Their hearts tell them that nothing is to be found,
they do not find, they search.

The amorous go along like crazy people
because they are alone, alone, alone,
delivering themselves, giving themselves in every moment,
crying because they cannot salvage love.
Love worries them. The amorous
live in the day, they cannot do more, they do not know how.
They are always going,
always, somewhere.
They wait,
they wait for nothing, but they wait.
They know nothing is to be found.
Love is the perpetual adjournment,
always the next step, and another, another.
The amorous are insatiable,
those who — thank goodness! — must be alone.

The amorous are the Hydra of myth.
They have serpents in place of arms.
The veins of their necks swell
like serpents also, to asphyxiate them.
The amorous are unable to sleep
because if they sleep, worms will eat them.

In the darkness they open their eyes
and fright falls upon them.

They find scorpions under the sheet
and their beds float as though on a lake.

The amorous are insane, just insane,
without God and without devil.

The amorous come out of their caves
trembling, hungry,
to hunt phantoms.
They laugh at the people who know everything,
who perpetually love, truthfully,
at those who believe in love like lamps that never run out of oil.

The amorous play at seizing water,
tatooing smoke, not going.
They play the long, sad game of love.
No one has to concede.
They say that no one has to concede.
The amorous are ashamed of all conformity.

Empty, but empty from one rib to the other,
death ferments behind their eyes,
and they walk, they weep until the break of day
in which trains and cocks awaken painfully.

Sometimes an odor of recently opened earth comes to them,
of women who sleep with a hand on their sex, complacent,
of arroyos of tender water and kitchens.
The amorous get ready to sing from between their lips
an unlearned song,
and go crying, crying,
the beautiful life.

 

[Angeline]

Spain

To Jośe Marίa Palacio
Antonio Machado

Palacio, good friend,
is spring there
showing itself on branches of black poplars
by the roads and river? On the steeps
of the high Duero, spring is late,
but so soft and lovely when it comes!
Are there a few new leaves
on the old elms?
The acacias must still be bare,
and the mountain peaks snow-filled.
Oh the massed pinks and whites
of Moncayo, massed up there,
beauty, in the sky of Aragon!
Are there brambles flowering,
among the grey stones,
and white daisies,
in the thin grass?

On the belltowers
the storks will be landing now.
The wheat must be green
and the brown mules working sown furrows,
the people seeding late crops,
in April rain. There’ll be bees,
drunk on rosemary and thyme.
Are the plum trees in flower? Violets still?
There must be hunters about, stealthy,
their decoys under long capes.
Palacio, good friend,
are there nightingales by the river?
When the first lilies,
and the first roses, open,
on a blue evening, climb to Espino,
high Espino, where she is in the earth.

 

[jthserra]

Argentina

Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938)


Deleted

The day I die the news will follow
Its practical course
And immediately from office to office
In offical record books they'll look for me.

Somewhere far away in a little town
Which sleeps in the mountain sun
In an old record book
A hand unknown to me
Will draw a line through my name.


To Eros

I caught you by the neck
on the shore of the sea, while you shot
arrows from your quiver to wound me
and on the ground I saw your flowered crown.

I disemboweled you stomach like a doll's
and examined your deceitful wheels,
and deeply hidden in your golden pulleys
I fround a trapdoor that said: sex.

On the beach I held you, now a sad recap
up to the sun, accomplice of your deeds,
before a circus of sirens.

Your deceitful godmother, the moon
was climbing through the crest of the dawn,
and I threw you into the mouth of the waves.


In 1935 Storni learned she had breast cancer. She underwent surgery, but when the malignancy returned in October of 1938 she went to a favorite oceanside resort, wrote a final poem and then walked into the see. Her final poem:


I Am Going to Sleep

Teeth of flowers, hairnet of dew,
hands of herbs, you, perfect wet nurse,
prepare the earthly sheets for me
and the down quilt of weeded moss.

I am going to sleep, my nurse, put me to bed.
Set a lamp at my headboard;
a constellation; whatever you like;
all are good: lower it a bit.

Leave me alone: you hear the buds breaking through . . .
a celestial foot rocks you from above
and a bird traces a pattern for you

so you'll forget . . . Thank you. Oh, one request:
i f he telephones again
tell him not to keep trying for I have left . . .


October was her favorite month, spring in Argentina. She often wrote of death and of the ocean, seemingly predicting her own death.


jim : )

 

[twelveoone]

For Eve:
LUSTIGE PERSON:
So braucht sie denn, die schönen Kräfte
Und treibt die dichtrischen Geschäfte
Wie man ein Liebesabenteuer treibt.
Zufällig naht man sich, man fühlt, man bleibt
Und nach und nach wird man verflochten;
Es wächst das Glück, dann wird es angefochten
Man ist entzückt, nun kommt der Schmerz heran,
Und eh man sich's versieht, ist's eben ein Roman.
Laßt uns auch so ein Schauspiel geben!
Greift nur hinein ins volle Menschenleben!
Ein jeder lebt's, nicht vielen ist's bekannt,
Und wo ihr's packt, da ist's interessant.
In bunten Bildern wenig Klarheit,
Viel Irrtum und ein Fünkchen Wahrheit,
So wird der beste Trank gebraut,
Der alle Welt erquickt und auferbaut.
Dann sammelt sich der Jugend schönste Blüte
Vor eurem Spiel und lauscht der Offenbarung,
Dann sauget jedes zärtliche Gemüte
Aus eurem Werk sich melanchol'sche Nahrung,
Dann wird bald dies, bald jenes aufgeregt
Ein jeder sieht, was er im Herzen trägt.
Noch sind sie gleich bereit, zu weinen und zu lachen,
Sie ehren noch den Schwung, erfreuen sich am Schein;
Wer fertig ist, dem ist nichts recht zu machen;
Ein Werdender wird immer dankbar sein.

from Goethe's Faust
another perspective...

 

[foehn]

Pasternak

I really enjoy this thread, so I come back to "pay dues"...

Here's one by Boris Pasternak, translated from the Russian by Christopher Barnes:

"Winter Night"


Snow on snow the blizzard blew,
All frontiers enswirling.
A candle on the table stood -
A tallow candle burning.

Like summer midges' swarming flight,
Towards the candle chasing,
The snowflakes eddied to the light,
Converging on the casement.

And on the pane the blizzard hewed
Its arrows, darts and circles.
A candle on the table stood -
A tallow candle burning.

And shadows settled overhead
Upon the illumined ceiling,
Dim forms of crossing arms and legs,
Fate's shadows interlacing.

A pair of shoes slid to the floor
And raised a sudden clatter,
And on her gown the waxen flare
Shed tears that oozed and spattered.

And all was lost in snowy murk,
A pallid, gray-white blurring.
The candle on the table stirred -
A tallow candle burning.

A sudden draught breathed on the flame,
Seductive fires enkindling,
With arms outspread in cruciform
Like two wings of an angel.

All February the blizzard raved,
Yet ever and anon, unchanging,
Candle and table still remained -
A candle ever flaming.

~
fitting, perhaps, for my 100th post... now maybe someone will be kind and blow me out! lol