Anthology - Poets B-D - E-I - J-L - M - N-S - T-Z
Albert Balasch
*
How are you, mum.
Today, with an unstained stump,
I’ve only opened my mouth the once.
I’ve turned into a bare knuckle—everything that’s in—
and that, mum, was to pop the question.
I’ve rummaged in what is to come
(nothing other than what we’re about)
with lousy blankets tied tight,
with stunted elbows for hands
till I’ve stretched out in the shade and given up.
Our voices know no pity, mum,
but some listen to them like rats
cowering before the rain.
Do yourself up nicely. The head can bow down
to the side that’s abandoned,
where is the stone pillow, the front
that holds us up. And may fear
not catch us out.
tr. Jonathan Dunne
Emily Dickinson
AMPLE MAKE THIS BED
Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.
Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this ground.
Aleksandr Skidan
from SCHOLIA
neither the hills blistering with vineyards
nor the tercets which promise catharsis
the utility of the image
monitoring
the valorization of the chasm in your groin
dishonors dreaming
the pure duration of the offer
to make love
the devastating splendor
of the saint’s relics exhibited under glass
imagine
you’re still alive
in the subjunctive mood
in webs of information
glossy fires
aura of the burnt offering
aura of the disappearance of aura
<call yourself Benjamin>
auto-eroticism and auto-
referentialism of art
artificial cock
jerked by a trinity of fingers
the crusade
of capital
invested
in the crusade
in <the> dead God we trust
tr. Genya Turovskaya
Rosmarie Waldrop
DISASTER
I
Grief it began with. And disbelief. Went and looked and went and looked. For what was no more. Scrutinized screens and saw. Nothing. The papers in the land and. Took in nothing.
Nothing has room. For all. No ruins can fill it. No rubble. No number of dead.
Like a movie. Like a comic strip. Please distinguish between. Crumbling towers and the image of crumbling towers. The image, repeated, multiplies. Locks on the plural. Crowds.
Our morning was mourning. Our day, frantic. Our night, fear. Up to down we prefer. And right to left. But many movements in many directions are better than how crashes a wounded boar through the woods. Where safe in the dark it used to rest.
Aleš Debeljak
IN A MARSEILLE HOTEL ROOM
The key in my pocket doesn’t keep me warm, I swear.
Darkness has been passing away for hours,
morning is almost here. I will never stop searching
for you. But I don’t have a clue what has to be done.
The walls are warm and heavy scented, damp
from lonely visitors, their forgotten families.
I am going down the corridor, my fingertips
are trailing the wallpaper and the paintings
as I approach the destination and step
through the final door. I immerse myself
in the boiling white of clouds with no name,
tiny veins on the breasts, a map of muffled thrill.
Look, my lord, how it’s not difficult at all
to choose a path. A choir in the pelvis starts singing,
the sky inflames when I plant the sapling,
it shoots up high, as fast as lightning, as nerves.
You scream, lord, and I with you:
warm milk pours across my face and floods me,
the city, the world. Foam and furrow show the way.
No hesitation. I follow you, I swear.
tr. Andrew Zawacki & the author
Edvard Kocbek
THE TIME OF THE POEM
They say the day of the poem is setting,
man has sold the leftovers,
shortages are tiresome,
fear of death destroys
poetics after poetics,
what we write are just signs,
only a fool is what he is not.
We are all in a tired place.
Time sets and rises again.
Each darkness is miraculous.
Every confusion is healing.
Power and unrest never cease.
Home has gone abroad
like a girl before a mirror
delighting in her face,
the sea is immensely deep.
I am returning now, my dear.
The gardener’s palm glows with charms.
She never repeats a gesture.
I sketch her by tattooing
everything living and lose my fear.
The seven wounds of sacred madness
reek with the stupefaction of incredible speech.
I depart for rank regions.
I have allowed all my fields to lie fallow.
My queen bee remains wild.
You will know me by my bare feet
and by my deep dreams about the mountain
which has gone to the prophet.
tr. Michael Scammell & Veno Taufer
Aleš Šteger
CLOSE YOUR EYES
Close your eyes and see a poem.
Drained out from it, you desire in secret the solidity of all things.
It reminds you of a white room recently painted,
of the windows and doors summer forgot to shut.
But these also fail to suggest forms of the physical world.
There is no place to enter the poem.
It exists only in a gaseous state.
People floating inside it, the metaphors
that hang on its walls, might possibly allow
for a galactic breeze to churn into something else.
Two naked clouds might begin to make love.
Might ventilate stars into a cloud
of slaughtered boar, of grey smoke,
of father smoking and watching from the poem’s
darkened corner. Probably he authored every poem.
You can’t see him in the shadow unless by himself
he appears silently behind you, playfully closing your eyes,
asking: Who am I? Won’t you kill me? Aren’t you mine?
tr. Peter Richards & the author
Dane Zajc
LUMP OF ASHES
For a long time you carried fire in your mouth.
For a long time you hid it there.
Behind a bony fence of teeth.
Pressed within the white magic circle of your lips.
You know that no one must catch scent
of the smoke in your mouth.
You remember that black crows will kill a white one.
So you lock your mouth.
And hide the key.
But then you feel a word in your mouth.
It echoes in the cavern of your head.
You begin to search for the key to your mouth.
You search for a long time.
When you find it, you unlock the lichen from your lips.
You unlock the rust from your teeth.
Then you search for your tongue.
But it isn’t there.
You want to utter a word.
But your mouth is full of ashes.
And instead of a word
a lump of ashes rolls down
your blackened throat.
So you throw away the rusty key.
And you make a new language from the soil.
A language that speaks with words of clay.
tr. Erica Johnson Debeljak
Alexei Parshchikov
CATS
At the factory, where they make antibiotics,
the cats roam about.
One covered with shells is like driftwood
somewhat knotty.
Another with its outstretched tongue
resembling a fire iron.
And the third so gigantic, like some great calm
over the Persian Gulf.
They criss-cross about the pharmaceutical factory
licking the various pills,
between the plague and cholera,
the flu and smallpox,
slithering through so many different deaths.
They shoo around everything, these tsars of indulgence,
and only while dying, they obtain their skeletons.
Here’s the black cat writhing, scratching the ground
hallucinating, he sees himself buried there.
And the white one, burnt out on drugs
fleecy, like feather-grass,
his small heart in plumes.
The cats are guessing that they’re beholding paradise
becoming the very supporting points on which it exists,
as if they were stretching a canvas,
getting ready to shake down
the ripe apples.
Now that they’ve apprehended paradise,
they’ll go off at the same pace
like mechanics alongside the wing of an airplane
embraced by the forces of disappearance.
And they’ll let paradise fall from their paws,
and the dictators will meet them in passing,
and crush the cats under their boots.
Nero’s battling with the cat.
Attila’s battling with the cat.
Ivan the Fourth’s battling with the cat.
Lavrentiy’s battling with the cat.
Korea’s battling with the cat.
Kotov’s battling with the cat.
The cat’s battling with the cat.
And the cat’s karate is nothing
compared with the statues of dictators!
tr. John High
Michael Palmer
CONSTRUCTION OF THE MUSEUM
In the hole we found beside the road
something would eventually go
Names we saw spelled backward there
In the sand we found a tablet
In the hole caused by bombs
which are smart we might find a hand
It is the writing hand
hand which dreams a hole
to the left and the right of each hand
The hand is called day-inside-night
because of the colored fragments which it holds
We never say the word desert
nor does the sand pass through the fingers
of this hand we forget
is ours
We might say, Memory has made its selection,
and think of the body now as an altered body
framed by flaming wells or walls
What a noise the words make
writing themselves
Ali Abdollahi
MEMORIES OF SECLUSION
My right shoe has gone on leave
I am neither four-footed now nor two-footed
I read Nietzsche in primordial trinity
At nights, he comes to my sleep and says:
At last, I will rub your mustache away!
The telephone has been on answering for days
Again, this importunate landlord!
I scratch my foot with a knitting-needle
I never saw any good from the right
Left has always been left
I am tired, tired
Tired of this tripartite opposition
Right-handedness, left-mindedness, nihilistic belief!
tr. Alireza Abiz
Alireza Abiz
*
We came out of the café at five
For a short walk in the street
For a short walk in the street
We came out of the café at five
A man was shaking his head
In the butchery on the right
In the butchery on the right
A man was shaking his head
When they beheaded us at five
We also shook our head
We also shook our head
When they beheaded us at five
tr. the author
Andrzej Sosnowski
A SONG FOR EUROPE
Is that a rainbow? No one has seen one for forty years
it’s the end of the world or something of that kidney.
Do not run to the shelter. When love is
quite literally an occult power divvying up life
into equal parts bliss and loss—like the siren
slanting through memory in the air raid of flashbacks—
this is Germany close to the French border.
The dream enlarges of the battle of continents.
The factories spew by night, there are discords and afterglows
and the style of this tale is impossible to pin down
so the poem is shoved this way and that before ending up
in the hands of an unknown recipient.
It was never thus. No, it was ever thus.
Will you be the one? Such a strange encounter—with an emerald
round your neck and a shadow on your eyeshadow—is that a smile
or a veil of mourning for the words that have gone missing?
Is the emerald so that you won’t
distract yourself? So the poem can tail you
like a shadow and screen your eyes, I mean this
poem—a dark spot on the truth fetched up from the depths
of a tear, a sliver of light, vitreous full stop
that terminates all this chat about broken mirrors.
Be her, be the one left over, in the quiet of the ‘all clear.’
Perhaps we were callous to be drawn so easily into
the blackout life with never a hint
when you took the ground from under my feet
while the sky took an overdose of snow. Love
isn’t the word, but neither is any other. The poem knows this
and declares it, as if it’s declaring the Blitz.
tr. Rod Mengham
John Clare
A VISION
I lost the love of heaven above,
I spurned the lust of earth below,
I felt the sweets of fancied love,
And hell itself my only foe.
I lost earth’s joys, but felt the glow
Of heaven’s flame abound in me.
Till loveliness and I did grow
The bard of immortality.
I loved but woman fell away,
I hid me from her faded fame,
I snatch’d the sun’s eternal ray
And wrote till earth was but a name.
In every language upon earth,
On every shore, o’er every sea,
I gave my name immortal birth
And kept my spirit with the free.
THE LOOM
I drowned in sleep.
And once my lungs were gills,
I watched my liquid shadow,
fathoms deep,
Weave through a trembling warp
of light and hope
a weft that kills.
No working hand
Had anything to do
with how the sea
Hurled itself in salt against the sand,
or how unfeelingly
The shore forgot to be the land
and mimed the sea…
Or how, under the dream,
One tightening thread
Gathered those crooked strokes of light
into a beam
Through which I rose—not quite
from the dead—
more from the blame
Fanned out in
Micro-shards of extinct species
threatening my head—
Motes that might have been
curses, or killer faces,
Had they not welcomed me, as I woke,
with human voices.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
SPRING AND FALL, TO A YOUNG CHILD
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Antonella Anedda
TONGUE
You own no coffin to drag across the snow,
just a dog shivering in the dark.
Mother tongue you’re heavy-hearted;
garlic blackens in the copper pan.
A low drone rises from the hearth.
Winds tangle throughther all confused.
Aeolus blows but Babel’s left alive.
Daughter tongue: creak of the juniper.
Your shudder at birth’s a shard chipped off
a storm among the planets
and the clouds, the clouds blindly race
obliterating from the skies all trace of lineage.
tr. Jamie McKendrick
Elizabeth Bishop, LITTLE EXERCISE
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
POSSIBLE SYMPTOMS
To see this stone and not experience indecision
To see these stones and not to look away
To see these stones and comprehend the stoneness of stone
To see these stone stones at dawn and at sunset
But not to think of walls, no, not to think of dust, or else deathlessness
To see these stones at night and think of the reverie of wasps in liquid solutions
Accepting as evident that, at the thought of them, stones
add to their essence neither shadow, nor reflected light, nor conquest.
To see these same stones in thunder, see them as you see the pupils of Heraclitus
in which the agamy of stones resembles shards.
To examine the nature of resemblance, without resorting to symmetry.
To turn away and see how stones hover—night for their wings,
This is why they are higher than seraphim, hurtling as stones toward the earth
Burning in the air, as hair burning from a bridge—
Toward the earth that in one fell moment
Will lie down as a stone on the brick wall of the unnecessary name
For how much longer will signifiers smolder, coal of hoar-frost, at the parameter?
For as long as the stones that are dreamt by the act of falling.
Earlier, toward spring, faceted clusters of wasps rose to a boil in dreams
Earlier, in spring, sand would awaken, spread as a spiral in the wind
Thousand-eyed, like snow or God—the hawk of airborne hordes
advancing toward the perpetual countries of an alphabet of a single letter.
Only as a grimace along the margin, in the tension of mercury, as a blind rose
Flash-captured crystal, like a sea-annexed island
Or possibly as subterranean grasses over streaming footfall
Entering into the possession of doubling, the acrid oxide of rupture.
What is it? How is it translated? What is the measure of the past?
Where does it come from? What is its motive?
Yes, I do not hear: such is the pendulum’s string.
Reverberation of vision.
The narrow sail of the sand.
tr. Zhenia Turofsky
Ludwig Wittgenstein
REMARKS ON COLOUR
III.156
Runge: ‘Black dirties.’ That means it takes the brightness out of a colour, but what does that mean? Black takes away the luminosity of a colour. But is that something logical or something psychological? There is such a thing as a luminous red, a luminous blue, etc., but no luminous black. Black is the darkest of the colours. We say ‘deep black’ but not ‘deep white.’
But a ‘luminous red’ does not mean a light red. A dark red can be luminous too. But a colour is luminous as a result of its context, in its context.
Grey, however, is not luminous.
But black seems to make a colour cloudy, but darkness doesn’t. A ruby could thus keep getting darker without ever becoming cloudy; but if it became blackish red, it would become cloudy. Now black is a surface colour. Darkness is not called a colour. In paintings darkness can also be depicted as black.
The difference between black and, say, a dark violet is similar to the difference between the sound of a bass drum and the sound of a kettle-drum. We say of the former that it is a noise not a tone. It is matt and absolutely black.
tr. Linda McAlister & Margarete Schättle
Photo: Seslavtsi Cross by Jonathan Dunne
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