Boris Pasternak

Storm, Momentary, Forever

Then summer said goodbye
to the station. Lifting its cap,
the thunder took souvenirs,
hundreds of shots on the fly.

The lilac went black. And that
instant, gathering whole armfuls
of lightning, the far clearing lit
the white station-master’s shack.

And when the whole roof ran
with a fierce torrent of malice,
and, like charcoal onto a sketch,
the rain crashed down on the fence,

consciousness started to flash,
here, it seems, flooding in play
even the corners of mind
where it’s always bright as day. 

                    Translation by A.S. Kline

Boris Pasternak

1908

Spring

How many sticky buds, candle ends
sprout from the branches! Steaming
April. Puberty sweats from the park,
and the forest’s blatantly gleaming.

A noose of feathered throats grips
the wood’s larynx, a lassoed steer,
netted, like a gladiatorial organ,
it groans steel-piped sonatas here.

Poetry! Be a Greek sponge with suckers,
among green stickiness drenched,
I’ll consent, by the sopping wood
of a green-stained garden bench.

Grow sumptuous pleats and flounces,
suck up the gullies and clouds,
Poetry, tonight, I’ll squeeze you out
to make the parched sheets flower. 

Translation by A. S. Klein

Boris Pasternak

1953

How many buds, how many sticky butts...

How many buds, how many sticky butts
Of candles, April kindled, now are glued
Fast to the boughs! The park is redolent
Of puberty. The woods' retorts are rude.

The forest's throat is caught in a thick knot
Of feathered throats: a lassoed buffalo
Bellowing in the nets as organs pant:
Wrestlers who groan sonatas, deep and slow.

Oh, poetry, be a Greek sponge supplied
With suction pads, a thing that soaks and cleaves,
For I would lay you on the wet green bench
Out in the garden, among sticky leaves.

Grow sumptuous frills, fabulous hoopskirts, swell,
And suck in clouds, roulades, ravines, until
Night comes; then, poetry, I'll squeeze you out
And let the thirsty paper drink its fill.

                            Translated by Babette Deutsch

Samuel Backett

    photograph by John Minihan, 1984

 

Samuel Beckett

 

photograph by Richard Avedon, April

Vladimir: What do they say?

Estragon: They talk about their lives.

Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.

Estragon: They have to talk about it."

― 'Waiting For Godot'.

Samuel Beckett

 

  bon bon il est un pays 

all right all right there's a land

where forgetting where forgetting weighs 

gently upon worlds unnamed

there the head we shush it the head is mute

and one knows no but one knows nothing

the song of dead mouths dies

on the shore it has made its voyage

there is nothing to mourn 

my loneliness I know it oh well I know it badly

I have the time is what I tell myself I have time

but what time famished bone the time of the dog

of a sky incessantly paling my grain of sky

of the climbing ray ocellate trembling

of microns of years of darkness 

you want me to go from A to B I cannot

I cannot come out I'm in a traceless land

yes yes it's a fine thing you've got there a mighty fine thing 

what is that ask me no more questions

 spiral dust of instants what is this the same

 the calm the love the hate the calm the calm

Samuel Beckett

 

Dortmunder

Int  the magic the Homer dusk

past the red spire of sanctuary

I null she royal hulk

hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K'in music of the bawd.

She stands before me in the bright stall

sustaining the jade splinters

the scarred signaculum of purity quiet

the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east

shall resolve the long night phrase.

Then, as a scroll, folded,

and the glory of her dissolution enlarged

in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners.

Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd

puts her lute away.

William Butler Yeats

        with Walter de la Mare, by Lady Ottoline Morrell

 

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

 

 

 painting by Joaquin Sorolla

Who Knows What is Going On

Translation by Robert Bly

     Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

     How many times the sunrise was
there, behind a mountain!

     How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off
was already a golden body full of thunder!

     This rose was poison.

     That sword gave life.

     I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.

     I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

 Dawn Outside the City Walls

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY

You can see the face of everything, and it is white—

plaster, nightmare, adobe, anemia, cold—

turned to the east. Oh closeness to life!

Hardness of life! Like something

in the body that is animal—root, slag-ends—

with the soul still not set well there—

and mineral and vegetable!

Sun standing stiffly against man,

against the sow, the cabbages, the mud wall!

—False joy, because you are merely

in time, as they say, and not in the soul!

   The entire sky taken up   

by moist and steaming heaps,

a horizon of dung piles.   

Sour remains, here and there,   

of the night. Slices

of the green moon, half-eaten,

crystal bits from false stars,

plaster, the paper ripped off, still faintly

sky-blue. The birds

not really awake yet, in the raw moon,

streetlight nearly out.   

Mob of beings and things!

—A true sadness, because you are really deep

in the soul, as they say, not in time at all!

Juan Ramon Jimenez

 

“I Am Not I”

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY

I am not I.

                   I am this one

walking beside me whom I do not see,

whom at times I manage to visit,

and whom at other times I forget;

who remains calm and silent while I talk,

and forgives, gently, when I hate,

who walks where I am not,

who will remain standing when I die.

Eugenio Montale

 

People talk and talk more
about black holes.

I believe the blackest hole
is the one we inhabit,
and that maybe someone outside it
wonders if in here there exist
beasts with two legs or four
or no beasts at all, and that nobody 
even mentions plants or flowers.

           

Saul Bellow

 

from Herzog

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Some people thought he was cracked and for a time he himself had doubted that he was all there. But now, though he still behaved oddly, he felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong. He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun. He was so stirred by these letters that from the end of June he moved from place to place with a valise full of papers. He had carried this valise from New York to Martha’s Vineyard, but returned from the Vineyard immediately; two days later he flew to Chicago, and from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts. Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.

It was the peak of summer in the Berkshires. Herzog was alone in the big old house. Normally particular about food, he now ate Silvercup bread from the paper package, beans from the can, and American cheese. Now and then he picked raspberries in the overgrown garden, lifting up the thorny canes with absent-minded caution. As for sleep, he slept on a mattress without sheets – it was his abandoned marriage bed – or in the hammock, covered by his coat. Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him in the yard. When he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases – minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.

When some new thought gripped his heart he went to the kitchen, his headquarters, to write it down. The white paint was scaling from the brick walls and Herzog sometimes wiped mouse droppings from the table with his sleeve, calmly wondering why field mice should have such a passion for wax and paraffin. They made holes in paraffin-sealed preserves; they gnawed birthday candles down to the wicks. A rat chewed into a package of bread, leaving the shape of its body in the layers of slices. Herzog ate the other half of the loaf spread with jam. He could share with rats too.

All the while, one corner of his mind remained open to the external world. He heard the crows in the morning. Their harsh call was delicious. He heard the thrushes at dusk. At night there was a barn owl. When he walked in the garden, excited by a mental letter, he saw roses winding about the rain spout; or mulberries – birds gorging in the mulberry tree. The days were hot, the evenings flushed and dusty. He looked keenly at everything but he felt half blind.

Saul Bellow

---

from Humboldt's Gift

“There are a few things I have to get off my chest about Humboldt. Why should Humboldt have bothered himself so much? A poet is what he is in himself. Gertrude Stein used to distinguish between ‘a person who is an ‘entity’ and one who has an ‘identity.A significant man is an entity. Identity is what they give you socially. Your little dog recognizes you and therefore you have an identity. An entity by contrast, an impersonal power, can be a frightening thing. It's as T, S. Eliot said of William Blake. A man like Tennyson was merged into his environment or encrusted with parasitic opinion, but Blake was naked and saw man naked, and from the center of his own crystal. There was nothing of the ‘superior person’ about him, and this made him terrifying. That is an entity. An identity is easier on itself. An identity pours a drink, lights a cigarette seeks its human pleasure, and shuns rigorous conditions. The temptation to lie down is very great. Humboldt was a weakening entity. Poets have to dream, and dreaming in America is no cinch. God ‘giveth songs in the night,the Book of Job says. I've devoted lots of thought to all these questions and famous insomnia. But I think that Humboldt's insomnia testified mostly to the strength of the world, the human world and all its wonderful works. The world was interesting, really ;nteresting. The world had money, science, war, politics, anxiety, sickness perplexity. It had all the voltage. Once you had picked up the high‐voltage wire and were someone, a known name, you couldn't release yourself from the electrical current. You were transfixed. Okay, Renate, I'm summarizing: the world has power, and interest follows power. Where are the poets’ power and interest? They originate in dream states. These come because the poet is what he is in himself because a voice sounds in his soul which has a power equal to the power of societies, states, and regimes. You don't make yourself interesting through madness, eccentricity, or anything of the sort but because you have the power to cancel the world's distraction, activity, noise, and become fit to hear the essence of things. I can't tell you how terrible he looked last time I him.”

—Viking Press New York, 1975

Saul Bellow

 

Excerpt
Ravelstein

Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it. During the Civil War people complained about Lincoln's funny stories. Perhaps he sensed that strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke. But critics said that he was frivolous and his own Secretary of War referred to him as an ape. 

Among the debunkers and spoofers who formed the tastes and minds of my generation H. L. Mencken was the most prominent. My high school friends, readers of the American Mercury, were up on the Scopes trial as Mencken reported it. Mencken was very hard on William Jennings Bryan and the Bible Belt and Boobus Americanus. Clarence Darrow, who defended Scopes, represented science, modernity, and progress. To Darrow and Mencken, Bryan the Special Creationist was a doomed Farm Belt absurdity. In the language of evolutionary theory Bryan was a dead branch of the life-tree. His Free Silver monetary standard was a joke. So was his old-style congressional oratory. So were the huge Nebraska farm dinners he devoured. His meals, Mencken said, were the death of him. His views on Special Creation were subjected to extreme ridicule at the trial, and Bryan went the way of the pterodactyl - the clumsy version of an idea which later succeeded - the gliding reptiles becoming warm-blooded birds that flew and sang. 

I filled up a scribbler with quotes from Mencken and later added notes from spoofers or self-spoofers like W. C. Fields or Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Huey Long, and Senator Dirksen. There was even a page on Machiavelli's sense of humor. But I'm not about to involve you in my speculations on wit and self-irony in democratic societies. Not to worry. I'm glad my old scribbler has disappeared. I have no wish to see it again. It surfaces briefly as a sort of extended footnote. 

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject-shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, Miekell Jack-sown. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the Paris Herald. 

"Terrific, isn't it, having this pop circus?" said Ravelstein

Eugenio Montale

Bring Me the Sunflower

Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it
here in my own field burned by salt-spray,
so it can show all day to the blue reflection of the sky
the anxiety of its golden face.

Darker things yearn for a clarity,
bodies fade and exhaust themselves in a flood
of colors, as colors do in music. To vanish,
therefore, is the best of all good luck.

Bring me the plant that leads us
where blond transparencies rise up
and life evaporates like an essence;
bring me the sunflower sent mad with light.

                                                                 translated by Charles Wright

Eugenio Montale

The Storm

Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grand's merveilles,
Leurs mains ne servent plus qu' à nous persécuter . . .
                                                    (Agrippa D' Aubigné: À Dieu)

The storm that trickles its long March
thunderclaps, its hail, onto the stiff
leaves of the magnolia tree;

(sounds of shaking crystal which startle you
in your nest of sleep; and the gold
snuffed on the mahogany, on the backs
of the bound books, flares again
like a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids)

the lightning that blanches
the trees and walls, freezing them
like images on a negative (a benediction
and destruction you carry carved
within you, a condemnation that binds you
stronger to me than any love, my strange sister);
and then the tearing crash, the jangling sistrums, the rustle
of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night,
the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango. . .and overhead
some gesture that blindly is groping. . .
                                                           as when
turning around, and, sweeping clear your forehead
of its cloud of hair,

you waved to me—and entered the dark.

                                                                          translated by Charles Wright

 

 

Eugenio Montale

 

CONCERNING THE UNIVERSE. THE CITY OF GOD

Concerning the universe, the city of God, 
we know very little.
It was cooked for a long time
over a low flame.

Now, according to some idiots,
things are speeding up,
an acceleration that seems almost
a prelude to total extinction.

Perhaps thought itself will survive
without the one doing the thinking.
What’s left is sheer absurdity,
the black hole, the Encyclopedia
of zero.

Translation by George Bradley

Pablo Neruda

Gentleman Alone

The young maricones and the horny muchachas, 
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia, 
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant, 
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night, 
Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters 
Surround my solitary home, 
Enemies of my soul, 
Conspirators in pajamas 
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords. 
Radiant summer brings out the lovers 
In melancholy regiments, 
Fat and thin and happy and sad couples; 
Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon, 
There is a continual life of pants and panties, 
A hum from the fondling of silk stockings, 
And women's breasts that glisten like eyes. 
The salary man, after a while, 
After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night, 
Has decisively fucked his neighbor, 
And now takes her to the miserable movies, 
Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes, 
And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down 
With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes. 
The night of the hunter and the night of the husband 
Come together like bed sheets and bury me, 
And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating, 
And the animals mount each other openly, 
And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically, 
And cousins play strange games with cousins, 
And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient, 
And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought, 
Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast, 
And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly 
On beds big and tall as ships: 
So, eternally, 
This twisted and breathing forest crushes me 
With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth 
And black roots like fingernails and shoes. 

Translated by Mike Topp