[Lika_k]

Збигнев Херберт
Метаморфозы Тита Ливия
Как понимали Ливия мой дед мой прадед
ведь в классической гимназии они его конечно читали
в не очень подходящую пору
когда за окном каштаны — пылкие свечи соцветий —
а все мысли деда и прадеда мчались запыхавшись к Мизе
поющей в саду демонстрируя декольте
и божественные ножки аж до колена
или Габи из венской оперы в локонах как херувим
Габи с курносым носиком и с Моцартом в горле
или в конце концов к Юзе утешительнице огорченных
без красоты без таланта и без особых капризов
а стало быть Ливия читали — о время цветенья —
под запах меланхолии мела нефти которой мыли полы
под портретом императора
ведь был тогда император
а империя как все империи
казалась вечной

Читая историю Города они поддавались иллюзии
что будто бы они римляне или потомки римлян
эти сыновья покоренных сами порабощенные
конечно участвовал в этом и латинист их профессор
чином придворный советник
коллекция античных достоинств под потертой тужуркой
он по Ливию внушал гимназистам презрение к черни
народный бунт — res tam foeda — вызывал у них отвращенье
тогда как завоеванья казались им правомерны
означали просто победу того что лучше сильнее
поэтому их огорчало пораженье при Тразименском озере
преисполняли гордостью подвиги Сципиона
смерть Ганнибала приняли с искренним облегченьем
легко чересчур легко они дали себя вести
через шанцы придаточных предложений
запутанные конструкции которыми управляет причастие
полые реки риторики
засады синтаксиса
— в битву
за не свое дело

Лишь мой отец и я за ним
читали Ливия наперекор Ливию
вникая в то что кроется под фреской
в нас не рождали сочувствия ни театральный жест Сцеволы
ни крик центурионов триумфы полководцев
скорей нас волновали пораженья
самнитов галлов и этрусков
мы перечисляли народы стертые Римом в прах
без почестей похороненные те что для Ливия
не стоили даже морщинки стиля
этих гирпинов апулов луканцев узентинов
а также жителей Тарента Метапонта Локр

Мой отец знал прекрасно и я также знаю
что однажды без всяких небесных знамений
на далеких окраинах
в Паннонии Сараеве или же в Трапезунте
в городе над холодным морем
или в долине Паншир
вспыхнет локальный пожар

и рухнет империя

пер. Вл. Британишский

@темы: polish, 20, х (rus)

---

[Lika_k]

Ciaran Carson
Eesti*
I wandered homesick-lonely through that Saturday of
silebt Tallinn
When a carillon impringed a thousand raining quavers
on my ear, tumbling

Dimly from immeasurable heights into imaginary
brazen gong-space, trembling
Dimpled in their puddled, rain-drop halo-pools,
concentrically assembling.

I glimpsed the far-off, weeping onion-domes. I was
inveigled towards the church
Through an aural labyrinth of streets until I sheltered
in its porch.

I thumbed the warm brass worn thumb-scoop of the
latch. Tock. I entered into bronze —
Dark, shrines and niches lit by beeswax tapers and
the sheen of ikons.

Their eyes and the holes in their hands were nailed
into my gaze, quod erat demonstrandum:
Digits poised and pointed towards their hearts. The
are beautiful Panjandrums

Invoked by murmuring and incense, hymns that
father passes on the father,
The patina of faces under painted faces. They evoke
another

Time, where I am going with you, fatherm to first
Mass. We walked
The starry frozen pavement, holding hands to stop
ourselves from falling. There was no talk,
Nor need for it. Our incense-breath was word
enough as we approached the Gothic,
Shivering in top-coats, on the verge of sliding off the
metronomic

Azure-gradual dawn as nave and transept summoned
us with beaded, thumbed
And fingered whispering, Silk-tasselled missals.
Rosaries, Statues stricken dumb

Beneath their rustling purple shrouds, as candles
wavered in the holy smoke.
The mosaic chapel echoed with a clinking, chinking
censer-music.

This red-letter day would not be writte, had I not
wandered through the land of Eesti.
I askede my father how he thought it went. He said to
me in Irish, listen. Èist.

(с)

* Eesti - Estonia in Estonian

@темы: c, 20, english-british, carson, ciaran, english-british-irish

---

[Lika_k]

Хуан Рамон Хименес
Не знаю, кем она забыта…
Подняв ее с травы лесной,
я ощутил смущенье — словно
следила женщина за мной…
И в тот же миг поверхность флейты
покинул пряный аромат —
осталась память сновиденья,
благоуханного стократ.
Я заиграл на ней: так странно
мне подарил певучий звук
весеннюю зарю, девчушек
и розами покрытый луг,
нежданную печаль и нежность,
стеснившую смущеньем грудь,
как будто беглая улыбка
спешит во вздохе потонуть…
Грусть и веселье, смех и стоны
лились, как будто в полусне, —
так, словно женщина внимала
неведомо откуда мне…

пер. П. Грушко

@темы: espanol, 20, х (rus)

---

[Lika_k]

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966)
The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me
“the withness of the body”
The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

@темы: s, 20, english-american

---

[Lika_k]

Фернандо Пессоа
Мой облик, жесты, взгляд - не я:
Так нереален небосвод.
Та суть во мне, что не моя,
Моею жизнью не живет.
Притихший ветер сном прогрет,
День смысла начисто лишен.
Моей тоске исхода нет.
Я выжат и опустошен.
Когда б на память мне пришли
Другие небеса, края,
Прекрасней жизни и земли,
Известных мне! Но мысль сия,
Плод умствующего ума,
Что праздным умствованьям рад,
В моей дремоте спит сама,
Как водоросли в море спят.
И лишь в чужой мне яви дня,
Забывшей обо мне давно,
Есть все места, где нет меня,
Есть все, чего мне не дано.
Мне нет ни сути, ни пути,
Ни знания, ни бытия.
Мне только снится жизнь моя.

Пер. А. Косе

@темы: portuguese, 20, pessoa, fernando, п

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[Lika_k]

Vance Thompson
Symbols
My Palace is of smoke and rain
And from the window I look forth
And see a blurred, tumultuous train
Glide through a tunnel to the north,
Beaconed by lantern-lights of blood.
My palace is of storm and flood,
And through the window panes I see
The white stars miming oracles
To the dead sand and sleeping sea-
Stars sigh and cry aloud like bells.
My palace is of black basalt.
The stars which mimed in the blue vault
Have passed with dark averted cowls.
I see the city’s fitful light
(Lights winking like the eyes of owls).
Men mad with dreams, shout to the night.

@темы: t, 19, english-american

---

[Lika_k]

Rainer Maria Rilke
Musik
Wüsste ich für wen ich spiele, ach!
immer könnt ich rauschen wie der Bach.

Ahnte ich, ob tote Kinder gern
tönen hören meinen innern Stern;

ob die Mädchen, die vergangen sind,
lauschend wehn um mich im Abendwind.

Ob ich einem, welcher zornig war,
leise streife durch das Totenhaar...

Denn was wär Musik, wenn sie nicht ging
weit hinüber über jedes Ding.

Sie, gewiss, die weht, sie weiss es nicht,
wo uns die Verwandlung unterbricht.

Dass uns Freunde hören, ist wohl gut -,
aber sie sind nicht so ausgeruht

wie die Andern, die man nicht mehr sieht:
tiefer fühlen sie ein Lebens-Lied,

weil sie wehen unter dem, was weht,
und vergehen, wenn der Ton vergeht.

Aus: Die Gedichte 1922 bis 1926 (Muzot, 11. August 1924)

Райнер Мария Рильке
Музыка
Слушателя знать бы мне, кто чей;
я тогда звучал бы, как ручей.
Если мертвым детям иногда
слышится внутри меня звезда,
если мертвых девочек полет -
ветер, что душе моей поет,
если мертвых я коснусь волос
и того, что яростью звалось,
мне тогда подскажет естество:
музыка не выше ли всего,
хоть она не знает, где подчас
измененье прерывает нас.
Как твои друзья ни хороши,
слушатели лучше есть в тиши;
кто не видим больше, тот постиг
песню жизни глубже в этот миг;
веет он, пока она слышна,
и пройдет, когда пройдет она.

пер. В. Микушевич

@темы: 20, rilke, deutsche-oesterreichisch, р (rus), r

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[Lika_k]

Paul Celan
Illegibility
of this world. All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify
the splitting hour,
hoarsely.
You, clamped
into your deepest part,
climb out of yourself
for ever.

tr. by Michael Hamburger

@темы: c, 20, deutsche-oesterreichisch, celan, paul

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[Lika_k]

Rainer Maria Rilke
An die Musik
Musik: Atem der Statuen. Vielleicht:
Stille der Bilder. Du Sprache wo Sprachen
enden. Du Zeit,
die senkrecht steht auf der Richtung vergehender Herzen.

Gefühle zu wem? O du der Gefühle
Wandlung in was? -: in hörbare Landschaft.
Du Fremde: Musik. Du uns entwachsener
Herzraum. Innigstes unser,
das, uns übersteigend, hinausdrängt, -
heiliger Abschied:
da uns das Innre umsteht
als geübteste Ferne, als andre
Seite der Luft:
rein,
riesig,
nicht mehr bewohnbar.

(Aus dem Nachlaß )

Райнер Мария Рильке
Музыке
Музыка: дух изваяний. А может быть:
тишь картин. Ты - язык, где кончается
речь. Ты времени
отвес на пути, где сердца погибают.
Чувства - к кому же? О! Ты странствие
чувств, но куда? - в пейзаж еле слышный.
Ты, музыка, чужеземка. Ты - выросший
из нас сердечный простор. То сокровенное,
что, нас превзойдя, рвется наружу:
священным прощаньем,
в час, когда нас нутро обстает
далью затверженной, изнанкой
воздуха:
чистой,
огромной
и уже нежилой.

Пер. Сер. Петров

Rainer Maria Rilke
To Music
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

Transl. by Stephen Mitchell

@темы: 20, rilke, deutsche-oesterreichisch, р (rus), r

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[Lika_k]

Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Hard Dying
By heaven and hell, and all the fools between them,
I will not die, nor sleep, nor wink my eyes,
But think myself into a God; old Death
Shall dream he has slain me, and I’ll creep behind him,
Thrust off the bony tyrant from his throne
And beat him into dust. Or I will burst
Damnation’s iron egg, my tomb, and come
Half damned, ere they make lightning of my soul,
And creep into thy carcase as thou sleepest
Between two crimson fevers. I’ll dethrone
The empty skeleton, and be thy death,
A death of grinding madness. - Fear me now;
I am a devil, not a human soul.

(from the fragments of "The Last Man", 1823-5)

@темы: b, 19, english-british

---

29.12.1926

[Lika_k]

Rainer Maria Rilke
Von den Fontänen
Auf einmal weiß ich viel von den Fontänen,
den unbegreiflichen Bäumen aus Glas.
Ich könnte reden wie von eignen Tränen,
die ich, ergriffen von sehr großen Träumen,
einmal vergeudete und dann vergaß.
Vergaß ich denn, daß Himmel Hände reichen
zu vielen Dingen und in das Gedränge?
Sah ich nicht immer Großheit ohnegleichen
im Aufstieg alter Parke, vor den weichen
erwartungsvollen Abenden, - in bleichen
aus fremden Mädchen steigenden Gesängen,
die überfließen aus der Melodie
und wirklich werden und als müßten sie
sich spiegeln in den aufgetanen Teichen?

Ich muß mich nur erinnern an das Alles,
was an Fontänen und an mir geschah, -
dann fühl ich auch die Last des Niederfalles,
in welcher ich die Wasser wiedersah:
Und weiß von Zweigen, die sich abwärts wandten,
von Stimmen, die mit kleiner Flamme brannten,
von Teichen, welche nur die Uferkanten
schwachsinnig und verschoben wiederholten,
von Abendhimmeln, welche von verkohlten
westlichen Wäldern ganz entfremdet traten
sich anders wölbten, dunkelten und taten
als wär das nicht die Welt, die sie gemeint...

Vergaß ich denn, daß Stern bei Stern versteint
und sich verschließt gegen die Nachbargloben?
Daß sich die Welten nur noch wie verweint
im Raum erkennen? - Vielleicht sind wir oben,
in Himmel andrer Wesen eingewoben,
die zu uns aufschaun abends. Vielleicht loben
uns ihre Dichter. Vielleicht beten viele
zu uns empor. Vielleicht sind wir die Ziele
von fremden Flüchen, die uns nie erreichen,
Nachbaren eines Gottes, den sie meinen
in unsrer Höhe, wenn sie einsam weinen,
an den sie glauben und den sie verlieren,
und dessen Bildnis, wie ein Schein aus ihren
suchenden Lampen, flüchtig und verweht
über unsere zerstreuten Gesichter geht....

(Aus: Das Buch der Bilder)

Райнер Мария Рильке
О фонтанах
Я многое вдруг понял в этом странном
непостижимом древе из стекла.
Так слезы в детстве радужным туманом
вставали, источаясь под нажимом
забытой грезы, что во мглу влекла.

Но разве я забыл, как близоруко
хваталось небо за любой обломок.
И с чем сравнить величье - что порукой
ему в старинном парке, долгой мукой
идущем вверх, и, как перед разлукой,
чего-то ждущем, в пенье незнакомок,
чуть слышимом и бьющем через край
мелодии - продлись, не умирай,
в прудах, очнувшихся на миг от звука.

Но стоит вспомнить, что происходило
с фонтанами, да и со мной тогда,
как чувствую всю тяжесть этой силы,
и вновь в глазах моих стоит вода,
и мне ветла становится понятна,
и голоса горят светло и внятно,
и берега пустились в путь обратный
беспомощным смещенным отраженьем,
и небеса уже, закатным жженьем
обуглены, круглятся над лесами,
и, отрешенные, не верят сами
в немыслимый потусторонний свет...

Но разве я забыл: ответа нет,
что звезды межевым камням подобны,
что лишь в слезах миры провидят след
иных миров? - а вдруг тот свет - загробный,
и наверху мы для существ, способных
в нас вглядываться, словно в преподобных
на небесах, и может быть, в хвалебных
нас прославляют гимнах, и в молебнах
к нам обращаются. И проклинают.
Но глухи мы, когда они стенают
от одиночества. И поминают
нас, близких к их невидимому Богу,
чей образ, угасая понемногу,
что капельки горячие лампад,
по нашим лицам бродит наугад.. .

пер. А. Прокопьев

@темы: 20, rilke, deutsche-oesterreichisch, р (rus), r

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[Lika_k]

Arthur Rimbaud
Rêvé pour l'hiver
L'hiver, nous irons dans un petit wagon rose
Avec des coussins bleus.
Nous serons bien. Un nid de baisers fous repose
Dans chaque coin moelleux.

Tu fermeras l'oeil, pour ne point voir, par la glace,
Grimacer les ombres des soirs,
Ces monstruosités hargneuses, populace
De démons noirs et de loups noirs.

Puis tu te sentiras la joue égratignée...
Un petit baiser, comme une folle araignée,
Te courra par le cou...

Et tu me diras : " Cherche ! " en inclinant la tête,
- Et nous prendrons du temps à trouver cette bête
- Qui voyage beaucoup...

Артюр Рембо
Зимняя мечта ( к ней)
В вагоне розовом уедем мы зимою.
Уютно будет нам:
Там всюду гнезда поцелуев, полных зноя,
Таятся по углам.
Закроешь ты глаза, чтобы во мгле вечерней
Не видеть за окном
Теней кривляющихся, адской этой черни,
Подкравшейся тайком.
Тут словно паучок тебе царапнет щеку,
Вдоль шеи побежит мой поцелуй и к сроку
Не возвратится вспять.
И, голову склонив, "Ищи", -- ты скажешь строго,
И паучка, что путешествует так много,
Мы примемся искать.

пер. М. Кудинов

@темы: francaise, 19, symbolism, р (rus), r

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[Lika_k]

W. H. Auden
September 1, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

пер. Шломо Кроль (SENTJAO)

@темы: links, 20, youtube, auden, w.h., english-british, thomas, dylan, english: anglo-american

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[Lika_k]

Rudyard Kipling
The Lovers' Litany
Eyes of grey -- a sodden quay,
Driving rain and falling tears,
As the steamer wears to sea
In a parting storm of cheers.
Sing, for Faith and Hope are high --
None so true as you and I --
Sing the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"

Eyes of black -- a throbbing keel,
Milky foam to left and right;
Whispered converse near the wheel
In the brilliant tropic night.
Cross that rules the Southern Sky!
Stars that sweep and wheel and fly,
Hear the Lovers' Litany:
Love like ours can never die!"

Eyes of brown -- a dusy plain
Split and parched with heat of June,
Flying hoof and tightened rein,
Hearts that beat the old, old tune.
Side by side the horses fly,
Frame we now the old reply
Of the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"

Eyes of blue -- the Simla Hills
Silvered with the moonlight hoar;
Pleading of the waltz that thrills,
Dies and echoes round Benmore.
"Mabel," "Officers," "Good-bye,"
Glamour, wine, and witchery --
On my soul's sincerity,
"Love like ours can never die!"

Maidens of your charity,
Pity my most luckless state.
Four times Cipid's debtor I --
Bankrupt in quadruplicate.
Yet, despite this evil case,
And a maiden showed me grace,
Four-and-forty times would I
Sing the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"

Редьярд Киплинг
Серые глаза - рассвет,
Пароходная сирена,
Дождь, разлука, серый след
За винтом бегущей пены.

Черные глаза - жара,
В море сонных звезд скольженье,
И у борта до утра
Поцелуев отраженье.

Синие глаза - луна,
Вальса белое молчанье,
Ежедневная стена
Неизбежного прощанья.

Карие глаза - песок,
Осень, волчья степь, охота,
Скачка, вся на волосок
От паденья и полета.

Нет, я не судья для них,
Просто без суждений вздорных
Я четырежды должник
Синих, серых, карих, черных.

Как четыре стороны
Одного того же света,
Я люблю - в том нет вины -
Все четыре этих цвета.

Пер. К. Симонов

@темы: 20, k, 19, english-british, к (rus)

---

[Lika_k]

@темы: interesting, a, 20, youtube, auden, w.h., english: anglo-american

---

[Lika_k]

W. H. Auden
The Wanderer
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,
That he should leave his house,
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
By pot-holed becks
A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.
There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway
voices
Of new men making another love.

Save him from hostile capture,
From sudden tiger's leap at corner;
Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.


W. H. Auden - The Wanderer by poetictouch

@темы: a, 20, youtube, auden, w.h., english: anglo-american

---

[Lika_k]

Габриэла Мистраль
Сонеты смерти
1
В стене бетонной ложе ледяное
не для тебя, и я исправлю это:
ты будешь ждать свидания со мною
среди травы, и шелеста, и света.
Я уложу тебя в иной постели,
мое дитя, продрогшее в темнице,
и станет пухом, мягче колыбели,
тебе земля, в которой сладко спится.
С пыльцою роз смешаю комья глины,
покуда лунный столп вверху дымится,
и, впредь не зная ревности и страха,
вернусь к тебе, счастливой и безвинной:
ведь как моим соперницам не биться -
моя и только эта горстка праха!

2
Но будет день с такой ломотой в теле,
что мне душа шепнет на полпути:
как розовые тропы надоели,
как не к лицу с веселыми идти!
Еще одна захлопнется темница,
ударит заступ, глина упадет...
И нам придет пора наговориться
взахлеб и вволю, вечность напролет!
Наедине с тобой в глухой пустыне
открою, отчего, не кончив круга,
в расцвете сил ты лег в земную твердь.
И станет явным тайное доныне:
нас небо сотворило друг для друга
и, уходя к другой, ты выбрал смерть.

3
Злые руки к тебе протянулись в тот горестный миг,
и застыли в печали созвездья, когда ради муки
ты покинул навек беломраморных лилий цветник.
Для чего ты отдал свое сердце в недобрые руки?..
И взмолилась я: "Смилуйся, Господи, гибнет мой друг
на неверной стезе. Провожатый не знает дороги.
Или вырви его из коварных губительных рук,
или в сон погрузи, подводящий земные итоги.
Ни окликнуть его, ни его удержать не могу -
черный ветер морей прямо в бурю уносит челнок.
Не вернешь его мне -- пусть достанется мертвой воде!"
Тонет розовый челн, беззащитно кренясь на бегу...
Разве тот не любил, кто и жалость в себе превозмог?
Ты, Всевышний, меня оправдаешь на Страшном Суде!

Пер. Н. Ванханен

@темы: м, 20, latinoamericano, mistral, gabriela

---

[Lika_k]

Wallace Stevens
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
To Henry Church
And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

It Must Be Abstract
I
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images . . .

The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.

II
It is the celestial ennui of apartments
That sends us back to the first idea, the quick
Of this invention; and yet so poisonous

Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,

Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.
May there be an ennui of the first idea?
What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?

The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher
Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.
But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
It is desire at the end of winter, when

It observes the effortless weather turning blue
And sees the myosotis on its bush.
Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.

It knows that what it has is what is not
And throws it away like a thing of another time,
As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.

III
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.

We say: At night an Arabian in my room,
With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy

Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor. By day
The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo

And still the grossest iridescence of ocean
Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.
Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

IV
The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes
And Eve made air the mirror of herself,

Of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves
In heaven as in a glass; a second earth;
And in the earth itself they found a green—

The inhabitants of a very varnished green.
But the first idea was not to shape the clouds
In imitation. The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
The air is not a mirror but bare board,
Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro

And comic color of the rose, in which
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

V
The lion roars at the enraging desert,
Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise,
Defies red emptiness to evolve his match,

Master by foot and jaws and by the mane,
Most supple challenger. The elephant
Breaches the darkness of Ceylon with blares,

The glitter-goes on surfaces of tanks,
Shattering velvetest far-away. The bear,
The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain

At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow.
But you, ephebe, look from your attic window,
Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie

In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner
Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press
A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,

Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look
Across the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .

These are the heroic children whom time breeds
Against the first idea—to lash the lion,
Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.

VI
Not to be realized because not to
Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,

Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,
Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to
Be spoken to, without a roof, without

First fruits, without the virginal of birds,
The dark-blown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.
Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia

And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.
Without a name and nothing to be desired,
If only imagined but imagined well.

My house has changed a little in the sun.
The fragrance of the magnolias comes close,
False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

VII
It feels good as it is without the giant,
A thinker of the first idea. Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,

A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain and

A wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence,

As when the cock crows on the left and all
Is well, incalculable balances,
At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes

And a familiar music of the machine
Sets up its Schwärmerei, not balances
That we achieve but balances that happen,

As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which

We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.

VIII
Can we compose a castle-fortress-home,
Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc,
And see the MacCullough there as major man?

The first idea is an imagined thing.
The pensive giant prone in violet space
May be the MacCullough, an expedient,

Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word,

Beau linguist. But the MacCullough is MacCullough.
It does not follow that major man is man.
If MacCullough himself lay lounging by the sea,

Drowned in its washes, reading in the sound,
About the thinker of the first idea,
He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,

Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,
Or a leaner being, moving in on him,
Of greater aptitude and apprehension,

As if the waves at last were never broken,
As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.

IX
The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance
Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate
And of its nature, the idiom thereof.

They differ from reason’s click-clack, its applied
Enflashings. But apotheosis is not
The origin of the major man. He comes,

Compact in invincible foils, from reason,
Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,
Swaddled in revery, the object of

The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,
Hidden from other thoughts, he that reposes
On a breast forever precious for that touch,

For whom the good of April falls tenderly,
Falls down, the cock-birds calling at the time.
My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.

He is and may be but oh! he is, he is,
This foundling of the infected past, so bright,
So moving in the manner of his hand.

Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him
No names. Dismiss him form your images.
The hot of him is purest in the heart.

X
The major abstraction is the idea of man
And major man is its exponent, abler
In the abstract than in his singular,

More fecund as principle than particle,
Happy fecundity, flor-abundant force,
In being more than an exception, part,

Though an heroic part, of the commonal.
The major abstraction is the commonal,
The inanimate, difficult visage. Who is it?

What rabbi, grown furious with human wish,
What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious,

Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one, in his old coat,
His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,

Looking for what was, where it used to be?
Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man
In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,

It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final elegance, not to console
Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

It Must Change

I
The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair
And these the seraph saw, had seen long since,
In the bandeaux of the mothers, would see again.

The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant

Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This means

Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.
It means the distaste we feel for this withered scene

Is that it has not changed enough. It remains,
It is a repetition. The bees come booming
As if—The pigeons clatter in the air.

An erotic perfume, half of the body, half
Of an obvious acid is sure what it intends
And the booming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.

II
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains. But does
The body lift its heavy wing, take up,

Again, an inexhaustible being, rise
Over the loftiest antagonist
To drone the green phrases of its juvenal?

Why should the bee recapture a lost blague,
Find a deep echo in a horn and buzz
The bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old?

The President has apples on the table
And barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The curtains to a metaphysical t

And the banners of the nation flutter, burst
On the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack
At the halyards. Why, then, when in golden fury

Spring vanishes the scraps of winter, why
Should there be a question of returning or
Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?

This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing
Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this
Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

III
The great statue of the General Du Puy
Rested immobile, though neighboring catafalques
Bore off the residents of its noble Place.

The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested that, at the final funeral,
The music halted and the horse stood still.

On Sundays, lawyers in their promenades
Approached this strongly-heightened effigy
To study the past, and doctors, having bathed

Themselves with care, sought out the nerveless frame
Of a suspension, a permanence, so rigid
That it made the General a bit absurd,

Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.
There never had been, never could be, such
A man. The lawyers disbelieved, the doctors

Said that as keen, illustrious ornament,
As a setting for geraniums, the General,
The very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged

Among our more vestigial states of mind.
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

IV
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.

In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.
Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,
Sister and solace, brother and delight.

V
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,

Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted
With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise
And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,

A green baked greener in the greenest sun.
These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in
White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.

There was an island beyond him on which rested,
An island to the South, on which rested like
A mountain, a pine-apple pungent as Cuban summer.

And là-bas, là-bas, the cool bananas grew,
Hung heavily on the great banana tree,
Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.

He thought often of the land from which he came,
How that whole country was a melon, pink
If seen rightly and yet a possible red.

An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

VI
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in my coppice you behold me be.

Ah, ké! The bloody wren, the felon jay,
Ké-ké, the jug-throated robin pouring out,
Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.

There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many clappers going without bells,
That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.

One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,
The phrases of a single phrase, ké-ké,
A single text, granite monotony,

One sole face, like a photograph of fate,
Glass-blower’s destiny, bloodless episcopus,
Eye without lid, mind without any dream—

These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird

Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.

VII
After a luster of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe

An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.

The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he can take within him on his breath,
Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.

For easy passion and ever-ready love
Are of our earthy birth and here and now
And where we live and everywhere we live,

As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,
As in the courage of the ignorant man,
Who chants by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes

The book, hot for another accessible bliss;
The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.

VIII
On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio
Confronted Ozymandias. She went
Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.

I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear.

I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me
In its own only precious ornament.
Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.

Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.

Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never naked. A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening form the heart and mind.

IX
The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it move to and fro or is it of both

At once? Is it a luminous flittering
Or the concentration of a cloudy day?
Is there a poem that never reaches words

And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seems

To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?

Evade, this hot, dependent orator,
The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,
Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker

Of a speech only a little of the tongue?
It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak

The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the imagination’s Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.

X
A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre
Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of
The lake was full of artificial things,

Like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color, in which swans
Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.

The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

There was a will to change, a necessitous
And present way, a presentation, a kind
Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,

The eye of a vagabond in metaphor
That catches our own. The casual is not
Enough. The freshness of transformation is

The freshness of a world. It is our own,
It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,
And that necessity and that presentation

Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

It Must Give Pleasure

I
To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,
To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude
And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome
Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,
The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.
But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.

II
The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window
Did not desire that feathery argentines
Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds

Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them,
Nor that the sexual blossoms should repose
Without their fierce addictions, nor that the heat

Of summer, growing fragrant in the night,
Should strengthen her abortive dreams and take
In sleep its natural form. It was enough

For her that she remembered: the argentines
Of spring come to their places in the grape leaves
To cool their ruddy pulses; the frothy clouds

Are nothing but frothy clouds; the frothy blooms
Waste without puberty; and afterward,
When the harmonious heat of August pines

Enters the room, it drowses and is the night.
It was enough for her that she remembered.
The blue woman looked and from her window named

The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,
Cold, coldly delineating, being real,
Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion.

III
A lasting visage in a lasting bush,
A face of stone in an unending red,
Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate,

An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair,
The channel slots of rain, the red-rose-red
And weathered and the ruby-water-worn,

The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips,
The frown like serpents basking on the brow,
The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself,

Red-in-red repetitions never going
Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,
A little roughened and ruder, a crown

The eye could not escape, a red renown
Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.
An effulgence faded, dull cornelian

Too venerably used. That might have been.
It might and might have been. But as it was,
A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell

And bade the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.

IV
We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

There was a mystic marriage in Catawba,
At noon it was on the mid-day of the year
Between a great captain and the maiden Bawda.

This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon
We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take,

Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.
Each must the other take not for his high,
His puissant front nor for her subtle sound,

The shoo-shoo-shoo of secret cymbals round.
Each must the other take as sign, short sign
To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

The great captain loved the ever-hill Catawba
And therefore married Bawda, whom he found there,
And Bawda loved the captain as she loved the sun.

They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.

V
We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango
Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed
Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy

She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one
Of four, and one of seven, whom she dressed
The way a painter of pauvred color paints.

But still she painted them, appropriate to
Their poverty, a gray-blue yellowed out
With ribbon, a rigid statement of them, white,

With Sunday pearls, her widow’s gayety.
She hid them under simple names. She held
Them closelier to her by rejecting dreams.

The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

The Canon Aspirin, having said these things,
Reflected, humming an outline of a fugue
Of praise, a conjugation done by choirs.

Yet when her children slept, his sister herself
Demanded of sleep, in the excitements of silence
Only the unmuddled self of sleep, for them.

VI
When at long midnight the Canon came to sleep
And normal things had yawned themselves away,
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,

Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold

Beneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.

So that he was the ascending wings he saw
And moved on them in orbits’ outer stars
Descending to the children’s bed, on which

They lay. Forth then with huge pathetic force
Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point

Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice

Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.

VII
He imposes orders as he thinks of them,
As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.
Next he builds capitols and in their corridors,

Whiter than wax, sonorous, fame as it is,
He establishes statues of reasonable men,
Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite

Of elephants. But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,

To discover winter and know it well, to find,
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,

Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,

The fiction of an absolute—Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

VIII
What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?
Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour
Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have

No need, am happy, forget need’s golden hand,
Am satisfied without solacing majesty,
And if there is an hour there is a day,

There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections, the escapades of death,
Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

IX
Whistle aloud, too weedy wren. I can
Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,
Like men besides, like men in light secluded,

Enjoying angels. Whistle, forced bugler,
That bugles for the mate, nearby the nest,
Cock bugler, whistle and bugle and stop just short,

Red robin, stop in your preludes, practicing
Mere repetitions. These things at least comprise
An occupation, an exercise, a work,

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round

And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,
So that we look at it with pleasure, look

At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

X
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?

You are familiar yet an aberration.
Civil, madam, I am, but underneath
A tree, this unprovoked sensation requires

That I should name you flatly, waste no words,
Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.
Even so when I think of you as strong or tired,

Bent over work, anxious, content, alone,
You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That’s it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,

Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.

—————
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,

Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,
Two parallels that meet if only in

The meeting of their shadows or that meet
In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.
But your war ends. And after it you return

With six meats and twelve wines or else without
To walk another room . . . Monsieur and comrade,
The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines,

His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,
Inevitably modulating, in the blood.
And war for war, each has its gallant kind.

How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

Annotated text

@темы: interesting, s, links, 20, utile, modernism, ...logy, english-american, stevens, wallace

---

[Lika_k]

Габриэла Мистраль
Вопросы
Как спят самоубийцы, ушедшие бесцельно?
Кровавый ком в гортани? Зияние виска?
Огромные, как луны, распахнутые бельма?
Впилась в незримый якорь сведенная рука?
А, может, ты приходишь, когда уйдут живые,
твердеющие веки с усилием сомкнуть?
Накладываешь руки на раны ножевые
и кисти бездыханным кладешь крестом на грудь?
И правда ли, что розы у их плиты могильной
темнеют, будто струпья смертельно-алых ран?
Что тленом пахнет воздух, безрадостный и пыльный,
и оплетают змеи разросшийся бурьян?
Скажи, Господь, на бегство решившись своенравно,
навеки покидая обмякшие тела,
душа твои пределы пересекает плавно,
иль в ужасе трепещут безумные крыла?
Свой бледный круг светила смыкают перед нею?
Добычу окружает сторылое зверье?
Она тебя боится, приблизиться на смея,
иль с плачем бьется в сердце бесстрастное твое?
Она не видит солнца, блуждая одиноко?
Ей не осушит слезы миролюбивый дух?
Пред ней навек закрыто всевидящее око,
и чуткий слух господень к ее стенаньям глух?
Так утверждают люди -- такое им примнилось,
но я, великий Боже, -- вино твое и кровь -
пускай тебя другие прозвали Справедливость,
тебя не называю иначе, чем Любовь!
Пусть человек уродец, ночная лихорадка,
слепой заморыш, язва, глухой валун в пыли, -
ты -- благостная чаша, в которой бродят сладко
целительные соки садов всея Земли!

Пер. Н. Ванханен

@темы: м, 20, latinoamericano, mistral, gabriela

---

[Lika_k]

W. H. Auden
The Quest
I. The Door
Out of it steps our future, through this door
Enigmas, executioners and rules,
Her Majesty in a bad temper or
A red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.

Great persons eye it in the twilight for
A past it might so carelessly let in,
A widow with a missionary grin,
The foaming inundation at a roar.

We pile our all against it when afraid,
And beat upon its panels when we die:
By happening to be open once, it made

Enormous Alice see a wonderland
That waited for her in the sunshine and,
Simply by being tiny, made her cry.

II. The Preparations

All had been ordered weeks before the start
From the best firms at such work: instruments
To take the measure of all queer events,
And drugs to move the bowels or the heart.

A watch, of course, to watch impatience fly,
Lamps for the dark and shades against the sun;
Foreboding, too, insisted on a gun,
And coloured beads to soothe a savage eye.

In theory they were sound on Expectation,
Had there been situations to be in;
Unluckily they were their situation:

One should not give a poisoner medicine,
A conjurer fine apparatus, nor
A rifle to a melancholic bore.

III. The Crossroads

Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.

So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated his vocation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?

All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for; yet
Who could complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?

IV. The Traveler

No window in his suburb lights that bedroom where
A little fever heard large afternoons at play:
His meadows multiply; that mill, though, is not there
Which went on grinding at the back of love all day.

Nor all his weeping ways through weary wastes have found
The castle where his Greater Hallows are interned;
For broken bridges halt him, and dark thickets round
Some ruin where an evil heritage was burned.

Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
And institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
He'd tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,

That everywhere on his horizon, all the sky,
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.

V. The City

In villages from which their childhoods came
Seeking Necessity, they had been taught
Necessity by nature is the same
No matter how or by whom it be sought.

The city, though, assumed no such belief,
But welcomed each as if he came alone,
The nature of Necessity like grief
Exactly corresponding to his own.

And offered them so many, every one
Found some temptation fit to govern him,
And settled down to master the whole craft

Of being nobody; sat in the sun
During the lunch-hour round the fountain rim,
And watched the country kids arrive, and laughed.

VI. The First Temptation

Ashamed to be the darling of his grief,
He joined a gang of rowdy stories where
His gift for magic quickly made him chief
Of all these boyish powers of the air;

Who turned his hungers into Roman food,
The town's asymmetry into a park;
All hours took taxis; any solitude
Became his flattered duchess in the dark.

But, if he wished for anything less grand,
The nights came padding after him like wild
Beasts that meant harm, and all the doors cried Thief;

And when Truth had met him and put out her hand,
He clung in panic to his tall belief
And shrank away like an ill-treated child.

VII. The Second Temptation

His library annoyed him with its look
Of calm belief in being really there;
He threw away a rival's boring book,
And clattered panting up the spiral stair.

Swaying upon the parapet he cried:
"O Uncreated Nothing, set me free,
Now let Thy perfect be identified,
Unending passion of the Night, with Thee."

And his long-suffering flesh, that all the time
Had felt the simple cravings of the stone
And hoped to be rewarded for her climb,

Took it to be a promise when he spoke
That now at last she would be left alone,
And plunged into the college quad, and broke.

VIII. The Third Temptation

He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say,
Re-opened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey,

And came reluctantly to his conclusion:
"All the arm-chair philosophies are false;
To love another adds to the confusion;
The song of mercy is the Devil's Waltz."

All that he put his hand to prospered so
That soon he was the very King of creatures,
Yet, in an autumn nightmare trembled, for,

Approaching down a ruined corridor,
Strode someone with his own distorted features
Who wept, and grew enormous, and cried Woe.

IX. The Tower

This is an architecture for the old;
Thus heaven was attacked by the afraid,
So once, unconsciously, a virgin made
Her maidenhead conspicuous to a god.

Here on dark nights while worlds of triumph sleep
Lost Love in abstract speculation burns,
And exiled Will to politics returns
In epic verse that makes its traitors weep.

Yet many come to wish their tower a well;
For those who dread to drown, of thirst may die,
Those who see all become invisible:

Here great magicians, caught in their own spell,
Long for a natural climate as they sigh
"Beware of Magic" to the passer-by.

X. The Presumptuous

They noticed that virginity was needed
To trap the unicorn in every case,
But not that, of those virgins who succeeded,
A high percentage had an ugly face.

The hero was as daring as they thought him,
But his pecular boyhood missed them all;
The angel of a broken leg had taught him
The right precautions to avoid a fall.

So in presumption they set forth alone
On what, for them, was not compulsory,
And stuck half-way to settle in some cave
With desert lions to domesticity,

Or turned aside to be absurdly brave,
And met the ogre and were turned to stone.

XI. The Average

His peasant parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil
For any of those fine professions which
Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.

The pressure of their fond ambition made
Their shy and country-loving child afraid
No sensible career was good enough,
Only a hero could deserve such love.

So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town;
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes,
The silence roared displeasure:
looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the exceptional, and ran.

XII. Vocation

Incredulous, he stared at the amused
Official writing down his name among
Those whose request to suffer was refused.

The pen ceased scratching: though he came too late
To join the martyrs, there was still a place
Among the tempters for a caustic tongue

To test the resolution of the young
With tales of the small failings of the great,
And shame the eager with ironic praise.

Though mirrors might be hateful for a while,
Women and books would teach his middle age
The fencing wit of an informal style,
To keep the silences at bay and cage
His pacing manias in a worldly smile.

XIII. The Useful

The over-logical fell for the witch
Whose argument converted him to stone,
Thieves rapidly absorbed the over-rich,
The over-popular went mad alone,
And kisses brutalised the over-male.

As agents their importance quickly ceased;
Yet, in proportion as they seemed to fail,
Their instrumental value was increased
For one predestined to attain their wish.

By standing stones the blind can feel their way,
Wild dogs compel the cowardly to fight,
Beggars assist the slow to travel light,
And even madmen manage to convey
Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.

XIV. The Way

Fresh addenda are published every day
To the encyclopedia of the Way,

Linguistic notes and scientific explanations,
And texts for schools with modernised spelling and illustrations.

Now everyone knows the hero must choose the old horse,
Abstain from liquor and sexual intercourse,

And look out for a stranded fish to be kind to:
Now everyone thinks he could find, had he a mind to,

The way through the waste to the chapel in the rock
For a vision of the Triple Rainbow or the Astral Clock,

Forgetting his information comes mostly from married men
Who liked fishing and a flutter on the horses now and then.

And how reliable can any truth be that is got
By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?

XV. The Lucky

Suppose he'd listened to the erudite committee,
He would have only found where not to look;
Suppose his terrier when he whistled had obeyed,
It would not have unearthed the buried city;
Suppose he had dismissed the careless maid,
The cryptogram would not have fluttered from the book.

"It was not I," he cried as, healthy and astounded,
He stepped across a predecessor's skull;
"A nonsense jingle simply came into my head
And left the intellectual Sphinx dumbfounded;
I won the Queen because my hair was red;
The terrible adventure is a little dull."

Hence Failure's torment: "Was I doomed in any case,
Or would I not have failed had I believed in Grace?"

XVI. The Hero

He parried every question that they hurled:
"What did the Emperor tell you?" "Not to push."
"What is the greatest wonder of the world?"
"The bare man Nothing in the Beggar's Bush."

Some muttered: "He is cagey for effect.
A hero owes a duty to his fame.
He looks too like a grocer for respect."
Soon they slipped back into his Christian name.

The only difference that could be seen
From those who'd never risked their lives at all
Was his delight in details and routine:

For he was always glad to mow the grass,
Pour liquids from large bottles into small,
Or look at clouds through bits of coloured glass.

XVII. Adventure

Others had found it prudent to withdraw
Before official pressure was applied,
Embittered robbers outlawed by the Law,
Lepers in terror of the terrified.

But no one else accused these of a crime;
They did not look ill: old friends, overcome,
Stared as they rolled away from talk and time
Like marbles out into the blank and dumb.

The crowd clung all the closer to convention,
Sunshine and horses, for the sane know why
The even numbers should ignore the odd:

The Nameless is what no free people mention;
Successful men know better than to try
To see the face of their Absconded God.

XVIII. The Adventurers

Spinning upon their central thirst like tops,
They went the Negative Way towards the Dry;
By empty caves beneath an empty sky
They emptied out their memories like slops,

Which made a foul marsh as they dried to death,
Where monsters bred who forced them to forget
The lovelies their consent avoided; yet,
Still praising the Absurd with their last breath,

They seeded out into their miracles:
The images of each grotesque temptation
Became some painter's happiest inspiration,

And barren wives and burning virgins came
To drink the pure cold water of their wells,
And wish for beaux and children in their name.

XIX. The Waters

Poet, oracle, and wit
Like unsuccessful anglers by
The ponds of apperception sit,
Baiting with the wrong request
The vectors of their interest,
At nightfall tell the angler's lie.

With time in tempest everywhere,
To rafts of frail assumption cling
The saintly and the insincere;
Enraged phenomena bear down
In overwhelming waves to drown
Both sufferer and suffering.

The waters long to hear our question put
Which would release their longed-for answer, but.

XX. The Garden

Within these gates all opening begins:
White shouts and flickers through its green and red,
Where children play at seven earnest sins
And dogs believe their tall conditions dead.

Here adolescence into number breaks
The perfect circle time can draw on stone,
And flesh forgives division as it makes
Another's moment of consent its own.

All journeys die here: wish and weight are lifted:
Where often round some old maid's desolation
Roses have flung their glory like a cloak,

The gaunt and great, the famed for conversation
Blushed in the stare of evening as they spoke
And felt their centre of volition shifted.

@темы: a, 20, auden, w.h., english: anglo-american