[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
In Patmos
Quiet room, four candles, red wine in pottery:
Our conversation burning like a fuse,
In this cone of light like some emulsion:
Aristarchus of Samos was only half a man
Believing he could make it all coherent
Without the muddled limits of a woman's arm,
Darning a ladder, warming the begging-bowl.

Quiet force of candles burning in pools of oak,
Conducted by the annals of the word
Towards poor Aristarchus. If he was only half
A man, Melissa, then I am the other half,
Not in believing with him but by failing to.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

[Lika_k]

Fernando Pessoa
35 Sonnets: XXVIII
The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss
Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream.
Surely reality cannot be this!
Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!
The sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed
Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,
Is not something, but something interposed.
Only what in this is not this is real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things
For the rarer potion mine own dreams I’ll take
And for truth commune with imaginings,
Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse,
This common sleep of men, the universe.

Фернандо Пессоа
35 сонетов: XXII
Шипит волна, в пути меняя цвет,
Чтоб пеной стать и на песке осесть.
Не может быть, чтоб это не был бред,
Но где-то есть же то, что все же есть!

Лазурь - ив глубине и в вышине, -
Которую в душе боготворим, -
Лишь странный образ, явленный извне:
Он невозможен, потому что зрим.

Хоть жаль почесть реальностью пустой
Весь этот яркий, грубо-вещный сон,
Я пью мечту - магический настой:
Пусть к истине меня приблизит он.

И отметаю, горечь затая,
Всеобщий сон людского бытия.

пер. Евг. Витковский

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

---

[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
At Rhodes
Anonymous hand, record one afternoon,
In May, some time before the fig-leaf:
Boats lying idle in the sky, a town
Thrown as on a screen of watered silk,
Lying on its side, reddish and soluble,
A sheet of glass leading down into the sea . . .

Down here an idle boy catches a cicada:
Imprisons it, laughing, in his sister's cloak
In whose warm folds the silly creature sings.

Shape of boats, body of a young girl, cicada,
Conspire and join each other here,
In twelve sad lines against the dark.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

C.P. Cavafy - April 29, 1863-April 29, 1933

[Poesia]

23.10.2015 в 12:55

Пишет  Lika_k:

Я просто не могла удержаться и не сохранить это и отдельно.
Даниэл Мендельсон читает "Since Nine" Кавафиса в оригинале. На самом деле я давно уже слышала его чтение того же самого вот здесь в самом конце (здесь отдельно отрывок с чтением стихотворения). Там он еще много интересного говорит - об отношении к искусству и в частности к литературе. И мое любимое: "I need a commentary to read Callimachus. That does not make Callimachus a worse poet. Makes me a worse reader maybe". И это не снобизм, потому что читатель "обязывается" не знать и понимать все, а иметь желание и/или мотивацию понимать больше, чем он может в этот самый момент. Вместо того, чтобы предъявлять претензии автору. Вот он ответ заявлениям типа "Фолкнер - отстой". И еще прекрасно про культурный снобизм и про то, что Classical Studies делают человека не зацикленным на античность и высокую культуру, а дают подходящие инструменты для восприятия и анализа вообще культуры.



C.P. Cavafy
Since Nine
Half past twelve. The time has quickly passed
since nine when I first turned up the lamp
and sat down here. I've been sitting without reading,
without speaking. With whom ought I to speak,
so utterly alone within this house?

The apparition of my youthful body,
since nine when I first turned up the lamp,
has come and found me and reminded me
of shuttered perfumed rooms
and of pleasure spent—what wanton pleasure!
And it also brought before my eyes
streets now made unrecognizable by time,
bustling city centres that are no more,
and theaters and coffeehouses that existed long ago.

The apparition of my youthful body
came and also brought me cause for pain:
deaths in the family;...separations...;
the feelings of my loved ones, the feelings of
those long dead which I so little valued.

Half past twelve. How the time has passed.
Half past twelve. How the years have passed.

transl. by Daniel Mendelsohn

@темы: c, repost, compleanno, 20, youtube, 19, cavafy, helenike

---

[Lika_k]

Fernando Pessoa
35 Sonnets: XXII
My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,
Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older,
Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,
Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder.
Whate'er its sense may mean, its age is twin
To that of priesthoods whose feet stood near God,
When knowledge was so great that 'twas a sin
And man's mere soul too man for its abode.
But when I ask what means that pageant I
And would look at it suddenly, I lose
The sense I had of seeing it, nor can try
Again to look, nor hath my memory a use
That seems recalling, save that it recalls
An emptiness of having seen those walls.

Фернандо Пессоа
35 сонетов: XXII
Моя душа - египтян череда,
Блюдущая неведомый устав.
Кто сделал эту роспись и когда,
Сработал склеп, поставил кенотаф?

Но что б ни значил этот ритуал,
Он, несомненно, вдвое старше тех,
Кто на Земле близ Господа стоял,
Кто в знанье видел величайший грех.

Я действо древнее хочу порой
Постичь сквозь вековую немоту -
Но вижу лишь людей застывший строй
И смысла ни на миг не обрету.

И память столь же бесполезна мне,
Как лицезренье фрески на стене.

пер. Евг. Витковский

@темы: portuguese, sonnet, p, 20, english-other, pessoa, fernando, п

---

[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
Matapan
Unrevisited perhaps forever
Southward from the capes of smoke
Where past and present to the waters are one
And the peninsula's end points out
Three fingers down the night:
On a corridor of darkness a beam
To where the islands, at last, the islands . . .

Abstract and more lovely
Andros Delos and Santorin,
Transpontine headlands in crisp weather,
Cries amputated by the gulls,
Formless, yet made in marble
Whose calm insoluble statues wear
Stone vines for hair, forever sharing
A sea-penumbra, the darkened arc
Where mythology walks in a wave
And the islands are.

Leaving you, hills, we were unaware
Or only as sleepwalkers are aware
Of a key turned in the heart, a letter
Posted under the door of an empty house;
Now Matapan and her forebodings
Became an identity, a trial of conduct,
Rolled and unrolled by the surges
Like a chart, mapped by a star,
With thistle and trefoil blowing,
An end of everything known
A beginning of water.

Here sorrow and beauty shared
Like time and place an eternal relation,

Matapan . . .
Here we learned that the lover
Is contained by love, not containing,
Matapan, Matapan:

Here the lucky in summer
Tied up their boats; a mile from land
The cicada's small machine came like a breath;
Touching bottom saw their feet become
Webbed and monstrous on the sandy floors.
Here wind emptied the snowy caves: the brown

Hands about the tiller unbuckled.
Day lay like a mirror in the sun's eye.
Olives sleeping, rocks hanging, sea shining
And under Arbutus the scriptural music
Of a pipe beside a boy beside a bay
Soliloquised in seven liquid quibbles.

Here the lucky in summer
Made fast like islanders
And saw upon the waters, leaning down
The haunted eyes in faces torn from books:
So painted the two dark-blue Aegean eyes
And Theos dikaios 'God the Just'
Under them upon the rotting prows.

Inhabitants of reflection going:
We saw the dog-rose abloom in bowls,
Faces of wishing children in the wells
Under the Acropolis the timeless urchin
Carrying the wooden swallow,
Teller of the spring; on the hills of hair
Over Athens saw the night exhaling.

Later in islands, awaiting passage,
By waters like skin and promontories,
Were blessed by the rotation
Of peach-wind, melon-wind,
Fig- wind and wind of lemons;
Every fruit in the rotation of its breath.
And in the hills encountered
Sagacious and venerable faces
Like horn spoons: forms of address:
Christian names, politeness to strangers.

Heard the ant's pastoral reflections:
'Here I go in Arcadia, one two
Saffron, sage, bergamot, rue,
A root, a hair, a bead — all warm,
A human finger swarming
With little currents: a ring:
A married man.

In a late winter of mist and pelicans
Saw the thread run out at last; the man
Kiss his wife and child good-bye
Under the olive-press, turning on a heel.
To enter April like swimmer,
And memory opened in him like a vein,
Pushed clear on the tides a pathless keel.

Standing alone on the hills
Saw all Greece, the human
Body of this sky suspending a world
Within a crystal turning,
Guarded by the green wicks of cypresses.

Far out on the blue
Like notes of music on a page
The two heads: the man and his wife.
They are always there.

It is too far to hear the singing.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

[Lika_k]

Фернандо Пессоа
Ветшает жизнь - покинутая шхуна
В пустом порту, где бьет ее волна.
Когда же прочь от мутного буруна
Уйдет она, с судьбой обручена?

Кто окрылил бы плеском полотна
Ее снастей оборванные струны
И той дорогой вывел из лагуны,
Где ждет заря, свежа и солона?

Но зыбь тоски защелкнула капканом
Плавучий гроб покоящихся сил -
И никого, кто б мертвых воскресил.

Не слышно ветра в такелаже рваном,
В зеленый тлен засасывает ил,
А милая земля - за океаном.

Пер. А. Гелескул

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

---

[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
Asphodels: Chalcidice
'No one will ever pick them, I think,
The ugly off-white clusters: all the grace
Lies in the name of death named.
Are they a true certificate for death?'
'I wonder'

'You might say that once the sages,
Death being identified, forgave it language:
Called it "asphodel", as who should say
The synonym for scentless, colourless,
Solitary,

Rock-loving . . .' 'Memory is all of these.'
'Yes, they asserted the discipline of memory,
Which admits of no relapse in its
Consignment, does not keep forever.'
'Nor does death.'

'You mean our dying?' 'No, but when one is
Alone, neither happy nor unhappy, in
The deepest ache of reason where this love
Becomes a malefactor, clinging so,
You surely know — '

'Death's stock will stand no panic,
Be beautiful in jars or on a coffin,
Exonerate the flesh when it has turned
Or mock the enigma with an epitaph
It never earned.'

These quite precisely guard ironic truth,
And you may work your way through every
Modulation of the rose, to fill your jars
With pretty writing-stuff: but for death — '
'Truly, always give us

These comfortless, convincing, even, yes,
A little mocking, Grecian asphodels.'

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

[Lika_k]

Фернандо Пессоа
Системы, идеалы, мифы, сны -
Щербинки на поверхности волны
Здесь, под причалом, - как клочки бумаги,
Судьбой врученные тяжелой влаге;
Гляжу на них, гляжу со стороны
Глазами равнодушного бродяги.

Я нахожу в них радость и ответ
На множество болезненных сомнений, -
И это я, за столько долгих лет
Обретший только тени, только тени,
Уставший от надежд, и от сует,
И даже от богов, которых нет!

пер. Евг. Витковский

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

---

[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
Thasos
Indifferent history! In such a place
Can we choose what really matters most?
Three hundred oars munched up the gulf.
A tyrant fell. The wise men turned their beds
To face the East — this was war. Or else
Eating and excreting raised to the rank of arts:
Sporting the broad purple — this was peace,
For demagogues exhausted by sensations.
From covens of delight they brought
The silver lampreys served on deathless chargers
By cooks of polity and matchless tact.
Only their poets differed in being free
From the historic consciousness and its
Defeats: wise servants of the magnet and
The sieve, against this human backdrop told
The truth in oracles and never asked themselves
In what or why they never could believe.

@темы: antiquity, history, d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

[Lika_k]

Фернандо Пессоа
Думаю все чаще,
Как спокойно я
Отошел бы, спящий,
В море забытья,

Без стыда и боли,
Мирно, в тишине -
Но не просто в поле,
А дремать бы мне

Под древесной кроной,
Там, где так легка
Тень листвы зеленой,
Тень у родника.

пер. Евг. Витковский

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

---

[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
To Argos
The roads lead southward, blue
Along a circumference of snow,
Identified now by the scholars
As a home for the cyclops, a habitation
For nymphs and ancient appearances.
Only the shepherd in his cowl
Who walks upon them really knows
The natural history in a sacred place;
Takes like a text of stone
A familiar cloud-shape or fortress,
Pointing at what is mutually seen,
His dark eyes wearing the crowsfoot.

Our idols have been betrayed
Not by the measurement of the dead ones
Who are lying under these mountains,
As under England our own fastidious
Heroes lie awake but do not judge.
Winter rubs at the ice like a hair,
Dividing time; and a single tree
Reflects here a mythical river.
Water limps on ice, or scribbles
On doors of sand its syllables,
All alone, in an empty land, alone.
This is what breaks the heart.

We say that the blood of Virgil
Grew again in the scarlet pompion,
Ever afterwards reserving the old poet
Memorials in his air, his water: so
In this land one encounters always

Agamemnon, Agamemnon; the voice
Of water falling on hair in caves,
The stonebreaker's hammer on walls,
A name held closer in the circles
Of bald granite than even these cyclamen,
Like children's ears attentive here,
Blown like glass from the floors of snow.
Truly, we the endowed who pass here
With the assurance of visitors in rugs
Can raise from the menhir no ghost
By the cold sound of English idioms.
Our true parenthood rests with the eagle,
We recognize him turning over his vaults.
Bones have no mouths to smile with
From the beds of companionable rivers dry.
The modern girls pose on a tomb smiling;
Night watches us on the western horn;
The hyssop and the vinegar have lost their meaning,
And this is what breaks the heart.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

[Lika_k]

Фернандо Пессоа
В подлунном этом мире есть приют
Любой гнилушке,
Но лишь в болоте грез моих поют
Мои лягушки.

Во мне встает поддельная луна,
И лунным светом
Вся заросль камышей оттенена
В болоте этом.

Откуда, из какого бытия
За мною следом
Воспоминанье шло - не помню я,
И путь неведом.

Безмолвствует ничто средь камыша,
Где нет в помине
Меня. И чья-то квакает душа
В ночной пустыне.

пер. М. Березкина

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

---

[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
Greek Church: Alexandria
The evil and the good seem undistinguished,
Indeed all half asleep; their coming was
No eloquent proposition of natures
Too dense for material ends, quartered in pain.
But a propitiation by dreams of belief
A relief from the chafing ropes of thought.
Piled high in Byzane like a treasure-ship
The church heels over, sinking in sound
And yellow lamplight while the arks and trolleys
And blazing crockery of the orthodox God
Make it a fearful pomp for peasants,
A sorcery to the black-coated rational,
To the town-girl an adventure, an adventure.

Now however all hums and softly spins
Like a great top, the many-headed black
Majority merged in a single sea-shell.

Idle thoughts press in, amazing one —
How the theologians with beards of fire
Divided us upon the boiling grid of thought,
Or with dividers spun for us a fine
Conniving cobweb — traps for the soul.

Three sailors stand like brooms.
The altar has opened like a honeycomb;
An erect and flashing deacon like a despot howls.
Surely we might ourselves exhale
Our faults like rainbows on this incense?

If souls did fire the old Greek barber
Who cut my hair this morning would go flying,
Not stand, a hopeless, window-bound and awkward
Child at this sill of pomp,
Moved by a hunger money could not sate,
Smelling the miracle and softly sighing.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

[Lika_k]

Фернандо Пессоа
На свете этом есть у всех вещей
Предназначенье,
И лишь лягушки в памяти моей -
Как исключенье.

пер. М. Березкина

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

---

[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
At Epidaurus
The islands which whisper to the ambitious,
Washed all winter by the surviving stars
Are here hardly recalled: or only as
Stone choirs for the sea-bird,
Stone chairs for the statues of fishermen.
This civilized valley was dedicated to
The cult of the circle, the contemplation
And correction of famous maladies
Which the repeating flesh has bred in us also
By a continuous babyhood, like the worm in meat.

The only disorder is in what we bring here:
Cars drifting like leaves over the glades,
The penetration of clocks striking in London,
The composure of dolls and fanatics,
Financed migrations to the oldest sources:
A theatre where redemption was enacted,
Repentance won, the stones heavy with dew.
The olive signs the hill, signifying revival,
And the swallow's cot in the ruin seems how
Small yet defiant an exaggeration of love!

Here we can carry our own small deaths
With the resignation of place and identity;
A temple set severely like a dice
In the vale's Vergilian shade; once apparently
Ruled from the whitest light of the summer:
A formula for marble when the clouds
Troubled the architect, and the hill spoke
Volumes of thunder, the sibyllic god wept.
Here we are safe from everything but ourselves,

The dying leaves and the reports of love.
The land's lie, held safe from the sea,
Encourages the austerity of the grass chambers,
Provides a context understandably natural
For men who could divulge the forms of gods.
Here the mathematician entered his own problem,
A house built round his identity,
Round the fond yet mysterious seasons
Of green grass, the teaching of summer-astronomy.
Here the lover made his calculations by ferns,
And the hum of the chorus enchanged.
We, like the winter, are only visitors,
To prosper here the breathing grass,

Encouraging petals on a terrace, disturbing
Nothing, enduring the sun like girls
In a town window. The earth's flower
Blows here original with every spring,
Shines in the rising of a man's age
Into cold texts and precedents for time.
Everything is a slave to the ancestor, the order
Of old captains who sleep in the hill.

Then smile, my dear, above the holy wands,
Make the indefinite gesture of the hands,
Unlocking this world which is not our world.
The somnambulists walk again in the north
With the long black rifles, to bring us answers.
Useless a morality for slaves: useless
The shouting at echoes to silence them.
Most useless inhabitants of the kind blue air,
Four ragged travellers in Homer.
All causes end within the great Because.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

[Lika_k]

Фернандо Пессоа
Возведение лесов
Я часто вижу сны о том,
Как чахнут прежней жизни всходы.
Я написать сумел бы том
Про то, как миновали годы
В мечтах о будущем пустом.

Ручей - подобьем вижу я
Всего, что пережил доселе:
Спешит прозрачная струя,
Изображая бытия
Бесстрастный бег, лишенный цели.

Надежда, нужен ли отгадчик,
Чтоб распознать, как ты слаба?
Взлетает выше детский мячик,
Чем ты, и не хочу подачек,
Что мне еще сулит судьба.

Вода быстробегущих рек -
Вода ли ты иль сон текучий?
Проходит час, проходит век,
Иссохнет зелень, сгинет снег,
Чуть сгинуть подвернется случай.

Иллюзия так долго длилась:
Быть королевой - чем не роль?
Но вот она явила милость,
Пред королем разоблачилась -
И умер в тот же час король.

Как нежно, берег размывая,
Журчать доводится волне!
О, эта память чуть живая,
Туманная и вековая,
И сон, приснившийся во сне!

Что сделал я с самим собой?
В итоге встречи слишком поздней,
Решив не лезть в бесплодный бой,
Оставил я вдвоем с судьбой
Безумца, жертву темных козней.

Как мертвая, течет вода,
Не зажурчит, пути не спросит;
Воспоминанья без следа
Она смывает в никуда,-
Надежды - губит и уносит.

Я сгину через миг короткий,
Я жив, покуда сном объят,-
О сон несвязный и нечеткий,
В нем только стены и решетки,
Мой окружающие сад.

О волны, в море через мол
Да будет жизнь моя влекома -
Туда, где мне сужден прикол,
Туда, где я леса возвел,
Однако не построил дома.

пер. Евг. Витковский

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

---

[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
Exile in Athens
To be a king of islands,
Share a boundary with eagles,
Be a subject of sails.

Here, on these white rocks,
In cold palaces all winter,
Under the salt blanket,

Forget not yet the tried intent,
Pale hands before the face: face
Before the sea's blue negative,

Washing against the night,
Pushing against the doors,
Earth's dark metaphors.

Here alone in a stone city
I sing the rock, the sea-squill,
Over Greece the one punctual star.

To be king of the clock —
I know, I know — to share
Boundaries with the bird,

With the ant her lodge:
But they betray, betray.
To be the owner of stones,

To be a king of islands,
Share a bed with a star,
Be a subject of sails.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

---

[Lika_k]

Фернандо Пессоа
Я спал... От сновидений к пробужденью
Мучительно свершает переход
Моя душа, проникнутая ленью.
Я родствен зыби океанских вод,
Что словно и не движутся вперед.

Схож отлетевший сон с погасшим бликом...
Я был заворожен его игрой,
Я грезил о неясном и великом.
Я - океан бессолнечной порой:
Я - повесть, где отсутствует герой.

Ужели греза причиняет рану?
О, кто же я? Чем стражду обладать?
Подобен я ночному океану -
Зыбь улеглась, и распростерлась гладь:
Плеснет, проблещет - и замрет опять.

пер. С. Александровский

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

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[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
A Small Scripture
Now when the angler by Bethlehem's water
Like a sad tree threw down his trance
What good was the needle of resurrection,
A bat-like soul for the father Adam,
But to bury in haystacks of common argument
The Fish's living ordinance?

A bleeding egg was the pain of testament,
Murder of self within murder to reach the Self:
The grapnel of fury like a husband's razor
Turned on his daughter in a weird enchantment
To cut out the iron mask from the iron man,
His double, the troubled elf.

Now one eye was the cyclop's monstrous ration,
But this face looked forward to Heliopolis,
Rehearsed its charm in other exilic lovers
God-bound near Eden on the crutches of guilt;
Aimed like a pistol through the yellow eyes —
Your heart and mine know the truth of this.

This we make to the double Jesus, the nonpareil,
Whose thought snapped Jordan like a dam.
Darling and bully with the bloody taws,
Both walked in this tall queen by the green lake.
Both married when the aching nail sank home.
Weep for the lion, kneel to the lamb.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence