Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

C. K. Williams

Light

Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples—

I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante,
“a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…”

then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp
of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave,

a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures,
their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings

churning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one,
perfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others,

was looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up
from beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings

as though it couldn’t believe I was there, or were trying to place me,
to situate me in the gnarl we’d evolved from, and now,

the trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again,
this time the way he’ll refer to a figure he meets as “the life of…”

not the soul, or person, the life, and once more the bat, and I,
our lives in that moment together, our lives, our lives,

his with no vision of celestial splendor, no poem,
mine with no flight, no unblundering dash through the dark,

his without realizing it would, so soon, no longer exist,
mine having to know for us both that everything ends,

world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away
like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

C.K Williams

Blackbird

There was nothing I could have done—
a flurry of blackbirds burst
from the weeds at the edge of a field
and one veered out into my wheel
and went under. I had a moment
to hope he'd emerge as sometimes
they will from beneath the back
of the car and fly off,
but I saw him behind on the roadbed,
the shadowless sail of a wing
lifted vainly from the clumsy
bundle of matter he'd become.

There was nothing I could have done,
though perhaps I was distracted:
I'd been listening to news of the war,
hearing that what we'd suspected
were lies had proved to be lies,
that many were dying for those lies,
but as usual now, it wouldn't matter.
I'd been thinking of Lincoln's,
". . .You can't fool all of the people
all of the time. . ." how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.

I had to slow down now,
a tractor hauling a load of hay
was approaching on the narrow lane.
The farmer and I gave way and waved:
the high-piled bales swayed
menacingly over my head but held.
Out in the newly harvested fields,
already harrowed and raw,
more blackbirds, uncountable
clouds of them, rose, held
for an instant, then broke,
scattered as though by a gale.

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Robert Creeley (1926 – 2005) – poeta amerykański, w latach 1943-1946 studiował na Uniwersytecie w Harvardzie, tam też w 1946 r. opublikował swój pierwszy wiersz na łamach pisma „Harvard Wake”. Przez kilka lat wraz z żoną próbował założyć własne pismo literackie, aby zmniejszyć koszty, zamieszkali nawet na pewien czas w Europie na Majorce. Założyli pismo „The Divers Press”, ale nie przyniosło ono im ani rozgłosu, ani spodziewanych zysków. Przełom nastąpił w 1954 r., kiedy R. Creeley zaproszony został na gościnne wykłady o literaturze do Black Mountain College w Północnej Karolinie, gdzie wkrótce zaczął redagować pismo „The Black Mountain Review”.
Pismo to było organem grupy poetyckiej Black Mountain Poets, które odegrało ważną rolę w rozwoju współczesnej literatury amerykańskiej. Po ukończeniu w 1960 r. przerwanych studiów, dostał propozycję zatrudnienia na stanowisku profesora na Uniwersytecie Stanowym w Buffalo. Wydał za życia przeszło 60 tomów swojej poezji, m. in. „Le Fou” (1952), “The Kind of Act Of” (1953), “All That Is Lovely in Men” (1955), “If You” (1956), “A Form of Women” (1959), “Distance” (1964), “Mister Blue (1964), “Words” (1965; 1967), “About Women” (1966), “The Boy” (1968), “One Day after Another” (1972), “Myself” (1977), “Mother As Voice” (1981), “Mirrors” (1983), “Places” (1990), “Life and Death” (1998), “For Friends” (2000), “If I Were Writing This” (2003). Był laureatem wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich, a w 1999 r. został wybrany na Kanclerza Akademii Poetów Amerykańskich.

The Innocence

Looking to the sea, it is a line
of unbroken mountains.

It is the sky.
It is the ground. There
we live it, on it.

It is a mist
now tangent to another
quiet. Here the leaves
come, there
is the rock in evidence

or evidence.
What I come to do
is partial, partially kept.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Niewinność” w temacie Mój świat

The Door

for Robert Duncan

It is hard going to the door
cut so small in the wall where
the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.

What I understood, I understand.
My mind is sometime torment,
sometimes good and filled with livelihood,
and feels the ground.

But I see the door,
and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,
and would get there if I could
with my feet and hands and mind.

Lady, do not banish me
for digressions. My nature
is a quagmire of unresolved
confessions. Lady, I follow.

I walked away from myself,
I left the room, I found the garden,
I knew the woman
in it, together we lay down.

Dead night remembers. In December
we change, not multiplied but dispersed,
sneaked out of childhood,
the ritual of dismemberment.

Mighty magic is a mother,
in her there is another issue
of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal,
the charge of the command.

The garden echoes across the room.
It is fixed in the wall like a mirror
that faces a window behind you
and reflects the shadows.

May I go now?
Am I allowed to bow myself down
in the ridiculous posture of renewal,
of the insistence of which I am the virtue?

Nothing for You is untoward.
Inside You would also be tall,
more tall, more beautiful.
Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You.

So I screamed to You,
who hears as the wind, and changes
multiply, invariably,
changes in the mind.

Running to the door, I ran down
as a clock runs down. Walked backwards,
stumbled, sat down
hard on the floor near the wall.

Where were You.
How absurd, how vicious.
There is nothing to do but get up.
My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.

For that one sings, one
writes the spring poem, one goes on walking.
The Lady has always moved to the next town
and you stumble on after Her.

The door in the wall leads to the garden
where in the sunlight sit
the Graces in long Victorian dresses,
of which my grandmother had spoken.

History sings in their faces.
They are young, they are obtainable,
and you follow after them also
in the service of God and Truth.

But the Lady is indefinable,
she will be the door in the wall
to the garden in sunlight.
I will go on talking forever.

I will never get there.
Oh Lady, remember me
who in Your service grows older
not wiser, no more than before.

How can I die alone.
Where will I be then who am now alone,
what groans so pathetically
in this room where I am alone?

I will go to the garden.
I will be a romantic. I will sell
myself in hell,
in heaven also I will be.

In my mind I see the door,
I see the sunlight before me across the floor
beckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt
moves small beyond it.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Drzwi” w temacie Drzwi

The Flower

I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.
Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.
Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. Kwiat” w temacie Kwiaty

Self-Portrait

He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the “oh,
let’s hold hands together”
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on
his own dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Autoportret”
w temacie Autoportret w lustrze wiersza

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

I Know a Man – czyta Robert Creeley

Znam jednego

Jak to raz powiedziałem
przyjacielowi, bo ja
zawsze coś mówię – John,

powiadam, chociaż nie tak
miał na imię, ciemność wo-
kół nas, co możemy

na to poradzić, a jak
nie, to co, mamy sobie (bo niby
czemu nie) sprawić jakiś duży jak wszyscy diabli samochód,

jedź, on na to, na
miłość boską, patrz,
gdzie jedziesz

tłum. Stanisław Barańczak

Znam faceta

Mówię kiedyś do
kumpla, bo gadam
ciągle - John,

powiadam, a nie tak
się nazywał, ciemność
nas otacza, co

można na to poradzić, a jak-
by tak, bo czemu nie,
kupić naprawdę diablo duży wóz,

no jedź, powiada, i
chryste panie, patrz
jak jedziesz.

tłum. Piotr Sommer

The Dishonest Mailmen

They are taking all my letters, and they put them into a fire.
I see the flames, etc.
But do not care, etc.

They burn everything I have, or what little
I have. I don't care, etc.

The poem supreme, addressed to
emptiness - this is the courage
necessary. This is something
quite different.

Nieuczciwi listonosze

Oni zabierają wszystkie moje listy i
Wrzucają je w ogień.
Widzę płomienie, itd.
Lecz nie dbam o to, itd.

Oni palą wszystko co mam, odrobinę
Którą posiadam. nie dbam o to, itd.

Najdoskonalszy poemat, skierowany do
Pustki - jest aktem odwagi

Niezbędnej. Czymś całkiem
Odmiennym.

tłum. Teresa Truszkowska

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHLUlPa5lAI
Robert Creeley czyta „The Dishonest Mailmen”

Inne wiersze Roberta Creeley’a w tematach:
Miłość, s. 9, s. 15, Noce ..., Blaski i cienie małżeństwa Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 03.07.12 o godzinie 20:04

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Gregory Corso (1930-2001) – poeta amerykański, jeden z najwybitniejszych przedstawicieli ruchu Beat Generation. Opuszczony w wieku 2 lat przez swoją 17-letnią matkę, większość dzieciństwa spędził w sierocińcach i rodzinach zastępczych. Kiedy miał 11 lat jego ojciec ponownie się ożenił i chciał wychowywać chłopca ze swoją nową partnerką, ale Gregory wciąż uciekał z domu. Za drobne kradzieże trafił wkrótce najpierw do domu poprawczego, a potem dwukrotnie do więzienia. Odsiadując trzyletni wyrok w więzieniu stanowym Clinton, zainteresował się literaturą, dużo czytał i zaczął pisać wiersze. Po odbyciu kary wrócił do Nowego Jorku, gdzie spotkał przypadkowo w barze Allena Ginsberga, a przez niego innych beatników, co było momentem przełomowym dla jego dalszego życia. Nie mając wykształcenia, zarabiał na życie imając się różnych zawodów, przez jakiś czas na przykład był marynarzem na statku handlowym, uczęszczał jednak jako wolny słuchacz na zajęcia uniwersyteckie i doskonalił swój warsztat literacki. W 1954 r. opublikował swój pierwszy tomik poezji „The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems”, w dwa lata później – w znanym, nowojorskim wydawnictwie Lawrence’a Ferlinghetti’ego – następny pt. „Gasoline”. W tym czasie związał się blisko z ruchem beatników, zwłaszcza z Allenem Ginsbergiem
i Jackiem Kerouakiem, dużo podróżował, również za granicę, m. in. do Meksyku i Europy Wschodniej, dawał odczyty, uczestniczył w spotkaniach literackich, wykładał też literaturę w New York State University w Bufflao i w Naropa Institute w Boulder (Kolorado).
Zmarł na raka prostaty w wieku 71 lat i zgodnie ze swoim życzeniem został pochowany obok swojego ulubionego poety Persy’ego Schelleya. Ważniejsze jego książki poetyckie to: „The Happy Birthday of Death” (1960), „Long Live Man” (1962), “Elegaic Feelings American” (1970), “Egyptian Cross” (1971), “Earth Egg” (1974), “Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit” (1981).

One Day

One day while Peter-Panning the sky
I sow a man,
a man dying over the Eastern Gulf,
and I said to this man:
- The light that makes us a fiend of a eagles
has made our poor wounds an interval of clouds,
slow and creeping, calm and sad,
and this skyful dungeon of thinks. –
And he replited:
- The sky is awful! The sky undarkens!
Hermes, is wingéd foot, rests old in China!
Rests uncontested while cloudbuds burst
and windleaves fall!
while my tired hands hold back
the violent skirt of night!
while my moss-covered feet crush
the seaports of the day! –
I left the dying man, and he must always die,
for Solitude refruses to lower a gentle hand
upon this long sad face.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. "Pewnego dnia"
w temacie Śmierć

Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem

There’s a truth limits man
A truth prevents his going any farther
The world is changing
The world knows it’s changing
Heavy is the sorrow of the day
The old have the look of doom
The young mistake their fate in that look
That is truth
But it isn’t all l truth

Life has meaning
And I do not know the meaning
Even when I felt it were meaningless
I hoped and prayed and sought a meaning
It wasn’t all frolic poesy
There were dues to pay
Summoning Death and God
I’d a wild dare to tackle Them
Death proved meaningless without Life
Yes the world is changing
But Death remains the same
It takes man away from Life
The only meaning he knows
And usually it is a sad business
This Death

I’d an innocence I’d a seriousness
I’d a humor save me from amateur philosophy
I am able to contradict my beliefs
I am able able
Because I want to know the meaning of everything
Yet sit I like a brokenness
Moaning: Oh what responsibility
I put on thee Gregory
Death and God
Hard hard it’s hard

I learned life were no dream
I learned truth deceived
Man is not God
Life is a century
Death an instant

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Pisane na stopniach portorykańskiego Harlemu”
w tematach: ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie i O pisaniu i różnych pismach

In the Fleeting Hand of Time

On the steps of the bright madhouse
I hear the bearded bell shaking down the woodlawn
the final knell of my world
I climb and enter a fires gathering of knights
they unaware of my presence lay forth sheepskin plans
and with mailcoated fingers trace my arrival
back back back when on the black steps of Nero lyre Rome
I stood
in my arms the wailing philosopher
the final call of mad history
Now my presence is known
my arrival marked by illuminated stains
The great windows of Paradise open
Down to radiant dust fall the curtains of Past Time

In fly flocks of multicolored birds
Light winged light O the wonder of light
Time takes me by the hand
born March 26 1930 1 am led 100 mph o'er the vast market
of choice
what to choose? what to choose?
Oh--------and I leave my orange room of myth
no chance to lock away my toys of Zeus
I choose the room of Bleecker Street
A baby mother stuffs my mouth with a pale Milanese breast
I suck I struggle I cry O Olympian mother
unfamiliar this breast to me
Snows

Decade of icy asphalt doomed horses
Weak dreams Dark corridors of P. S. 42 Roofs Ratthroated
pigeons
Led 100 mph over these all too real Mafia streets
profanely I shed my Hermean wings
O Time be merciful
throw me beneath your humanity of cars
feed me to giant grey skyscrapers
exhaust my heart to your bridges
I discard my lyre of Orphic futility
And for such betrayal I climb these bright mad steps
and enter this room of paradiscal light
ephemeral
Time
a long long dog having chased its orbited tail
comes grab my hand
and leads me into conditional life

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „W ulotnej ręce czasu”
w temacie W głąb siebie... („Szaleństwo i geniusz”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yKpiabp2uc
Gregory Corso czyta swoje wiersze

Patrz też w tematach Między dobrem a złem, Antyczne korzenie cywilizacji, Poezja
i malarstwo, Śmierć, Miniatury poetyckie, Schyłek miłości..., Ciało mojego ciała, Lot nasz podniebny.../Poezja kolei żelaznych, s. 7, s. 8.Marta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 15.12.10 o godzinie 03:20

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Charles Simic (właść. Dušan Simić, ur. 1938) – poeta amerykański narodowości serbskiej,
w 1953 r. wyemigrował wraz z matką do Stanów Zjednoczonych, gdzie wcześniej osiedlił się jego ojciec. Ukończył studia na Uniwersytecie w Chicago, przez wiele lat wykładał literaturę angielską na uniwersytecie stanowym New Hampshire. Oprócz własnej poezji, którą od początku pisał w języku angielskim, zajmuje się również krytyką literacką i przekładami
z języków narodów byłej Jugosławii. Opublikował m. in. „What the Grass Says” (1967), “White” (1972), “Return To A Place Lit By A Glass Of Milk” (1974), “School For Dark Thoughts” (1978), “Unending Blues” (1986), “The Book of Gods and Devils” (1990), “Hotel Insomnia” (1992), "Aunt Lettuce, I Want To Peek Under Your Skirt" (2005), “Monkey Around” (2006), “Sixty Poems” (2008), “Monster Loves His Labyrinth” (2008).

Fork

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka, pt. "Widelec",
w temacie Narzędzia - przedłużenie człowieka

My Shoes

Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice nests.

My brother and sister who died at birth
Continuing their existence in you,
Guiding my life
Toward their incomprehensible innocence.

What use are books to me
When in you it is possible to read
The Gospel of my life on earth
And still beyond, of things to come?

I want to proclaim the religion
I have devised for your perfect humility
And the strange church I am building
With you as the altar.

Ascetic and maternal, you endure:
Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,
With your mute patience, forming
The only true likeness of myself.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Moje buty”
w temacie Poetycka garderoba...

Shirt

To get into it
At is lies
Crumpled on the floor
Without disturbing a single crease
Respectful
Of the way I threw it down
Last night
The way it happened to land

Almost managing
The impossible contortions
Doubling back now
Through a knotted sleeve

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Koszula"
w temacie Poetycka garderoba...

The Devils

You were a “victim of semiromantic anarchism
In its most irrational form.”
I was “il at easy in an ambiguous word

Deserted by Providence.” We drank wine
And made love in the afternoon. The neighbors’
TVs were tuned to soap operas.

The unhappy couples spoke little.
There were interminable pauses.
Soft organ music. Someone coughing.

“It’s like Strinberg’s Dream Play,” you said.
“What is?” I asked and got no reply.
I was watching a spider on the ceiling.

It was the kind St. Veronica ate in her martyrdom.
“That woman subsisted on spiders only,”
I told the janitor when he came to fix the faucet.

He wore dirty overalls and a derby hat.
Once he had been an inmate of a notorious state institution.
“I’m no longer Jesus,” he informed us happily.

He believed only in devils now.
“This building is full of them,” he confided.
One could see their horns and tails.

If one caught them in their baths.
“He’s got Dark Ages on his brain,” you said.
“Who does?” I asked and got no reply.

The spider had the beginnings of a web
Over our heads. The word was quiet
Except when one of us took a sip of wine.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Diabły”
w temacie Mów do mnie...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zKahTbzUwc
Charles Simic czyta swoje wiersze

Inne wiersze Charlesa Simica w tematach: Narzędzia - przedłużenie człowieka, Imiona
w poezji, Miłość, Inspiracje, nawiązania i parafrazy poetyckie, Nagość, Dziecko jest chodzącym cudem..., Pierzaści bracia mniejsi, Starość, s. 4, s. 5, Erotyka, W zamieci słowa, s. 3, s. 4, Widzę ich w duszy teatrze..., Poezja i taniec, Lęk, Cisza w poezji, Szpital, Śmierć, Przemoc w majestacie prawa, Być poetą, Motyw dłoni i rąk, Potrawy
i napoje..., s. 1, s. 2, Co się poetom śni...? s. 6, s. 9,W głąb siebie..., Czas, zegary..., Głosy i dźwięki, szepty i krzyki, Cyrk: tu wzlatuje się i spada..., W świecie wróżb, zaklęć i sił tajemnych, Czym jest wiersz?, Pomniki, Samobójstwo w wierszach..., Wiersze na Święto Zmarłych, A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech, Kalectwo, Muzea i galerie, s. 1, s. 2, Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok, Turpizm, Motyw kamienia, Zawody i profesje widziane okiem poety, Na miejskich ulicach, Sobowtóry w życiu i fikcji literackiejMarta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 24.05.11 o godzinie 16:01

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Allen Ginsberg

Dream Record: June 8, 1955

A drunken night in my house with a
boy, San Francisco, I lay asleep:
darkness:
I went back to Mexico City
And saw Joan Burroughs leaning
Forward in a garden chair, arms
On her knees. She studied me with
Clear eyes and downcast smile, her
Face restored to a fine beauty
Tequila and salt had made strange
Before the bullet in her brow.

We talked of the life since then.
Well, what's Burroughs doing now ?
Bill on earth, he's in North Africa.
Oh, and Kerouac ? Jack still jumps
With the same beat genius as before,
Notebooks filled with Buddha.
I hope he makes it, she laughed.
Is Huncke still in the can ? No,
Last time I saw him on Times Square.
And how is Kenney ? Married, drunk
And golden in the East. You ? New
Loves in the West -
Then I knew
She was a dream: and questioned her
- Joan, what kind of knowledge have
The dead ? can you still love
Your mortal acquaintances ?
What do you remember of us?
She
Faded in front of me - The next instant
I saw her rain-stained tombstone
Rear an illegible epitapth
Under the gnarled branch of a small
Tree in the wild grass
Of an unveiled garden in Mexico.


Zapis snu: 8 czerwca 1955

San Francisco, pijana noc u mnie
w domu z pewnym chłopcem: śpię:
ciemność:
Wróciłem do Mexico City
i zobaczyłem Joan Burroughs na
leżaku, pochyloną do przodu, z rękami
na kolanach. Patrzyła na mnie niezmąconym
wzrokiem, ze znękanym uśmiechem na
twarzy, co odzyskała niezwykłe piękno
zniszczone przez tequilę z solą,
zanim jeszcze kula uderzyła w jej skroń.

Mówiliśmy o życiu od tamtej pory.
Co porabia teraz Burroughs?
Bill żyje, jest w północnej Afryce.
A Kerouac? Jack ciągle fruwa
z tym samym czuciem beatu co dawniej,
z notesami wypełnionymi Buddą.
Może mu wyjdzie, zaśmiała się.
Huncke dalej w kiciu? Nie,
ostatnio widziałem go na Times Square.
A jak tam Kenney? Żonaty, pije,
i kwitnie na Wschodzie. A ty? Nowe
miłości na Zachodzie -
Wtedy zrozumiałem
że to sen, i zapytałem
- Joan, jaką wiedzę mają
zmarli? czy możesz jeszcze kochać
znajomych z tego świata?
Co z nas pamiętasz?
Na moich oczach
rozwiała się - Po chwili ujrzałem
jak jej ociekający deszczem nagrobek
odsłania nieczytelne epitafium
pod kostropatą gałęzią niewielkiego
drzewa, wśród dzikiej trawy
nieodwiedzanego ogrodu w Meksyku.

przełożył Piotr Sommer

inny przekład, Bogdana Barana, w temacie Co się poetom śni...?

Kaddish (fragm.)

For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956

I

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--
And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
how we suffer--
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,
prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-
swers--and my own imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn--
Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward Apoca-
lypse,
the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom
Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed--
like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,
trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worship-
ping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while it
lasts, a Vision--anything more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,
Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shoul-
dering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant--and
the sky above--an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk toward the Lower East Side
--where you walked 50 years ago, little girl--from Russia, eating the
first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?--toward
Newark--
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice
cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards--
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,
and learning to be mad, in a dream--what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of light
on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the
sidewalk--in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward
the Yiddish Theater--and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now--Strange to have moved
thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on
the street, firs escapes old as you
--Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me--
Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe--and I guess that dies with
us--enough to cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever
every time--
That's good! That leaves it open for no regret--no fear radiators, lacklove,
torture even toothache in the end--
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul--and the lamb, the soul,
in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair
and teeth--and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,
braintricked Implacability.
Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you're out, Death let you out,
Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with
God, done with the path thru it--Done with yourself at last--Pure
--Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all--before the
world--
There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've gone, it's good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more
fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,
loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands--
No more of sister Elanor,--she gone before you--we kept it secret you
killed her--or she killed herself to bear with you--an arthritic heart
--But Death's killed you both--No matter--
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and
weeks--forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-
ity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar
--by standing room with Elanor & Max--watching also the Capital
ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts
pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and
laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave--lucky to
have husbands later--
You made it--I came too--Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and
will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer--or kill
--later perhaps--soon he will think--)
And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now
--tho not you
I didn't foresee what you felt--what more hideous gape of bad mouth came
first--to you--and were you prepared?
To go where? In that Dark--that--in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the
Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with
you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull
in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon--Deaths-
head with Halo? can you believe it?
Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence,
than none ever was?
Nothing beyond what we have--what you had--that so pitiful--yet Tri-
umph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower--fed to the
ground--but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,
shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth
wrapped, sore--freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the
knife--lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy--even in the Spring--strange ghost
thought some--Death--Sharp icicle in his hand--crowned with old
roses--a dog for his eyes--cock of a sweatshop--heart of electric
irons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out--clocks, bodies, consciousness,
shoes, breasts--begotten sons--your Communism--'Paranoia' into
hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of
stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is
Elanor happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over
midnight Accountings, not sure. His life passes--as he sees--and
what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might
have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Im-
mortality, Naomi?
I'll see him soon. Now I've got to cut through to talk to you as I didn't
when you had a mouth.
Forever. And we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's horses
--headed to the End.
They know the way--These Steeds--run faster than we think--it's our own
life they cross--and take with them.

Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, mar-
ried dreamed, mortal changed--Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under
pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,
Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm
hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not
light or darkness, Dayless Eternity--
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some
of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-
derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping
--page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine and Naomi--to God's perfect
Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!

przekład (całego utworu) Bogdana Barana, pt. „Kaddysz”,
w temacie Treny, epitafia i inne wiersze o tematyce żałobnejMarta Konarska edytował(a) ten post dnia 20.03.09 o godzinie 22:15

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Robert Bly (ur. 1926) – poeta amerykański norweskiego pochodzenia, pacyfista, przywódca ruchu mężczyzn pn. Mythopoetic Men's Movement, wyznawca i propagator buddyzmu. Pomimo, iż od wielu lat izoluje się od wielkich aglomeracji, należy do jednych
z najbardziej popularnych poetów w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Jego poezja przepełniona
jest refleksją nad egzystencją człowieka i jego miejscem w świecie przyrody. Świadomie
nie utożsamia się z żadnym wiodącym nurtem w poezji współczesnej, wierny własnej oryginalnej stylistyce. Autor tomów poezji: „Silence in the Snowy Fields” (1962), „The Light Around the Body” (1967 – uhonorowany National Book Award), „Jumping Out of Bed” (1973), „Sleepers Joining Hands” (1973), „Old Man Rubbing His Eyes” (1974), „The Morning Glory, Prose Poems” (1975), „This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood” (1977), „This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years” (1979), „The Man in the Black Coat Turns” (1981), „Mirabai Versions” (1984), „Loving a Woman in Two Worlds” (1985), „Meditations on the Insatiable Soul” (1994), „The Morning Poems” (1997), „Snowbanks North of the House” (1999), „Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems” (1999), „The Night Abraham Called to the Stars” (2001), „My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy” (2005), „Turkish Pears in August” (2007). Równie znaczący jest dorobek translatorski Roberta Bly’a: przekłady z norweskiego (Henryk Ibsen, Knut Hamsun), szwedzkiego (Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelöf, Tomas Tranströmer), hiszpańskiego (Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca), niemieckiego (Georg Trakl), perskiego (Kabir).
Polskie przekłady starszych wierszy Roberta Bly'a ukazały się w tomie Robert Bly: Jadąc przez Ohio i inne wiersze. Wybrała, przełożyła i wstępem opatrzyła Julia Hartwig. PIW, Warszawa 1985 oraz w tomie Grzegorz Musiał: Ameryka, Ameryka. Antologia wierszy poetów amerykańskich po 1940 roku. Wyd. Pomorze, Bydgoszcz 1994. Nowsze wiersze Roberta Bly'a w moim przekładzie ukazują się po raz pierwszy na naszym forum.
        
        
Z tomu „Silence in the Snowy Fields”, 1962




        
Waking from Sleep

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the waterlines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full
Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,
Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
We know that our master has left us for the day.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. "Budząc się ze snu" w temacie
Wiersze na różne pory dnia

Poems in Three Parts

1

Oh on an early morning I think I shall live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

2

Rising from a bed where I dreamt
Of long rides past castles and hot coals
The sun lies happily on my knees;
I have suffered and survived the night
Bathed in dark water like any blade of grass.

3

The strong leaves of the box-elder tree
Plunging in the wind call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant
And live forever like the dust.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Poemat w trzech częściach”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą

In a Train

There has been a light snow.
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness.
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust.
I have awakened at Missoula Montana utterly happy.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „W pociągu” w temacie
Poezja kolei żelaznych

Watering the Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Pojąc konia”
w temacie Jak wysłowić konia czerń...?

After Drinking All Night with a Friend,
We Go Out in a Boat at Down
to See Who Can Write the Best Poem

These pines, these fall oaks, these rocks,
This water dark and touched by wind---
I am like you, you dark boat,
Drifting over water fed by cool springs.

Beneath the waters, since I was a boy,
I have dreamt of strange and dark treasures,
Not of gold, or strange stones, but the true
Gift, beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota.

This morning also, drifting in the dawn wind,
I sense my hands, and my shoes, and this ink---
Drifting, as all of this body drifts,
Above the clouds of the flesh and the stone.

A few friendships, a few dawns, a few glimpses of grass,
A few oars weathered by the snow and the heat,
So we drift toward shore, over cold waters,
No longer caring if we drift or go straight.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Po piciu przez całą noc z przyjacielem
wypływamy łodzią o świcie, aby się przekonać, kto napisze
lepszy wiersz” w temacie Być poetą...

The Clear Air of October

I can see outdoors the gold wings without birds
Flying around, and the wells of cold water
Without walls standing eighty feet up in the air,
I can feel the crickets' singing carrying them into the sky.

I know these shadows are falling for hundreds of miles,
Crossing lawns in tiny towns, and the doors of Catholic churches;
I know the horse of darkness is riding fast to the east,
Carrying a thin man with no coat.

And I know the sun is sinking down great stairs,
Like an executioner with a great blade walking into a cellar,
And the gold animals, the lions, and the zebras, and the pheasants,
Are waiting at the head of the stairs with robbers' eyes.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Czyste powietrze października”
w temacie Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

         
               
Z tomu „The Light Around the Body”, 1967





The Great Society

Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain:
Hands developed with terrible labor by apes
Hang from the sleeves of evangelists;
There are murdered kings in the light-bulbs outside movie theaters:
The coffins of the poor are hibernating in piles of new tires.

The janitor sits troubled by the boiler,
And the hotel keeper shuffles the cards of insanity.
The President dreams of invading Cuba.
Bushes are growing over the outdoor grills,
Vines over the yachts and the leather seats.

The city broods over ash cans and darkening mortar.
On the far shore, at Coney Island, dark children
Playing on the chilling beach: a sprig of black seaweed,
Shells, a skyful of birds,
While the mayor sits with his head in his hands.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Wielkie społeczeństwo”
w temacie Poezja codzienności

Johnon’s Cabinet Watched by the Ants

I.

It is a clearing deep in a forest: overhanging boughs
Make a low place. Here the citizens we know during the day,
The ministers, the department heads,
Appear changed: the stockholders of large steel companies
In small wooden shoes; here are the generals dressed as gamboling lambs.

II.

Tonight they burn the rice supplies; tomorrow
They lecture on Thoreau; tonight they move around the trees;
Tomorrow they pick the twigs from their clothes;
Tonight they throw the firebombs; tomorrow
They read the Declaration of Independence; tomorrow they are in church.

III.

Ants are gathered around an old tree.
In a choir they sing, in harsh and gravelly voices,
Old Etruscan songs on tyranny.
Toads nearby clap their small hands, and join
The fiery songs, their five long toes trembling in the soaked earth.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Gabinet Johnsona oglądany przez mrówki”
w temacie Wiersze „zaangażowane”

The Executive’s Death

Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven.
Half the population are like the long grasshoppers
That sleep in the bushes in the cool of the day;
The sound of their wings is heard at noon, muffled, near the earth.
The crane handler dies; the taxi driver dies, slumped over
In his taxi. Meanwhile high in the air an executive
Walks on cool floors, and suddenly falls.
Dying, he dreams he is lost in a snowbound mountain
On which he crashed, carried at night by great machines.
As he lies on the wintry slope, cut off and dying,
A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus.
Commuters arrive in Hartford at dusk like moles
Or hares flying from a fire behind them,
And the dusk in Hartford is full of their sighs.
Their trains come through the air like a dark music,
Like the sound of horns, the sound of thousands of small wings.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Śmierć dyrektora” w temacie Śmierć
        
        
Z tomu „The Morning Glory, Prose Poems”, 1975





A Bird's Nest Made of White Reed Fibers

The nest is white as the foam thrown up when the sea hits rocks. It is translucent like those cloudy transoms above Victorian doors. It is swirled like the hair of those intense nurses, gray and tangled after long nights in the Crimean wards. This wren's nest is something made and then forgotten, like our own life that we will entirely forget in the grave when we are about to be pushed up on shore like some stone, ecstatic and black.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Ptasie gniazdo uwite z białej trzciny”
w temacie Pierzaści bracia mniejsi
        
        
Z tomu „This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood”, 1977





Finding the Father

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing - as the ocean carries logs. So on some days the body wails with its great energy; it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides. Someone knocks on the door. We do not have time to dress.
He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets, to the dark house.
We will go there, the body says, and there find the father whom we have never met,
who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born, and who then lost his memory, and has lived since longing for his child, whom he saw only once... while he worked as
a shoemaker, as a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who painted at night.
When you light the lamp you will see him. he sits there behind the door.... the eyebrows so heavy, the forehead so light... lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Odszukiwanie ojca” w temacie Motyw ojca

        
Z tomu „This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years”, 1979





Driving my Parents Home at Christmas

As I drive my parents home through the snow
their frailty hesitates on the edge of a mountainside.
I call over the cliff
only snow answers.
They talk quietly
of hauling water of eating an orange
of a grandchild's photograph left behind last night.
When they open the door of their house they disappear.
And the oak when it falls in the forest who hears it through miles and miles of silence?
They sit so close to each other¡ - as if pressed together by the snow.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Odwożąc rodziców do domu na Boże Narodzenie”
w temacie O przemijaniu...
        
        
Z tomu „Meditations on the Insatiable Soul”, 1994





My Father at Eighty-Five

His large ears                               By him any longer.
Hear everything                            The general of shame
A hermit wakes                             Has discharged
And sleeps in a hut                        Him, and left him
Underneath                                   In this small provincial
His gaunt cheeks.                          Egyptian town.
His eyes blue, alert,                       If I do not wish
Disappointed,                                To shame him, then
And suspicious,                              Why not love him?
Complain I                                      His long hands,
Do not bring him                            Large, veined,
The same sort of                            Capable, can still
Jokes the nurses                           Retain hold of what
Do. He is a bird                             He wanted. But
Waiting to be fed,—                       Is that what he
Mostly beak— an eagle                  Desireed? Some
Or a vulture, or                              Powerful engine
The Pharoah's servant                  Of desire goes on
Just before death.                        Turning inside his body.
My arm on the bedrail                   He never phrased
Rests there, relaxed,                    What he desired,
With new love. All                         And I am
I know of the Troubadours            His son.
I bring to this bed.
I do not want
Or need to be shamed

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Mój ojciec
w osiemdziesiątym piątym roku życia” w temacie Motyw ojca

Z tomu „The Morning Poems”, 1998





A Christmas Poem

Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where all agree
To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for horses;
All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place
As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late
At night, when a trapper who has been caught
In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a man
With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of the fire.

As children we knew there was more to it—
Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve
Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often
Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,
Why so much was lost. Those men and women
Who had died in wars started by others,
Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas tree
Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we
Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er
The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not
Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Wiersz Bożonarodzeniowy”
w temacie Boże Narodzenie w poezji

        
Z tomu „Eating the Honey of Words”, 1999




The Moon

After writing poems all day,
I go off to see the moon in the pines.
Far in the woods I sit down against a pine.
The moon has her porches turned to face the light,
But the deep part of her house is in the darkness.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Księżyc”
w temacie Wstrzymaj się chwilo, jesteś tak piękna!...

Solitude Late at Night in the Woods

I

The body is like a November birch facing the full moon
And reaching into the cold heavens.
In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves,
Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire!

II

My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn
I must return to the trapped fields,
To the obedient earth.
The trees shall be reaching all the winter.

III

It is a joy to walk in the bare woods.
The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves.
The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth,
Giving off the odor that partridges love.
         
przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Samotność
późną nocą w lesie” w temacie Samotność           
        
              
Z tomu „My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy”, 2005





There are so many Platos

The mourning dove insists there is only one morning.
The nail remains faithful to its first board.
The hoarse crow cries out to a thousand planets.

The sun goes down through ghettos of clouds.
There is one Burning Mind and so many Platos.
The Morning Star rises over a flutter of wings.

To those who make up music, and write poems,
I say: Our task is to become a moist tongue
By which subtle ideas slip into the world.

Probably we were born too near the potato bin.
Like the potato, we have many closed eyes.
A touch on the thigh displaces all the heavens.

There are more planets than have ever been found.
They rise and set again. Some people say
A painting is a pitcher full of the invisible.

Robert, some images in this poem are just right.
It is probably as good as anyone can do
Who is still living in the old inn of desire.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Jest tak wielu
Platonów” w temacie Umysł i potęga myśli

Stealing Sugar from the Castle

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see
Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Kradzież cukru z zamku”
w temacie Smutek czy radość... miłość, czy nienawiść...

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

August 2002

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Wołanie i odpowiedź"
w temacie Wiersze "zaangażowane"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPzajev3vkE
Robert Bly czyta swój wiersz „Call and Aswer”
          
              
Z tomu „Turkish Pears in August”, 2007





Orion the Great Walker

Orion, that old hunter, floats among the stars
Firmly... the farms beneath his feet. How long
It takes for me to walk in grief like him.
Seventy years old, and still placing my feet
So hopefully each night on the ground.
How long it takes for me to agree to sorrow.
But that great walker follows his dogs,
Hunting all night among the disappearing stars.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Wielki wędrowiec Orion”
w temacie Gwiazdy, planety, kosmos w poezji...

The Hermit at Dawn

Early in the morning the hermit wakes, hearing
The roots of the fir tree stir beneath his floor.
Someone is there. that strength buried
In earth carries up the summer world. When
A man loves a woman, he nourishes her.
Dancers strew the lawn with the light of their feet.
When a woman loves the earth, she nourishes it.
Earth nourishes what no one can see.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Pustelnik o świcie”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą

Wanting Sumptuous Heavens

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Pragnienie wystawnych
Niebios” w temacie Raj, wyspy szczęśliwe, arkadia

What is Sorrow for?

What is sorrow for? It is a storehouse
Where we store wheat, barley, corn an tears.
We step to the door on a round stone
And the storehouse feeds all the birds of sorrow.
And I say to myself: Will you have
Sorrow at last? Go on, be cheerful in autumn,
Be stoic, yes, be tranquil, calm;
Or in the valley of sorrows spread your wings.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Czym jest smutek?”
w temacie Smutek, melancholia, nostalgia

        
        
Z tomu „The New Yorker” January 25, 2010





Sunday Afternoon

The snow is falling, and the world is calm.
The flakes are light, but they cool the world
As they fall, and add to the calm of the house.
It’s Sunday afternoon. I am reading
Longinus while the Super Bowl is on.
The snow is falling, and the world is calm.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Niedzielne
popołudnie” w temacie Zima

Inne wiersze Roberta Bly’a w tematach:
Motyw dłoni i rąk, A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech/Spacery poetów, W głąb siebie..., Co się poetom śni...? s. 5, s. 9, Wiersze z podróży, Góry, poezja i my, Samotność, Miniatury poetyckie, W harmonii z przyrodą, Polowania i łowy, Poezja kolei żelaznych, Wierność i zdrada, Jak wysłowić konia czerń...?/Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok.

Przekłady Roberta Bly’a utworów Kabira z języka perskiego na angielski w temacie
Buddyzm i kultura Dalekiego WschoduTen post został edytowany przez Autora dnia 19.10.13 o godzinie 16:10

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Denise Levertov (1923-1997) – poetka i pisarka amerykańska, urodzona w Anglii, jej matka była Walijką, ojciec rosyjskim Żydem, który przeszedł na chrześcijaństwo i został anglikańskim księdzem. W czasie II wojny światowej Denise pracowała w Londynie jako pielęgniarka. Debiutowała w 1946 roku tomikiem wierszy „The Double Image” – utrzymanych jeszcze w tradycyjnej brytyjskiej poetyce neoromantyzmu. W 1948 roku wyszła za mąż za amerykańskiego aktywistę Mitchella Goodmana i wyemigrowała do Stanów Zjednoczonych. Dzięki mężowi szybko poznała najwybitniejszych wówczas poetów amerykańskich: Roberta Creeleya, Cida Cormana, Williama Carlosa Williamsa, Charlesa Olsona i Roberta Duncana.
Z tym ostatnim połączyły ją nie tylko zainteresowania literackie, ale też okultystyczne.
Na przełomie lat pięćdziesiątych i sześćdziesiątych związała się też z ruchem hippiesowskim, z którym ostro protestowała przeciw wojnie w Wietnamie (patrz jej wiersz „What Were They Like” w temacie Wiersze „zaangażowane”).
Wydała blisko 15 tomików poetyckich, m. in. „With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads” (1959), “The Jacob's Ladder” (1961), “Life At War” (1968), “The Freeing of the Dust” (1975), “Life in the Forest” (1978), “Candles in Babylon” (1982), “The May Mornings” (1982). Przyjaźniła się też z Czesławem Miłoszem, który przygotował wybór jej poezji we własnym tłumaczeniu na język polski: Denise Levertov: Żółty tulipan. Oprac. i wstęp Czesław Miłosz. Wyd. Znak, Kraków 1999. Jej wiersze ukazały się też w polskich antologiach: Wizjonerzy i buntownicy. Wiersze współczesnych poetów amerykańskich. Wybór i tłum. Teresa Truszkowska. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1976 oraz Julia Hartwig: Dzikie brzoskwinie. Wyd. Sic, Warszawa 2003.

Pleasures

I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden

in white pulp: the bones of squid
which I pull out and lay
blade by blade on the draining board--

tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce
the heart, but fragile, substance
belying design. Or a fruit, mamey,

cased in rough brown peel, the flesh
rose-amber, and the seed:
the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed
like a brazilnut, but large,
large enough to fill
the hungry palm of a hand.

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow

in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. "Przyjemności"
w temacie Być poetą

Living

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

przekład Czesława Miłosza pt. „Żyjąc”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą

The Breathing

An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Oddychanie”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą

Hymn to Eros

O Eros, silently smiling one, hear me.
Let the shadow of thy wings
brush me.
Let thy presence
enfold me, as if darkness
were swandown.
Let me see that darkness
lamp in hand,
this country become
the other country
sacred to desire.

Drowsy god,
slow the wheels of my thought
so that I listen only
to the snowfall hush of
thy circling.
Close my beloved with me
in the smoke ring of thy power,
that we way be, each to the other,
figures of flame,
figures of smoke,
figures of flesh
newly seen in the dusk.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Hymn do Erosa"
w temacie Hymn

The ache of marriage

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

przekład Jana Leszczy pt. „Dolegliwości małżeństwa”
w temacie Blaski i cienie małżeństwa

February Evening in New York

As the stores close, a winter light
opens air to iris blue,
glint of frost through the smoke
grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.

As the buildings close, released autonomous
feet pattern the streets
in hurry and stroll; balloon heads
drift and dive above them; the bodies
aren't really there.

As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens,
a woman with crooked heels says to another woman
while they step along at a fair pace,
"You know, I'm telling you, what I love best
is life. I love life! Even if I ever get
to be old and wheezy--or limp! You know?
Limping along?--I'd still..." Out of hearing.

To the multiple disordered tones
of gears changing, a dance
to the compass points, out, four-way river.
Prospect of sky
wedged into avenues, left at the ends of streets,
west sky, east sky: more life tonight! A range
of open time at winter's outskirts.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Lutowy wieczór w Nowym Jorku”
w tematach: Miasto i Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ek5gpES4kI
Denise Levertov czyta swoje wiersze

Inne wiersze Denise Levertov w tematach: Wiersze na każdy dzień tygodnia,
Zaśpiewam ci pieśń, Psalmy, Poezja i malarstwo, Cóż jest piękniejszego niż (wysokie) drzewa..., s. 4, s. 6, Starość, Pocztówki poetyckie, Miłość, Erotyka, s. 6, s. 10, Schyłek miłości..., O czytaniu i czytelnikach "Okrutną zagadką jest życie"... Ciemność, Przypowieść, Spotkania/Miłość sprzed lat, Pierzaści bracia mniejsi, Za bramą piekieł, czyli motyw diabła w poezji /Na miejskich ulicach, Motyw studni w poezji, Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok, Smutek, melancholia, nostalgia, Oślepiony błyskiem, czyli o tym,
co się mowie wymyka, Życie po życiu, Pożądanie, fantazje erotyczne, Dary, podarunki, prezenty, Popatrz na mgłę, ileż cudów ukrywa..., W zamieci słowa..., Poezja religijnaRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 03.05.12 o godzinie 07:04

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) – irlandzki poeta, dramaturg i krytyk literacki, laureat Nagrody Nobla w dziedzinie literatury za 1995 rok. Autor tomów poetyckich: “Death of a Naturalist” (1966), “Door into the Dark” (1969), “Wintering Ou” (1972), “Stations” (1975), “North” (1975), “Field Work” (1979), “Selected Poems 1965-1975” (1980), “Station Island,” (1984), “The Haw Lantern” (1987), “New Selected Poems 1966-1987” (1990), “Seeing Things” (1991), “The Spirit Level” (1996), “Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996” (1998), “Electric Light” (2001), ”District and Circle” (2006). Seamus Heaney ceni sobie bardzo polskich poetów, zwłaszcza Czesława Miłosza i Zbigniewa Herberta, któremu zadedykował swój tomik “Electric Light” (Światło elektryczne”).
Ze Stanisławem Barańczakiem przygotował też własne tłumaczenia na język angielski „Trenów” Jana Kochanowskiego („Laments”, 1995). Jest znanym popularyzatorem poezji
dla radia i telewizji, w swoich licznych podróżach literackich nie omija też Polski. W 2005 roku Uniwersytet Jagielloński przyznał mu tytuł doktora honoris causa. Poezję jego tłumaczą na język polski m. in. Stanisław Barańczak, Piotr Sommer, Adam Szuba, Paweł Marcinkiewicz
i Magdalena Heydel.

Z tomu "Death of a Naturalist" (1966)

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Kopać” w temacie Być poetą

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzJgbNANzk
Seamus Heaney czyta wiersz "Digging"

Death of a Naturalist

All the year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampots full of the jellied
Specks to range on the window-sills at home,
On shalves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hadges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

przekład Violi Greg pt. "Śmierć przyrodnika"
w temacie A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwjhbj4n14o
Seamus Heaney czyta wiersz "Death of a Naturalist"

Z tomu "Door into the Dark" (1969)

Bogland

for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Kraina bagien”
w temacie Błoto, które sięga niebios...

The Given Note

On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather

Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy

For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.

So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don't care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Podana nuta"
w temacie Nobliści

Z tomu "Field Work" (1979)

Glanmore Sonnets

For Ann Saddlemyer,
our heartiest welcomer

I

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

II

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,
Words entering almost the sense of touch
Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch—
‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’
Oisin Kelly told me years ago
In Belfast, hankering after stone
That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.
Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore
And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise
A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter
That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:
Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

X

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.
Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.
Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out
Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.
And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?—
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka sonetu X
w tematach: Sonet i Co się poetom śni...?

Z tomu "Station Island" (1984)

Widgeon

for Paul Muldoon

It had been badly shot.
While he was plucking it
he found, he says, the voice box -

like a flute stop
in the broken windpipe -

and blew upon it
unexpectedly
his own small widgeon cries.

przekład Magdy Heydel pt. Świstun"
w temacie Nobliści

Z tomu "Seeing Things" (1991)

Wheels within Wheels

I

The first real grip I ever got on things
Was when I learned the art of pedalling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
Its back wheel preternaturally fast.
I loved the disappearance of the spokes,
The way the space between the hub and rim
Hummed with transparency. If you threw
A potato into it, the hooped air
Spun mush and drizzle back into your face;
If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered.
Something about the way those pedal treads
Worked very palpably at first against you
And then began to sweep your hand ahead
Into a new momentum -- that all entered me
Like an access of free power, as if belief
Caught up and spun the objects of belief
In an orbit coterminous with longing.

II

But enough was not enough. Who ever saw
The limit in the given anyhow?
In fields beyond our house there was a well
("The well" we called it. It was more a hole
With water in it, with small hawthorn trees
On one side, and a muddy, dungy ooze
On the other, all tramped through by cattle).
I loved that too. I loved the turbid smell,
The sump-life of the place like old chain oil.
And there, next thing, I brought my bicycle.
I stood its saddle and its handlebars
Into the soft bottom, I touched the tyres
To the water's surface, then turned the pedals
Until like a mill-wheel pouring at the treadles
(But here reversed and lashing a mare's tail)
The world-refreshing and immersed back wheel
Spun lace and dirt-suds there before my eyes
And showered me in my own regenerate clays.
For weeks I made a nimbus of old glit.
Then the hub jammed, rims rusted, the chain snapped.

III

Nothing rose to the occasion after that
Until, in a circus ring, drumrolled and spotlit,
Cowgirls wheeled in, each one immaculate
At the still centre of a lariat.
Perpetuum mobile. Sheer pirouette.
Tumblers, Jongleurs, Ring-a-rosies. Stet!

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Koła wewnątrz kół"
w temacie Motyw koła w poezji

Z tomu "The Spirit Level" (1996)

A Sofa in the Forties"

All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling
Behind each other, eldest down to youngest.
Elbows going like pistons, for this was a train

And between the jamb-wall and the bedroom door
Our speed and distance were inestimable.
First we shunted, then we whistled, then

Somebody collected the invisible
For tickets and very gravely punched it
As carriage after carriage under us

Moved faster, chooka-chook, the sofa legs
Went giddy and the unreachable ones
Far out on the kitchen floor began to wave.

Ghost-train? Death-gondola? The carved, curved ends,
Black leatherette and ornate gauntness of it
Made it seem the sofa had achieved

Flotation. Its castors on tiptoe,
Its braid and fluent backboard gave it airs
Of superannuated pageantry:

When visitors endured it, straight-backed,
When it stood off in its own remoteness,
When the insufficient toys appeared on it

On Christmas mornings, it held out as itself,
Potentially heavenbound, earthbound for sure,
Among things that might add up or let you down.

We entered history and ignorance
Under the wireless shelf. Yippee-i-ay,
Sang "The Riders of the Range." HERE IS THE NEWS,

Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us
A great gulf was fixed where pronunciation
Reigned tyrannically. The aerial wire

Swept from a treetop down in through a hole
Bored in the window frame. When it moved in wind,
The sway of language and its furtherings

Swept and swayed in us like nets in water
Or the abstract, lonely curve of distant trains
As we entered history and ignorance.

We occupied our seats with all our might,
Fit for the uncomfortableness.
Constancy was its own reward already.

Out in front, on the big upholstered arm,
Somebody craned to the side, driver or
Fireman, wiping his dry brow with the air

Of one who had run the gauntlet. We were
The last thing on his mind, it seemed; we sensed
A tunnel coming up where we'd pour through

Like unlit carriages through fields at night,
Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead,
And be transported and make engine noise.

przekład Stanisłąwa Barańczaka pt. "Kanapa, lata czterdzieste"
w temacie W świecie dziecięcych zabaw i zabawek

Z nowych wierszy

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in -

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable
and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those who had known him all along.

2009

przekład Magdy Heydel pt. „Cud' w temacie Motyw cudu w poezji

Inne wiersze Seamusa Heaneya w tematach: Nobliści, Sonet, Dlaczego zabijamy?,
Blaski i cienie małżeństwa, s. 1, s. 3, Co się poetom śni...?, W harmonii z przyrodą,
W czasie deszczu..., Listy poetyckie, Wspomnienia, Poeci poetom, Dlaczego piszę?,
A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech, W świecie wróżb, zaklęć i sił tajemnych,
Dziecko jest chodzącym cudem..., Jesień przychodzi za wcześnie..., Potrawy i napoje..., Dlaczego zabijamy?, Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam, Przemoc w majestacie prawa,
Wiersze z podróży, W świecie dziecięcych zabaw i zabawek, s. 1, s. 2, Trochę o duszy, Motyw studni w poezji/Kalectwo; Elegia/Poeci poetom, Narzędzia - przedłużenie człowieka, Motyw cudu w poezji, Wiersze jak kartki z pamiętnika, To (nie) jest rozmowa na telefon..., Błoto, które sięga niebios..., Poetyckie grzybobranie i inne leśne zbieranie, Dar słuchu, O rybach i innych mieszkańcach wód, Plaża, dzika plaża..., Miary
i wagi, Poetyckie newsy

Wspomnienie Seamusa Heaneya o Czesławie Miłoszu pt. "Śmierć starego króla"
w temacie Czesław Miłosz - wiersze, wspomnienia i inne poetyckie gadżetyTen post został edytowany przez Autora dnia 31.08.13 o godzinie 11:20

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Fleur Adcock (ur. 1934) – angielska poetka, tłumaczka i edytorka, urodziła się
w Nowej Zelandii, skąd w dzieciństwie wyemigrowała wraz z rodzicami do Anglii.
Poza krótkim okresem (1975-1976) spędzonym w Nowej Zelandii, mieszka i pracuje
w Anglii. Wydała kilkanaście tomików poezji, m. in. „Eye of the Hurricane” (1964),
„Tigers” (1967), “High Tide in the Garden” (1971), “The Scenic Route” (1974),
“The Inner Harbour” (1979), “Hotspur: a ballad” (1986), “Meeting the Comet” (1988),
“Time-zones” (1991), “Looking Back” (1997). Oprócz własnej twórczości, tłumaczy też poezję z łaciny i rumuńskiego. Jest też autorką kilku antologii poetyckich, m. in. antologii współczesnej poezji kobiecej (Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry, (1987)
oraz leksykonu współczesnych poetów nowozelandzkich ( Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry, 1982). Jej pierwsze wiersze utrzymane były w dość rygorystycznej poetyce klasycznej, z czasem forma i styl jej poezji stawały się luźniejsze. Adcock porusza zarówno tematykę historyczną, jak i współczesną, związaną z różnymi aspektami życia: płci, emigracji, tożsamości narodowej, ekologii. Często wykorzystuje jako środki stylistyczne niedopowiedzenia, ironię i makabreskę.

Flowers of the Field

At the blood-test laboratory
people come out one by one
each carrying a test-tube of blood
like a lighted candle.
(Could you carry a poem in your hand like that
without spilling a drop?)
Prickly smells, faces anonymous
as camomile, but plucked out and chosen.
The colours show up as clearly
as in a painting.
(Remember the well-known question:
“Which would you save from a fire, a famous picture
or a man who hadn’t long to live?”)
Reflections from the test-tubes make face blush red,
illuminate rough hands.
This is surely a picture that must be saved:
a procession of poppies
through the long corridors,
advancing, invading – making no mistake
about how long they’ve got.

Happy Ending

After they had not made love
she pulled the sheet up over her eyes
until he was unbottoning his shirt:
not shyness for their bodies-those
they had willingly displayed-but a frail
endeavour to apologise.

Later, though, drawn together by
a distaste for such 'untidy ends'
they agreed to meet again; whereupon
they giggled, reminisced, held hands
as though what they had made was love-
and not that happier outcome, friends.

Leaving the Tate

Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate gallery bag and another clutch
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river

and there's a new one: light bright buildings,
a streak of brown water, and such a sky
you wonder who painted it - Constable? No:
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic -

a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,
perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes
rushing up it (today, that is,
April. Another day would be different

but it wouldn't matter. All skies work.)
Cut to the lower right for a detail:
seagulls pecking on mud, below
two office blocks and a Georgian terrace.

Now swing to the left, and take in plane-trees
bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,
and a red bus...Cut it off just there,
by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in.

That's your next one. Curious how
these outdoor pictures didn't exist
before you'd looked at the indoor pictures,
the ones on the walls. But here they are now,

marching out of their panorama
and queuing up for the viewfinder
your eye's become. You can isolate them
by holding your optic muscles still.

You can zoom in on figure studies
(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,
abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.
The light painted them. You're in charge

of the hanging committee. Put what space
you like around the ones you fix on,
and gloat. Art multiplies itself.
Art's whatever you choose to frame.


Poem Ended by a Death

They will wash all my kisses and fingerprints off you
and my tearstains--I was more inclined to weep
in those wild-garlicky days--and our happier stains,
thin scales of papery silk...Fuck that for a cheap
opener; and false too--any such traces
you pumiced away yourself, those years ago
when you sent my letters back, in the week I married
that anecdotal ape. So start again. So:

They will remove the tubes and drips and dressings
which I censor from my dreams. They will, it is true,
wash you; and they will put you into a box.
After which whatever else they may do
won't matter. This is my laconic style.
You praised it, as I praised your intricate pearled
embroideries, these links laced us together,
plain and purl across the ribs of the world...

The Russian War

Great-great-great-uncle Francis Eggington
came back from the Russian War
(it was the kind of war you came back from,
if you lucky: bad, but over).
He didn’t come to the front door –
the lice and filth were falling off him –
he slipped along the alley to the yard.
“Who’s that out at the pump?” they said
“- a tall tramp stripping his rags off!”
The soap was where it usually was.
He scrubbed and splashed and scrubbed
and combed his beard over the hole in his throat.
“Give me some clothes,” he said. “I’m back.”
“Got save us, Frank, it’s you!” they said.
“What happened? Were you at Scutari?
And what’s that hole inside your beard?”
“Tea first,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.
And Willie’s children will tell their grandchildren;
I’ll be a thing called oral history.”

przekład Andrzeja Szuby, pt. „Wojna krymska”, w temacie Powroty

Inne wiersze Fleur Adcock, w tłumaczeniu Andrzeja Szuby, w tematach:
Pocałunki, Potrawy i napoje..., Blaski i cienie małżeństwa, Samobójstwo w wierszach..., Kobiecy portret, Ta nasza młodość, Z wyspy Lesbos i nie tylko..., Wiersz na taki dzień, jak dzisiajRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.05.11 o godzinie 13:12

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) – poeta amerykański żydowskiego pochodzenia, jego rodzice wyemigrowali z Rosji do Stanów Zjednoczonych na kilka lat przed jego urodzeniem. Studiował dziennikarstwo, ale ostatecznie ukończył studia prawnicze. Nie odnosił jednak większych sukcesów w swoim wyuczonym zawodzie i przez większość życia utrzymywał się z redagowania książek, tłumaczeń z niemieckiego i pisania kronik gmin żydowskich w USA. Jego żoną była pisarka i edytorka Marie Syrkin. Wiersze zaczął pisać w wieku 20 lat i pisał je do końca życia. Nie cieszyły się one jednak zainteresowaniem krytyków i wydawców, dlatego wydawał je własnym sumptem. Jego osobliwym hobby były piesze spacery po Nowym Jorku. Przez wiele lat pokonywał codziennie po kilka kilometrów, a obserwacje z tych wędrówek służyły mu za materiał do jego wierszy. Reznikoff pisał w poetyce tzw. obiektywizmu, która zakładała, że wiersz powinien opisywać jedynie same fakty, bez ich oceny przez autora. Jest autorem tomów wierszy: "Rhythms" (1918), "Poems" (1920), "Uriel Accosta: A Play and a Fourth Group of Verese" (1921), "Five Groups of Verse" (1927), "Jerusalem The Golden" (1934), "Separate Way" (1936), „Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down” (1941), "Inscriptions: 1944-1956" (1959), "By the Well of Living and Seeing and the Fifth Book of the Maccabees" (1969, "Holocaust" (1975). Wiersze Reznikoffa zostały zebrane w publikacji: "Poems 1918-1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff" (1989), która ukazała się 13 lat po śmierci poety.

Z tomu „Poems”, 1920

2

Old men and boys search the wet garbage with fingers
and slip pieces in bags.
This fat old -man has found the hard end of a bread
and bites it.

3

The girls outshout the machines
and she strains for their words, blushing.
Soon she, too, will speak
their speech glibly.

7

The house-wreckers have left the door and a staircase,
now leading to the empty room of night

Z tomu „Five Groups of Verse”, 1927

* * *

After I had worked all day at what I earn my living.
I was tired. Now my work has lost another day
I thought, but began slowly,
and slowly my strength came back to me.
Surely the tide comes in twice a day.

Z tomu „Jerusalem the Golden”, 1936

39

What are you doing in our street among the automobiles,
horse?
How are your cousins, the centaur and the unicorn?

What are you doing in our street... - czyta Charles Reznikoff

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „***[Co robisz na naszej ulicy...]”
w temacie Jak wysłowić konia czerń...?

40

Rooted among roofs, their smoke among the clouds,
factory chimneys——our cedars of Lebanon.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „***[Wrośnięte w dachy...]”
w temacie Świat dachów

Z tomu „Separate Way, 1936

Epitaphs IV

A brown oak leaf
scraping the sidewalk
frightened me.

Z tomu „Going To and Fro and Walking Up
and Down”, 1941

Autobiography: New York

IV

I like the sound of the street -
but I, apart and alone,
beside an open window
and behind a closed door.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „***[Lubię odgłosy ulicy...]”
w temacie Na miejskich ulicach

XVII

The elevator man, working long hours
for little—whose work is dull and trivial—
must also greet each passenger
pleasantly:
to be so heroic
he wears a uniform.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „***[Windziarz, pracujący całymi godzinami...]”
w temacie Zawody i profesje widziane okiem poety

XXIII

Cooper Union Library

Men and women with open books before them -
and never turn a page: come
merely for warmth
not light.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Biblioteka Cooper Union”
w temacie O czytaniu i czytelnikach

Oprócz wskazanych przekładów, wszystkie publikowane wyżej wiersze
w tłumaczeniu Piotra Sommera są w temacie Miniatury poetyckie

Z tomu "Inscriptions: 1944-1956”, 1959

* * *

Of course, we must die.
How else will the world be rid of
the old telephone numbers
we cannot forget?

The numbers
it would be foolish—
utterly useless—
to call.

Of course, we must die... - czyta Charles Reznikoff

przekład Piotra Sommera „***[Oczywiście, że musimy umrzeć...]”
w temacie Śmierć

Z tomu „By the Well of Living and Seeing
and the Fifth Book of the Maccabees", 1969

* * *

I was walking along Forty-Second Street as night was falling.
On the other side of the street was Bryant Park.
Walking behind me were two men
and I could hear some of their conversation:
“What you must do,” one of them was saying to his companion,
“is to decide on what you want to do
and then stick to it. Stick to it!
And you are sure to succeed finally.”

I turned to look at the speaker giving such good advice
and was not surprised to see that he was old.
But his companion
to whom the advice was given so earnestly,
was just as old;
and just then the great clock on top of a building across the park
began to shine.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „***[Szedłem Czterdziestą Drugą Ulicą...]”
w temacie Na miejskich ulicach

Inne wiersze Charlesa Reznikoffa, w przekładzie Piotra Sommera, w tematach:
Jak wysłowić konia czerń...?, Żydzi, judaizm i kultura żydowska w poezji, s. 6, s. 7, Wiersze na różne pory dnia, Owady są wszędzie, Pierzaści bracia mniejsi, s. 4, s. 8, Narzędzia – przedłużenie człowieka, Sierściuchy, Rozstania, Cóż jest piękniejszego niż (wysokie) drzewa , Homo automobilus, czyli jadę samochodem.../Popatrz na mgłę, ileż cudów ukrywa..., Między sacrum a profanum (motywy religijne w poezji świeckiej), Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam, Ruiny - dosłownie i w przenośni, SpotkaniaRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 20.05.11 o godzinie 12:12

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Barry Dempster (ur. 1952) – poeta i prozaik kanadyjski, wieloletni redaktor działu recenzji w Poetry Canada Review, w 1978 r. wydał antologię „Tributaries. An Anthology Writer to Writer”. Jako poeta debiutował w 1982 r. tomikiem wierszy „Fables for Isolated Men”, nominowanym do prestiżowej w Kanadzie nagrody Governor General's Awards. Ponadto jest autorem książek: „Globe Doubts” (1983), „ Real Places and Imaginary Men” (1984), „David and the Daydreams” (1985), „Writing Home” (1989), “Positions to Pray In” (1989),“The Unavoidable Man” (1990), “The Ascension of Jesse Rapture” (1993), “Fire and Brimstone” (1997), “The Salvation of Desire” (2000), “The Words Wanting Out: Selected and New Poems” (2003), “The Words Wanting Out: Selected and New Poems” (2003), “The Burning Alphabet” (2005 – również nominowana w 2006 r. do Governor General's Awards oraz nagrodzona Canadian Authors Association Jack Chalmers Poetry Award).

Links

She plays the piano, her head
folded into her bosom like a flower.
He sits beside her, the edge of one
thigh pressed on the gathers of
her dress. Chopin in the air. Summer
night tinkling. The parlour heavy with warm thoughts.

There are lovely words in his mouth, his
cheek stuffed with candy hearts. “Run away
with me into the forest, we’ll live in a cabin,
sleep on pine boughs.” His throat is tight,
the collar of his hard shirt like a lock.
Moon shines on the piano keys, turns into music.

She is so innocent, pale eyes closed, one
foot tapping discreetly. A wolf howls out
back. She thinks it romantic – the hot
fur, growls trembling out of the body, wet
white teeth dazzling like stars. He hears it too,
dreams of protecting her.

When they get up, she catches a glimpse of
herself in the mirror: tiny, wedding party pink,
waist slim enough for fingers. She brushes against
him, sends him into the night steaming.
There’s a strip of light on the road – he rides his
horse as if it were time, pounding into the future.

When they’re married, they both imagine babies.
My mother is born during dinner one night.
Then I’m there, wanting to be. I learned from
my grandfather how to beat time. They look at
me, then down at their baby, a sixty year old
woman with blue hair. Grandmother turns to dust.

I place their bones on the piano bench, link them
together like chains. Music fills the room. His leg
bone lies over her thigh, his fingers like sticks wrapped
around her waist. Picking my mother up, I leave,
down the same shining road, hors hooves mixed
with the howling of a piano.

przekład Jacka Podsiadły pt. „Ogniwa”
w temacie O przemijaniu...

The Birth of My Father

My grandmother was on a smoky train when she felt
the beginnings of regulated pain, and at the
station, being shuttled into a dark taxi, she
marvelled at the spasms and was told by the driver
the head was already through.

In the shadows of the back seat, my father slid
into the leather air, a strawberry face
and a shriek.

I think about this in the silence of clean beds and
ready hot water, and wonder it my father was
marked by it at all: a disrespect of time, darkness as
a comfort, a trust of
rear windows and panic.

Sometimes, in dreams, I imagine him struggling with the
ticking of the meter, working against the motion
of a car.
He grips the two windows, forcing himself down,
breaking
through worn vinyl, his first breath soured by gasoline
and old cigars.

Now, when the years have been impatient with him and
his body’s tattered and beginning to fold, I worry
when he phones taxis, offer to drive him myself.

przekład Jacka Podsiadły pt. „Narodziny mego ojca”
w temacie Motyw ojca

Three Women

They’ve got her lying in a long
white room, in the bed that bends
at the neck. To her right:
a woman who’s lost control of her
nerves; the one of her left:
half-dead, waiting for the other half
to catch on. Outside, the surface of
the grass slides by in the wind, everything
worthwhile is moving; the three women
as well: walking away from their stuffy
beds with every breath. When the one dies
(the half-dead one) we’re afraid mother
will surrender like a boy at his first
sight of blood. But she takes it well, smiling
over at the corpse before they cart it away
saying: such a face, a face like a dried-out
apple, so unconcerned. The two women continue,
their silence as arrogant as a disease.
One morning, sitting up, the twitching woman
cries out, falls back, sprawled across the bed
as if she’d fallen from a tree. That leaves
my mother, empty beds at both elbows
like ghosts. She lies there and listens,
silence a necessity now. The sky leans
down, pressing on her chest, curious,
like a doctor. One day when we go
to visit, she’s dead – her and the
bed: one quiet ache of white.

przekład Jacka Podsiadły pt. „Trzy kobiety” w temacie Szpital

Wszystkie wiersze pochodzą z tomu: Fables for Isolated Men.
Guernica Editions, Montréal – Québec 1982.

Inne wiersze Barry’ego Dempstera, w przekładzie Jacka Podsiadły,
w tematach: Magia kina, Bohema, cyganeria artystyczna, Poezja religijnaRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.05.11 o godzinie 13:14

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

James Tate (ur. 1943) – zaliczany jest do jednych z najciekawszych, najbardziej oryginalnych, ale zarazem kontrowersyjnych, współczesnych poetów amerykańskich. Wczesne wiersze, utrzymane w poetyce postsurrealistycznej wydał w swoim debiutanckim tomiku „The Lost Pilot” (1967). Tomik ten został ciepło przyjęty przez krytykę, a sam autor zyskał uznanie u takich autorytetów poezji współczesnej, jak Robert Lowell i John Ashbery. Następnie opublikował: „The Torches, „The Oblivion Ha-Ha” (1970), “Hints to Pilgrims” (1970), “Absences”, (1972), “A Sip for Gabrielle” (1974), “Viper Jazz” (1976), “Riven Doggeries” (1979), “Constant Defender” (1983), “Reckoner” (1986), “Distance from Loved Ones” (1990), “Selected Poems” (1991 – Nagroda Pulitzera za 1992 r. i nagroda Williama Carlosa Williamsa), “Worshipful Company of Fletchers” (1995 - National Book Awards), “ Shroud of the Gnome” (1998), “Memoir of the Hawk” (2002), “Return to the City of White Donkeys” (2004), “Ghost Soldiers” (2008).

The Lost Pilot

for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others--the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others--it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger's life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.

(z tomu Selected Poems. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover and London 1991)

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Zaginiony pilot” w temacie Motyw ojca

The Book of Lies

I`d like to have a word
with you. Could we be alone
for a minute? I have been lying
until now. Do you believe

I believe myself? Do you believe
yourself when you believe me? Lying
is natural. Forgive me. Could we be alone
forever? Forgive us all. The word

is my enemy. I have never been alone;
bribes, betrayals. I am lying
even now. Can you believe
that? I give you my word.

(z tomu Selected Poems. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover and London 1991)

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Księga kłamstw” w temacie W zamieci słowa

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful
day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

(z tomu Selected Poems. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover and London 1991)

Rozrywkowy Jezus

Jezus wstał pewnego dnia trochę później niż zwykle. Sen był tak głęboki, że nic mu nie zostało w głowie. Co to było? Jakiś koszmar, trupy drepczące wokół niego, połyskujące białkami oczu, ciała z odpadającą skórą. Ale tego przecież się nie bał. Był piękny dzień. A może mała kawka? Pozwól, że skorzystam. Zrób sobie rundkę na moim osiołku, kocham tego osiołka. Do diabła, wszystkich kocham.

przełożył Paweł Marcinkiewicz

A Knock On The Door

They ask me if I've ever thought about the end of
the world, and I say, "Come in, come in, let me
give you some lunch, for God's sake." After a few
bites it's the afterlife they want to talk about.
"Ouch," I say, "did you see that grape leaf
skeletonizer?" Then they're talking about
redemption and the chosen few sitting right by
His side. "Doing what?" I ask. "Just sitting?" I
am surrounded by burned up zombies. "Let's
have some lemon chiffon pie I bought yesterday
at the 3 Dog Bakery." But they want to talk about
my soul. I'm getting drowsy and see butterflies
everywhere. "Would you gentlemen like to take a
nap, I know I would." They stand and back away
from me, out the door, walking toward my
neighbors, a black cloud over their heads and
they see nothing without end.

(z tomu Shroud of the Gnome. The Ecco Press, New Jersey 1998)

przekład Barbary Bernhardt pt. „Pukanie do drzwi” w temacie Drzwi

Dream On

Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
Extraordinary people who don't hesitate
to cut somebody's heart or skull open.
They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease.
and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing.
These same people stroll into a church
as if that were a natural part of life.
Investing money is second nature to them.
They contribute to political campaigns
that have absolutely no poetry in them
and promise none for the future.
They sit around the dinner table at night
and pretend as though nothing is missing.
Their children get caught shoplifting at the mall
and no one admits that it is poetry they are missing.
The family dog howls all night,
lonely and starving for more poetry in his life.
Why is it so difficult for them to see
that, without poetry, their lives are effluvial.
Sure, they have their banquets, their celebrations,
croquet, fox hunts, their sea shores and sunsets,
their cocktails on the balcony, dog races,
and all that kissing and hugging, and don't
forget the good deeds, the charity work,
nursing the baby squirrels all through the night,
filling the birdfeeders all winter,
helping the stranger change her tire.
Still, there's that disagreeable exhalation
from decaying matter, subtle but everpresent.
They walk around erect like champions.
They are smooth-spoken and witty.
When alone, rare occasion, they stare
into the mirror for hours, bewildered.
There was something they meant to say, but didn't:
"And if we put the statue of the rhinoceros
next to the tweezers, and walk around the room three times,
learn to yodel, shave our heads, call
our ancestors back from the dead--"
poetrywise it's still a bust, bankrupt.
You haven't scribbled a syllable of it.
You're a nowhere man misfiring
the very essence of your life, flustering
nothing from nothing and back again.
The hereafter may not last all that long.
Radiant childhood sweetheart,
secret code of everlasting joy and sorrow,
fanciful pen strokes beneath the eyelids:
all day, all night meditation, knot of hope,
kernel of desire, pure ordinariness of life
seeking, through poetry, a benediction
or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal,
explore, to imbue meaning on the day's extravagant labor.
And yet it's cruel to expect too much.
It's a rare species of bird
that refuses to be categorized.
Its song is barely audible.
It is like a dragonfly in a dream--
here, then there, then here again,
low-flying amber-wing darting upward
then out of sight.
And the dream has a pain in its heart
the wonders of which are manifold,
or so the story is told.

(z tomu Shroud of the Gnome. The Ecco Press, New Jersey 1998)

przekład Barbary Bernhardt pt. „Śnij dalej” w temacie Być poetą

Never Again The Same

Speaking of sunsets,
last night's was shocking.
I mean, sunsets aren't supposed to frighten you, are they?
Well, this one was terrifying.
People were screaming in the streets.
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.
It wasn't natural.
One climax followed another and then another
until your knees went weak
and you couldn't breathe.
The colors were definitely not of this world,
peaches dripping opium,
pandemonium of tangerines,
inferno of irises,
Plutonian emeralds,
all swirling and churning, swabbing,
like it was playing with us,
like we were nothing,
as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,
this for which nothing could have prepared us
and for which we could not have been less prepared.
The mockery of it all stung us bitterly.
And when it was finally over
we whimpered and cried and howled.
And then the streetlights came on as always
and we looked into one another's eyes?
ancient caves with still pools
and those little transparent fish
who have never seen even one ray of light.
And the calm that returned to us
was not even our own.

(z tomu Shroud of the Gnome. The Ecco Press, New Jersey 1998)

Nigdy więcej taki sam

Jeśli chodzi o zachody słońca –
ten wczorajszy był szokujący.
Zachody słońca nie powinny przecież zatrważać, prawda?
A jednak był przerażający.
Ludzie krzyczeli na ulicach.
Jasne, że był piękny, lecz o wiele zbyt piękny.
To było naturalne.
Moment kulminacji – jeden po drugim,
aż kolana same się uginały
i nie można było oddychać.
Kolory – zdecydowanie nie z tego świata,
ociekające opium brzoskwinie,
pandemonium mandarynek,
inferno irysów,
szmaragdy z hadesowych głębi,
wszystko wirujące, kłębiące się, kipiące
jakby wodziło nas za nos,
jakbyśmy doprawdy byli niczym,
a całe nasze życie miało nas tylko przygotować
na to, na co nic nie mogło nas przygotować
i na co nie moglibyśmy być przygotowani mniej.
Całe urągowisko użądliło nas boleśnie.
I kiedy wreszcie się skończyło
zaczęliśmy skomleć i płakać i wyć.
A potem jak zwykle zapłonęły uliczne latarnie
i patrzyliśmy sobie w oczy
- starożytne jaskinie z nieruchomymi sadzawkami
i tymi małymi przezroczystymi rybkami,
które nigdy nie widziały nawet promyczka światła.
I nawet spokój, który do nas powrócił
nie był nasz.

przełożyła Barbara Bernhardt

Inne wiersze Jamesa Tate’a w tematach: Przemoc w majestacie prawa,
A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech, Narzędzia – przedłużenie człowieka, Śmierć, Kalectwo, Nagość, W zamieci słowa, Tęsknota, W czasie deszczu ...,
W świecie wróżb, zaklęć i sił tajemnych, Wędrówki po śladach historii,
Poetyckie studium przedmiotu, Wędrówką życie jest człowieka, Co się poetom śni...?, Czynności i zajęcia, poza pisaniem wierszy – M. K.Marta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 07.04.10 o godzinie 17:09

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) – jeden z najwybitniejszych poetów amerykańskich, zaliczany do kierunków: modernizmu i imagizmu. Debiutował w 1909 roku tomem „Poems”.
Inne jego tomy wierszy to: „The Tempers” (1913), „Al Que Quiere” (1917), “Kora in Hell: Improvisations” (1920), “Sour Grapes” (1921), “Spring and All” (1923), “Go Go” (1923),
“The Cod Head” (1932), “An Early Martyr and Other Poems” (1935), „Adam & Eve & The Cit” (1936), “The Broken Span” (1941), “The Wedge” (1944), “Paterson”, vol. I-V (1948-1958), “Clouds, Aigeltinger, Russia” (1948), “The Desert Music and Other Poems” (1954), “Journey to Love” (1955), “Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems” (1962). Pisał również prozę
i dramaty. Poezję W. C. Williamsa cechuje prosty i klarowny język oraz duża obrazowość,
w myśl wyznawanej przez niego zasady, że poezja jest rozległym polem, na którym autor umieszcza obrazy, aby w ten sposób przemawiać do zwykłych ludzi.
Wiersze W. C. Williamsa ukazały się po polsku w tomach: William Carlos Williams: Poezje. Wybrał i przełożył Leszek Elektorowicz. PIW, Warszawa 1972; William Carlos Williams: Spóźniony śpiewak. Wybór, posłowie i przekład Julia Hartwig. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2009 oraz w numerze monograficznym "Literatury na Świecie" nr 1-2/2009 (w tłumaczeniu Krystyny Dąbrowskiej, Andrzeja Szuby i Piotra Sommera).

Szerzej o życiu i twórczości W. C. Williamsa:
Julia Hartwig „William Carlos Williams – nota o autorze”.

Z tomu „Al Que Quiere!”, 1917





Apology

Why do I write today?

The beauty of
the terrible faces
of our nonentites
stirs me to it:

colored women
day workers -
old and experience -
returning home at dusk
in cast off clothing
faces like
old Florentine oak.

Also

the set pieces
of your faces stir me -
leading citizens -
but not
in the same way.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Usprawiedliwienie”
w temacie Dlaczego piszę?

Love Song

I lie here thinking of you:---

the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branched the lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!
There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world-

you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej
pt. „Pieśń miłosna” w temacie Miłość

Z tomu „Kora in Hell: Improvisations”, 1920





Portrait of a Lady

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze -- or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
-- As if that answered
anything. -- Ah, yes. Below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore --
Which shore? --
the sand clings to my lips --
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
-- the petals from some hidden
appletree -- Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Portret
damy” w temacie Kobiecy portret

Z tomu „Sour Grapes”, 1921





The Late Singer

Here it is spring again
and I still a young man!
I am late at my singing.
The sparrow with the black rain on his breast
has been at his cadenzas for two weeks past:
What is it that is dragging at my heart?
The grass by the back door
is stiff with sap.
The old maples are opening
their branches of brown and yellow moth-flowers.
A moon hangs in the blue
in the early afternoons over the marshes.
I am late at my singing.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Spóźniony śpiewak”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą

The Birds

The world begins again!
Not wholly insufflated
the blackbirds in the rain
upon the dead topbranches
of the living tree,
stuck fast to the low clouds,
notate the dawn.
Their shrill cries sound
announcing appetite
and drop among the bending roses
and the dripping grass.

przekład Julii Harrtwig pt. „Ptaki”
w temacie Pierzaści bracia mniejsi

The Widow's Lament in Springtime

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Lament wdowy na wiosnę”
w temacie Blaski i cienie małżeństwa

January

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
                          Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
                                    And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Styczeń”
w temacie Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

April

If you had come away with me
into another state
we had been quiet together.
But there the sun coming up
out of the nothing beyond the lake was
too low in the sky,
there was too great a pushing
against him,
too much of sumac buds, pink
in the head
with the clear gum upon them,
too many opening hearts of lilac leaves,
too many, too many swollen
limp poplar tassels on the
bare branches!
It was too strong in the air.
I had no rest against that
springtime!
The pounding of the hoofs on the
raw sods
stayed with me half through the night.
I awoke smiling but tired.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Kwiecień”
w temacie Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

Memory of April

You say love is this, love is that:
Poplar tassels, willow tendrils
the wind and the rain comb,
tinkle and drip, tinkle and drip--
branches drifting apart. Hagh!
Love has not even visited this country.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Pamięć kwietnia”
w temacie Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

Spouts

In this world of
as fine a pair of breasts
as ever I saw
the fountain in
Madison Square
spouts up of water
a white tree
that dies and lives
as the rocking water
in the basin
turns from the stonerim
back upon the jet
and rising there
reflectively drops down again.

przekład Andrzeja Szuby pt. „Fontanna” w temacie
Fontanna – co poetów i kochanków skłania do zadumy...

Z tomu „Spring and All”, 1923





Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

przekład Krzysztofa Boczkowskiego pt. „Wiosna
i wszystko” w temacie Nim przyjdzie wiosna...

Z tomu „An Early Martyr and Other Poems”, 1935





Invocation and Conclusion

January!
The beginning of all things!
Sprung from the old burning nest
upward in the flame!

I was married at thirteen
My parents had nine kinds
and we were on the street
That's why thet old bugger -

He was twenty-six
snd I haden't evev had
my changes yet. Now look at me!

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Inwokacja i wniosek” w tematach:
Los i przeznaczenie oraz Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok


The Catholic Bells

Tho' I'm no Catholic
I listen hard when the bells
in the yellow-brick tower
of their new church

ring down the leaves
ring in the frost upon them
and the death of the flowers
ring out the grackle

toward the south, the sky
darkened by them, ring in
the new baby of Mr. and Mrs.
Krantz which cannot

for the fat of its cheeks
open well its eyes, ring out
the parrot under its hood
jealous of the child

ring in Sunday morning
and old age which adds as it
takes away. Let them ring
only ring! over the oil

painting of a young priest
on the church wall advertisng
last week's Novena to St.
Anthony, ring for the lame

young man in black with
gaunt cheeks and wearing a
Derby hat, who is hurrying
to 11 o'clock Mass (the

grapes still hanging to
the vines along the nearby
Concordia Halle like broken
teeth in the head of an

old man) Let them ring
for the eyes and ring for
the hands and ring for
the children of my friend

who no longer hears
them ring but with a smile
and in a low voice speaks
of the decisions of her

daughter and the proposals
and betrayals of her
husband's friends. O bells
ring for the ringing!

the beginnng and the end
of th ringing! Ring ring
ring ring ring ring ring!
Catholic bells-!

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Katolickie dzwony"
w temacie Motyw dzwonu w poezji

Z tomu „The Broken Span”, 1941





These

are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.

The year plunges into night
and the heart plunges
lower than night

to an empty, windswept place
without sun, stars or moon
but a peculiar light as of thought

that spins a dark fire -
whirling upon itself until,
in the cold, it kindles

to make a man aware of nothing
that he knows, not loneliness
itself - Not a ghost but

would be embraced - emptiness
despair - (They
whine and whistle) among

the flashes and booms of war;
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,

the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused -

Hide it away somewhere
out of mind, let it get to roots
and grow, unrelated to jealous

ears and eyes - for itself.
In this mine they come to dig - all.
Is this the counterfoil to sweetest

music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped

that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing - that is now stone.

dwa przekłady: Artura Międzyrzeckiego pt. „To są właśnie...”
w temacie Samotność i Krzysztofa Boczkowskiego pt. „To”,
w temacie W nigdzie nic..., czyli o pustce w poezji

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed--

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat--
They're starving me--
I'm all right--I won't go
to the hospital.No, no, no

Give me something to eat!
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please--

Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher--
Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear--
Oh you think you're smart
you young people,

she said, but I'll tell you
you don't know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy looking things out there?
Trees?Well, I'm tired
of them and rolled her head away.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Ostatnie słowa mojej angielskiej
babki” w temacie Pożegnania, ostatnie słowa...
        
        
Z tomu „The Wedge”, 1944





Perfection

      O lovely apple!
beautifully and completely
      rotten,
hardly a contour marred—

      perhaps a little
shriveled at the top but that
      aside perfect
in every detail! O lovely

      apple! What a
deep and suffusing brown
      mantles that
unspoiled surface! No one

      has moved you
since I placed you on the porch
      rail a month ago
to ripen.

      No one. No one!

przekład Krystyny Dąbrowskiej pt. „Doskonałość”
w tematach: Owoce i Piękno

A Cold Front

This woman with a dead face
has seven foster children
and a new baby of her own in
spite of that. She want pills

for an abortion and says,
Uh hum, in reply to me while
her blanketed infant makes
unrelated grunts of salutation.

She looks at me with her mouth
open and blinks her expressionless
carved eyes, like a cat
on a limb too tired to go higher

from its tormentors. And still
the baby chortles in its spit
and there is a dull flush
almost of beauty to the woman's face

as she says, looking at me
quietly, I won't have any more.
In a case like this I know
quick action is the main thing.

przekład Krystyny Dąbrowskiej pt. „Zimny
front” w temacie Patologia wokół nas
        
        
Z tomu „Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems”, 1962





I. Self Portrait

In a red winter hat blue
eyes smiling
just the head and shoulders

crowded on the canvas
arms folded one
big ear the right showing

the face slightly tilted
a heavy wool coat
with broad buttons

gathered at the neck reveals
a bulbous nose
but the eyes red-rimmed

from over-use he must have
driven them hard
but the delicate wrists

show him to have been a
man unused to
manual labor unshaved his

blond beard half trimmed
no time for any-
thing but his painting

przekład Krystyny Dąbrowskiej pt. „Autoportret”
w temacie Poezja i malarstwo

V. Peasant Wedding

Pour the wine bridegroom
where before you the
bride is enthroned her hair

loose at her temples a head
of ripe wheat is on
the wall beside her the

guests seated at long tables
the bagpipers are ready
there is a hound under

the table the bearded Mayor
is present women in their
starched headgear are

gabbing all but the bride
hands folded in her
lap is awkwardly silent simple

dishes are being served
clabber and what not
from a trestle made of an

przekład Krystyny Dąbrowskiej pt. „Chłopskie
wesele” w temacie Poezja i malarstwo

VI. Haymaking

The living quality of
the man’s mind
stands out

and its covert assertions
for art, art, art!
painting

that the Renaissance
tried to absorb
but

it remained a wheat field
over which the
wind played

men with scythes tumbling
the wheat in
rows

the gleaners already busy
it was his own –
magpies

the patient horses no one
could take that
from him

przekład Krystyny Dąbrowskiej pt. „Sianokosy”
w temacie Poezja i malarstwo

Inne wiersze Williama Carlosa Willliamsa wcześniej w tym temacie, a także w tematach:
Sierściuchy, Kwiaty, Dlaczeg piszę?, Autoportret w lustrze wiersza, Czym jest wiersz?, Umysł i potęga myśli, Jak wysłowić konia czerń, Starość, Zima, Między bogactwem
a ubóstwem, Motyw wiatru w poezji, s. 3, s. 5, Kobiecy portret, s. 6, s. 11, Czułość,
Blaski i cienie małżeństwa/Rozstania, Kalendarz poetycki na cały rokRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 04.04.12 o godzinie 13:23

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Zofia M.:
C.K Williams

THE SINGING

I was walking home down a hill near our house
on a balmy afternoon
under the blossoms
Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here
every spring with
their burgeoning forth

When a young man turned in from a corner singing
no it was more of
a cadenced shouting
Most of which I couldn't catch I thought because
the young man was
black speaking black

It didn't matter I could tell he was making his
song up which pleased
me he was nice-looking
Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously
full of himself
hence his lyrical flowing over

We went along in the same direction then he noticed
me there almost
beside him and "Big"
He shouted-sang "Big" and I thought how droll
to have my height
incorporated in his song

So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing
he looked
in fact pointedly away
And his song changed "I'm not a nice person"
he chanted "I'm not
I'm not a nice person"

No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat
but he did want
to be certain I knew
That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord
between us I should forget it

That's all nothing else happened his song became
indecipherable to
me again he arrived
Where he was going a house where a girl in braids
waited for him on
the porch that was all

No one saw no one heard all the unasked and
unanswered questions
were left where they were
It occurred to me to sing back "I'm not a nice
person either" but I
couldn't come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he have believed
it both of us
knew just where we were
In the duet we composed the equation we made
the conventions to
which we were condemned

Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that
someone something
is watching and listening
Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though
no one saw nor
heard no one was there

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8NiuRx1a3k
C. K. Williams czyta swój wiersz "The Singing"

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

C. K. (Charles Kenneth) Williams (ur. 1936) – jeden z najbardziej cenionych
i popularnych współczesnych poetów amerykańskich, także tłumacz i krytyk literacki, były redaktor prestiżowego pisma „American Poetry Review”. Obecnie mieszka pół roku w Paryżu i drugie pół w Stanach Zjednoczonych, gdzie przez jeden semestr prowadzi zajęcia z creative writting na uniwersytecie w Princeton. Debiutował w roku 1969 tomem wierszy „Lies”. Ponadto opublikował następujące książki poetyckie:
"I Am the Bitter Name” (1972), “With Ignorance” (1977), “Tar” (1983), “Flesh and Blood” (1987 – nagrodzona National Book Critics Circle Award) “A Dream of Mind” (1992), “The Vigil” (1997), “Repair” (1999 – nagrodzona: National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry oraz Los Angeles Times Book Prize), “Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself “ (2000), “The Singing” (2003), “Collected Poems” 2006.
Poeta przyjaźni się z Adamem Zagajewskim i jego żoną Mają Wodecką. Tłumaczy wiersze A. Zagajewskiego (tom „Canvas”, 1991, we współautorstwie z Renatą Gorczyńską i Benjaminem Ivry), a Maja Wodecka jest autorką i tłumaczką pierwszej
w Polsce antologii wierszy C. K. Wililamsa ( C. K. Williams: Czuwanie. Wybór i przekład Maja Wodecka, przy współpracy Adama Zagajewskiego. Wyd a5, Kraków 2002).
Na zaproszenie małżeństwa Zagajewskich C. K. Williams gościł w Polsce w 1997 r., kiedy wziął udział w Spotkaniu Poetów Wschodu i Zachodu w Krakowie, a od 2002 r., niemal corocznie, uczestniczy w krakowskich seminariach pn. „Polsko-amerykańskie spotkania poetyckie”.


Polsko-amerykańskie spotkania poetyckie, Kraków 2007.
Od lewej: C. K. Williams, Adam Zagajewski i Maja Wodecka.
Fot. Mateusz Skwarczek „Gazeta Wyborcza” (wyd. krakowskie z 14. 06. 2007)

C. K. Williams

We

A basset-hound with balls
so heavy they hang
a harrowing half-
inch from the pavement,

ears cocked, accusingly
watches as his beautiful
mistress croons
to her silver cell-phone.

She does, yes, go on,
but my, so slim-
waistedly
does she sway there,

so engrossedly does her dark
gaze drift
towards even
for a moment mine...

Though Mister Dog of course
sits down right
then to lick
himself, his groin of course,

till she cuts off, and he,
gathering his folds
and flab, heaves
erect to leave with her...

But wait, she's turning to
a great Ducati
cycle gleaming
black and chromy at the curb,

She's mounting it, (that long
strong lift of flank!)
snorting it to life,
coaxing it in gear...

Why, she's not his at all!
No more than mine!
What was he thinking?
What was I? Like a wing,

a wave, she banks away
now, down-shifts,
pops and crackles
round the curve, is gone.

How sleek she was, though;
how scrufty, how
anciently scabby
we, he and I;

how worn, how
self-devoured,
balls and all,
balls, balls and all.

First Desires

It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew anything at all about the music,
what the instruments might sound like, look like, what portion of the orchestra each represented:
there were only volumes and velocities, thickenings and thinnings, the winding cries of change
that seemed to touch within you, through your body, to be part of you and then apart from you.
And even when you’d learned the grainy timbre of the single violin, the aching arpeggios of the horn,
when you tried again there were still uneases and confusions left, an ache, a sense of longing
that held you in chromatic dissonance, droning on beyond the dominant’s resolve into the tonic,
as though there were a flaw of logic in the structure, or in (you knew it was more likely) you.


Love: Beginnings

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity and unity they make—
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in flame into the sexual—
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that filling of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again, stamping in its stall.

Love: Habit

He has his lips pressed solidly against her cheek, his eyes are wide open, though, and she, too,
gazes into the distance, or at least is nowhere in the fragile composition they otherwise create.
He breaks off now, sulkily slouches back; his hand, still lifted to her face, idly cups her chin,
his fingers casually drumming rhythms on her lips, a gesture she finds not at all remarkable—
she still gazes away, looking for whatever she’s been looking for, her inattention like a wall.
Now he kisses her again, and they both, like athletes, hold that way again, perversely persevering…
Oh, Paolo! Oh, Francesca! Is this all it comes to, the perturbations and the clamor, the broken breath,
the careenings on the wheel—just this: the sorrowing flame of consciousness so miserably dimmed?

Inne wiersze C. K. Williamsa, po angielsku wcześniej i dalej w tym temacie
oraz po polsku w tematach: Rozstania, Kobiecy portret, Zima, Motyw zwierciadła, lustra i odbicia, Między bogactwem a ubóstwem, Poeci poetom, Wspomnienia/Homo automobilus..., Ogród przedziwny, Dotknij mnie.../Archetypy i symbole w poezjiRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 07.11.11 o godzinie 17:45

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) – angielski poeta, prozaik i krytyk muzyczny, uważany
za jednego z najwybitniejszych, najbardziej oryginalnych poetów anglojęzycznych. Po ukończeniu studiów w Oksfordzie w 1943 roku do końca życia pracował jako bibliotekarz, odmawiając nawet po śmierci Johna Benjemana objęcia na dworze królewskim zaszczytnej funkcji poety nadwornego (Poet Laureate). Opublikował następujące tomy wierszy: „The North Ship” (1945), „XX Poems” (1953), „The Fantasy Poets No. 21” (1954), “The Less Deceived”(1955), “The Whitsun Weddings” (1964), „High Windows” (1974).
Po polsku ukazały się dwa wybory jego wierszy: Philip Larkin: 44 wiersze. Wybór i przekład Stanisław Barańczak. Arka, Kraków 1991 i Philip Larkin: Zebrane. Przekład Jacek Dehnel, pezedmowa Jerzy Jarniewicz. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2008. Ukazała się też książka
o jego twórczości: Jerzy Jarniewicz: Larkin. Odsłuchiwanie wierszy. SIW Znak, Kraków 2006.
Patrz też recenzję Adama Suchomskiego z książki Ph. Larkina „Zebrane” w temacie Recenzje o publikacjach – naszych oraz innych autorów.

Philip Larkin

Z tomu “The Less Deceived”, 1955:

Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album

At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose --
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat

(Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways) --
From every side you strike at my control,
Not least through those these disquieting chaps who loll
At ease about your earlier days:
Not quite your class, I'd say, dear, on the whole.

But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards,

But shows a cat as disinclined, and shades
A chin as doubled when it is, what grace
Your candour thus confers upon her face!
How overwhelmingly persuades
That this is a real girl in a real place,

In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry
Not only at exclusion, but because
It leaves us free to cry. We know what was
Won't call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across

The gap from eye to page. So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you'd spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

Na panieński album ze zdjęciami

Nareszcie się zgodziłaś, abym przejrzał album:
Otwarty, oszołomił mnie. Tyle okazów
Ciebie na czerni grubych kart, wszystkie od razu
Lata twojego życia! Za dużo tych skarbów:
Dławi mnie gładki lukier sycących obrazów.

Głodne oko wędruje od pozy do pozy:
Tu — w warkoczykach, z kotem opornym w objęciach;
Tam — świeżo upieczona słodka absolwentka;
Tam znów koło altany, w towarzystwie nożyc
I ciężkogłowych róż, lub w kapeluszu (zdjęcia

Niepokojące dość pod wieloma względami) —
Z każdej stronicy rzucasz mi inne wyzwanie,
Zwłaszcza w postaci typków, którzy bezustannie,
Jak widzę, po twych dawnych latach się szwendali:
Nie na twoim poziomie byli, moim zdaniem.

Lecz fotografio, któraś wśród sztuk jest ojczyzną
Wierności i zawodu! ty, co dni uwieczniasz
Szarość, odsłaniasz fałsz pod uśmiechu powierzchnią,
Nie cenzurujesz błędów tła: sznurów z bielizną
Lub weterynaryjnych na murze obwieszczeń,

Ale ujawniasz niechęć kota i nie przeczysz
Podwójności podbródka: ta szczerość bez skazy
Ile łaski wyświadcza jej dziewczęcej twarzy!
Jak przekonuje nas, że jest to w samej rzeczy
Rzeczywista dziewczyna w realnym pejzażu,

Empirycznie i w każdym znaczeniu prawdziwa!
Czy może jest to przeszłość? Te kwiaty, to miejsce
Na ławce, mglisty park, samochód — ranią serce
Po prostu tym, że już ich nie ma; wzrok odkrywa
Z czułością w twym wyglądzie to, co niedzisiejsze.

Tak; lecz co jest przyczyną tego roztkliwienia?
Nie tylko wykluczenie, ale i to jeszcze,
Że dzięki niemu płacz jest tak łatwy. Co przeszłe,
Nie będzie od nas żądać usprawiedliwienia
Naszego żalu, choćby jęk wypełniał przestrzeń

Od oka do stronicy. Dlatego potrafię
Opłakiwać (bez groźby jakichś konsekwencji)
Ciebie, pod żywopłotem wspartą o panieński
Rower, albo kąpiącą się (tę fotografię
Chętnie bym ukradł); album pozwala mi zgęścić

Całą twą przeszłość, której dziś z tobą nie dzieli
Nikt, choćby przyszłość miała należeć do niego;
Obejmuje cię suche i pogodne niebo,
I spoczywasz w urodzie, której czas nie zmieni,
Coraz to wyraźniejsza pomimo lat biegu.

przełożył Stanisław Barańczak

inny przekład Jacka Dehnela pt. “Na młodej damy portret ze zdjęciami”
w temacie Poezja i fotografia

I Remember, I Remember

Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
”Why, Coventry!” I exclaimed. 'I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols?... A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
”Was that,” my friend smiled, “where you >>have your roots<<?”
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -
”You look as though you wished the place in Hell,”
My friend said, “judging from your face.” “Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,” I said.

”Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”

Pamiętam, pamiętam

Jadąc tym razem inną niż zazwyczaj trasą,
W głąb Anglii i nowego roku, w środku zimy,
Zatrzymaliśmy się, i - widząc pasażerów
Biegnących z walizami przez znajomy peron -
"Coventry!", wykrzyknąłem, "Tu się urodziłem!".

Usilnie chciałem dojrzeć jakiś znak, że miasto
Wcale się nie zmieniło od tamtego czasu,
Gdy było moje, ale cóż - nawet nie byłem
Pewien stron świata. Tamten stojak dla rowerów -
Czy nie spod niego zabieraliśmy się w drogę

Podczas letnich wakacji?... Pociąg gwizdnął:
Wszystko ruszyło. Siadłem, gapiąc się na nosek
Buta. "A więc - uśmiechnął się kolega - to są
Twoje <<korzenie>>?" Nie, tu się nie wydarzyło
Moje dzieciństwo - chciałem rzec - tu się zacząłem,

A teraz mam już cały plan z legendą w głowie.
Najpierw nasz ogród, w którym mnie nie poraziła
Swym blaskiem teologia kwiatów i owoców
I gdzie nie mówił do mnie żaden zacny starzyk.
Tu oto mamy moich wspaniałych rodziców,

Którym się nie zwierzałem, gdy byłem w depresji.
Chłopaki - same mięśnie, a dziewczyny - piersi,
Ten ich komiczny ford i farma, gdzie "raz w życiu
Czułem się sobą". Teraz może ci pokażę
Tę tu paproć, pod którą nigdy nie siedziałem

Cały się trzęsąc, ale z powziętą decyzją;
Gdzie ona położyła się w trawie na plecy
I "spowiła nas mgła płomienna". Także żadnych
Moich wypocin nie składałem w tych redakcjach
Ani nie czytał ich sam kuzyn burmistrzowej,

By dzwonić potem do mojego ojca: Może
Ten talent, który tu widzimy, będzie wzrastał.
"Sądząc po twojej minie, teraz pewnie chciałbyś
Całe to miasto", rzekł kolega, "posłać w diabły".
"Cóż", odparłem, "to chyba nie jest wina miasta.

Nic - tak jak i coś - może zdarzyć się gdziekolwiek".

przełożył Paweł Tomanek

inny przekład Jacka Dehnela pt. „Pomnę, pomnę”
w temacie Wspomnienia

Z tomu „The Whitsun Weddings”, 1964:

The Whitsun Weddings

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn't notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And
someone running up to bowl - and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Wesela w Zielone Święta

W tym roku wyjechałem późno na Zielone
Święta; dopiero
W sobotę, pierwsza dziesięć, przy skwarnym peronie
Wsiadłem w pustawy pociąg, co w drogę zabierał
Swoje otwarte okna, kurz siedzeń rozgrzanych
I poczucie spóźnienia. Pociąg ruszył, minął
Rząd odwróconych tyłem kamienic; zza niego
Blask szyb aut na ulicy, fetor ryb z przystani,
I już rzeka pomknęła w dal poziomą linią,
W której zbiegły się woda, Lincolnshire i niebo.

Zbaczając na południe, pociąg brnął pomału
I z poświęceniem
Przez drzemiące nad ziemią pokłady upału.
Mijały nas rozległe farmy, krótkie cienie
Krów, kanały z kożuszkiem przemysłowej piany;
Z rzadka błysła cieplarnia; żywopłot to wzrastał,
To malał; i co jakiś czas pluszowy odór
Kanapek z guzikami znikał, wypierany
Przez woń traw, aż do granic następnego miasta
Z wciąż takim samym cmentarzyskiem samochodów.

Z początku nie spostrzegłem, że przyczyną wrzawy
Na każdej stacji
Są wesela; tkwiąc w słońcu, nie jest się ciekawym
Tego, co dokonuje się w cieniu; postaci
Rojące się krzykliwie na chłodnych peronach
Brałem więc, z nosem w książce, za tragarzy z pocztą.
Za którymś razem wreszcie spojrzałem z uwagą:
Te parodie żurnali, w szpilkach i welonach,
W lśnieniu zębów i pomad, niepewne, co począć —
Panny młode, wpatrzone w ruszający wagon,

Jakby po zakończeniu imprezy machały
Na pożegnanie
Komuś, kto z niej szczęśliwie ocalał. Przez cały
Następny postój z okna spoglądałem na nie
Dokładniej, widząc teraz pełną sytuację:
Garnitury łysawych ojców, filuternie
Mrugających do zięciów; matki — głośne, duże;
Sprośne dowcipy wujka; i te ondulacje,
Rękawiczki z nylonu, sztuczną biżuterię
I liliowości, żółcie cytrynowe, róże,

Które wyodrębniały z tłumu nierealnie
Sylwetki dziewczyn.
Tak, pustoszały strojne wstążkami kawiarnie
I sale bankietowe — kończył się dzisiejszy
Tradycyjny dzień ślubów. I na całej trasie
Wsiadały świeże pary, garściami konfetti
I dobrymi radami żegnane przez resztę,
A kiedyśmy ruszali, każda twarz w tej masie
Streszczała na swój sposób sens skończonej fety:
Dzieciaki grymasiły z nudów; ojcom jeszcze

Nigdy w życiu nie było tak dumnie i dobrze;
Kobiety niosły
W sobie kobiecy sekret, jak udany pogrzeb;
Dziewczęta, uczepione torebek, zazdrosnym
Wzrokiem goniły wizję krwawego obrzędu.
Obładowani wszystkim, co tamci widzieli,
Wolni wreszcie, ruszyliśmy, strzykając parą,
Na Londyn. Z pól zrobiły się parcele, rzędy
Topoli cięły szosy rytmem długich cieni,
I w trzy kwadranse — kiedyś wydadzą się parą

Chwil, dość aby poprawić kapelusz i jęknąć
Już ledwo żyję —
Tuzin pożyć małżeńskich przeszło fazę wstępną.
Siedząc, pary ku oknu wyciągały szyje —
Mignęła wieża ciśnień i kino Odeon,
Ktoś z kijem do krykieta — i żadne z nich wcale
Nie myślało o innych, których już nie spotka,
I jak w ich życiach zamknie się, co się zaczęło.
Myślałem o Londynie, co leżał w upale,
Na rejony pocztowe podzielona otchłań:

Tam był nasz cel. Mijając stojące pulmany,
Szyn zwęźleniami
Wtoczyliśmy się w końcu w poczerniałe ściany
Dworca, i niemal wszystko zostało za nami
Z tego kruchego splotu podróży. Co trwało,
Trwało z tą mocą, jaką doznanie przemiany

przełożył Stanisław Barańczak

inny przekład Jacka Dehnela pt. “Wesela w Zielone Świątki” w tematach:
Ceremonie, obrzędy i święta i A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Dni

Po co są dni?
Dni to miejsce, gdzie mieszkamy.
Przychodzą i budzą nas
Raz po raz, nieustannie.
Dni są, by w nich być szczęśliwym:
Gdzie indziej możemy zamieszkać?

Ach, odpowiedź na to pytanie
Sprowadza kapłana, sprowadza lekarza,
W swoich długich płaszczach
Biegną poprzez pola.

przełożył Jerzy Jarniewicz

inny przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. “Dni”
w temacie Trudne pytania

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Grobowiec w Arundel

Jedno obok drugiego, twarze ocienione,
Spoczywają w kamieniu hrabina i hrabia;
Jak niegdyś świetność manier, tak teraz ozdabia
Oboje sztywność stroju: suknia z zakładkami,
Płyty żelaznej zbroi zmyślnie połączone
I ta szczypta absurdu - pieski pod stopami.

Trudno się po prostocie tego pre-baroku
Spodziewać, że przykuje czyjś wzrok, nim spostrzeżesz
Pustą, ściśniętą w prawej dłoni, zdjętą z lewej -
Rękawicę. I nagle szok niespodziewany
I tkliwy: zauważasz, że oto wzdłuż boku
Złożył ramię i ujął rękę ukochanej.

Nigdy nie pomyśleli, że będzie im dane
Tak długie spoczywanie. Tylko przyjaciołom
Ten szczegół - dwu posągów wierność - przeznaczono:
Obstalowali przecież u rzeźbiarza (który
Wykonał pracę z wdziękiem) przedłużenie trwania
Pasa łacińskich imion dookoła tumby.

Nigdy nie przypuszczali, jak prędko zaskoczy
Ich w tej dziwnej podróży na wznak, nieruchomej,
Powietrze, w moc bezgłośnie niszczącą zmienione,
Które odprawi dawnych dzierżawców; jak szybko
Zaczną patrzeć - nie czytać - ich następców oczy.
Przez czasu szerokości i długości, sztywno

Płynęli, połączeni. Śnieg spadł poza datą.
Co lato blask się tłoczył u szyb. Ptasie trele
Jak okruchy sypały się w tę samą ziemię,
Gęsto przesianą kośćmi. I szli w górę zmienną
I nieskończoną linią ludzie, ich tożsamość
Zmywając. Teraz w pustce stulecia bez herbów,

W korycie dymu, wolno zwijanym na nieba
Szpulę nad ich historii strzępem, trwa to jedno:
Czas zmienił ich w zmyślenie; ich kamienna wierność
Prawie niezamierzona, ostatnim się staje
Wykładem znaczeń herbu i wyjaśnia niemal
Coś niemal przeczuł: tylko miłość z nas zostanie.

przełożył Jacek Dehnel

inny przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Grobowiec w Arundel”
w temacie Cmentarze

Z tomu „High Windows”, 1974:

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Wysokie okna

Gdy widzę parę dzieciaków i wiem, że
Ona spiralę nosi albo bierze
Jakieś globulki, a on ją posuwa,
Myślę: to właśnie jest ten raj, o którym

Wszyscyśmy, starzy, marzyli - formuły,
Gesty i więzi zepchnięte na stronę
Jak przestarzałe kombajny - i każdy
Kto młody, zjeżdża długim, śliskim torem

Ku szczęśliwości, bez końca. Ciekawe,
Czy ktoś tak na mnie czterdzieści lat temu
Patrzył i myślał: Ten będzie miał klawe
Życie; żadnego tam Boga, żadnego

Potu w ciemnościach na myśl o tym wszystkim
I piekle, powie, co zechce, o księżach:
On i podobni jemu długim, śliskim
Torem w dół zjadą jak swobodne, ciężka
Cholera, ptaki. I od razu zamiast

Słów, myśl się zjawia o wysokich oknach:
Gdzieś za szybami zalanymi słońcem
Głęboki błękit powietrza objawia
Nic, które nigdzie jest - i jest bez końca.

przełożył Jacek Dehnel

Dwa inne przekłady: Jerzego Jarniewicza w temacie Marzenia
i Stanisława Barańczaka w temacie Blask (wysokich) okien

This Be The Vers

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can

And don't have any kids yourself.

Powiedzmy, że wiersz

Rodzice cię pierdolą, stary,
Nawet jeżeli nieumyślnie.
Wpajają własne ci przywary
Plus jeszcze innych całą listę.

Lecz ich z kolei też ktoś ruchał,
Idioci w paltach, co pół życia
Spędzili we "wspólnocie ducha",
Zanim nie zżarła ich kurwica.

Człowiek jest człowiekowi wilkiem,
Nieszczęście rośnie wciąż na świecie.
Wyrwij się z tego kręgu chyłkiem
I sam przynajmniej nie miej dzieci.

przełożył Paweł Tomanek

inny przekład Jacka Dehnela pt. “To może taki wierszyk”
w temacie Dziecko jest chodzącym cudem

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

dwa przekłady tego wiersza pt. "Wybuch": Stanisława Barańczaka w temacie Śmierć
i Jacka Dehnela w temacie Kataklizmy i katastrofy - w sile natury i umysłu

Inne Wiersze Philipa Larkina w tematach: ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”…, Marynistyka, Poezja codzienności, Poezja i muzyka, Poetycka garderoba, s. 2, s. 3, Starość, Motyw twarzy, Szczęście, Erotyka, Między bogactwem a ubóstwem, Kolorowe jarmarki, Blaski
i cienie małżeństwa/Motyw wiatru w poezji, O przemijaniu..., 10, s. 12, Szukanie lata,
Mury, ściany, granice, Miłości sprzed latMarek F. edytował(a) ten post dnia 25.06.12 o godzinie 09:40

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Brakowało nam dotąd na naszym forum poezji Larkina, urzekającej głębią treści, wielopoziomowością znaczeń i niezwykłym kunsztem formalno-językowym.
Sam nie wiem, jak to się stało, ale chwała Markowi, że nam o niej przypomniał i to
w dodatku tak rzetelnie, w szerokim zakresie, pokazując ją zarówno w oryginale,
jak i w przekładach różnych, znakomitych tłumaczy. Aż głupio byłoby nie dodać też czegoś od siebie. Zapraszam więc do lektury i życzę wielu niebanalnych poetyckich wrażeń.



Philip Larkin

Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Annus Mirabilis"
w temacie Erotyka

Talking in bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Lying together there goes back so far
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Rozmowa w łóżku"
w temacie Erotyka

Essential Beauty

In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,
Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine
Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves
Of how life should be. High above the gutter
A silver knife sinks into golden butter,
A glass of milk stands in a meadow, and
Well-balanced families, in fine
Midsummer weather, owe their smiles, their cars,
Even their youth, to that small cube each hand
Stretches towards. These, and the deep armchairs
Aligned to cups at bedtime, radiant bars
(Gas or electric), quarter-profile cats
By slippers on warm mats,
Reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares

They dominate outdoors. Rather, they rise
Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,
Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes
That stare beyond this world, where nothing's made
As new or washed quite clean, seeking the home
All such inhabit. There, dark raftered pubs
Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs,
And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents
Just missed them, as the pensioner paid
A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes' Tea
To taste old age, and dying smokers sense
Walking towards them through some dappled park
As if on water that unfocused she
No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,
Who now stands newly clear,
Smiling, and recognising, and going dark.

przekład Jacka Dehnela pt. "Istota piękna" w temacie Piękno

Patrz też w tematach: Poezja i muzyka, Starość, Motyw twarzy.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 08.10.09 o godzinie 10:59

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) – amerykańska poetka, pisarka i eseistka pochodzenia żydowskiego. Urodziła się w Nowym Jorku jako Laura Reichenthal. W 1918 roku zaczęła studiować na uniwersytecie Cornell. Tam poznała wykładowcę historii Louisa Gottschalka, którego poślubiła w 1920 roku. W tym czasie zaczęła pisać wiersze i publikować je pod nazwiskiem Laura Riding Gottschalk w renomowanych pismach literackich: "Poetry", "Sewanee Review", "The Fugitive". Kiedy po trzech latach małżeństwa rozeszła się z Louisem Gottschalkiem, publikowała pod nazwiskiem Laura Riding. Jej wiersze zostały przyjęte przez krytykę literacką bardzo życzliwie, w wyniku czego młoda poetka została zaproszona w 1925 r. przez przez znanego już wówczas i cenionego poetę Roberta Gravesa do Anglii. Z Gravesem, jego żoną Nancy Nicholson i czwórką ich dzieci wyjechała do Egiptu, gdzie Graves otrzymał posadę profesora. Laura została jego asystentką, a wkrótce też kochanką. Związek Gravesa i Laury Riding trwał 14 lat, w tym czasie założyli wspólne wydawnictwo Seizin Press, a także napisali razem dwie książki z krytyki literackiej: „A Survey of Modernist Poetry” (1927) i „A Pamphlet Against Anthologies” (1928). Laura opublikowała też swoje tomiki poetyckie: „The Close Chaplet” (1926), „Love as Love, Death as Death” (1928) i „A Joking Word” (1930). W 1929 r. poetka w wyniku załamania nerwowego próbowała popełnić samobójstwo. Zaraz potem wyjechała wraz z Gravesem do Hiszpanii. W 1938 r. ukazał się najpełniejszy, ale zarazem ostatni, tom jej wierszy: „Collected Poems”, w którym autorka złożyła deklarację całkowitego zerwania z poezją. Przy okazji zerwała też ostatecznie znajomość z Robertem Gravesem, oskarżając go m. in. o przywłaszczanie jej pomysłów literackich. W 1939 r. powróciła do Stanów Zjednoczonych, poświęcając się twórczości prozatorskiej i krytycznoliterackiej. W 1947 r. wyszła po raz drugi za mąż za znanego poetę amerykańskiego Schuylera B. Jacksona. Zmarła w 1991 roku, w wieku 90 lat. Poezja Laury Riding, po latach zapomnienia, przeżywa obecnie w Stanach Zjednoczonych swój renesans. Krytycy dopatrują się w niej dużej oryginalności i nowatorstwa formalno-językowego. Jej wiersze tłumaczyła na polski Julia Fiedorczuk. Ukazały się one w „Literaturze na Świecie” nr 7-8/2003 oraz w tomie: Laura (Riding) Jackson: Obroty cudów. Utwory wybrane: wiersze i eseje. Wybór, przekład i posłowie Julia Fiedorczuk. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2012. Moje przekłady wierszy Laury Riding publikowane są na naszym forum po raz pierwszy.

Z tomu „Collected Poems”, 1938

Z cyklu: Poems of Mythical Occasion

Into Laddery Street

The stove was grey, the coal was gone.
In and out of the same room
One went, one came.
One turned into nothing.
One turned into whatever
Turns into children.

But remember the coal was gone.
Old Trouble carried her down
To her cellar where the rags were warm.

And turned her sooner
Than had her mother
Into one of the Laddery children,
And called her Lida For short and for long,
For long, for long.
In Laddery Street

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt.
„Na ulicy Laddery” w temacie Wspomnienia

Incarnations

Do not deny,
Do not deny, thing out of thing.
Do not deny in the new vanity
The old, original dust.

From what grave, what past of flesh and bone
Dreaming, dreaming I lie
Under the fortunate curse,
Bewitched, alive, forgetting the first stuff ...
Death does not give a moment to remember in

Lest, like a statue’s too transmuted stone,
I grain by grain recall the original dust
And, looking down a stair of memory, keep saying:
This was never I.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Wcielenia”
w temacie Metamorfozy

The Number

The number is a secret,
How many elements assemble
To pronounce Alive -
And leave Alive to count places,
The conference adjourned
And the ghosts inaccurate,
Scattering poor memories.

Calamity if they remember
And long counting of fingers.
No sooner known the number,
There is division to prove the whole,
But never reassembling.
The elements are many
As they were in meeting.
The ghosts reminded,
The commemoration of the scene
Is man parading myriadly,
A precise madness distributing
Alive to ghosts accurately.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego
pt. „Liczba” w temacie Poezja liczb

Take Hands

Take hands.
There is no love now.
But there are hands.
There is no joining now,
But a joining has been
Of the fastening of fingers
And their opening.
More than the clasp even, the kiss
Speaks loneliness,
How we dwell apart,
And how love triumphs in this.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Na przykład
dłonie” w temacie Motyw dłoni i rąk

Z cyklu: Poems of Immediate Occacion

The Map of Places

The map of places passes.
The reality of paper tears.
Land and water where they are
Are only where they were
When words read "here" and "here"
Before ships happened there.

Now on naked names feet stand,
No geographies in the hand,
And paper reads anciently,
And ships at sea
Turn round and round
All is known, all is found.
Death meets itself everywhere.
Holes in maps look through to nowhere.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. "Mapa miejsc"
w temacie Lekcja geografii...

Death as Death

To conceive death as death
Is difficulty come by easily,
A blankness fallen among
Images of understanding,
Death like a quick cold hand
On the hot slow head of suicide.
So is it come by easily
For one instant. Then again furnaces
Roar in the ears, then again hell revolves,
And the elastic eye holds paradise
At visible length from blindness,
And dazedly the body echoes
„Like this, like this, like nothing else”.

Like nothing - a similarity
Without resemblance. The prophetic eye,
Closing upon difficulty,
Opens upon comparison,
Halving the actuality
As a gift too plain, for which
Gratitude has no language,
Foresight no vision.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Śmierć
jako śmierć” w temacie Śmierć

The Troubles of a Book

The trouble of a book is first to be
No thoughts to nobody,
Then to lie as long unwritten
As it will lie unread,
Then to build word for word an author
And occupy his head
Until the head declares vacancy
To make full publication
Of running empty.

The trouble of a book is secondly
To keep awake and ready
And listening like an innkeeper,
Wishing, not wishing for a guest,
Torn between hope of no rest
And hope of rest.
Uncertainly the pages doze
And blink open to passing fingers
With landlord smile, then close.

The trouble of a book is thirdly
to speak its sermon, then look the other way,
Arouse commotion in the margin,
Where tongue meets the eye,
But claim no experience of panic,
No complicity in the outcry.
The ordeal of a book is to give no hint
Of ordeal, to be flat and witless
Of the upright sense of print.

The trouble of a book is chiefly
To be nothing but book outwardly;
To wear binding like binding,
Bury itself in book-death,
Yet to feel all but book;
To breathe live words, yet with the breath
Of letters; to address liveliness
In reading eyes, he answered with
Letters and bookishness.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Kłopoty
książki” w temacie Moja biblioteka

The Wind Suffers

The wind suffers of blowing,
The sea suffers of water,
And fire suffers of burning,
And I of a living name.

As stone suffers of stoniness,
As light of its shiningness,
As birds of their wingedness,
So I of my whoness.

And what the cure of all this?
What the not and not suffering?
What the better and later of this?
What the more me of me?

How for the pain-world to be
More world and no pain?
How for the faithful rain to fall
More wet and more dry?

How for the wilful blood to run
More salt-red and sweet-white?
And how for me in my actualness
To more shriek and more smile?

By no other miracles,
By the same knowing poison,
By an improved anguish,
By my further dying.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. "Wiatr
choruje" w temacie Ból

Throe of Apocalypse

And in that shrill antithesis of calm
The goaded brain is struck with ague,
By a full moon of waste sublimely sweats.

Relent not, divine hatred,
In this convulsive prime.
You are enchanted against death
By that you are but death
And nothing but death can love or know.
Nor yet can mourn, except by mocking,
Crushed zeal, tired verse, bruised decoration,
Or any agony of blemish -
Except by vengeful imitation.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Ból apokalipsy”
w temacie Apokalipsa i eschatologia (motyw końca świata
i sądu ostatecznego w poezji)

Celebration of Failure

Through pain the land of pain,
Through tender exiguity,
Through cruel self-suspicion:
Thus came I to this inch of wholeness.

It was a promise.
After pain, I said,
An inch will be what never a boasted mile.

And haughty judgement,
That frowned upon a faultless plan,
Now smiles upon this crippled execution,
And my dashed beauty praises me.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Obchody klęski”
w temacie Przegrana i klęska

Z cyklu: Poems of Final Occasion

Cycles of Strangeness

When a tree falls
A tree only dies only.
When a rock crumbles
Rock only dies not only.
When a man dies
Man dies:
It is death indeed.
No further the change
From sea or tree
To rock or man
Who changes all to man
But may not man change.
Without death indeed.
For later than himself
Comes God which is not
Save as death tarries
Or as woman pities.
Think you this strange?
But think you not woman strange,
And strange as death indeed,
Stranger than God-you?

But to change to flies—
They which so prettily annoy
And with subdued regret
See themselves scarcely killed,
Scarcely alive, scarcely dead.
Or of moths, how if turned outdoors
Next morning with goodbye,
A gratitude beyond their will
Humanizes the unasked release,
And an emotion reels away.
Such insincere hysterias
Or terrorless philosophies
Show nature’s suave proficiency in man.
Have you not seen swallows
By the sea flash themselves
High and down more knowingly
Than even the hyperbolic air
Can render bird-veritable?

But suppose in that same sea
A man turns human-hearted
And—as an angel walking earth
In heavenly difference from once mortal gait
Might in a sudden doubt of self
Be man and instantly a corpse
Inhuman, nature’s meanest same-
Dives into languid foretime
To be connatural with fish:
That’s drowning, and a fish
A better man, gliding like man
Manwards, and with mournful fins,
Lest uncommemorated pass
The near-strange funerals of flies.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Obroty cudów”
w tematach: Metamorfozy i Motyw cudu w poezji

With the Face

With the face goes a mirror
As with the mind a world.
Likeness tells the doubting eye
That strangeness is not strange.
At an early hour and knowledge
Identity not yet familiar
Looks back upon itself from later,
And seems itself.

To-day seems now.
With reality-to-be goes time.
With the mind goes a world.
Wit the heart goes a weather.
With the face goes a mirror
As with the body a fear.
Young self goes staring to the wall
Where dumb futurity speaks calm,
And between then and then
Forebeing grows of age.

The mirror mixes with the eye.
Soon will it be the very eye.
Soon will the eye that was
The very mirror be.
Death, the final image, will shine
Transparently not otherwise
Than as the dark sun described
With such faint brightnesses.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Z twarzą”
w temacie Motyw zwierciadła, lustra i odbicia

Z cyklu: Poems Continual

Auspice of Jewels

They have connived at those jewelled fascinations
That to our hands and arms and ears
And heads and necks and feet
And all the winding stalk
Extended the mute spell of the face.

They have endowed the whole of us
With such a solemn gleaming
As in the dark of flesh-love
But the face at first did have.

We are studded with wide brilliance
As the world with towns and cities—
The travelling look builds capitals
Where the evasive eye may rest
Safe from the too immediate lodgement.

Obscure and bright these forms
Which as the women of their lingering thought
In slow translucence we have worn.
And the silent given glitter locks us
In a not false unplainness:
Have we ourselves been sure
What steady countenance to turn them?

Until now—when this passionate neglect
Of theirs, and our twinkling reluctance,
Are like the reader and the book
Whose fingers and whose pages have confided
But whose sight and sense
Meet in a chilly time of strangeness;
And it is once more early, anxious,
And so late, it is intolerably the same
Not speaking coruscation
That both we and they made endless, dream-long,
Lest be cruel to so much love
The closer shine of waking,
And what be said sound colder
Than the ghastly love-lisp.

Until now—when to go jewelled
We must despoil the drowsy masquerade
Where gloom of silk and gold
And glossy dazed adornments
Kept safe from flagrant realness
The forgeries of ourselves we were—
When to be alive as love feigned us
We must steal death and its wan splendours
From the women of their sighs we were.

For we are now otherwise luminous.
The light which was spent in jewels
Has performed upon the face
A gradual eclipse of recognition.
We have passed from plaintive visibility
Into total rareness,
And from this reunion of ourselves and them
Under the snuffed lantern of time
Comes an astonished flash like truth
Or the unseen-unheard entrance of someone
Whom eyes and ears in their dotage
Have forgotten for dead or lost.
(And hurrying towards distracted glory,
Gemmed lady-pageants, bells on their hearts,
By restless knights attended
Whose maudlin plumes and pommels
Urge the adventure past return.)

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Pod auspicjami
klejnotów” w temacie Drogie kamienie w poezji

Inne wiersze Laury Riding w tematach:
Głosy i dźwięki, szepty i krzyki, Ogród przedziwny, Dom, Marynistyka, Wspomnienia, Dotknij mnie, Trudne pytania, Poetycka garderoba..., Miłość, Ciało mojego ciała, Trochę o duszy/Wiersze na każdy dzień tygodniaRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 12.03.12 o godzinie 15:28

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) – poeta amerykański, jeden z czołowych, obok Johna Asbery'ego, przedstawicieli ruchu bitników (Beat Generation) i tzw. ”szkoły nowojorskiej”. Sam nie przykładał większej wagi do swojej twórczości, wiersze drukował
w niskonakładowych pismach awangardowych, bądź zapisywał na luźnych kartkach papieru,
z których wiele zaginęło. Zmarł tragicznie, w wyniku potrącenia przez samochód plażowy buggy, w wieku 40 lat. Po opublikowaniu pośmiertnie całości zachowanego po nim dorobku
( The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, 1971), uznano go za jednego z najwybitniejszych współczesnych poetów amerykańskich.
W Polsce opublikowano kilka jego utworów w tomie Od Walta Whitmana do Boba Dylana. Antologia poezji amerykańskiej. Przeł. i oprac. Stanisław Barańczak. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1998, w „Literaturze na Świecie” nr 6/1976, 7/1986 i 3/1994 oraz wybór jego wierszy: Frank O’Hara: Twoja pojedynczość. Wybór i przekład Piotr Sommer. PIW, Warszawa 1987.

Autobiographia Literaria

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

1949

przekład Piotra Sommera w tematach:
Nihilizm... i Być poetą

A Step Away From Them

It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Maina, wife of
Federico Fellini, é bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full of life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhatten Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

August 16, 1956

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „O krok od nich”
w temacie Poezja codzienności

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Moje serce” w tematach:
Autoportret w lustrze wiersza oraz Miej serce i patrzaj w serce

Why I Am Not A Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

1956

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Dlaczego nie jestem malarzem”
w tematach: Być poetą... oraz Poezja i malarstwo

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „W dzień śmierci Lady Day”
w temacie Poezja i muzyka

Inne wiersze Franka O’Hary w tematach: Blaski i cienie małżeństwa, Poezja codzienności,
Z wyspy Lesbos i nie tylko..., s. 1, s. 3, Nudzę się, nudzę piekielnie..., Poetyckie studium przedmiotu, Kieunki, szkoły, manifesty poetyckie, Na falach eteru, czyli poezja i radio,
Być poetą..., Homo automobilus, czyli jadę samochodem, Oda, O liściach, O krytykach
i krytyce literackiej, Magia kina, W głąb siebie..., Dar słuchu,
Miłość, Marzenia, Dlaczego piszę?, Niepokój, Angelologia i dal..., czyli motyw anioła w poezji, Poezja i muzyka, s. 2, s. 6/Świat dachówKrzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 28.10.12 o godzinie 21:02