Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Thomas Campion (1567-1620) – poeta angielski, tworzył na przełomie renesansu
i baroku, specjalizował się w pieśniach, do których tworzył też muzykę. Opublikował
je w czterech tomach pt. „A Booke of Ayeres” w latach 1601-1617. Były to utwory
o tematyce religijnej i miłosnej, odznaczające się nowatorstwem formalnym w zakresie kompozycji, prozodii i wersyfikacji. Pisał też fraszki, epigramy, eseje i tzw. maski –
- utwory parateatralne z elementami tańca, muzyki i śpiewu.

There is a garden in her face

There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies grow;
A heav'nly paradise is that place
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
There cherries grow which none may buy,
Till 'Cherry ripe' themselves do cry.

Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rose-buds fill'd with snow;
Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,
Till 'Cherry ripe' themselves do cry.

Her eyes like angels watch them still,
Her brows like bended bows do stand,
Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
Those sacred cherries to come nigh,
Till 'Cherry ripe' themselves do cry.

W jej twarzy ogród

W jej twarzy ogród rozkwita majem,
Rosną w nim róże i lilie wiotkie;
Ten ogród jest mi niebiańskim rajem,
Gdzie dojrzewają owoce słodkie.
Rosną tam nie na sprzedaż wiśnie,
Nim same krzykną: "dojrzałyśmy!"

W wiśniach kunsztownie przed okiem skryte
Perły orientu dwoistym szeregiem,
Co są w jej cudny uśmiech uwite,
By napełniony pęk róży śniegiem.
Nie kupi lord ni król tych wiśni,
Nim same krzykną: "dojrzałyśmy!"

Jej oczy jako anioły strzegą,
Jej brwi jak łuki stoją napięte,
Aby śmiertelnie przeszyć każdego,
Kto się ośmieli oko lub rękę
Zbliżyć zuchwale do świętych wiśni,
Nim same krzykną: "dojrzałyśmy!"

przełożył Bolesław Taborski

inny przekład, Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „W jej twarzy
ogród się odkrywa”, w temacie Motyw twarzy

When to her lute Corinna sings

When to her lute Corinna sings,
Her voice revives the leaden strings,
And doth in highest notes appear,
As any challenged echo clear;
But when she doth of mourning speak,
E'en with her sighs, the strings do break,

And as her lute doth live or die,
Led by her passion, so must I:
For when of pleasure she doth sing,
My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring,
But if she doth of sorrow speak,
E'en from my heart the strings do break

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Kiedy do wtóru lutni
korynna zaśpiewa” w temacie Zaśpiewam ci pieśń

My Sweetest Lesbia

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
Let us not weigh them. Heaven's great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive,
But soon as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleep one ever-during night.

If all would lead their lives in love like me,
Then bloody swords and armor should not be;
No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleeps should move,
Unless alarm came from the camp of love.
But fools do live, and waste their little light,
And seek with pain their ever-during night.

When timely death my life and fortune ends,
Let not my hearse be vexed with mourning friends,
But let all lovers, rich in triumph, come
And with sweet pastimes grace my happy tomb;
And Lesbia, close up thou my little light,
And crown with love my ever-during night.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Najsłodsza Lesbio,
żyjmy i miłujmy” w temacie Z wyspy Lesbos i nie tylko...

Follow thy fair sun

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Though thou be black as night
And she made all of light,
Yet follow thy fair sun unhappy shadow.

Follow her whose light thy light depriveth,
Though here thou liv’st disgraced,
And she in heaven is placed,
Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth.

Follow those pure beams whose beauty burneth,
That so have scorched thee,
As thou still black must be,
Till Her kind beams thy black to brightness turneth.

Follow her while yet her glory shineth,
There comes a luckless night,
That will dim all her light,
And this the black unhappy shade divineth.

Follow still since so thy fates ordained,
The Sun must have his shade,
Till both at once do fade,
The Sun still proved, the shadow still disdained.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Tuż za swym
słońcem dąż, nieszczęsny cieniu” w temacie Światło

When thou must home to shades of underground

When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arriv'd, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finish'd love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;

Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake:
When thou hast told these honours done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Gdy cię królestwo mroku w podziemia
przywoła” w temacie Smutek czy radość... miłość, czy nienawiść...

Inne wiersze Thomasa Campiona w tematach Piękno, Poezja i muzyka,
Los i przeznaczenie.Krzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 24.04.10 o godzinie 15:06

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Donald Justice (1925-2004) – poeta amerykański. Urodził się w Miami na Florydzie, gdzie ukończył studia w zakresie literatury angielskiej na University of Miami. Studiował też na uniwersytetach w Północnej Karolinie, Stanford i Iowa. Był wykładowcą na Syracuse University, University of California w Irvine, Princeton University, University of Virginia i University of Iowa,
a od 1982 r. do przejścia na emeryturę w 1992 r., wykładał na University of Florida, Gainesville. Wykształcił wielu znanych poetów amerykańskich, m. in. Marka Stranda, Marvina Bella i Charlesa Wrighta. Opublikował trzynaście tomów poezji: „The Old Bachelor and Other Poems” (1951),
„The Summer Anniversaries “ (1960); 1981), „A Local Storm” (1963), „Night Light” (1967; 1981), „Sixteen Poems” (1970), „From a Notebook” (1971), „Departures” (1973), „Selected Poems” (1979), „Tremayne” (1984), „The Sunset Maker” (1987), „A Donald Justice Reader” (1991), „New and Selected Poems” (1995), „Orpheus Hesitated beside the Black River: Poems, 1952-1997” (1998). Był laureatem wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich: Lamont Poetry Prize (1961), Pulitzer Prize (1980), Bollingen Prize (1991), Lannan Litarary Award. W latach 1997-2003 piastował zaszczytną funkcję Kanclerza Akademii Poetów Amerykańskich (Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets). Napisał też dwa libretta operowe: „The Young God” (1969) i „The Death of Lincoln” (1988).
Wiersze Donalda Justice’a tłumaczyli na język polski m. in. Julia Hartwig, Grzegorz Musiał i Stanisław Barańczak. Ukazały się one w antologiach: ...opiewam nowoczesnego człowieka. Antologia poezji amerykańskiej. Wybór i opracowanie Julia Hartwig i Artur Międzyrzecki. RePrint-ResPublica, Warszawa 1992; Grzegorz Musiał: Ameryka, Ameryka! Antologia wierszy poetów amerykańskich po 1940 roku. Wyd. Pomorze, Bydgoszcz 1994; Od Walta Whitmana do Boba Dylana. Antologia poezji amerykańskiej. Przełożył i opracował Stanisław Barańczak. Wyd. Literackie, Kraków 1998.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Mężczyźni czterdziestoletni

Czterdziestoletni mężczyźni,
Nauczcie się zamykać lekko
Drzwi pokojów, do których tamci
Już nie powrócą.

Przystając między pietrami
Czują jak
Podest porusza się teraz pod nim niby pokład okrętu,
Choć kołysanie jest łagodne.

W głębi lustra
Odnajdują
Twarz chłopca wprawiającego się potajemnie
W zawiązywanie ojcowskiego krawata.

I twarz ojca
Jeszcze rozgrzaną od wody kolońskiej.
Teraz oni są bardziej ojcami niż synami.
Ich wnętrze wypełnia coś, co jest

Jak granie świerszczy
O zmierzchu, ogromne,
W drzewach u stóp wzgórza
Za domami kupionymi na hipotekę.

tłum. Julia Hartwig

inny przekład, Stanisława Barańczaka,
w temacie Portret (super) męski

Counting the Mad

This one was put in a jacket,
This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat
But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there,
This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one thought himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man,
An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. "Liczenie szaleńców"
w temacie W głąb siebie ... ("Szaleństwo i geniusz")

The Telephone Number of the Muse

Sleepily, the muse to me: “Let us be friends.
Good friends, but only friends. You understand.”
And yawned. And kissed, for the last time, my ear.
Who earlier, weeping at my touch, had whispered:
“I loved you once.” And: “No, I don’t love him,
Not after everything he did.” Later,
Rebuttoning her nightgown with my help:
“Sorry, I just have no desire, it seems.”
Sighing: “For you, I mean.” Long silence. Then:
“You always were so serious.” At which
I smiled, darkly. And that was how I came
To sleep beside, not with her; without dreams.

I call her up sometimes, long distance now.
And she still knows my voice, but I can hear,
Beyond the music of her phonograph,
The laughter of the young men with their keys.

I have the number written down somewhere.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. "Numer telefoniczny Muzy"
w temacie To (nie) jest rozmowa na telefon

Anonymous Drawing

A delicate young Negro stands
With the reins of a horse clutched loosely in his hands;
So delicate, indeed, that we wonder if he can hold the spirited creature
beside him
Until the master shall arrive to ride him.
Already the animal's nostrils widen with rage or fear.
But if we imagine him snorting, about to rear,
This boy, who should know about such things better than we,
Only stands smiling, passive and ornamental, in a fantastic livery
Of ruffles and puffed breeches,
Watching the artist, apparently, as he sketches.
Meanwhile the petty lord who must have paid
For the artist's trip up from Perugia, for the horse, for the boy, for
everything here, in fact, has been delayed,
Kept too long by his steward, perhaps, discussing
Some business concerning the estate, or fussing
Over the details of his impeccable toilet
With a manservant whose opinion is that any alteration at all would spoil it.
However fast he should come hurrying now
Over this vast greensward, mopping his brow
Clear of the sweat of the fine Renaissance morning, it would be too late:
The artist will have had his revenge for being made to wait,
A revenge not only necessary but right and clever --
Simply to leave him out of the scene forever.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Anonimowy rysunek”
w temacie Fantomy wyobraźni

AMERICAN SKETCHES

Crossing Kansas by Train

The telephone poles
have been holding their
arms out
a long time now
to birds
that will not
settle there
but pass with
strange cawings
westward to
where dark trees
gather about
a waterhole. This
is Kansas. The
mountains start here
just behind
the closed eyes
of a farmer's
sons asleep
in their workclothes.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Jadąc pociągiem przez Kansas”
w temacie Poezja kolei żelaznych

Poem to Be Read at 3 A. M.

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts.
The town of Ladora
At 3 a.m.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking.
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on

for William Carlos Williams

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Wiersz do czytania o 3 rano”
w temacie Wiersze na różne pory dnia

Inne wiersze Donalda Justice’a w tematach Inspiracje, nawiązania i parafrazy poetyckie,
Czym jest wiersz?, Starość, Autoportret w lustrze wierszaRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 06.12.10 o godzinie 10:45

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Gerald Stern (ur. 1925) – poeta amerykański. Urodził się w Pitsburgu w stanie Pennsylvania jako syn żydowskich imigrantów, pochodzących z Ukrainy i Polski. Studiował na uniwersytecie w Pitsburgu i Columbii, a podyplomowo w Paryżu.
Był wykładowcą uniwersytetów Columbia, Princeton, Iowa, a ostatnio Temple University i Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Opublikował tomy poezji: „Pineys” (1971), „The Naming of Beasts”(1972), „Lucky Life” (1977), „Paradise Poems” (1984), „Lovesick” (1986), „Two Long Poems” (1990), „Bread without Sugar” (1992), „This Time: New and Selected Poems” (1998), „Last Blue“ (2000), „American Sonnets” (2002), „Not God After All” (2004), „Everything Is Burning” (2005), „Save the Last Dance” (2008), „Early Collected Poems, 1965-1992” (2010). Jest laureatem wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich, m. in. National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1976, 1982, 1987), Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (1991), Paterson Poetry Prize (1992), National Book Award (1998), National Jewish Book Award in Poetry (2005), Wallace Stevens Award (2005).

Today a Leaf

Today it was just a dry leaf that told me
I should live for love.
It wasn't the six birds sitting like little angels
in the white birch tree,
or the knife I use to carve my pear with.
It was a leaf, that had read Tolstoi, and Krishnamurti,
that had loved William James,
and put sweet Jesus under him where he could be safe forever.
"The world is so bright," he said. "You should see the light."
"We are born without defenses, both babies and leaves."
"The branch is necessary, but it is in the way."
"I am not afraid. I am never afraid."
Then he stretched his imaginary body
this way and that.
He weighs half a gram, is brown and green,
with two large mold spots on one side, and a stem
that curls away, as if with a little pride,
and he could be easily swept up and forgotten,
but oh he taught me love for two good hours,
and helped me with starvation, and dread, and dancing.
As far as I'm concerned his grave is here
beside me,
next to the telephone and the cupful of yellow pencils,
under the window, in the rich and lovely presence
of Franz Joseph Haydn and Domenico Scarlatti and Gustav Mahler
forever.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Dziś był to liść”
w temacie O liściach

96 Vandam

I am going to carry my bed into New York City tonight
complete with dangling sheets and ripped blankets;
I am going to push it across three dark highways
or coast along under 600,000 faint stars.
I want to have it with me so I don't have to beg
for too much shelter from my weak and exhausted friends.
I want to be as close as possible to my pillow

in case a dream or a fantasy should pass by.
I want to fall asleep on my own fire escape
and wake up dazed and hungry
to the sound of garbage grinding in the street below
and the smell of coffee cooking in the window above.

przekład Grzegorz Musiała pt. „Ulica Vandam 96”
w temacie Marzenia

Behaving Like A Jew

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds – just
seeing him there – with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
- I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevies passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

przekład Grzegorz Musiała pt. „Żydowskie zachowanie”
w temacie Żydzi, judaizm i kultura żydowska w poezji

Let Me Please Look Into My Window

Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching
the white face, without straightening the tie or crumpling the flower.

Let me walk up Broadway past Zak's, past the Melody Fruit Store,
past Stein's Eyes, past the New Moon Inn, past the Olympia.

Let me leave quietly by Gate 29

and fall asleep as we pull away from the ramp
into the tunnel.

Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am, let me lie still,
as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light.

przekład Grzegorz Musiała pt. „Pozwólcie mi, proszę, spojrzeć przez okno”
w temacie Pożegnania, ostatnie słowa...

This Was A Wonderful Night

.This was a wonderful night. I heard the Brahms
piano quintet, I read a poem by Schiller,
I read a story, I listened to Gloomy Sunday.
No one called me, I studied the birthday poem
of Alvaro de Campos. I thought, if there was time,
I'd think of my garden––all that lettuce, wasted,
all those huge tomatoes lying on the ground
rotting, and I'd think of the sticks I put there,
waving good-bye, those bearded sticks. De Campos,
he was the one who suffered most, his birthday
was like a knife to him; he sat in a chair
remembering his aunts; he thought of the flowers
and cakes, he thought of the sideboard crowded with gifts.
I look at the photo of Billie Holiday;
I turn the lightbulb on and off. I envy
those poets who loved their childhood, those who remember
the extra places laid out, the china and glasses.
They want to devour the past, they revel in pity,
they live like burnt-out matches, memory ruins them;
again and again they go back to the first place.

De Campos and I are sitting on a bench
in some American city. He hardly knows
how much I love his country. I have two things
to tell him about my childhood, one is the ice
on top of the milk, one is the sign in the window––
three things–– the smell of coal. There is some snow
left on the street, the wind is blowing. He trembles
and touches the buttons on his vest. His house
is gone, his aunts are dead, the tears run down
our cheeks and chin, we are like babies crying.
"Leave thinking to the head,"
he says. I sob
"I don't have birthdays any more" I say,
"I just go on," although I hardly feel
the sadness, there is such joy in being there
on that small bench, watching the sycamores,
looking for birds in the snow, listening for boots,
staring at the begonias, getting up
and down to rub the leaves and touch the buds –
endless pleasure, talking about New York,
comparing pain, writing the names down
of all the cities south of Lisbon, singing
one or two songs - a hundred years for him,
a little less for me, going east and west
in the new country, my heart forever pounding.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „To była piękna noc”
w temacie Być poetą...

Inne wiersze Geralda Sterna w tematach Wędrówką życie jest człowieka,
Fantomy wyobraźni, Żydzi, judaizm i kultura żydowska w poezji.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.05.11 o godzinie 09:55

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Adrienne Rich (ur. 1929) – amerykańska poetka i aktywistka polityczna, przedstawicielka radykalnego feminizmu i pacyfizmu. Urodziła się w Baltimore w stanie Maryland. W 1951 roku ukończyła Radcliffe College, dwa lata później wyszła za mąż za Alfreda H. Conrada – profesora ekonomii z Harvard Univerity. W latach 50-tych i 60-tych brała udział w różnego rodzaju strajkach, marszach protestu i demonstracjach przeciwko nierównemu traktowaniu kobiet oraz wszelkiego rodzaju przemocy, zwłaszcza zbrojnym. W 1951 roku wydała też swój debiutancki tomik wierszy pod znamiennym tytułem „A Change of World” (Zmiana świata). Wysoko oceniony przez W. H. Audena i nominowany do serii poetyckiej uniwersytetu w Yale. W latach 60-tych wydała kilka tomików poezji, m. in. „Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (1963) i „Leaflets (1969). W 1970 roku Rich porzuciła swojego męża, który wkrótce popełnił samobójstwo. W tym czasie zaangażowała się przede wszystkim w ruchy przeciwko wojnie w Wietnamie. Najważniejsze jej książki poetyckie to: „The Dream of a Common Language” (1978), „The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984” (1984), „Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988” (1989 – uhonorowana National Book Award), „An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (1991), „Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970” (1993), „Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995” (1995), „Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998” (1999), „Fox: Poems 1998-2000” (2001), „The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004” (2004 – uhonorowana Book Critics Circle Award).
Po polsku ukazały się – poza prezentowanymi tu wierszami – głośny esej z 1980 roku: Przymusowa heteroseksualność a egzystencja lesbijska, przeł. Agnieszka Grzybek, "Furia Pierwsza" 2000 nr 4/5 i książka Zrodzone z kobiety. Macierzyństwo jako doświadczenie
i instytucja, przeł. Joanna Mizielińska. Wyd. Sic!, Warszawa 2000.

In the Evening

Three hours chain-smoking words
and you move on. We stand in the porch,
two archaic figures: a woman and a man.

The old masters, the old sources,
haven’t a clue what we’re about,
shivering here in the half-dark sixties.

Our minds hover in a famous impasse
and cling together. Your hand
grips mine like a railing on an icy night.

The wall of the house is bleeding. Eirethorn!
The moon, craced every witch-way,
pushes steadily on.

1966

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Wieczorem”
w temacie Rozstania

Trying to talk with a man

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that's why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river
forcing its way between deformed cliffs
an acute angle of understanding
moving itself like a locus of the sun
into this condemned scenery.

What we’ve had to give up to get here –
whole LP collections, films we starred in
playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows
full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,
the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,
afternoons on the riverbank
pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of the place
except that it came with us
and is familiar
and everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out –
coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you
You mention the danger
and list the equipment
we talk of people caring for each other
in emergencies - laceration, thirst -
but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power
your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else.

1971

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Próbując rozmowy z mężczyzną”
w temacie Mów do mnie jeszcze...

Incipience

1. To live, to lie awake
under scarred plaster
while ice is forming over the earth
at an hour when nothing can be done
to further any decision

to know the composing of the thread
inside the spider's body
first atoms of the web
visible tomorrow

to feel the fiery future
of every matchstick in the kitchen

Nothing can be done
but by inches, I write out my life
hour by hour, word by word
gazing into the anger of old women on the bus
numbering the striations
of air inside the ice cube
imagining the existence
of something uncreated
this poem
our lives

2. A man is asleep in the next room
We are his dreams
We have the heads and breasts of women
the bodies of birds of prey
Sometimes we turn into silver serpents
While we sit up smoking and talking of how to live
he turns on the bed and murmurs

A man is asleep in the next room
A neurosurgeon enters his dream
and begins to dissect his brain
She does not look like a nurse
she is absorbed in her work
she has a stern, delicate face like Marie Curie
She is not/might be either of us

A man is asleep in the next room
He has spent a whole day
standing, throwing stones into the black pool
which keeps its blackness
Outside the frame of his dream we are stumbling up the hill
hand in hand, stumbling and guiding each other
over the scarred volcanic rock

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Zaczątek”
w temacie ”Okrutną zagadka jest życie”...

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

I was in danger of verbalizing my
moral impulses out of existence.

(Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore)

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. "The burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book."
Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Durer's Complete Works
for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman
the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, so blue
I think, It is her color
and they take the book away
because I dream of her too often
love and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn

2. To imagine a time of silence
or few words
a time of chemistry and music
the hollows above your buttocks
traced by my hand
or, hair is like flesh, you said
an age of long silence
relief
from this tongue this slab of limestone
or reinforced concrete
fanatics and traders
dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred
that breathed once
in signals of smoke
sweep of the wind
knowledge of the oppressor
this is the oppressor's language
yet I need it to talk to you

3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.
(the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering)

4. We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:
deliverance
What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature
still it happens
sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed
dryness of mouth
after panting
there are books that describe all this
and they are useless
You walk into the woods behind a house
there in that country
you find a temple
built eighteen hundred years ago
you enter without knowing
what it is you enter
so it is with us
no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything
burn the texts said Artaud

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Palenie papieru zamiast dzieci”
w temacie Moja biblioteka

"I Am in Danger - Sir - "

"half-cracked" to Higginson, living,
afterward famous in garbled versions,
your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield,
now your old snood
mothballed at Harvard
and you in your variorum monument
equivocal to the end -
who are you?
Gardening the day-lily,
wiping the wine-glass stems,
your thought pulsed on behind
a forehead battered paper-thin,
you, woman, masculine
in single-mindedness,
for whom the word was more
than a symptom --
a condition of being.
Till the air buzzing with spoiled language
sang in your ears
of Perjury
and in your half-cracked way you chose
silence for entertainment,
chose to have it out at last
on your own premises.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Jestem w niebezpieczeństwie –
- wie Pan?” w temacie Poeci poetom

From the Survivor

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next

dwa przekłady: Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. "Od ocalonej" w temacie Wspomnienia
i Julii Hartwig pt. "Od pozostałej przy życiu" w temacie "Okrutną zagadką jest życie"...

The Trees

The trees inside are moving out into the forest,
the forest that was empty all these days
where no bird could sit
no insect hide
no sun bury its feet in shadow
the forest that was empty all these nights
will be full of trees by morning.

All night the roots work
to disengage themselves from the cracks
in the veranda floor.
The leaves strain toward the glass
small twigs stiff with exertion
long-cramped boughs shuffling under the roof
like newly discharged patients
half-dazed, moving
to the clinic doors.

I sit inside, doors open to the veranda
writing long letters
in which I scarcely mention the departure
of the forest from the house.
The night is fresh, the whole moon shines
in a sky still open
the smell of leaves and lichen
still reaches like a voice into the rooms.
My head is full of whispers
which tomorrow will be silent.

Listen. The glass is breaking.
The trees are stumbling forward
into the night. Winds rush to meet them.
The moon is broken like a mirror,
its pieces flash now in the crown
of the tallest oak.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. "Drzewa"
w temacie W głąb siebie... ("Szaleństwo i geniusz")

Final Notations

it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. "Ostatnie zapiski" w temacie
Pożegnania, ostatnie słowa...

Inne wiersze Adrienne Rich w tematach:
Portret (super) męski, Kobiecy portret, Wiersze jak kartki z pamiętnika,
Przodkowie - bliżsi i dalsi, O czytaniu i czytelnikach, Łzy, płacz, rozpacz....Marta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 03.05.11 o godzinie 07:01

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Philip Whalen (1923-2002) – poeta amerykański, czołowy przedstawiciel ruchów: San Francisco Renaissance i Beat Generation, propagator buddyzmu. Urodził się w Portland w stanie Oregon, wychował w małym miasteczku Whalen. W czasie II wojny światowej służył w lotnictwie. Ukończył studia w Reed College w Portland, gdzie poznał i zaprzyjaźnił się z Gary Snyderem i Lew Welchem. W 1955 roku wziął udział w słynnym czytaniu poezji w Six Gallery (obok Allena Ginsberga, Philipa Lamantii, Gary Snydera i Michaela McClure'a), które uważa się za początek San Francisko Renaissance. W latach 1961-1967 przebywał w Kyoto w Japonii jako stypendysta American Academy of Arts and Letters , gdzie uczył języka angielskiego i zaczął praktykować ZEN. Po powrocie do Stanów Zjednoczonych kontynuował naukę buddyzmu, m. in. w San Francisco Zen Center. Został mnichem, a z czasem szefem Dharma Sangha, w Santa Fe w Nowym Meksyku. Ważniejsze tomy poezji: „Self-Portrait from Another Direction” (1959), „Like I Say” (1960), „Memoris of an Interglacial Age (1960), „Hymnus ad Patrem Sinensis” (19630, „Three Mornings” (1964), „You Didn't Even Try” (1967), „Looking for Help” (1972), „Goofbook for Jack Kerouac” (2001).

Since You Ask Me

This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a
world body being here and now which is history...and you. Or think
about the Wilson Cloud-chamber, not ideogram, not poetic beauty:
bald-faced didacticism moving as Dr. Johnson commands all poetry
should, from the particular to the general. (Not that Johnson was
right—nor that I am trying to inherit his mantle as a literary
dictator but only the title Doctor, i. e., teacher —who is
constantly studying). I do not put down the academy but have
assumed its function in my own person, and in the strictest sense
of the word—academy: a walking grove of trees. But I cannot
and will not solve any problems or answer any questions.

My life has been spent in the midst of heroic landscapes which never overwhelmed me and yet I live in a single room in the city—
the room a lens focusing on a sheet of paper. Or the inside
of your head. How do you like your world?

Small Tantric Sermon

The release itself—
The comfort of your body—
Our freedom together and more, a
Revelation
Of myself as father, as a landscape as a universe
Being....

This breaks down,
Here, on paper, although I am free
To spread these words, putting them
Where I want them (something of a release
In itself)
All they can say is
Your foot
Braced against the table-leg beside the bed
Springing your hips to admit
My gross weight, the other foot
Stroking the small of my back:
A salacious picture of a man and a woman
Making out together
Or ingenuous autobiography—
"Memoirs of a Fat & Silly Poet"—
It might as well show them gathering tulips
Or playing cards

To say concisely
That the man in the picture
Really made it out through the roof
Or clear through the floor, the ground itself
Into free space beyond direction—

Impossible gibberish no one
Can understand, let alone believe;
Still, I try, I insist I can
Say it and persuade you
That the knowledge is there that the revelation
Is yours.

The Same Old Jazz

OK, it's imperishable or a world as Will & Idea, a Hindu illusion that our habits continuously
Create. Whatever I think, it
Keeps changing from bright to dark, from clear
To colored: Thus before I began to think and
So after I've stopped, as if it were real & I
Were its illusion

But as Jaime de Angulo said, "What's wrong with two?"

So Sunday morning I'm in bed with Cleo
She wants to sleep & I get up naked at the table
Writing
And it all snaps into focus
The world inside my head & the cat outside the window
A one-to-one relationship
While I imagine whatever I imagine

Weed
dry stalks of yarrow,
repeated Y-branching V's, a multiplication

Of antelope, deer-horns? Umbels
Hairy brown stars at the tip of brown wires
A menorah, or more learnedly, "hand" written in Great Seal Script

Almost against the window, horns again
Reindeer colored (in the sun) branching
Bare young loquat tree

Next door on the right the neighbors are building
Something in the garage, sawing & whirly-grinding
On wood. Models of the nina, the pinta & the santa maria
Life-size with television sails

Bright sky & airplanes & bugs mixed with
Flying paper ashes, the lid's off somebody's incinerator

There all that is & the reflection of tatami-color
In the silver bowl of my hanging lamp.

What if I never told any of this?

White cat
Spooked in the grass, alert against the satyrs
That pursue, she's full of kittens already
. . . gone under the steps, under the porch

Cleo rises to bathe
& closes the bathroom door
My own bathtub becomes a mystery

Now that cat's on the window-ledge
Propped against the green sash, whiter
In the creamy light reflected off the kitchen door

What if I never said?

Singing & splashing in the bathtub
A mystery, a transformation, a different woman
Will emerge

The birds have been pleased to show up
Bugs in the air won't last

And the chief satyr cat arrives
Ignores the birds, ascends the back stairs to spray the newel-post
A Message To The White Queen:
"Sweet Papa is here."

He disappears and immediately
There she is, delicate pink nose reading"
"Sweet papa! The same old jazz."

Water glugs in the drain
A strange girl scours herself with my tired old towels
I think of her body & stop writing
To admire my own, some of her beauty rubbed off on me
Now some of my ugliness, some of my age
Whirls down the bathroom drain.

She'll go away. I'll go away. The world will go away.
("The idea of emptiness engenders compassion
Compassion does away with the distinction
between Self & Other . . .")
But through her everything else is real to me & I have
No other self.
"What's wrong with two?"

z tomu „The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen”, 2007

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Ta sama stara śpiewka”
w temacie Mój światMarta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 03.06.10 o godzinie 17:45

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Jane Hirshfield (ur. 1953) – jedna z najwybitniejszych współczesnych poetek amerykańskich. Urodzona w Nowym Jorku, ukończyła z wyróżnieniem w 1973 roku Uniwersytet Princeton, po czym przez osiem lat poświęciła się całkowicie zgłębianiu i praktykowaniu filozofii Zen. Potem wykładała, m. in. na Uniwersytecie Kalifornijskim w Berkeley i na Uniwersytecie San Francisco.
Publikuje w najważniejszych amerykańskich pismach litareckich. Wydała tomy poezji: „Alaya” (1982), „Of Gravity & Angels”, (1988), „The October Palace” (1994), „The Lives of the Heart” (1997), „Given Sugar, Given” (2001 – nagrodzony Bay Area Book Reviewers Award), „Pebbles & Assays” (2004), „Each Happiness Ringed by Lions” (2005), „After” (2006 – uznany za najlepszą książke roku przez redakcje pism: The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle i The Financial Times.
Poetka gościła w Polsce w lipcu 2000 roku, uczestnicząc w zorganizowanym z inicjatywy Adama Zagajewskiego „Krakowskim Seminarium Poetyckim”. Wiersze Jane Hirshfield tłumaczyli na polski m. in. Czesław Miłosz, Julia Hartwig i Magda Haydel. Najpełniejszy, jak dotąd, wybór jej twórczości zawiera tomik: Jane Hirshfield: Uważność. Tłum. Magda Heydel, wstęp Czesława Miłosza. Wyd. Znak, Kraków 2002.

A Hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping--
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

This Was Once a Love Poem

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent -- what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness --
between you, there is nothing to forgive --
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt.. „To było tak: byłeś szczęśliwy”
w temacie Smutek czy radość... miłość, czy nienawiść...

The Woodpecker Keeps Returning

The woodpecker keeps returning
to drill the house wall.
Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another.
There is nothing good to eat there:
he has found in the house
a resonant billboard to post his intentions,
his voluble strength as provider.

But where is the female he drums for? Where?

I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding,
the handsome red-capped bird, the missing mate.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Dzięcioł stale wraca”
w temacie Pierzaści bracia mniejsi

Sheep’s Cheese

In the cellar, sheep's milk cheeses
soak in cold brine.
Once a week, a man comes to turn them.
Sixty pounds lifted like child after child,
lain back and re-wrapped
in their cloths on the wooden shelves.
The shelves are nameless, without opinion or varnish.
The wheels are only sheep's milk, not ripening souls.
He sings no lullabye to them. But his arms know the weight.

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „Owczy ser” w temacie Potrawy i napoje...

Inne wiersze Jane Hirshfield w tematach: Dar słuchu i Świat chwiejnych cieniKrzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 21.08.12 o godzinie 14:27

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Like the Touch of Rain by Edward Thomas

Like the touch of rain she was
On a man's flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:

With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her 'Go now'.

Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Seamus Heaney

The Railway Children

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Kolejowe dzieci”
w temacie Dzieciństwo

notka o autorze, inne jego wiersze i linki
w tym temacie na str.5Michał M. edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.08.10 o godzinie 05:59

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) – poeta angielski, zaliczany do tzw. lakistów (poetów jezior), jeden z najwybitniejszych prekursorów romantyzmu w poezji światowej, w swojej twórczości zrywał z konwencjami klasycyzmu, czerpał inspirację z twórczości ludowej, wprowadzał do poezji język potoczny, ukazywał ścisły związek człowieka ze światem przyrody, eksponował uczucia jako główny motyw twórczości poetyckiej. Wiersze Wordsworta tłumaczyli na polski m. in. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Stanisław Egbert Koźmian, Władysław Nawrocki, Jan Kasprowicz, Miriam (Zenon Przesmycki), Profanus (Gustaw Wolff), Czesław Jarzębiec-Kozłowski, Stanisław Kryński, Zygmunt Kubiak, Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Stanisław Barańczak, Maciej Froński.

The World is Too Much With Us…

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. - Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

przekład Juliusza Żuławskiego pt. „Zbytnio nam ciąży świat...”
w temacie Świecie nasz

To Sleep

Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep!
And thou hast had thy store of tenderest names;
The very sweetest, Fancy culls or frames,
When thankfulness of heart is strong and deep!
Dear Bosom-child we call thee, that dost steep
In rich reward all suffering; Balm that tames
All anguish; Saint that evil thoughts and aims
Takest away, and into souls dost creep,
Like to a breeze from heaven. Shall I alone,
I surely not a man ungently made,
Call thee worst Tyrant by which Flesh is crost?
Perverse, self-willed to own and to disown,
Mere slave of them who never for thee prayed,
Still last to come where thou art wanted most!

przekład Czesława Jastrzębiec-Kozłowskiego pt. „Sen”
w temacie Noce bezsenne...

My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold…

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

przekład Jerzego Pietrkiewicza pt. „Serce mi z piersi się wyrywa...”
w tematach: Skąd tęczy okrąg... i O przemijaniu...

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal…

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

przekład Jerzego Pietrkiewicza pt. „Dusza pieczęcią snu zamknięta..."
w temacie Trochę o duszy...

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

przekład Jerzego Pietrkiewicza pt. „Ułożone na Moście Westminsterskim
3 września 1802 roku" w temacie Mosty w poezji

London, 1802

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

przekład Zygmunta Kubiaka pt. „Londyn, 1802”
w temacie Miasto

A Night-piece

--- The sky is overcast
With a continuous cloud of texture close,
Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon,
Which through that veil is indistinctly seen,
A dull, contracted circle, yielding light
So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls,
Chequering the ground --- from rock, plant, tree, or tower.
At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam
Startles the pensive traveller while he treads
His lonesome path, with unobserving eye
Bent earthwards; he looks up --- the clouds are split
Asunder, --- and above his head he sees
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black-blue vault she sails along,
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small
And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss
Drive as she drives: how fast they wheel away,
Yet vanish not! --- the wind is in the tree,
But they are silent; --- still they roll along
Immeasurably distant; and the vault,
Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds,
Still deepens its unfathomable depth.
At length the Vision closes; and the mind,
Not undisturbed by the delight it feels,
Which slowly settles into peaceful calm,
Is left to muse upon the solemn scene.

przekład Zygmunta Kubiaka pt. „Scena nocna”
w temacie Wiersze na różne pory dnia

Lucy II

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh,
The difference to me!

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Żyła w ustroniu, gdzie ślad ścieżek...”
w temacie Treny, epitafia i inne wiersze o tematyce żałobnej

Lucy V

A Slumber my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Pod szczelnym kloszem snu...”
w temacie Treny, epitafia i inne wiersze o tematyce żałobnej

The Solitary Reaper

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Samotna żniwiarka”
w tematach: Żniwo, plon – zwieńczenie, szczyt...
i Zawody i profesje widziane okiem poety

The Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch’d in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

przekład Macieja Frońskiego pt. „Żonkile”
w temacie Kwiaty

Inne wiersze Williama Wordswortha w tematach: Sonet, Dziecko jest chodzącym cudem..., Samotność, Kwiaty, Pierzaści bracia mniejsi, Cóż jest piękniejszego niż (wysokie) drzewa...Marta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 31.08.10 o godzinie 06:44

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Andrew Motion (ur. 1952) – jeden z najwybitniejszych współczesnych poetów i krytyków literackich na Wyspach Brytyjskich. Studiował anglistykę pod kierunkiem Johna Fullera
w University College na Oksfordzie oraz pod kierunkiem Philipa Larkina na uniwersytecie
w Hull, gdzie w latach 1976-1980 roku był wykładowcą. W latach 1980-1982 wykładał na University of East Anglia w Norwich i był redaktorem naczelnym "Poetry Society 's Poetry Review" Potem, do 1989 roku, kierował działem poezji w wydawnictwie "Chatto & Windus". Od 2003 roku jest profesorem creative writing na Royal Holloway Uniwersytetu w Londonie. W latach 1999-2009 pełnił zaszczytna funkcję Poet Laureate. W ciągu prawie 40 lat swojej pracy twórczej opublikował tomy poezji: „Goodnestone: a sequence” (1972), „Inland” (1976), „The Pleasure Steamers” (1977), „Independence” (1981), “Secret Narratives” (1983), “Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984“ (1984), “Natural Causes” (1987), “Two Poems” (1988), “Love in a Life”, (1991), “The Price of Everything“ (1994), “Salt Water” (1997), “Selected Poems 1976-1997” (1998), “A Long Story” (2001), “Public Property” (2002),
“The Cinder Path” (2009). Jest też autorem biografii znanych poetów i książek krytyczno-literackich: “The Poetry of Edward Thomas” (1980), „Philip Larkin” (1982), „Elizabeth Bishop” (1986), „Keats: A Biography”(1987), “Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life” (1993), „Sarah Raphael: Strip!” (1998), „In the Blood: A Memoir of my Childhood” (2006), “Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets” (2008). Od trzydziestu lat redaguje książki znanych poetów. Jest laureatem wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich. Wiersze Motiona tłumaczyli na polski Piotr Sommer i Jarosław Anders, ukazały się one w książce Piotra Sommera: Antologia nowej poezji brytyjskiej. Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza „Czytelnik", Warszawa 1983.

Holy Island

I am behind you on the mainland, leaning
on your shoulder and pointing with one arm
in front of your face at weightless cinders
which are ravens blustering above the island.

Boulder clay on the outcrops, and beaches
dotted and dashed with coal dust. Guillemots
whitening the cliff face. Small orchids definitely
still evolving in a downpour of Arctic sunlight.

How many years are there left to cross over
and show you things themselves, not my idea
of things? Thirty, if I live to the age of my father.
I cannot explain why I have left it as late as this.

Your black hair blows into my eyes but I can see
everything moving fast now. Weather polishes
the silver fields ahead; the ravens swoop down
and settle among the gorgeous pages of the gospels.

Ice

When friends no longer remembered
the reasons we set forth,
I switched between nanny and tartar
driving us on north.

Will you imagine a human hand
welded by ice to wood?
And skin when they chip it off?
I don’t think you should.

By day the appalling loose beauty
of prowling floes:
lions’ heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks,
and a thing like a blown rose.

By night the seething hiss
of killers cruising past -
the silence after each fountain-jet,
and our hearts aghast.

Of our journey home and the rest
there is nothing more to say.
I have lived and not yet died.
I have sailed in the Scotia Sea.

A Glass of Wine

Exactly as the setting sun
clips the heel of the garden,

exactly as a pigeon
roosting tries to sing
and ends up moaning,

exactly as the ping
of someone’s automatic carlock
dies into a flock
of tiny echo-aftershocks,

a shapely hand of cloud
emerges from the crowd
of airy nothings that the wind allowed
to tumble over us all day
and points the way

towards its own decay
but not before
a final sunlight-shudder pours
away across our garden-floor

so steadily, so slow
it shows you everything you need to know
about this glass I’m holding out to you,

its open eye
enough to bear the whole weight of the sky.

The Last Call

Death called me,
I did not hear.
He spoke again:
Come near.

I went to look
for pity.
Poor death, I thought,
he loves me.

I guessed right,
he does.
And now I love him too,
just because.

Leaving Belfast

for Craig Raine

Driving at dusk on the steep road
north to the airport, ‘Look back,’
you say, ‘The finest view of Belfast,’
and point, proud of your choice to stay.

How clear the rows of streetlamps show
which way we came. I trace them slope
by slope through marshlands slipping down
to lanes, and find the roofs again,

their stern geographies of punishment
and love where silence deepens under rain.
Each sudden gust of light explains itself
as flames, but neither they, nor even

bombs redoubled on the hills tonight
can quite include me in their fear.
What does remains invisible, is lost
in curt societies whose deaths become

revenge by morning, and whose homes
are nothing more than all they pity most.
I watch the moon above them, filling rooms
with shadow politics, though whether

voices there pronounce me an intruder,
traitor, or a friend, I leave them now
as much a stranger as I came, and turn
to listen in the twilight for their griefs,

but hear instead the promise of conclusion
fading fast towards me through these miles
of stubborn gorse, until it disappears
at last in darkness, out beyond the coast.

przekład Jarosława Andersa pt. „Wyjazd z Belfastu”
w temacie Wiersze „zaangażowane”

In the Attic

Even though we know now
your clothes will never
be needed, we keep them,
upstairs in a locked trunk.

Sometimes I kneel there
touching them, trying to relive
time you wore them, to catch
the actual shape of arm and wrist.

My hands push down
between hollow, invisible sleeves,
hesitate, then take hold
and lift:

a green holiday; a red christening;
all your unfinished lives
fading through dark summers
entering my head as dust.

1972

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Na strychu” w tematach:
Poetycka garderoba... i Poetycka zawartość strychów

Inne wiersze Andrew Motiona w tematach:
Powroty, Wspomnienia, Spacery poetów.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.03.11 o godzinie 09:40

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Galway Kinnell (ur. 1927) - amerykański poeta, prozaik i tłumacz. Urodził się w Providence
na Rhode Island, ukończył Uniwersytet Princeton. Debiutował w 1960 roku tomem wierszy
pt. "What a Kingdom It Was", który został entuzjastycznie przyjęty zarówno przez krytykę literacką, jak i czytelników. Po debiucie stworzył z innym poetą, Williamem Stanleyem Merwinem, swoisty tandem poetycki, który został uznany za nowy i interesujący głos w poezji amerykańskiej. Inne książki poetyckie Kinnella to: "Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock" ( 1964), "Body Rags" (1968), "The Book of Nightmares" (1973), "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World: Poems 1946-64 (1974), "Mortal Acts, Mortal Words" (1980), "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps". (1980), "Blackberry Eating" (1980), "Selected Poems" (1982 - Nagroda Pulizera), "How the Alligator Missed Breakfast" (1982), "The Fundamental Project of Technology" (1983), "The Past" (1985), "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone" (1990), "Imperfect Thirst" (1996), "A New Selected Poems" (2001), "Three Books" (2002), "The avenue bearing the initial of Christ into the New World: poems, 1953-1964" (2002), "Strong Is Your Hold" (2006). Tłumaczy głównie poezję francuską (m. in. Françoisa Villona, Yvesa Bonnefoy) i niemiecką (Rainera Marię Rilkego).

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run - as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears - in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players -
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startling muscled body -
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Poem of Night

1

I move my hand over
slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that give way so easily
it's a shock to feel underneath them

The bones smile.

Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.

2

I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand--and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.

3

A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.

4

Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.

You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.

5

And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.

I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in a place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave towards the emptiness.

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.

Under the Maud Moon

1

On the path
by this wet site
of old fires -
black ashes, black stones, where tramps
must have squatted down,
gnawing on stream water,
unhouseling themselves on cursed bread,
failing to get warm at a twigfire -

I stop,
gather wet wood,
cut dry shavings, and for her,
whose face I held in my hands
a few hours, whom I gave back
only to keep holding the space where she was,

I light
a small fire in the rain.

The black
wood reddens, the deathwatches inside
begin running out of time, I can see
the dead, crossed limbs
longing again for the universe, I can hear
in the wet wood the snap
and re-snap of the same embrace being torn.
The raindrops trying
to put the fire out
fall into it and are
changed: the oath broken,
the oath sworn between earth and water, flesh and spirit, broken,
to be sworn again,
over and over, in the clouds, and to be broken again,
over and over, on earth.

2

I sit a moment
by the fire, in the rain, speak
a few words into its warmth -
stone saint smooth stone – and sing
one of the songs I used to croak
for my daughter, in her nightmares.

Somewhere out ahead of me
a black bear sits alone
on his hillside, nodding from side
to side. He sniffs
the blossom-smells, the rained earth,
finally he gets up,
eats a few flowers, trudges away,
his fur glistening
in the rain.

The singed grease streams
out of the words, the one
held note
remains – a love-note
twisting under my tongue, like the coyote’s bark,
curving off, into a
howl.

3

A round-
cheeked girlchild comes awake
in her crib. The green
swaddlings tear open,
a filament or vestment
tears, the blue flower opens.

And she who is born,
she who sings and cries,
she who begins the passage, her hair
sprouting out,
her gums budding for her first spring on earth,
the mist still clinging about
her face, puts
her hand
into her father’s mouth, to take hold of
his song.

4

It is all over,
little one, the flipping
and overleaping, the watery
somersaulting alone in the oneness
under the hill, under
the old, lonely bellybutton
pushing forth again
in remembrance,
the drifting there furled in the dark,
pressing a knee or elbow
along a slippery wall, sculpting
the world with each thrash-the stream
of omphalos blood humming all about you.

5

Her head
enters the headhold
which starts sucking her forth: being itself
closes down all over her, gives her
into the shuddering
grip of departure, the slow,
agonized clenches making
the last molds of her life in the dark.

6

The black eye
opens, the pupil
droozed with black hairs
stops, the chakra
on top of the brain throbs a long moment in world light,

and she skids out on her face into light,
this peck
of stunned flesh
clotted with celestial cheesiness, glowing
with the astral violet
of the underlife. And as they cut

her tie to the darkness
she dies
a moment, turns blue as a coal,
the limbs shaking
as the memories rush out of them. When

they hang her up
by the feet, she sucks
air, screams
her first song – and turns rose,
the slow,
beating, featherless arms
already clutching at the emptiness.

7

When it was cold
on our hillside, and you cried
in the crib rocking
through darkness, on wood
knifed down to the curve of the smile, a sadness
stranger than ours, all of it
flowing from the other world,
I used to come to you
and sit by you
and sing to you. You did not know,
and yet you will remember,
in the silent zones
of the brain, a specter, descendant
of the ghostly forefathers, singing
to you in the nighttime -
not the songs
of light said to wave
through the bright hair of angels,
but a blacker
rasping flowering on that tongue.

For when the Maud moon
glimmered in those first nights,
and the Archer lay
sucking the icy biestings of the cosmos,
in his crib of stars,

I had crept down
to riverbanks, their long rustle
of being and perishing, down to marshes
where the earth oozes up
in cold streaks, touching the world
with the underglimmer
of the beginning,
and there learned my only song.

And in the days
when you find yourself orphaned,
emptied
of all wind-singing, of light,
the pieces of cursed bread on your tongue,

may there come back to you
a voice
spectral, calling you
sister!
from everything that dies.

And then
you shall open
this book, even if it is the book of nightmares.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Pod księżycem Maud"
w temacie Pamięć

Inny wiersz G. Kinnella "***[I słyszę idąc przez wzgórza...]"
w temacie Ameryka wczoraj i dziśRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 10.10.10 o godzinie 13:02

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

William Stanley Merwin (ur. 1927) – jeden z najwybitniejszych i najbardziej cenionych współczesnych poetów amerykańskich. Urodził się w Nowym Jorku w rodzinie prezbiteriańskiego pastora. Kiedy miał dziewięć lat przeniósł się z rodzicami do Scranton
w stanie Pensylwania, gdzie ukończył Wyoming Seminary College Preparatory School. Następnie studiował anglistykę na Princeton University, m. in. pod kierunkiem znanego poety Johna Berrymana. Debiutował w 1952 roku tomikiem „A Mask for Janus”, który zawierał wiersze utrzymane w tradycyjnej poetyce klasycznych gatunków, takich jak ballada i oda, ale napisanych z prawdziwą wirtuozerią, co podkreślił też we wstępie do tej książki W. H. Oden. Następnie wydał trzy kolejne tomiki w odstępach dwuletnich: „The Dancing Bears (1954), „Green with Beasts” (1956) i „The Drunk in the Furnace” (1960). Zwłaszcza ten ostatni został przez krytykę okrzyknięty za początek nowej epoki, a sam autor za czołowego przedstawiciela nowej generacji w poezji amerykańskiej. Merwin prowadził dość bujne życie zarówno zawodowe, jak i osobiste. Dużo podróżował, poza Stanami Zjednoczonymi mieszkał też na Hawajach, w Anglii i we Francji. Wykładał na wielu wyższych uczelniach, zasłynął wierszami pacyfistycznymi przeciwko wojnie w Wietnamie, praktykował buddyzm i filozofię tzw. głębokiej ekologii (depp ecology). Był trzy razy żonaty, w tym ze swoją współpracownicą Dido Milroy, starszą od niego o 15 lat, którą poznał na Hawajach
i wyjechał z nią do Londynu. Był przyjacielem znanej amerykańsko-angielskiej pary poetów: Sylvii Plath i Teda Hughesa. Obecnie mieszka na starej plantacji ananasów w pobliżu wulkanu na hawajskiej wyspie Manui. Utrzymuje się wyłącznie z pracy literackiej. Jest autorem przeszło 30 tomów wierszy: "A Mask for Janus" (1952), "The Dancing Bears" (1954), "Green with Beats" (1956), The Drunk in the Furnace" (1960), „The Moving Target” (1963), "The Lice" (1967), "The Carrier of Ladders" (1970), "Writings to an Unfinished Accompanimen" (1973), "The First Four Books of Poems" (1975), "The Compas Flower" (1977), "Feathers From the Hill" (1978), "Finding the Islands" (1982), "Opening the Hand" (1983), "The Rain in the Trees" (1988), "Selected Poems" (1988), "The Second Four Books of Poems" (1993), Travels" (1993), "The Vixen" (1996). "Flower and Hand. Poems 1977-1983" (1997), "The River Sound" (1999) , „The Pupil” (2001), "Migration. New and Selected Poems" (2005), "Present Company" (2005), "The Shadow of Sirius" (2008). Wydał też kilkanaście dramatów scenicznych i powieści. Oprócz tego tłumaczy poezję z języków: francuskiego, hiszpańskiego, włoskiego (m. in. „Czyściec” Dantego) i rosyjskiego (Osipa Mandelsztajna). Jest laureatem wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich, w tym: Yale Younger Poets Prize (za debiut w 1952), dwukrotnie Nagrody Pulitzera (1971 i 2009), National Book Award for Poetry (2005). W 2010 roku zastąpił Kaya Ryana na zaszczytnym stanowisku Poety Laureata do Biblioteki Kongresu Stanów Zjednoczonych. Wiersze W. S. Merwina tłumaczyli na język polski m. in: Czesław Miłosz, Teresa Truszkowska, Julia Hartwig, Tadeusz Rybowski, Zofia Prele, Piotr Sommer, Grzegorz Musiał i Piotr Marcinkiewicz. Pomimo międzynarodowego prestiżu, poeta nie doczekał się w Polsce, jak dotąd, większego osobnego wyboru swoich wierszy. Przekłady wymienionych wyżej tłumaczy publikowane były w niskonakładowych trudno dostępnych antologiach i wydawnictwach, m. in. w "Literaturze na Świecie" nr 5-6/1987. Moje przekłady z nietłumaczonych dotąd jego wierszy ukazują się po raz pierwszy.

Z tomu „Green with Beasts”, 1956





Low Fields and Light

I think it is in Virginia, that place
That lies across the eye of my mind now
Like a gray blade set to the moon's roundness,
Like a plain of glass touching all there is.

The flat fields run out to the sea there.
There is no sand, no line. It is autumn.
The bare fields, dark between fences, run
Out to the idle gleam of the flat water.

And the fences go on out, sinking slowly,
With a cow-bird half-way, on a stunted post, watching
How the light slides through them easy as weeds
Or wind, slides over them away out near the sky.

Because even a bird can remember
The fields that were there before the slow
Spread and wash of the edging line crawled
There and covered them, a little more each year.

My father never ploughed there, nor my mother
Waited, and never knowingly I stood there
Hearing the seepage slow as growth, nor knew
When the taste of salt took over the ground.

But you would think the fields were something
To me, so long I stare out, looking
For their shapes or shadows through the matted gleam, seeing
Neither what is nor what was, but the flat light rising.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Światło i niskie pola”
w temacie Wspomnienia
          
         
Z tomu „The Drunk in the Furnace”, 1960





The Drunk in the Furnace

For a good decade
The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless
And vacant as any hat. Then when it was
No more to them than a hulking black fossil
To erode unnoticed with the rest of the junk-hill
By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added
To their ignorance,

They were afterwards astonished
To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke like a pale
Resurrection, staggering out of its chewed hole,
And to remark then other tokens that someone,
Cosily bolted behind the eyeholed iron
Door of the drafty burner, had there established
His bad castle.

Where he gets his spirits
It's a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical:
Hammer-and-anviling with poker and bottle
To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang
As he collapses onto the rioting
Springs of a litter of car seats ranged on the grates,
To sleep like an iron pig.

In their tar-paper church
On a text about stoke holes that are sated never
Their reverend lingers. They nod and hate trespassers.
When the furnace wakes, though, all afternoon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
Stand in a row and learn.         
           
                
Z tomu „The Moving Target”, 1963





Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego
pt. "Rozstanie" w temacie Rozstania


My Friends

My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking

My friends without shoes leave
What they love
Grief moves among them as a fire among
Its bells
My friends without clocks turn
On the dial they turn
They part

My friends with names like gloves set out
Bare handed as they have lived
And nobody knows them
It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is their
Cups that are found at the wells
And are then chained up

My friends without feet sit by the wall
Nodding to the lame orchestra
Brotherhood it says on the decorations
My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling
With a nest of salt in his hand

My friends without fathers or houses hear
Doors opening in the darkness
Whose halls announce

Behold the smoke has come home

My friends and I have in common
The present a wax bell in a wax belfry
This message telling of
Metals this
Hunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heart
And these hands one
For asking one for applause

My friends with nothing leave it behind
In a box
My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night
They take the same road they miss
Each other they invent the same banner in the dark
They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe

At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish

The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise
Like a monument to my
Friends the forgotten
         
         
Z tomu „The Lice”, 1967





Dusk in Winter

The sun sets in the cold without friends
Without reproaches after all it has done for us
It goes down believing in nothing
When it is gone I hear the stream running after it
It has brought its flute it is a long way

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Zmierzch zimą”
w temacie Zima

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing what to what

dwa przekłady: Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Na rocznicę mej śmierci"
w temacie Urodziny, imieniny i inne ważne dni... oraz Czesława
Miłosza pt. "Na rocznicę mojej śmierci" w temacie Życie po życiu

The River Of Bees

In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blind man followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older

Soon it will be fifteen years

He was old he will have fallen into his eyes

I took my eyes
A long way to the calenders
Room after room asking how shall I live

One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Images of hope
It was offered to me by name

Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say

He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass

I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay

He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

When You Go Away

When you go away the wind clicks around to the north
The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls
Showing the black walls
The clock goes back to striking the same hour
That has no place in the years

And at night wrapped in the bed of ashes
In one breath I wake
It is the time when the beards of the dead get their growth
I remember that I am falling
That I am the reason
And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

Z tomu „Writings to an Unfinished Accompanimen”, 1973





Bread

                              for Wendell Berry

Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching

somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch

have they forgotten the pale caves
they dreamed of hiding in
their own caves
full of the waiting of their footprints
hung with the hollow marks of their groping
full of their sleep and their hiding

have they forgotten the ragged tunnels
they dreamed of following in out of the light
to hear step after step

the heart of bread
to be sustained by its dark breath
and emerge

to find themselves alone
before a wheat field
raising its radiance to the moon

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Chleb"
w temacie Chleb nasz powszedni

         
Z tomu „Opening the Hand”, 1983




 
Yesterday

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do
         
         
Z tomu „The Rain in the Trees”, 1988





Native Trees

Neither my father nor my mother knew
the names of the trees
where I was born
what is that
I asked and my
father and mother did not
hear they did not look where I pointed
surfaces of furniture held
the attention of their fingers
and across the room they could watch
walls they had forgotten
where there were no questions
no voices and no shade

Were there trees
where they were children
where I had not been
I asked
were there trees in those places
where my father and my mother were born
and in that time did
my father and my mother see them
and when they said yes it meant
they did not remember
What were they I asked what were they
but both my father and my mother
said they never knew

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Rodzime drzewa"
w temacie Cóż jest piękniejszego niż (wysokie) drzewa...

Z tomu „The Seconfd Four Books of Poems", 1993





Spring

On the water the first wind
Breaks it all up into arrows

The dead bowmen buried these many years

Are setting out again

And I
I take down from the door
My story with the holes
For the arms the face and the vitals
I take down the sights from the mantle
I'm going to my uncle the honest one
Who stole inc the horse in the good cause

There's light in my shoes
I carry my bones on a drum
I'm going to my uncle the dog
The croupier the old horror
The one who takes me as I am

Like the rest of the devils he was born in heaven

Oh withered rain

Tears of the candles veins full of feathers
Knees in salt
I the bell's only son

Having spent one day in his house
Will have your answer

przekład Zofii Prele pt. „Wiosna”
w temacie Nim przyjdzie wiosna...

The Asians Dying

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living

The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future

przekład Tadeusza Rybowskeigo pt. "Umierający Azjaci"
w temacie Świecie nasz
         
         
Z tomu „The Vixen”, 1996





Vixen

Comet of stillness princess of what is over
       high note held without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets
       of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words warden of where the river went
       touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished
window onto the hidden place and the other time
       at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting
in the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born
       you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me
you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you
       even now you are unharmed even now perfect
as you have always been now when your light paws are running
       on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you
when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer
       when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars
from the creeds of difference and the contradictions
       that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications
as long as it lasted until something that we were
       had ended when you are no longer anything
let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
       and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
guttering on a screen let my words find their own
      places in the silence after the animals
         
         
Z tomu „The Pupil”, 2001





Just Now

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Właśnie teraz" w temacie
Oślepiony błyskiem, czyli o tym, co się mowie wymyka

In Time

The night the world was going to end
when we heard those explosions not far away
and the loudspeakers telling us
about the vast fires on the backwater
consuming undisclosed remnants
and warning us over and over
to stay indoors and make no signals
you stood at the open window
the light of one candle back in the room
we put on high boots to be ready
for wherever we might have to go
and we got out the oysters and sat
at the small table feeding them
to each other first with the fork
then from our mouths to each other
until there were none and we stood up
and started to dance without music
slowly we danced around and around
in circles and after a while we hummed
when the world was about to end
all those years all those nights ago
       
      
Z tomu „Migration: New and Selected Poems”, 2005





The Fields

Saturday on Seventh Street
full-waisted gray-haired women in Sunday sweaters
moving through the tan shades of their booths
bend over cakes they baked at home
they gaze down onto the sleep of stuffed cabbages
they stir with huge spoons sauerkraut and potato dumplings
cooked as those dishes were cooked on deep
misty plains among the sounds of horses
beside fields of black earth on the other side of the globe
that only the oldest think they remember
looking down from their windows into the world
where everybody is now

none of the young has yet wept at the smell
of cabbages
those leaves all face
none of the young after long journeys
weeks in vessels
and staring at strange coasts through fog in first light
has been recognized by the steam of sauerkraut
that is older than anyone living
so on the street they play the music
of what they do not remember
they sing of places they have not known
they dance in new costumes under the windows
in the smell of cabbages from fields
nobody has seen

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Pola" w tematach:
Potrawy i napoje... i A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech

December Night

The cold slope is standing in darkness
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch

The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these
White plants older at night
The oldest
Come first to the ruins

And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon
The water flows through its
Own fingers without end

Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men

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

It is March

It is March and black dust falls out of the books
Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices

When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write

The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses

At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps

Whatever I have to do has not yet

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. „Jest marzec"
w temacie Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

Z tomu „Present Company”, 2005





To the Light of September

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later

you
who fly with them

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Do światła września"
w temacie Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok
       
      
Z tomu „The Shadow of Sirius”, 2008





Youth

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I

have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I

began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Młodość"
w temacie Ta nasza młodość

Good Night

Sleep softly my old love
my beauty in the dark
night is a dream we have
as you know as you know

night is a dream you know
an old love in the dark
around you as you go
without end as you know

in the night where you go
sleep softly my old love
without end in the dark
in the love that you know

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Dobranoc"
w temacie Pożegnania, ostatnie słowa...

Note

Remember how the naked soul
comes to language and at once knows
loss and distance and believing

then for a time it will not run
with its old freedom
like a light innocent of measure
but will hearken to how
one story becomes another
and will try to tell where
they have emerged from
and where they are heading
as though they were its own legend
running before the words and beyond them
naked and never looking back

through the noise of questions

przekład Ryszarda Mierzejewskiego pt. "Przypis"
w temacie Trochę o duszy

Inne wiersze Williama S. Merwina w tematach: Motyw wyspy, Erotyka, Kalendarz
poetycki na cały rok, W harmonii z przyrodą, Dawni Mistrzowie, Przypowieść,
Życie po życiu, Poeci poetom/Błędne koła rowerów..., Los i przeznaczenie,
Rzeki, potoki, strumienie..., Szukanie lata, Powroty, Poetyckie grzybobranie i inne
leśne zbieranieTen post został edytowany przez Autora dnia 18.02.20 o godzinie 13:16

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Robert Francis (1901-1987) – poeta amerykański. Urodził się w Upland w stanie Pennsylvania, ukończył studia na Uniwersytecie Harvarda. W 1940 roku osiedlił się
w miasteczku Amherst w stanie Massachusetts, gdzie wybudował sobie mały dom, który nazwał „Fort Juniper”. Nie zabiegał o koneksje i sławę. Pędził proste życie farmera i pisał proste, lapidarne wiersze. Jego wzorem w życiu i literaturze był Robert Frost. Pewien rozgłos zyskał dopiero u progu pięćdziesiątego roku życia. Wydał tomy wierszy: „Stand Here With Me” (1936), ”The Face Against the Glass” (1950.), “The Orb Weaver” (1960), “Come out into the sun: poems new and selected” (1965), “Like ghosts of eagles: poems 1966-1974” (1974), “Collected Poems 1936-1976” (1985). Wiersze Roberta Francisa tłumaczył na polski m. in. Grzegorz Musiał. Ukazały się one w jego autorskiej antologii: Grzegorz Musiał: Ameryka, Ameryka! Antologia wierszy poetów amerykańskich po 1940 roku. Wyd. Pomorze, Bydgoszcz 1994.

Glass

Words of a poem should be glass
But glass so simple-subtle its shape
Is nothing but the shape of what it holds.

A glass spun for itself is empty,
Brittle, at best Venetian trinket.
Embossed glass hides the poem of its absence.

Words should be looked through, should be windows.
The best word were invisible.
The poem is the thing the poet thinks.

If the impossible were not,
And if the glass, only the glass,
Could be removed, the poem would remain.

Silent Poem

backroad leafmold stonewall chipmunk
underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow

woodsmoke cowbarn honeysuckle woodpile
sawhorse bucksaw outhouse wellsweep

backdoor flagstone bulkhead buttermilk
candlestick ragrug firedog brownbread

hilltop outcrop cowbell buttercup
whetstone thunderstorm pitchfork steeplebush

gristmill millstone cornmeal waterwheel
watercress buckwheat firefly jewelweed

gravestone groundpine windbreak bedrock
weathercock snowfall starlight cockcrow

Blue Winter

Winter uses all the blues there are.
One shade of blue for water, one for ice,
Another blue for shadows over snow.
The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice-
Both different blues. And hills row after row
Are colored blue according to how far.
You know the bluejay's double-blur device
Shows best when there are no green leaves to show.
And Sirius is a winterbluegreen star.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Błękitna zima”
w temacie Zima

Paper Men to Air Hopes and Fears

The first speaker said
Fear fire. Fear furnaces
Incinerators, the city dump
The faint scratch of a match.

The second speaker said
Fear water. Fear drenching rain
Drizzle, oceans, puddles, a damp
Day and the flush toilet.

The third speaker said
Fear wind. And it needn't be
A hurricane. Drafts, open
Windows, electric fans.

The fourth speaker said
Fear knives. Fear any sharp
Thing, machine, shears
Scissors, lawnmowers.

The fifth speaker said
Hope. Hope for the best
A smooth folder in a steel file.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. “Papierowych ludzi w powietrze nadzieje i lęki”
w tematach: Przypowieść i Cztery żywioły

Yes, What?

What would earth do without her blessed boobs
her blooming bumpkins garden variety
her oafs her louts her yodeling yokels
and all her Breughel charcters
under the fat-faced moon?

Her nitwits numskulls universal
nincompoops jawohl jawohl with all
their yawps burps beers guffaws
her goofs her goons her big galoots
under the red-face moon?

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Tak, co?” w temacie
O głupkach, durniach, kretynach i im podobnych

Inne wiersze Roberta Francisa w tematach: Krew, Cóż jest piękniejszego niż (wysokie) drzewa..., Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok/Polowania i łowy.Ten post został edytowany przez Autora dnia 27.06.13 o godzinie 03:29

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) – jeden z najwybitniejszych współczesnych poetów szkockich, urodzony i mieszkający na Orkadach. Wychował się w ubóstwie, jako jedno z sześciorga dzieci listonosza i krawcowej. Wcześnie zachorował na gruźlicę, co zdeterminowało w znacznym stopniu jego dalsze życie. Ukończył filologię angielską na Uniwersytecie w Edynburgu. Debiutował w anglojęzycznej prasie literackiej na początku lat 50-tych XX w. Wydał tomy poezji: „The Storm” (1954), „Loaves and Fishes” (1959), „The Year of the Whale” (1965), „Fishermen with Ploughs” (1971), „ Poems New and Selected” (1971), „Winterfold” (1976), „Voyages” (1983), „The Wreck
of the Archangel” (1989), „ Tryst on Egilsay” (1989), „Brodgar Poems” (1992), „Foresterhill” (1992), „Following a Lark” (1996), „Water” (1996). Pisał też powieści, sztuki sceniczne, słuchowiska radiowe, eseje krytyczno-literackie i książki dla dzieci, utrzymując się wyłącznie z twórczości literackiej. Jego wiersze tłumaczył na polski Andrzej Szuba. Ukazały się one w tomie: George Mackay Brown: Antologia z wyspy fok. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1989 oraz w „Literaturze na Świecie” nr 7/1995 (288).

The Poet

Therefore he no more troubled the pool of silence
But put on mask and cloak,
Strung a guitar
And moved among the folk.
Dancing they cried,
'Ah, how our sober islands
Are gay again, since this blind lyrical tramp
Invaded the Fair.'

Under the last dead lamp
When all the dancers and masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, the interrogation of silence.

A Work for Poets

To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A ship
A star
A cornstalk

Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read

That not far from the stone
A well
Might open for wayfarers

Here is a work for poets—
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence.

Song: Further than Hoy

Further than Hoy
the mermaids whisper
through ivory shells
a-babble with vowels
Further than history
the legends thicken
the buried broken
vases and columns
Further than fame
are fleas and visions,
the hermit's cave
under the mountain
Further than song
the hushed awakening
of country children
the harp unstroked
Further than death
your feet will come
to the forest, black forest
where Love walks, alone.

Epiphany Poem

The red king
Came to a great water. He said,
Here the journey ends.
No keel or skipper on this shore.
The yellow king
Halted under a hill. He said,
Turn the camels round.
Beyond, ice summits only.
The black king
Knocked on a city gate. He said,
All roads stop here.
These are gravestones, no inn.
The three kings
Met under a dry star.
There, at midnight,
The star began its singing.
The three kings
Suffered salt, snow, skulls.
They suffered the silence
Before the first word.

Boy from the Shore

When horsemen at the inn-yards say
'Return to her'
I stay beside the barrel, drinking.
When the old women urge,
'Bring her a gift of fish'
I take nothing but hunger into your house.
When the elders insist
'Break bread together'
You are the witch in the flame, I the fiddler,
At the gate of loaves and fishes.
Each Sabbath silence
Our tree is crammed with birds,
And when the villages dance
Then we lie quiet all night with mixed hair.

Wiersze George'a Mackay'a Browna w polskim przekładzie w tematach:
Boże Narodzenie w poezji/Między sacrum a profanum (motywy religijne w poezji świeckiej), Archetypy i symbole w poezji, Hej kolęda! Kolęda!/Trzej Królowie przychodzą z darami..., W świecie baśni, legend i mitów, Poezja i muzyka, Portret (super) męski, Czynności i zajęcia, poza pisaniem wierszy, Żniwo, plon - zwieńczenie, szczyt..., A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech, W świecie wróżb, zaklęć i sił tajemnych, Pamięć.Marta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 08.02.11 o godzinie 07:46

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953) – jeden z najbardziej oryginalnych, ale też kontrowersyjnych, poetów XX wieku. Urodził się w Swansea w południowej Walii. Jego ojciec był nauczycielem języka angielskiego, matka – krawcową. W domu mówiło się po angielsku
i Dylan pisał później swoje utwory tylko w języku angielskim. Był dzieckiem chorowitym, cierpiał na astmę i zapalenie oskrzeli, co uniemożliwiło mu służbę wojskową i wzięcie udziału na froncie II wojny światowej. Formalną edukację zakończył w wieku 16 lat w Grammar School w Swansea na poziomie gimnazjalnym. Pracował potem jako reporter lokalnej gazety „South Wales Evening Post”. Pierwsze utwory poetyckie publikował wcześnie, już w szkolnej gazetce, a w 20-tym roku życia wydał swój debiutancki tomik pt. „Eighteen Poems” (Osiemnaście wierszy, 1914), który spotkał się z dużym zainteresowaniem i uznaniem
w środowisku literackim. Sukces ten ugruntował dwa lata później, wydając kolejny tom „Twenty-five Poems” (Dwadzieścia pięć wierszy, 1936). Te dwa tomy poezji Thomasa odznaczały się dużą oryginalnością formalną i stylistyczną nie tylko na tle tradycyjnej, dość zachowawczej poezji anglojęzycznej lat 30-tych XX wieku, reprezentowanej m. in. przez
N. Camerona, C. Day Lawisa, L. MacNeice'a, S. Spendera czy W. Empsona, ale też na tle nowoczesnej poezji, której kierunki rozwoju wyznaczały głównie utwory W. H. Audena.
W 1936 roku poeta poznał w londyńskim pubie tancerkę Caitlin Macnamarę, którą po kilku miesiącach nieformalnego związku i wbrew woli rodziców poślubił. W 1938 roku Thomas wraz z żoną wrócił do Walii i zamieszkał w miejscowości Laugharne. Rok później urodził się Llewelyn Edouard – pierwsze dziecko Thomasów, w 1943 przyszła na świat córka Aeronwy Bryn, późniejsza tłumaczka poezji włoskiej, a w 1949 drugi syn: Colm Garan Hart. W 1939 roku ukazuje się też trzeci tom poezji Thomasa - „The Map of Love” (Mapa miłości). Wojna,
w której poeta ze względów zdrowotnych nie mógł wziąć aktywnego udziału, wywarła na poecie głębokie piętno. W 1941 roku samoloty Luftwaffe zbombardowały Swansea – rodzinne miasta Thomasa, powodując ogromne szkody, w tym całkowite zniszczenie Castle Street – ulicy, przy której stał jego dom rodzinny. Przeżycia z czasów wojny zawarł Thomas głównie w swoim czwartym tomie wierszy „Deaths and Entrances” (Zgony i wstąpienia, 1946) oraz w scenariuszach radiowych i filmowych pisanych w latach 40-tych. Po wojnie Thomas miał już ugruntowaną pozycję jednego z najwybitniejszych poetów współczesnych. Zadziwiał nie tylko tym, co pisał, ale również umiejętnościami promocji swojej twórczości.
Był znakomitym recytatorem i ciekawym prelegentem, co wykorzystywał w trakcie swoich wykładów i prelekcji, m. in. dwóch podróży do Stanów Zjednoczonych w 1950 i 1953 roku. Sławie wybitnego poety towarzyszył rodzący się mit artysty wagabundy, prowadzącego ekscentryczny i skandalizujący tryb życia, w którym poczesne miejsce zajmowały alkohol
i liczne przygody erotyczne poety. I mimo, że Thomas nie jest raczej wymieniany wśród tzw. poetów przeklętych, to właśnie z uwagi na prezentowany zarówno w twórczości, jak i życiu prywatnym, nihilizm, łamanie przyjętych konwencji literackich i obyczajowych, krzykliwe manifestowanie własnej odrębności i niezależności, myślę że można by go śmiało wpisać na listę niepokornych „poètes maudits”. W 1952 roku ukazał się kolejny tom wierszy Thomasa: „In Country Sleep” (W wiejskim śnie). Wkrótce potem poeta wyjechał na swoje drugie tournée literackie do Stanów Zjednoczonych. Licznym odczytom towarzyszyły libacje suto zakrapiane alkoholem. Po jednej z takich imprez Thomas wrócił do swego pokoju hotelowego w Nowym Jorku bardzo osłabiony i przez dwa kolejne dni nie wychodził z łóżka. 5 listopada 1953 roku trafił do St. Vincent's Hospital w stanie śpiączki. Lekarze orzekli obustronne zapalenie oskrzeli i płuc. Zmarł, nie odzyskawszy przytomności, po czterech dniach, w wieku 39 lat. Na uroczystości żałobne w Nowym Jorku przybyli najwybitniejsi pisarze amerykańscy: Edward Estlin Cummings, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams.
Żona Thomasa sprowadziła jego ciało do Walii i pochowała na cmentarzu w Laugharne, gdzie też spoczęła u boku męża po swej śmierci w 1994 roku.
Zarówno za życia Dylan Thomasa, jak i po jego śmierci, tworzono wiele legend i mitów o nim samym, jego nałogach, romansach, a także o okolicznościach i przyczynach jego śmierci, np. że został wcześniej ciężko pobity lub że zapił się na śmierć i miał wylew krwi do mózgu.
Jak jednak trafnie pisze Stanisław Barańczak w posłowiu do polskiego wydania wierszy Thomasa: Biograficzne legendy przenoszą się (…) do muzeum literatury, poezja zaś pozostaje, świadcząc rosnącą sławą i wpływem, że potrafi sprawić, iż (jak głosi tytuł jednego z najpopularniejszych liryków Thomasa) „śmierć utraci swoją władzę”(Stanisław Barańczak: Posłowie, w: Dylan Thomas: Wiersze wybrane. Wyboru dokonał, przełożył i posłowiem opatrzył Stanisław Barańczak. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1974, s. 207). Oprócz Stanisława Barańczaka, wiersze Dylana Thomasa tłumaczyli też na polski, m. in.: Tadeusz Jan Dehnel, Janos Frühling, Jerzy Pietrkiewicz i Anna Szpakiewicz. Dylan Thomas był idolem dla pokolenia swej młodości i dla wielu pozostał idolem do dzisiaj. Na jego cześć znany poeta i piosenkarz Robert Zimmerman przybrał przydomek artystyczny "Bob Dylan".

Z tomu „Eighteen Poems”, 1934

In the beginning

In the beginning was the three-pointed star,
One smile of light across the empty face,
One bough of bone across the rooting air,
The substance forked that marrowed the first sun,
And, burning ciphers on the round of space,
Heaven and hell mixed as they spun.

In the beginning was the pale signature,
Three-syllabled and starry as the smile,
And after came the imprints on the water,
Stamp of the minted face upon the moon;
The blood that touched the crosstree and the grail
Touched the first cloud and left a sign.

In the beginning was the mounting fire
That set alight the weathers from a spark,
A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower,
Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas,
Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock
The secret oils that drive the grass.

In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void;
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First characters of birth and death.

In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
Before the pitch was forking to a sun;
Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,
Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light
The ribbed original of love.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Na początku”
w temacie Archetypy i symbole w poezji

From love's first fever to her plague

From love's first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron age
When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,
All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk.
And earth and sky were as one airy hill.
The sun and mood shed one white light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting
Hand, the breaking of the hair,
From the first scent of the heart, the warning ghost,
And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,
The sun was red, the moon was grey,
The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,
The growing bones, the rumour of the manseed
Within the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,
And the four winds, that had long blown as one,
Shone in my ears the light of sound,
Called in my eyes the sound of light.
And yellow was the multiplying sand,
Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,
Green was the singing house.

The plum my mother picked matured slowly,
The boy she dropped from darkness at her side
Into the sided lap of light grew strong,
Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,
And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,
Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain,
To shade and knit anew the patch of words
Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,
Need no word's warmth.
The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,
That but a name, where maggots have their X.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.

One wound, one mind, spewed out the matter,
One breast gave suck the fever's issue;
From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,
The two-framed globe that spun into a score;
A million minds gave suck to such a bud
As forks my eye;
Youth did condense; the tears of spring
Dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;
One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Od gorączki miłości
po jej epidemię” w temacie Dzieciństwo

All all and allthe dry worlds, lever

I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all and all, the corpse's lover,
Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

II

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh's lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
And the face to the driven lover.

III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,
Ghost with her ghost, contagious man
With the womb of his shapeless people.
All that shapes from the caul and suckle,
Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,
Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people's fusion,
O light in zenith, the coupled bud,
And the flame in the flesh's vision.
Out of the sea, the drive of oil,
Socket and grave, the brassy blood,
Flower, flower, all all and all.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Wszystkich, o, wszystkich
suchych światów potop” w temacie Ciało mojego ciała

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Ta siła, która przez zielony
lont prze kwiaty” w temacie ”Poeci przeklęci”

Z tomu „Twenty-five Poems”, 1936

This bread I break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this time wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Ta kromka, którą kruszę”
w temacie Żniwo, plon – zwieńczenie, szczyt...

Incarnate devil

Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
And God walked there who was a fiddling warden
And played down pardon from the heavens' hill.

When we were strangers to the guided seas,
A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,
The wisemen tell me that the garden gods
Twined good and evil on an eastern tree;
And when the moon rose windily it was
Black as the beast and paler than the cross.

We in our Eden knew the secret guardian
In sacred waters that no frost could harden,
And in the mighty mornings of the earth;
Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,
All heaven in the midnight of the sun,
A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Diabeł wcielony”
w temacie Za bramą piekieł, czyli motyw diabła w poezji

To-day, this insect

To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe,
Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,
Time at the city spectacles, and half
The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,
In trust and tale I have divided sense,
Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double
Of head and tail made witnesses to this
Murder of Eden and green genesis.

The insect certain is the plague of fables.

This story's monster has a serpent caul,
Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline,
Measures his own length on the garden wall
And breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning;
A crocodile before the chrysalis,
Before the fall from love the flying heartbone,
Winged like a sabbath ass this children's piece
Uncredited blows Jericho on Eden.

The insect fable is the certain promise.

Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen,
An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse,
John's beast, Job's patience, and the fibs of vision,
Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice:
'Adam I love, my madmen's love is endless,
No tell-tale lover has an end more certain,
All legends' sweethearts on a tree of stories,
My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.'

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „ Dzisiaj, ten insekt”
w temacie ”Poeci przeklęci”

The hand that signed the paper

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand the holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Dłoń, która podpisała
papier” w temacie Motyw dłoni i rąk

And death shall have no dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „A śmierć utraci
swoją władzę” w temacie Śmierć

Z tomu „The Map of Love”, 1939

When all my five and country senses see

When all my five and country senses see,
The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,
The whispering ears will watch love drummed away
Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,
And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry
That her fond wounds are mended bitterly.
My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.

My one and noble heart has witnesses
In all love's countries, that will grope awake;
And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,
The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Gdy każdy z moich pięciu
wiejskich zmysłów przejrzy" w temacie Miej serce i patrzaj w serce

O make me a mask

O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws
Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face,
Gag of dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemies
The bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece,
The present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies,
Shaped in old armour and oak the countenance of a dunce
To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners,
And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes
To veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceive
Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „O, uczyń mi maskę”
w temacie ”Poeci przeklęci”

Once it was the colour of saying

Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;
The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo
That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.
When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park
Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo
Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,
The shade of their trees was a word of many shades
And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;
Now my saying shall be my undoing,
And every stone I wind off like a reel.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „To barwa mowy
niegdyś przesycała” w temacie W zamieci słowa...

Z tomu „Deaths and Enrances”, 1946

The Conversation of Prayers

The conversation of prayers about to be said
By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs
Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,
The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move
And the other full of tears that she will be dead,

Turns in the dark on the sound they know will arise
Into the answering skies from the green ground,
From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.
The sound about to be said in the two prayers
For the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies

Will be the same grief flying. Whom shall they calm?
Shall the child sleep unharmed or the man be crying?
The conversation of prayers about to be said
Turns on the quick and the dead, and the man on the stair
To-night shall find no dying but alive and warm

In the fire of his care his love in the high room.
And the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayer
Shall drown in a grief as deep as his made grave,
And mark the dark eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,
Dragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Dialog modlitwy”
w temacie Modlitwa

The hunchback in the park

The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early
Like the water he sat down
And Mister they called Hey mister
The truant boys from the town
Running when he had heard them clearly
On out of sound

Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery
Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
Dodging the park keeper
With his stick that picked up leaves.

And the old dog sleeper
Alone between nurses and swans
While the boys among willows
Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors

Made all day until bell time
A woman figure without fault
Straight as a young elm
Straight and tall from his crooked bones
That she might stand in the night
After the locks and chains

All night in the unmade park
After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Garbus w parku”
w temacie Kalectwo

When I Woke

When I woke, the town spoke.
Birds and clocks and cross bells
Dinned aside the coiling crowd,
The reptile profligates in a flame,
Spoilers and pokers of sleep,
The next-door sea dispelled
Frogs and satans and woman-luck,
While a man outside with a billhook,
Up to his head in his blood,
Cutting the morning off,
The warm-veined double of Time
And his scarving beard from a book,
Slashed down the last snake as though
It were a wand or subtle bough,
Its tongue peeled in the wrap of a leaf.

Every morning I make,
God in bed, good and bad,
After a water-face walk,
The death-stagged scatter-breath
Mammoth and sparrowfall
Everybody's earth.
Where birds ride like leaves and boats like ducks
I heard, this morning, waking,
Crossly out of the town noises
A voice in the erected air,
No prophet-progeny of mine,
Cry my sea town was breaking.
No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,
I drew the white sheet over the islands
And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Gdy się przebudziłem”
w temacie ”Poeci przeklęci”

Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Leż cicho,
śpij spokojnie” w temacie Śmierć

Z tomu „In Country Sleep”, 1952

Poem on his Birthday

In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toesl towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, stepple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
Herons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river's robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dyive in their turnturtle dust,
The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
Slides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swung
Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his lovews lie wrecked,
Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is alwas true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
Or the stars' seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in youg Heaven's fold
Be at cloud quaking peace,

But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick starts,
Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons' vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Thangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
That ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thuderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Poemat urodzinowy” w temacie Urodziny,
imieniny i inne ważne dni, na okoliczność których piszemy wiersze

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

dwa przekłady: Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Nie wchodź łagodnie do tej dobrej nocy”
w temacie Motyw ojca i Anny Szpakiewicz pt. „Nie idź łagodnie w tamtą dobrą noc”
w temacie Śmierć

In the White Giant's Thigh

Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago.

Through throats where many many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,

And alone in the night's eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked

Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters' lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade
Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,
Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,

Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.

Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun's bush
Rough as cows' tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk
Manes, under the quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,

Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed

Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime

And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,
Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,
And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round--

(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose's ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)--

Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.

The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the birds' boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desires in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „W udzie białego olbrzyma”
w temacie ”Poeci przeklęci”

Inne wiersze Dylana Thomasa w tematach:
O przyjaźni w poetyckich strofach, Blaski i cienie małżeństwa, Być poetą..., Światło, Trudne pytania, Wspomnienia, Elegia, Treny, epitafia i inne wiersze o tematyce żałobnej, Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.10.12 o godzinie 10:57

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

James Dickey (1923-1997) – amerykański poeta i powieściopisarz. W 1942 roku ukończył North Fulton High School w Atlancie i rozpoczął studia w Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina. Po pierwszym semestrze porzucił studia i wstąpił do sił powietrznych Stanów Zjednoczonych. Służył jako pilot myśliwca nocnego w czasie II wojny światowej oraz wojny koreańskiej. Potem ukończył studia w zakresie filozofii i astronomii na Vanderbilt University w Nashville. W latach 1950-1954 był wykładowcą na Dickey Rice University w Houston. Potem przez kilka lat pracował w reklamie, aby powrócić do pracy akademickiej na Uniwersytecie Południowej Karoliny. Debiutował dopiero w wieku 37 lat tomem wierszy „Into the Stone and Other Poems” (1960). Inne książki poetyckie: „Drowning with Others” (1962), „Two Poems of the Air” (1964), „Veteran Birth: The Gadfly Poems 1947-49” (1978), „Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems” (1981), „The Central Motion: Poems 1968-79” (1983), „Bronwen, The Traw, and the Shape-Shifter: A Poem in Four Parts” (1986), „ The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1949-92” (1992). Sławę przyniosła mu powieść „Deliverance” (1970; wyd. polskie: „Wybawienie”, 1972), sfilmowana w 1972 roku, z Burtem Reynoldsem w roli głównej. Był wyróżniony wieloma ważnymi nagrodami literackimi, m. in. The National Book Awards w 1965 roku, a w 1966 - godnością poety laureata do Biblioteki Kongresu USA (The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress ). Jego wiersze tłumaczyli na polski m. in. Teresa Truszkowska, Tadeusz Sławek, Stanisław Barańczak i Grzegorz Musiał. Ukazał się wybór poezji James Dickey: Wnętrze rzeki. Wybrał, przełożył i wstępem opatrzył Tadeusz Sławek. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków - Wrocław 1985.

The Heaven of Animals

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

dwa przekłady tego wiersza: Tadeusza Sławka pt. „Raj zwierząt” w temacie Raj,
wyspy szczęśliwe, arkadia i Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Niebo zwierząt", w temacie
Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam

Blood

In a cold night
Of somebody. Is there other
Breath? What did I say?
Or do?

Merci.
MERCI!

There is nothing,
But did I do it? I did something.
Merciful, merciful
O God, what? And

Am I still drunk?
Not enough O

Is there any light O where
Do you touch this room?
O father

Of Heaven my head cannot
Lift but my hand maybe -

Nobody is breathing what weapon
Was it? Light smashes

Down there is nothing but
Blood blood all over

Me and blood. Her hair is smeared.
My God what has got loose
In here at last? Who is

This girl? She is
Some other town same far
From home: knife

Razor, fingernails O she has been opened
Somewhere and yet

She sighs she turns in the slaughtered sheets
To me in the blood of her children.
Where in what mounth?

In the cold in the blood
Of life, she turns
to me, and my weapon
will never recover its blood.
Who is

This woman? No matter; she is safe.
She is safe with me.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Krew” w temacie Krew

Cherrylog Road

Off Highway 106
At Cherrylog Road I entered
The ’34 Ford without wheels,
Smothered in kudzu,
With a seat pulled out to run
Corn whiskey down from the hills,

And then from the other side
Crept into an Essex
With a rumble seat of red leather
And then out again, aboard
A blue Chevrolet, releasing
The rust from its other color,

Reared up on three building blocks.
None had the same body heat;
I changed with them inward, toward
The weedy heart of the junkyard,
For I knew that Doris Holbrook
Would escape from her father at noon

And would come from the farm
To seek parts owned by the sun
Among the abandoned chassis,
Sitting in each in turn
As I did, leaning forward
As in a wild stock-car race

In the parking lot of the dead.
Time after time, I climbed in
And out the other side, like
An envoy or movie star
Met at the station by crickets.
A radiator cap raised its head,

Become a real toad or a kingsnake
As I neared the hub of the yard,
Passing through many states,
Many lives, to reach
Some grandmother’s long Pierce-Arrow
Sending platters of blindness forth

From its nickel hubcaps
And spilling its tender upholstery
On sleepy roaches,
The glass panel in between
Lady and colored driver
Not all the way broken out,

The back-seat phone
Still on its hook.
I got in as though to exclaim,
“Let us go to the orphan asylum,
John; I have some old toys
For children who say their prayers.”

I popped with sweat as I thought
I heard Doris Holbrook scrape
Like a mouse in the southern-state sun
That was eating the paint in blisters
From a hundred car tops and hoods.
She was tapping like code,

Loosening the screws,
Carrying off headlights,
Sparkplugs, bumpers,
Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs,
Getting ready, already,
To go back with something to show

Other than her lips’ new trembling
I would hold to me soon, soon,
Where I sat in the ripped back seat
Talking over the interphone,
Praying for Doris Holbrook
To come from her father’s farm

And to get back there
With no trace of me on her face
To be seen by her red-haired father
Who would change, in the squalling barn,
Her back’s pale skin with a strop,
Then lay for me

In a bootlegger’s roasting car
With a string-triggered I2-gauge shotgun
To blast the breath from the air.
Not cut by the jagged windshields,
Through the acres of wrecks she came
With a wrench in her hand,

Through dust where the blacksnake dies
Of boredom, and the beetle knows
The compost has no more life.
Someone outside would have seen
The oldest car's door inexplicably
Close from within:

I held her and held her and held her,
Convoyed at terrific speed
By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us,
So the blacksnake, stiff
With inaction, curved back
Into life, and hunted the mouse

With deadly overexcitement,
The beetles reclaimed their field
As we clung, glued together,
With the hooks of the seat springs
Working through to catch us red-handed
Amidst the gray breathless batting

That burst from the seat at our backs.
We left by separate doors
Into the changed, other bodies
Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road
And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard

Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.

przekład Tadeusza Sławka pt. „Cherrylog Road” w tematach: Homo automobilus,
czyli jadę samochodem... i W świecie dziecięcych zabaw i zabawek

Falling

A 29-year-old stewardess fell ... to her death tonight when
she was swept through an emergency door that suddenly
sprang open ... The body ... was found ... three hours after
the accident.

- New York Times

The states when they black out and lie there rolling when they turn
To something transcontinental move by drawing moonlight out of the great
One-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip some sleeper next to
An engine is groaning for coffee and there is faintly coming in
Somewhere the vast beast-whistle of space. In the galley with its racks
Of trays she rummages for a blanket and moves in her slim tailored
Uniform to pin it over the cry at the top of the door. As though she blew

The door down with a silent blast from her lungs frozen she is black
Out finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat
The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something
That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air
Still neat lipsticked stockinged girdled by regulation her hat
Still on her arms and legs in no world and yet spaced also strangely
With utter placid rightness on thin air taking her time she holds it
In many place and now, still thousands of feet from her death she seems
To slow she develops interest she turns in her maneuverable body

To watch it. She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her
Self in low body-whistling wrapped intensely in all her dark dance-weight
Coming down from a marvellous leap with the delaying, dumfounding ease
Of a dream of being drawn like endless moonlight to the harvest soil
Of a central state of one’s country with a great gradual warmth coming
Over her floating finding more and more breath in what she has been using
For breath as the levels become more human seeing clouds placed honestly
Below her left and right riding slowly toward them she clasps it all
To her and can hang her hands and feet in it in peculiar ways and
Her eyes opened wide by wind, can open her mouth as wide wider and suck
All the heat from the cornfields can go down on her back with a feeling
Of stupendous pillows stacked under her and can turn turn as to someone
In bed smile, understood in darkness can go away slant slide
Off tumbling into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread
Or whirl madly on herself in endless gymnastics in the growing warmth
Of wheatfields rising toward the harvest moon.  There is time to live
In superhuman health seeing mortal unreachable lights far down seeing
An ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it arriving
In a square town and off her starboard arm the glitter of water catches
The moon by its one shaken side scaled, roaming silver My God it is good
And evil lying in one after another of all the positions for love
Making dancing sleeping and now cloud wisps at her no
Raincoat    no matter    all small towns brokenly brighter from inside
Cloud    she walks over them like rain    bursts out to behold a Greyhound
Bus shooting light through its sides    it is the signal to go straight
Down like a glorious diver    then feet first    her skirt stripped beautifully
Up    her face in fear-scented cloths    her legs deliriously bare    then
Arms out    she slow-rolls over    steadies out    waits for something great
To take control of her    trembles near feathers    planes head-down
The quick movements of bird-necks turning her head    gold eyes the insight-
eyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops    a taste for chicken overwhelming
Her    the long-range vision of hawks enlarging all human lights of cars
Freight trains    looped bridges    enlarging the moon racing slowly
Through all the curves of a river    all the darks of the midwest blazing
From above. A rabbit in a bush turns white    the smothering chickens
Huddle    for over them there is still time for something to live
With the streaming half-idea of a long stoop    a hurtling    a fall
That is controlled    that plummets as it wills    turns gravity
Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon    shining
New Powers    there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing
But the whole night    time for her to remember to arrange her skirt
Like a diagram of a bat    tightly it guides her    she has this flying-skin
Made of garments    and there are also those sky-divers on tv    sailing
In sunlight    smiling under their goggles    swapping batons back and forth
And He who jumped without a chute and was handed one by a diving
Buddy. She looks for her grinning companion    white teeth    nowhere
She is screaming    singing hymns    her thin human wings spread out
From her neat shoulders    the air beast-crooning to her    warbling
And she can no longer behold the huge partial form of the world    now
She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape    watching it lose
And gain    get back its houses and peoples    watching it bring up
Its local lights    single homes    lamps on barn roofs    if she fell
Into water she might live    like a diver    cleaving    perfect    plunge

Into another    heavy silver    unbreathable    slowing    saving
Element: there is water    there is time to perfect all the fine
Points of diving    feet together    toes pointed    hands shaped right
To insert her into water like a needle    to come out healthily dripping
And be handed a Coca-Cola    there they are    there are the waters
Of life    the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir    so let me begin
To plane across the night air of Kansas    opening my eyes superhumanly
Bright    to the damned moon    opening the natural wings of my jacket
By Don Loper    moving like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water
One cannot just fall    just tumble screaming all that time    one must use
It she is now through with all    through all    clouds    damp    hair
Straightened    the last wisp of fog pulled apart on her face like wool revealing
New darks    new progressions of headlights along dirt roads from chaos

And night    a gradual warming    a new-made, inevitable world of one’s own
Country    a great stone of light in its waiting waters    hold    hold out
For water: who knows when what correct young woman must take up her body
And fly    and head for the moon-crazed inner eye of midwest imprisoned
Water    stored up for her for years    the arms of her jacket slipping
Air up her sleeves to go    all over her? What final things can be said
Of one who starts her sheerly in her body in the high middle of night
Air    to track down water like a rabbit where it lies like life itself
Off to the right in Kansas? She goes toward    the blazing-bare lake
Her skirts neat    her hands and face warmed more and more by the air
Rising from pastures of beans    and under her    under chenille bedspreads
The farm girls are feeling the goddess in them struggle and rise brooding
On the scratch-shining posts of the bed    dreaming of female signs
Of the moon    male blood like iron    of what is really said by the moan
Of airliners passing over them at dead of midwest midnight    passing
Over brush fires    burning out in silence on little hills    and will wake
To see the woman they should be    struggling on the rooftree to become
Stars: for her the ground is closer    water is nearer    she passes
It    then banks    turns    her sleeves fluttering differently as she rolls
Out to face the east, where the sun shall come up from wheatfields she must
Do something with water    fly to it    fall in it    drink it    rise
From it    but there is none left upon earth    the clouds have drunk it back
The plants have sucked it down    there are standing toward her only
The common fields of death    she comes back from flying to falling
Returns to a powerful cry    the silent scream with which she blew down
The coupled door of the airliner    nearly    nearly losing hold
Of what she has done    remembers    remembers the shape at the heart
Of cloud    fashionably swirling    remembers she still has time to die
Beyond explanation. Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour
Of cornfields    and have enough time to kick off her one remaining
Shoe with the toes    of the other foot    to unhook her stockings
With calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair
Near death    when the body will assume without effort any position
Except the one that will sustain it    enable it to rise    live
Not die    nine farms hover close    widen    eight of them separate, leaving
One in the middle    then the fields of that farm do the same    there is no
Way to back off    from her chosen ground    but she sheds the jacket
With its silver sad impotent wings    sheds the bat’s guiding tailpiece
Of her skirt    the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse    the intimate
Inner flying-garment of her slip in which she rides like the holy ghost
Of a virgin    sheds the long windsocks of her stockings    absurd
Brassiere    then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming
Off her: no longer monobuttocked    she feels the girdle flutter    shake
In her hand    and float    upward    her clothes rising off her ascending
Into cloud    and fights away from her head the last sharp dangerous shoe
Like a dumb bird    and now will drop in    soon    now will drop

In like this    the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas    down from all
Heights    all levels of American breath    layered in the lungs from the frail
Chill of space to the loam where extinction slumbers in corn tassels thickly
And breathes like rich farmers counting: will come along them after
Her last superhuman act    the last slow careful passing of her hands
All over her unharmed body    desired by every sleeper in his dream:
Boys finding for the first time their loins filled with heart’s blood
Widowed farmers whose hands float under light covers to find themselves
Arisen at sunrise    the splendid position of blood unearthly drawn
Toward clouds    all feel something    pass over them as she passes
Her palms over her long legs    her small breasts    and deeply between
Her thighs    her hair shot loose from all pins    streaming in the wind
Of her body    let her come openly    trying at the last second to land
On her back    This is it    this

All those who find her impressed
In the soft loam    gone down    driven well into the image of her body
The furrows for miles flowing in upon her where she lies very deep
In her mortal outline    in the earth as it is in cloud    can tell nothing
But that she is there    inexplicable    unquestionable    and remember
That something broke in them as well    and began to live and die more
When they walked for no reason into their fields to where the whole earth
Caught her    interrupted her maiden flight    told her how to lie she cannot
Turn    go away    cannot move    cannot slide off it and assume another
Position    no sky-diver with any grin could save her    hold her in his arms
Plummet with her    unfold above her his wedding silks    she can no longer
Mark the rain with whirling women that take the place of a dead wife
Or the goddess in Norwegian farm girls    or all the back-breaking whores
Of Wichita. All the known air above her is not giving up quite one
Breath    it is all gone    and yet not dead    not anywhere else
Quite    lying still in the field on her back    sensing the smells
Of incessant growth try to lift her    a little sight left in the corner
Of one eye    fading    seeing something wave    lies believing
That she could have made it    at the best part of her brief goddess
State    to water    gone in headfirst    come out smiling    invulnerable
Girl in a bathing-suit ad    but she is lying like a sunbather at the last
Of moonlight    half-buried in her impact on the earth    not far
From a railroad trestle    a water tank    she could see if she could
Raise her head from her modest hole    with her clothes beginning
To come down all over Kansas    into bushes    on the dewy sixth green
Of a golf course    one shoe    her girdle coming down fantastically
On a clothesline, where it belongs    her blouse on a lightning rod:

Lies in the fields    in this field    on her broken back as though on
A cloud she cannot drop through    while farmers sleepwalk without
Their women from houses    a walk like falling toward the far waters
Of life    in moonlight    toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms
Toward the flowering of the harvest in their hands    that tragic cost
Feels herself go go toward go outward breathes at last fully
Not    and tries less once tries tries AH, GOD -

przekład Tadeusz Sławka pt. „Spadanie” w temacie Śmierć

Inne wiersze Jamesa Dickeya w tematach: Metamorfozy, O rybach i innych mieszkańcach wód, Fantomy wyobraźni, Rzeki, potoki, strumienie..., Samobójstwo w wierszach..., Motyw twarzy, Wierność i zdrada, Oślepiony błyskiem, czyli o tym, co się mowie wymykaRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 03.02.11 o godzinie 09:47

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

David Lehman (ur. 1948) – jeden z najwybitniejszych współczesnych poetów amerykańskich, także ceniony krytyk literacki i animator życia kulturalnego w USA. Urodził się w Nowym Jorku, ukończył Stuyvesant High School, Columbia University i Cambridge University w Anglii. Uzyskał stopień naukowy doktora na Uniwersytecie Columbia, gdzie wykłada literaturę i prowadzi warsztaty z creative writing. Jest też cenionym redaktorem wielu antologii poetyckich, m. in. znanej serii książek “The Best American Poetry”. Jako krytyk pozostaje pod wpływem tzw. szkoły nowojorskiej, zwłaszcza Kennetha Burke'a i Lionela Trillinga, którego był studentem. Również we własnej twórczości poetyckiej świadomie nawiązuje do współczesnych poetów nowojorskich. Jest autorem siedmiu tomów poezji: “An Alternative to Speech” (1986), “Operation Memory” (1990), “Valentine Place“(1996) , “The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry” (2000), “The Evening Sun” (2002), “When a Woman Loves a Man” (2005), “Yeshiva Boys” (2010). W październiku 2005 roku uczestniczył w międzynarodowej konferencji amerykanistycznej w Kamieniu Śląskim k. Opola. Odbył również wieczory autorskie w Poznaniu, Łodzi i Warszawie.

Z tomu “The Daily Mirror: A journal in Poetry”, 2000

January 1

Some people confuse inspiration with lightning
not me I know it comes from the lungs and air
you breathe it in you breathe it out it circulates
it's the breath of my being the wind across the face
of the waters yes but it's also something that comes
at my command like a turkey club sandwich
with a cup of split pea soup or like tones
from Benny Goodman's clarinet my clarinet
the language that never fails to respond
some people think you need to be pure of heart
not true it comes to the pure and impure alike
the patient and impatient the lovers the onanists
and the virgins you just need to be able to listen
and talk at the same time and you'll hear it like
the long-delayed revelation at the end of the novel
which turns out to be something simple a traumatic
moment that fascinated us more when it was only
a fragment an old song a strange noise a mistake
of hearing a phone that wouldn't stop ringing

February 23

Light rain is falling in Central Park
but not on Upper Fifth Avenue or Central Park West
where sun and sky are yellow and blue
Winds are gusting on Washington Square
through the arches and on to LaGuardia Place
but calm is the corner of 8th Street and Second Avenue
which reminds me of something John Ashbery said
about his poem 'Crazy Weather' he said
he was in favor of all kinds of weather
just so long as it's genuine weather
which is always unusually bad, unusually
good, or unusually indifferent,
since there isn't really any norm for weather
When he was a boy his mother met a friend
who said, 'Isn't this funny weather?'

It was one of his earliest memories

April 14

The summer I worked
in the post office
all the carriers were
nervous wrecks who
had gone to Vietnam
and fathered children with
Vietnamese prostitutes
I saw their hands shake
there must be a reasonable
explanation there must
and made up my mind right
there I wouldn't go no
matter what it was 1967
and the Spanish girl who
opened the door when I
delivered the parcel had
black hair brown eyes and
nothing on beneath her slip

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. “14 kwietnia”
w temacie Wiersze jak kartki z pamietnika

April 25

America you are not getting any younger
looking less like T.S. Eliot each day
you would rather play volleyball
on the beach than listen to mermaids
the average age of the citizenry remains 18
and we would burn our draft cards
at the campfire singing "If I had a hammer"
in Spanish except there are no draft cards
left they're like the baseball cards
the mothers of America threw out when
their sons went to college and took the pills
that would keep them young forever
in New York, where everyone's in a hurry,
and I walk fast to seem inconspicuous
and look like I know where I'm going
to find you the way a sailor on his one-day leave
finds a woman to marry and never see again

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. “25 kwietnia”
w temacie Wiersze jak kartki z pamietnika

September 22

It's the day of the ram
and the head of the year
Rosh Ha'Shanah at
services I sat next to
Mel Torme who outshone
all comers with his bar
mitzvah heroics while on
my left is Barnett Newman
big talker whose favorite
subjects include the horses
and the stock market he
knows the odds the women
are seated upstairs this is
an orthodox congregation
very serious I make
eye contact with the wife
of Menelaus who runs off
with Paris confident I'm Paris.

Z tomu “When a Woman Loves a Man”, 2005

When a Woman Loves a Man

When she says margarita she means daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means mercurial.
And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"
she means, "Put your arms around me from behind
as I stand disconsolate at the window."

He's supposed to know that.

When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in Virginia
or he is in Boston, writing, and she is in New York, reading,
or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he
is raking leaves in Ithaca
or he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolate
at the window overlooking the bay
where a regatta of many-colored sails is going on
while he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

When a woman loves a man it is one ten in the morning
she is asleep he is watching the ball scores and eating pretzels
drinking lemonade
and two hours later he wakes up and staggers into bed
where she remains asleep and very warm.

When she says tomorrow she means in three or four weeks.
When she says, "We're talking about me now,"
he stops talking. Her best friend comes over and says,
"Did somebody die?"

When a woman loves a man, they have gone
to swim naked in the stream
on a glorious July day
with the sound of the waterfall like a chuckle
of water rushing over smooth rocks,
and there is nothing alien in the universe.

Ripe apples fall about them.
What else can they do but eat?

When he says, "Ours is a transitional era,"
"that's very original of you," she replies,
dry as the martini he is sipping.

They fight all the time
It's fun
What do I owe you?
Let's start with an apology
Ok, I'm sorry, you dickhead.
A sign is held up saying "Laughter."
It's a silent picture.
"I've been fucked without a kiss," she says,
"and you can quote me on that,"
which sounds great in an English accent.

One year they broke up seven times and threatened to do it
another nine times.

When a woman loves a man, she wants him to meet her at the
airport in a foreign country with a jeep.
When a man loves a woman he's there. He doesn't complain that
she's two hours late
and there's nothing in the refrigerator.

When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She's like a child crying
at nightfall because she didn't want the day to end.

When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking:
as midnight to the moon is sleep to the beloved.
A thousand fireflies wink at him.
The frogs sound like the string section
of the orchestra warming up.
The stars dangle down like earrings the shape of grapes.

przekład pt. „Kiedy kobieta kocha mężczyznę”
w temacie Miłość

Wittgenstein's Ladder

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them––as steps––to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Tractatus”

1.The first time I met Wittgenstein, I was
late.  “The traffic was murder,” I explained.
He spent the next forty-five minutes
analyzing this sentence.  Then he was silent.
I wondered why he had chosen a water tower
for our meeting.  I also wondered how
I would leave, since the ladder I had used
To climb up here ha fallen to the ground.

2.
Wittgenstein  served as a machine gunner
in the Austrian Army in World War I.
Before the war he studied logic in Cambridge
with Bertrand Russell.  Having inherited
his father’s fortune (iron and steel),  he
gave away his money, not to the poor, whom
it would corrupt,  but to relations so rich
it would not thus affect them.

3.
He would visit Russell’s rooms at midnight
and pace back and forth “like a caged tiger.
On arrival,  he would announce that when
he left he would commit suicide.  So, in spite
of getting sleepy, I did not like to turn him out.”On
such a night,  after hours of dead silence,  Russell asked,
“Wittgenstein, are you thinking about logic or about
your sins?” “Both,” he said, and resumed his silence.

4.
On leave in Vienna in August 1918
he assembled his notebook entries
into the Tractatus.  Realizing it provided
the definitive solution to all the problems
of philosophy, he decided to broaden
his interests.  He became a schoolteacher,
then a gardener’s assistant at a monastery
near Vienna.  He took up architecture.

5.
He returned to Cambridge in 1929,
Receiving his doctorate for the Tractatus,
“a work of genius,” in G.E. Moore’s opinion.
Starting in 1930 he gave a weekly lecture
and led a weekly discussion group.  He spoke
without notes amid long periods of silence.
Afterwards,  exhausted,  he went to the movies
and sat in the front row.  He like Carmen Miranda.

6.
Philosophy was an activity,   not a doctrine.
“Solipsism, when its implications are followed out
strictly,  coincides with pure realism,” he wrote.
Dozens of dons wondered what he meant.  Asked
how he knew that “this color is red,” he smiled
and said, “because I have learnt English.”  There
were no other questions.  Wittgenstein let the
silence gather.  Then he said, “This itself is the answer.”

7.
Religion went beyond the boundaries of language,
yet the impulse to run against “the walls of our cage,”
though “perfectly,  absolutely useless,” was not to be
dismissed.  A.J. Ayer, one of Oxford’s ablest minds,
was puzzled.  If logic cannot prove a nonsensical
conclusion, why didn’t Wittgenstein abandon it,
“along with the rest of metaphysics, as not worth
serious attention, except perhaps for sociologists”?

8.
Because God does not reveal himself in this world, and
“the value of this work,” Wittgenstein wrote, “is that
it shows how little is achieved when these problems
are solved.”  When I quoted Gertrude Stein’s line
about Oakland, “there’s no there there,”he nodded.
Was there a there,  I persisted.  His answer: Yes and No.
It was as impossible to feel another person’s pain
as to suffer another person’s toothache.

9.
At Cambridge the dons quoted him reverently.
I asked them what they thought was his biggest
contribution to philosophy. “Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent,” one said.
Others spoke of his conception of important
nonsense.  But I liked best the answer John
Wisdom gave: “His asking of the question
<<Can one play chess without the queen?>>”

10.
Wittgenstein preferred American detective
stories to British philosophy.  He liked lunch
and didn’t care what it was, “so long as it was
always the same,” noted Professor Malcolm
of Cornell, a former student, in whose house
in Ithaca Wittgenstein spent hours doing
handyman chores.  He was happy then.
There was no need to say a word.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. „Drabina Wittgensteina”
w temacie Umysł i potęga myśli

To the Autor of Glare

There comes a time when the story turns into twenty
different stories and soon after that he academy of shadows
retreats to the cave of a solitary boy in a thriving

metropolis where no one remembers the original story
whic is, of course, a sign of its great success: to be forgotten
implies you were once known, and that is something we

can prize more than the gesture greater than the achievement:
but I wander from the main point: the main point is one
among many fine dots so fine you need a microscope to see them

but then they multiply like germs: the work of the deepest cells
is ergonomically incorrect, but effective nevertheless, like
my footprints in the snow leading to you, wou would be my father

if this were a dream and I on the verge of waking up somewhere
other than home: but the hours remain ours, though they
were gone almost as soon as they arrived, hat and coat in hand.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. “Do autora Glare”
w temacie W zapomnieniu

A History of Modern Poetry

The idea was to have a voice of your own,
distinctive, sounding like nobody else's
The result was that everybody sounded alike
The new idea was to get rid of ideas
and substitute images especially the image
of a rock so everyone wrote a poem
with the image of a rock in it capped with snow
or unadorned this was in the early 1970s
a few years before Pet Rocks were a Christmas craze
showing that poetry was ahead of its time as usual
and poetry had moved on
the new idea was to make language the subject
because language was an interference pattern
there was no such thing as unmediated discourse
and the result was that everybody sounded alike

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. “Historia poezji nowoczesnej”
w temacie Czym jest wiersz?

Inne wiersze Davida Lehmana w tematach: Na falach eteru, czyli poezja i radio,
Wątki szekspirowskie w poezji, Wielcy i znani, Wędrówki po śladach historii,
Wiersze jak kartki z pamiętnika, Co się poetom śni...?, Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok, Być poetą... , W zamieci słowa..., Zaplątani w wirtualnej sieciMarta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 16.08.12 o godzinie 07:09

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) – poeta amerykański, podpisujący najczęściej swoje utwory jako "e. e. cummings". Urodził się w Cambridge w stanie Massachusetts.
Jego ojciec był profesorem socjologii i nauk politycznych na Uniwersytecie Harwarda.
W 1900 roku zrezygnował z pracy naukowo-dydaktycznej i został wyświęcony na pastora kościoła kongregacjonalistów w Bostonie. W latach 1911-1916 Edward studiował na Harwardzie filologię klasyczną i nowożytną. W czasie studiów publikował swoje pierwsze utwory poetyckie. W 1917 roku zgłosił się na ochotnika do wojska. Został wysłany do Francji, gdzie służył jako kierowca ambulansu na froncie w Normandii. Wkrótce na podstawie przechwyconej korespondencji między nim a jego przyjacielem Williamem S. Brownem, został oskarżony o postawy pacyfistyczne i trafił wraz ze swoim przyjacielem do obozu karnego
w La Ferté Macé. Dzięki staraniom ojca poety, obaj odzyskali wolność po trzech miesiącach, jednak od tej pory Cummings rzeczywiście stał się radykalnym pacyfistą. W latach 1918-
-1921 mieszkał w Nowym Jorku, a w latach 1921-23 w Paryżu. W tym czasie zaprzyjaźnił się ze znanymi poetami, m. in. z Ezrą Poundem i Hartem Crane'em. W 1920 roku ojciec poety zginął w wypadku samochodowym, a matka została ciężko ranna. Wydarzenie to wywarło na nim silne piętno. Od 1923 roku mieszkał, z krótkimi przerwami, w Nowym Jorku, stając się czołowym przedstawicielem nowojorskiej bohemy artystycznej. Oprócz poezji, zajmował się też dramatopisarstwem i malarstwem. Był żonaty dwukrotnie, ale oba związki nie były udane i szybko zakończyły się rozwodami. Zmarł w wyniku wylewu krwi do mózgu, w wieku 68 lat.
Opublikował tomy poezji: „Tulips and Chimneys” (Tulipany i kominy, 1923), „&” (1925), „XLI Poems” (XLI wierszy, 1925), „Is 5” (Równa się 5, 1926), „ViVa” (1931), „No Thanks” (Bez podziękowań, 1935), „New Poems" (Nowe wiersze, 1938), „50 Poems” (50 wierszy, 1940), „Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems" (Xaipe: Siedemdziesiąt jeden wierszy, 1950), „95 Poems” (95 wierszy, 1958); pośmiertnie: „73 Poems” (73 wiersze, 1963), „Complete Poems 1913-1962” (Wiersze zebrane 1913-1962, 1972; wyd. II 1991).
Wiersze Cummingsa tłumaczyli na polski m. in. Czesław Miłosz, Julia Hartwig, Artur Międzyrzecki, Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, Stanisław Barańczak i Piotr Sommer. Piosenki
do jego tekstów komponuje i śpiewa Grzegorz Turnau. W Polsce opublikowano dwa tomy jego poezji: 150 wierszy. Wybrał i przełożył oraz posłowiem opatrzył Stanisław Barańczak. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1983; wyd. poprawione 1994 oraz Wybór wierszy. Wybrał
i wstępem opatrzył Artur Międzyrzecki. PIW, Warszawa 1985. Obszerny wybór jego wierszy zawiera też książka: Piotr Sommer: O krok od nich. Przekłady z poetów amerykańskich. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2006.

Z tomu „Tulips and Chimneys”, 1923





* * *

Thy fingers make early flowers of
all things.
thy hair mostly the hours love:
a smoothness which
sings,saying
(though love be a day)
do not fear,we will go amaying.

thy whitest feet crisply are straying.
Always
thy moist eyes are at kisses playing,
whose strangeness much
says;singing
(though love be a day)
for which girl art thou flowers bringing?

To be thy lips is a sweet thing
and small.
Death,Thee i call rich beyond wishing
if this thou catch,
else missing.
(though love be a day
and life be nothing,it shall not stop kissing).

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[Dotyk twych palców
zmienia wszystkie rzeczy...]” w temacie Dotknij mnie...

* * *

i spoke to thee
with a smile and thou didst not
answer
thy mouth is as
a chord of crimson music

Come hither
O thou,is life not a smile?

i spoke to thee with
a song and thou
didst not listen
thine eyes are as a vase
of divine silence

Come hither
O thou, is life not a song?

i spoke
to thee with a soul and
thou didst not wonder
thy face is as a dream locked
in white fragrance

Come hither
O thou,is life not love?

i speak to
thee with a sword
and thou art silent
thy breast is as a tomb
softer than flowers

Come hither
O thou,is love not death?

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „***[mówiłem
do ciebie...]” w temacie Mów do mnie...

* * *

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

hem only with

spring)

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[O słodka spontaniczna...]”
w temacie Oślepiony błyskiem, czyli o tym, co się mowie wymyka

* * *

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things--
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless,the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[panie z Cambridge
mieszkają w umeblowanych duszach...]” w temacie Kobiecy portret

* * *

the moon is hiding in
her hair.
The
lily
of heaven
full of all dreams,
draws down.

cover her briefness in singing
close her with the intricate faint birds
by daisies and twilights
Deepen her,

Recite
upon her
flesh
the rain’s

pearls singly-whispering

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. "Księżyc się kryje"
w temacie Kołysanki, nie tylko dla dzieci

Z tomu „&”, 1925

* * *

Take for example this:
if to the colour of midnight
to a more than darkness (which
is myself and Paris and all
things) the bright
rain
occurs deeply,beautifully

and i(being at a window
in this midnight)
for no reason feel
deeply completely conscious of the rain or rather
Somebody who uses roofs and streets skilfully to make a
possible and beautiful sound:

if a(perhaps)clock strikes,in the alive
coolness,very faintly and
finally through altogether delicate gestures of rain

a colour comes,which is morning,O do not wonder that

(just at the edge of day)i surely
make a millionth poem which will not wholly
miss you;or if i certainly create,lady,
one of the thousand selves who are your smile.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[Chociażby to na przykład...]”
w temacie Oślepiony błyskiem, czyli o tym, co się mowie wymyka

* * *

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „***[Wiosna jest jak
jakaś może ręka...]” w temacie Nim przyjdzie wiosna...

* * *

the mind is its own beautiful prisoner.
Mind looked long at the sticky moon
opening in dusk her new wings

then decently hanged himself,one afternoon.

The last thing he saw was you
naked amid unnaked things,

your flesh,a succinct wandlike animal,
a little strolling with the futile purr
of blood;your sex squeaked like a billiard-cue
chalking itself,as not to make an error,
with twists spontaneously methodical.
He suddenly tasted worms windows and roses

he laughed,and closed his eyes as a girl closes
her left hand upon a mirror.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt.***[umysł jest swoim
własnym pięknym więźniem...]” w temacie Umysł i potęga myśli

* * *

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[lubię swe ciało,
kiedy jest przy twoim ]” w temacie Ciało mojego ciała

* * *

when you went away it was morning
(that is,big horses;light feeling up
streets;heels taking derbies (where?) a pup
hurriedly hunched over swill;one butting

trolley imposingly empty;snickering
shop doors unlocked by white-grub
faces) clothes in delicate hubbub

as you stood thinking of anything,

maybe the world….But i have wondered since
isn’t it odd of you really to lie
a sharp agreeable flower between my

amused legs
kissing with little dints

of april,making the obscene shy
breasts tickle,laughing when i wilt and wince

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[gdy odchodziłeś,
był właśnie poranek...]” w temacie Rozstania

Z tomu „XLI Poems”, 1925

* * *

earth like a tipsy
biddy with an old mop punching
underneath
conventions exposes

hidden obscenities
nudging
into neglected sentoments brings
to light dusty

heroisms
and
finally colliding with the most
expensive furniture upsets

a
crucifix which smashes into several
pieces and is hurriedly picked up and
thrown on the ash-heap

where
lies
what was once the discobolus of
one

Myron

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[ziemia
jak podchmielona...]” w temacie Świecie nasz

Z tomu „Is 5”, 1926

* * *

death is more than
certain a hundred these
sounds crowds odours it
is in a hurry
beyonmd that any this
taxi smile or angle we do

not sell and buy
things so necessary as
is death and unlike shirts
neckties trousers
we cannot wear it out

no sir which is why
granted who discovered
America ether the movies
may claim general importance

to me to you nothing is
what particularly
mastters hence in a

little sunlight and less
moonlight ourselves against the worms

hate laugh shimmy

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[śmierć
jest czymś więcej niż...]” w temacie Śmierć

* * *

my sweet old etcetera
aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting

for,
my sister

Isabel created hundreds
(and
hundreds)of socks not to
mention fleaproof earwarmers
etcetera wristers etcetera, my
mother hoped that

i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et

cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)

przekład Czesława Miłosza pt. „***[moje słodkie
stare etcetera...] w temacie Wspomnienia

* * *

i go to this window

just as day dissolves
when it is twilight(and
looking up in fear

i see the new moon
thinner than a hair)

making me feel
how myself has been coarse and dull
compared with you, silently who are
and cling
to my mind always

But now she sharpens and becomes crisper
until i smile with knowing
-and all about
herself

the sprouting largest final air

plunges
inward with hurled
downward thousands of enormous dreams

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[podchodzę
do tego okna...]” w temacie Blask (wysokich) okien

* * *

i am a beggar always
who begs in your mind

(slightly smiling, patient, unspeaking
with a sign on his
chest
BLIND)yes i

am this person of whom somehow
you are never wholly rid(and who

does not ask for more than
just enough dreams to
live on)
after all, kid

you might as well
toss him a few thoughts

a little love preferably,
anything which you can’t
pass off on other people: for
instance a
plugged promise-

the he will maybe (hearing something
fall into his hat)go wandering
after it with fingers;till having

found
what was thrown away
himself
taptaptaps out of your brain, hopes, life
to(carefully turning a
corner)never bother you any more

przekład Artura Międzyrzeckiego pt. „Jestem
żebrakiem wiecznie” w temacie Bez wzajemności

Z tomu „ViVa”, 1931





ohld song

you Know
a fly and
his reflection walking upon

a mirror this is
friday I

what

3 a fly
&

her his Its image
strutting (very
jerkily) not toucH-

ing becausee separated by an imprregnable

Because (amount of inter
-vening) anyway You
know Separated what
i Mean

           (oweld song by
           ;neither you nor i and

by the way)

   ,which is not fly

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „staara
piosenka” w temacie Owady są wszędzie...

* * *

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „***[jeżeli są jakieś
nieba...] w temacie Raj, wyspy szczęśliwe, arkadia

* * *

nothing is more exactly terrible than
to be alone in the house, with somebody and
with something)
                         You are gone. there is laughter

and despair impersonates a street

i lean from the window, behold ghosts,
                                                             a man
hugging a woman in a park. Complete.

and slightly (why?or lest we understand)
slightly I am hearing somebody
coming up stairs, carefully
(carefully climbing carpeted flight after
carpeted flight. in stillness, climbing
the carpeted stairs of terror)

and continually i am seeing something

inhaling gently a cigarette (in a mirror

przekład Julii Hartwig pt. „***[nic nie jest
równie straszne jak...]” w temacie Lęk

Z tomu „No Thanks”, 1935





* * *

little man
(in a hurry
full of an
important worry)
halt stop forget relax

wait

(little child
who have tried
who have failed
who have cried)
lie bravely down

sleep

big rain
big snow
big sun
big moon
(enter

us)

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[mały człowieku...]”
w temacie ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”...

* * *

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "***[przytul
no się powiedział...]" w temacie Erotyka

Z tomu „New Poems”, 1938

* * *

lucky means finding
Holes where
pockets aren't lucky
's to spend

laghter
not money lucky are
Breathe
grow dream

die love not
Fear eat sleep kill
and have you am luck
-y is we lucky luck-

ier
luck
-I-
est

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[mieć
szczęście znaczy znajdować...]” w temacie Szczęście

Z tomu „50 Poems”, 1940

* * *

flotsam and jetsam
are gentlemen poeds
urseappeal netsam
our spinsters and coeds)

thoroughly bretish
they scout the inhuman
itarian fetish
that man isn't wuman

vive the millenni
um three cheers for labor
give all things to enni
one bugger thy nabor

(neck and senecktie
are gentlemen ppoyds
even whose recktie
are covered by lloyd's

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[wrakami
i brakami...]” w temacie Być poetą...

* * *

up into the silence the green silence with a white earth in it
you will(kiss me)go

out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it

you will go(kiss me

down into your memory and
a memory and memory

i)kiss me,(will go)

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[w górę
w ciszę w zieloną...]” w temacie Cisza w poezji

* * *

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail

it is more mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[miłość
jest gęstsza niż zapomnieć...]” w temacie Miłość

* * *

yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year

both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're)

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[tak ma łagodny klimat...]”
w tematach: Miłość i Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

Z tomu „One Times One”, 1944





* * *

plato told

him:he couldn't
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn't believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn't believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

przekład Artura Międzyrzeckiego pt. „Platon
mówił” w temacie Wiara

* * *

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                                A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[litości
to ruchliwe monstrum...]”w temacie O litości

Z tomu „Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems”, 1950





* * *

nine birs (rising

through a gold moment) climb:
ing i

-nto
wintry
twi-

light
(all together a
manying
one

-ness) nine
souls
only alive with a single mys-

tery (liftingly
caught upon falling) silent!

Ly living the dying of glory

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[dziewięć ptaków
wznoszących się...]” w temacie Trochę o duszy

* * *

no time ago
or else a life
walking in the dark
i met christ
jesus)my heart
flopped over
and lay still
while he passed(as
close as i'm to you
yes closer
made of nothing
except loneliness

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „***[czas temu żaden...]” w temacie
Między sacrum a profanum (motywy religijne w poezji świeckiej)

* * *

maybe god

is a child
's hand) very carefully
bring
-ing
to you and to
me(and quite with
out crushing)the

papery weightless diminutive

world
with a hole in
it out
of which demons with wings would be streaming if
something had(maybe they couldn't
agree)not happened(and floating-
ly int

o

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[a może bóg...]” w temacie
Między sacrum a profanum (motywy religijne w poezji świeckiej)

Z tomu „95 Poems”, 1958





* * *

in time of daffodils (who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so (forgetting seem)

in time of roses (who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek (forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[gdy
kwitnie żonkil (ten co wie...]” w temacie Kwiaty

* * *

i love you much (most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

przekład Artura Międzyrzeckiego pt. „***[kocham cię mocniej
(najpiękniejsza jedyna)...]” w temacie Miłość

* * *

silence

is
a
loking

bird: the

turn
ong; edge, of
life

(inquiry before snow

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[cisza...]”
w temacie Cisza w poezji

* * *

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "***[Noszę twe serce
z tobą...]" w temacie Miej serce i patrzaj w serce

Z tomu „73 Poems”, 1963





* * *

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[jeśli
szukasz prawd...]” w temacie Prawda i kłamstwo

* * *

may i be gay

like every lark
who lifts his life

from all the dark

who wings his why

beyond beacause
and sings an if

of day to yes

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[obym był
wciąż wesół...]” w temacie Pierzaści bracia mniejsi

* * *

Me up at does

out of the floor
quietly Stare

a poisoned mouse

still who alive

is asking What
have i done that

You wouldn't have

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „***[O parę
kroków...]” w temacie Trudne pytania

Inne wiersze e. e. cummingsa w tematach:
Modlitwa, Palindromy, anagramy i inne zabawy słowem w poezji, Ameryka wczoraj
i dziś/W zamieci słowa..., Poezja codzienności, Nierząd i prostytucja, Wojna, Czym
jest wiersz?Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 07.01.12 o godzinie 22:35

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) – jeden z najwybitniejszych poetów amerykańskich XX wieku, współtwórca i czołowy autor tzw. szkoły nowojorskiej, obok Franka O'Hary, Johna Ashbery'ego i Jamesa Schuylera. Podczas II wojny światowej, mając osiemnaście lat, służył w amerykańskiej piechocie na Filipinach. Po wojnie studiował na Universytecie Harvarda. Podczas studiów publikował pierwsze wiersze i otrzymał prestiżową Nagrodę Poetycką Glascock. Wówczas poznał też Johna Ashbery'ego, z którym tworzył po wyjeździe do Nowego Jorku w 1948 roku podwaliny słynnej „szkoły nowojorskiej” w poezji. W Nowym Jorku kontynuował studia, uwieńczone obroną pracy doktorskiej na Uniwersytecie Columbia. W 1954 roku uzyskał stypendium naukowe Fulbrighta i wyjechał ze swoja pierwszą żoną Janice Elwood na przeszło rok do Francji i Włoch. W 1959 roku został zatrudniony na Uniwersytecie Columbia, gdzie pracował jako profesor literatury angielskiej i creative writing przez ponad 40 lat. W latach 1960-1962 był redaktorem znanego pisma literackiego "Locus Solus". W 1996 roku został członkiem Amerykańskiej Akademii Sztuki i literatury (American Academy of Arts and Letters ). Zmarł w 2002 roku na białaczkę, w wieku 77 lat.
Od swego debiutu poetyckiego „Poems” w 1953 roku opublikował 30 tomów poezji, m. in.: „Thank You and Other Poems” (1962), „The Pleasures of Peace and Other Poems” (1969), „The Art of Love: Poems” (1975), „The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951” (1979), „Days and Nights” (1982), „On the Edge” (1986), „Seasons on Earth” (1987), „One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays” (1988), „One Train” (1994), „Straits” (1998), „New Addresses” (2000). Pisał też sztuki teatralne, scenariusze, powieści i opowiadania.
Jego wiersze tłumaczyli na polski: Andrzej Szuba, Agata Preis-Smith, Stanisław Barańczak
i Piotr Sommer. Ukazały się one w „Literaturze na Świecie” nr 7/1986 (numer monograficzny poświęcony „szkole nowojorskiej”), 3/1994, 6/1997 i 10-11/2000, w antologii Stanisława Barańczaka: Od Walta Whitmana do Boba Dylana. Antologia poezji amerykańskiej. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1998 i antologii Piotra Sommera: O krok od nich. Przekłady z poetów amerykańskich. Biuro literackie , Wrocław 2006.

Z tomu „Thank You and Other Poems”, 1962

To You

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;
For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not
Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a
Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails
In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from
The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;
I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields
Always, to be near you, even in my heart
When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
The place where I again think of you, a new
Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow
Of a ship which sails
From Hartford to Miami, and I love you
Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun
Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

przekład Agaty Preis-Smith pt. „Do ciebie” w temacie Miłość

Permamently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing-for example, "Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently
to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby."

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throa -
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

przekład Agaty Preis-Smith pt. „Permanentnie” w temacie W zamieci słowa

You Were Wearing

You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.
In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.
Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me, "Do most boys think that most girls are bad?"
I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip.
"No," I said, "it's girls who think that boys are bad." Then we read Snowbound together
And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes.

Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes comb in her hair. We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville
As well as with illustrations from his book Moby Dick and from his novella, Benito Cereno.
Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: "How about a drink, everyone?"
I said, "Let's go outside a while." Then we went onto the porch and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing.
You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.
In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid mashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

przekład Andrzeja Szuby pt. „Miałaś na sobie” w temacie Być poetą...

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Wariacje na temat Williama Carlosa Williamsa”
w temacie Inspiracje, nawiązania i parafrazy poetyckie

Z tomu „The Art of Love: Poems”, 1975

The Magic of Numbers

The Magic of Numbers - 1

How strange it was to hear the furniture being moved
around in the apartment upstairs!
I was twenty-six, and you were twenty-two.

The Magic of Numbers - 2

You asked me if I wanted to run, but I said no
and walked on.
I was nineteen, and you were seven.

The Magic of Numbers - 3

Yes, but does X really like us?
We were both twenty-seven.

The Magic of Numbers - 4

You look like Jerry Lewis (1950).

The Magic of Numbers - 5

Grandfather and grandmother want you to go
over to their house for dinner.
They were sixty-nine, and I was two and a half.

The Magic of Numbers - 6

One day when I was twenty-nine years old I met you
and nothing happened.

The Magic of Numbers - 7

No, of course it wasn’t I who came to the library!
Brown eyes, flushed cheeks, brown hair. I was
twenty-nine, and you were sixteen.

The Magic of Numbers - 8

After we made love one night in Rockport I went
outside and kissed the road
I felt so carried away. I was twenty-three, and you were nineteen.

The Magic of Numbers - 9

I was twenty-nine, and so were you. We had a very passionate time.
Everything I read turned into a story about you and me,
and everything I did was turned into a poem.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Magia liczb” w temacie Poezja liczb

Alive for an Instant

I have a bird in my head and a pig in my stomach
And a flower in my genitals and a tiger in my genitals
And a lion in my genitals and I am after you but I have a song in my heart
And my song is a dove
I have man in my hands I have a woman in my shoes
I have a landmark decision in my reason
I have a death rattle in my nose I have summer in my brain water
I have dreams in my toes
This is the matter with me and the hammer of my mother and father
Who created me with everything
But I lack clam I lack rose
Though I do not lack extreme delicacy of rose petal
Who is it that I wish to astonish?
In the birdcall I found a reminder of you
But it was thin and brittle and gone in an instant
Has nature set out to be a great entertainer?
Obviously not a great reproducer? A great Nothing?
Well I will leave that up to you
I have a knocking woodpecker in my heart and I think I have three souls
One for love one for poetry and one for acting out my insane self
Not insane but boring but perpendicular but untrue but true
The three rarely sing together take my hand it’s active
The active ingredient in it is a touch
I am Lord Byron I am Percy Shelley I am Ariosto
I eat the bacon I went down the slide I have a thunderstorm in my inside I will never hate you
But how can this maelstrom be appealing? do you like menageries? my god
Most people want a man! So here I am
I have a pheasant in my reminders I have a goshawk in my clouds
Whatever is it which has led all these animals to you?
A resurrection? or maybe an insurrection? an inspiration?
I have a baby in my landscape and I have a wild rat in my secrets from you.

przekład Andrzeja Szuby pt. „Przez chwilkę żywy” w temacie Być poetą...

Z tomu „The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951”, 1979

The Simplicity of the Unknown Past

Out the window, the cow out the window
The steel frame out the window, the rusted candlestand;
Out the window the horse, the handle-less pan,
Real things. Inside the window my heart
That only beats for you—a verse of Verlaine.
Inside the window of my heart is a style
And a showplace of onion-like construction.
Inside the window is a picture of a cat
And outside the window is the cat indeed
Jumping up now to the top of the
Roof of the garage; its paws help take it there.
Inside this window is a range
Of things which outside the window are like stars
Arranged but huge in fashion.
Outside the window is a car, is the rusted wheel of a bicycle.
Inside it are words and paints; outside smooth hair
Of a rabbit, just barely seen. Inside the glass
Of this window is a notebook, with little marks,
They are words. Outside this window is a wall
With little parts—they are stones. Inside this window
Is the start, and outside is the beginning. A heart
Beats. The cat leaps. The room is light, the sun is almost blinding.
Inside this body is a woman, inside whom is a star
Of some kind or other, which is like a uterus; and
Outside the window a farm machine starts.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Prostota nieznanej przeszłości”
w temacie Poezja codzienności

Z tomu „One Train”, 1994

One Train May Hide Another
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line--
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath
may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by
the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
or the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading
A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit
at the foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one.
It can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Jeden pociąg może zasłonić drugi”
w temacie Wstrzymaj się chwilo, jesteś tak piękna!...

Inne wiersze Kennetha Kocha w tematach: Widzę ich w duszy teatrze..., Czas, zegary..., Buddyzm i kultura Dalekiego Wschodu/Mosty w poezji, Szczęście, Między sacrum
a profanum (motywy religijne w poezji świeckiej), Przypowieść, Poetycka garderoba..., Drzwi, Miniatury poetyckie.Krzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 06.03.11 o godzinie 14:21

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Mark Strand (ur. 1934) – jeden z najwybitniejszych współczesnych poetów amerykańskich. Urodził się w Summerside na Wyspie Księcia Edwarda w Kanadzie.
W młodości dość często zmieniał miejsca zamieszkania, podróżując po całym kontynencie Ameryki: Północnej, Południowej i Środkowej. Studiował literaturę angloamerykańską
w Antioch College w Ohio i malarstwo na Yale Iniversity. W latach 1960-1961 przebywał we Włoszech na stypendium Fulbrighta, studiując głównie XIX-wieczną poezję włoską. W latach 1965-1966 wykładał jako stypendysta Fulbrighta na Uniwersytecie Federalnym w Rio de Janerio, co też zapoczątkowało jego dalszą karierę nauczyciela akademickiego. Wykładał na wielu wyższych uczelniach, m. in. na Brooklyn College, Princeton University, John Hopkins University, Univeristy of Chicago. Obecnie jest profesorem na Uniwersytecie Columbia
w Nowym Jorku. Wydał 17 tomów poezji: „Sleeping with One Eye Open” (1964), „Reasons
for Moving” (1968), „Darker” (1970), „The Story of Our Lives” (1973), „The Sargentville Notebook,” (1973), „Elegy for My Father” (1978), „The Late Hour” (1978), „Selected Poems,” (1980), „The Continuous Life” (1990), New Poems” (1990), „The Monument” (1991), „Dark Harbor” (1993), „Blizzard of One” (1998), „Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More” (1999), „89 Clouds” (1999), „Man and Camel” (2006), „New Selected Poems” (2007). Od 1981 roku jest członkiem American Academy of Arts and Letters. W latach 1990-1991 pełnił prestiżową funkcję United States Poet Laureate przy Bibliotece Kongresu. Wśród wielu przyznanych mu nagród literackich na uwagę zasługuje Nagroda Pulitzera, którą otrzymał w 1999 roku za tom „Blizzard of One”.
Wiersze Marka Stranda tłumaczyli na język polski: Stanisław Barańczak, Grzegorz Musiał, Irena Grudzińska-Gross i Agnieszka Kołakowska. Najpełniejszy ich wybór ukazał się
w książce Mark Strand: Krok przed ciemnością. Wybór, przekład i wstęp Agnieszka Kołakowska. Wyd. Znak, Kraków 2010.

Z tomu „Sleeping with One Eye Open”, 1964

When the Vacation Is Over for Good

It will be strange
Knowing at last it couldn’t go on forever,
The certain voice telling us over and over
That nothing would change,

And remembering too,
Because by then it will all be done with, the way
Things were, and how we had wasted time as though
There was nothing to do,

When, in a flash
The weather turned, and the lofty air became
Unbearably heavy, the wind strikingly dumb
And our cities like ash,

And knowing also,
What we never suspected, that is was something like summer
At its more august except that the nights were warmer
And the clouds seemed to glow,

And even then,
Because we will not have changed much, wondering what
Will become of things, and who will be left to do it
All over again,

And somehow trying,
But still unable, to know just what it was
That went so completely wrong, or why it is
We are dying.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Gdy wakacje się
skończą na dobre” w temacie O przemijaniu...

The Tunnel

A man has been standing
in front of my house
for days. I peek at him
from the living room
window and at night,
unable to sleep,
I shine my flashlight
down on the lawn.
He is always there.

After a while
I open the front door
just a crack and order
him out of my yard.
He narrows his eyes
and moans. I slam
the door and dash back
to the kitchen, then up
to the bedroom, then down.

I weep like a schoolgirl
and make obscene gestures
through the window. I
write large suicide notes
and place them so he
can read them easily.
I destroy the living
room furniture to prove
I own nothing of value.
When he seems unmoved
I decide to dig a tunnel
to a neighboring yard.
I seal the basement off
from the upstairs with
a brick wall. I dig hard
and in no time the tunnel
is done. Leaving my pick
and shovel below,

I come out in front of a house
and stand there too tired to
move or even speak, hoping
someone will help me.
I feel I'm being watched
and sometimes I hear
a man's voice,
but nothing is done
and I have been waiting for days.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Tunel”
w temacie W głąb siebie („Szaleństwo i geniusz”)

Z tomu „Reasons for Moving”, 1968




The Mailman

It is midnight.
He comes up the walk
and knocks at the door.
I rush to greet him.
He stands there weeping,
Shaking a letter at me.
He tells me it contains
terrible personal news.
He falls to his knees.
“Forgive me! Forgive me!” he pleads.

I ask him inside.
He wipes his eyes.
His dark blue suit
is like an inkstain
on my crimson couch.
Helpless, nervous, small,
he curls up like a ball
and sleeps while I compose
more letters to myself
in the same vein:

“You shall live
by inflicting pain.
You shall forgive.”

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Listonosz”
w temacie Łaska przebaczenia

The Marriage

The wind comes from opposite poles,
traveling slowly.

She turns in the deep air.
He walks in the clouds.

She readies herself,
shakes out her hair,

makes up her eyes,
smiles.

The sun warms her teeth,
the tip of her tongue moistens them.

He brushes the dust from his suit
and straightens his tie.

He smokes.
Soon they will meet.

The wind carries them closer.
They wave.

Closer, closer.
They embrace.

She is making a bed.
He is pulling off his pants.

They marry
and have a child.

The wind carries them off
in different directions.

The wind is strong, he think
as he straightens his tie.

I like this wind, she says
as she puts on her dress.

The wind unfolds.
The wind is everything to them.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Małżeństwo”
w temacie Blaski i cienie małżeństwa

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Jedzenie poezji”
w temacie O czytaniu i czytelnikach

Z tomu „Darker”, 1970

The Room

It is an old story, the way it happens
sometimes in winter, sometimes not.
The listener falls to sleep,
the doors to the closets of his unhappiness open

and into his room the misfortunes come --
death by daybreak, death by nightfall,
their wooden wings bruising the air,
their shadows the spilled milk the world cries over.

There is a need for surprise endings;
the green field where cows burn like newsprint,
where the farmer sits and stares,
where nothing, when it happens, is never terrible enough.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Pokój”
w temacie ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”...

The Dress

Lie down on the bright hill
with the moon's hand on your cheek,
your flesh deep in the white folds of your dress,
and you will not hear the passionate mole
extending the length of his darkness,
or the owl arranging all of the night,
which is his wisdom, or the poem
filling your pillow with its blue feathers.
But if you step out of your dress and move into the shade,
the mole will find you, so will the owl, and so will the poem,
and you will fall into another darkness, one you will find
yourself making and remaking until it is perfect.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Suknia”
w temacie Ciemność

Black Maps

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

not the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,

the bleak, temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only your are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Czarne mapy”
w temacie Wędrówką życie jest człowieka

Z tomu „The Story of Our Lives”, 1973




Another Place

I walk
into what light
there is

not enough for blindness
or clear sight
of what is to come

yet I see
the water
the single boat
the man standing

he is not someone I know

this is another place
what light there is
spreads like a net
over nothing

what is to come
has come to this
before

this is the mirror
in which pain is asleep

this is the country
nobody visits.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Gdzie indziej”
w temacie Światło

Z tomu „The Late Hour”, 1978




Lines for Winter

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Wersy na zimę"
w tematach: Zima i Wędrówką życie jest człowieka

From the Long Sad Party

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its
white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We began to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the
stars,
how small they were, how far away.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Z długiego smutnego przyjęcia"
w temacie Smutek, melancholia, nostalgia

Pot Roast

I gaze upon the roast,
that is sliced and laid out
on my plate
and over it
I spoon the juices
of carrot and onion.
And for once I do not regret
the passage of time.

I sit by a window
that looks
on the soot-stained brick of buildings
and do not care that I see
no living thing-not a bird,
not a branch in bloom,
not a soul moving
in the rooms
behind the dark panes.
These days when there is little
to love or to praise
one could do worse
than yield
to the power of food.
So I bend

to inhale
the steam that rises
from my plate, and I think
of the first time
I tasted a roast
like this.
It was years ago
in Seabright,
Nova Scotia;

my mother leaned
over my dish and filled it
and when I finished
filled it again.
I remember the gravy,
its odor of garlic and celery,
and sopping it up
with pieces of bread.

And now
I taste it again.
The meat of memory.
The meat of no change.
I raise my fork
and I eat.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Zrazy”
w temacie Potrawy i napoje...

Z tomu „The Continuous Life”, 1990




Orpheus Alone

It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk
On the shores of the darkest known river,
Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks
And rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck;
Then to the great court with its marble yard
Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there
In the sunken silence of the place and speak
Of what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss,
And, then, pulling out all the stops, describing her eyes,
Her forehead where the golden light of evening spread,
The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything
Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come,
As if lifted from sleep, to drift upstream,
Against the water's will, where all the condemned
And pointless labor, stunned by his voice's cadence,
Would come to a halt, and even the crazed, disheveled
Furies, for the first time, would weep, and the soot-filled
Air would clear just enough for her, the lost bride,
To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light.
As everyone knows, this was the first great poem,
Which was followed by days of sitting around
In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes
Closed, trying to will her return, but finding
Only himself, again and again, trapped
In the chill of his loss, and, finally,
Without a word, taking off to wander the hills
Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken
The image of love and put in its place the world
As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure
Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed,
And trees suddenly appeared in the bare place
Where he spoke and lifted their limbs and swept
The tender grass with the gowns of their shade,
And stones, weightless for once, came and set themselves there,
And small animals lay in the miraculous fields of grain
And aisles of corn, and slept. The voice of light
Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing
Rose from its depths and shone as it never had.
And that was the second great poem,
Which no one recalls anymore. The third and greatest
Came into the world as the world, out of the unsayable,
Invisible source of all longing to be; it came
As things come that will perish, to be seen or heard
Awhile, like the coating of frost or the movement
Of wind, and then no more; it came in the middle of sleep
Like a door to the infinite, and, circled by flame,
Came again at the moment of waking, and, sometimes,
Remote and small, it came as a vision with trees
By a weaving stream, brushing the bank
With their violet shade, with somebody’s limbs
Scattered among the matted, mildewed leaves nearby,
With his severed head rolling under the waves,
Breaking the shifting columns of light into a swirl
Of slivers and flecks; it came in a language
Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark,
Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift,
So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope
Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Orfeusz Sam"
w temacie W świecie baśni, legend i mitów

Z tomu „Dark Harbor”, 1993




I

In the night without end, in the soaking dark,
I am wearing a white suit that shines
Among the black leaves falling, among

The insect-covered moons of the street lamps.
I am walking among the emerald trees
In the night without end. I am crossing

The street and disappearing around the corner.
I shine as I go through the park on my way
To the station where the others are waiting.

Soon we shall travel through the soundless dark,
With fires guiding us over the bitter terrain
Of the night without end. I am wearing

A suit that outdoes the moon, that is pure sheen
As I come to the station where the others
Are whispering, saying that the moon

Is no more a hindrance than anything else,
That, if anyone suffers, wings can be had
For a song or by trading arms, that the rules

On earth still hold for those about to depart,
That it is best to be ready, for the ash
Of the body is worthless and goes only so far.

przekład Agnieszki Kołodziejskiej pt. „I. W tę noc bez końca...”
w temacie Wiersze na różne pory dnia

XXXIX

When after a long silence one picks up the pen
And leans over the paper and says to himself:
Today I shall consider Marsyas,

Whose body was flayed to an excess
Of nakedness, who made no crime that would square
With what he was made to suffer.

Today I shall consider the shredded remains of Marsyas
What do they mean as they gather the sunlight
That falls in small pieces through the trees,

As in Titian's late painting. Poor Marsyas,
A body, a body of work as it turns and falls
Into suffering, becoming the flesh of light,

Which is fed to onlookers centuries later.
Can this be the cost of encompassing pain?
After a long silence, would I, whose body

Is whole, sheltered, kept in the dark by a mind
That prefers it that way, know what I'd done
And what its worth was? Or is a body scraped

From the bone of experience, the chart of suffering
To be read in such ways that all flesh might be redeemed,
At least for the moment, the moment it passes into song?

przekład Agnieszki Kołodziejskiej pt. „XXXIX. Kiedy po długiej
ciszy...” w temacie Ciało mojego ciała

XLV

I am sure you would find it misty here,
With lots of stone cottages badly needing repair.
Groups of souls, wrapped in cloaks, sit in the fields

Or stroll the winding unpaved roads. They are polite,
And oblivious to their bodies, which the wind passes through,
Making a shushing sound. Not long ago,

I stopped to rest in a place where an especially
Thick mist swirled up from the river. Someone,
Who claimed to have known me years before,

Approached, saying there were many poets
Wandering around who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say

Words whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure. Then he joined a small group,
Gathered beside a fire. I believe I recognized

Some of the faces, but as I approached they tucked
Their heads under their wings. I looked away to the hills
Above the river, where the golden lights of sunset

And sunrise are one and the same, and saw something flying
Back and forth, fluttering its wings. Then it stopped in mid-air.
It was an angel, one of the good ones, about to sing.

przekład Agnieszki Kołodziejskiej pt. „XLV. Narzekałbyś tu na mgłę...”
w temacie Popatrz na mgłę, ileż cudów ukrywa...

Z tomu „Blizzard of One”, 1998




I Will Love the Twenty-First Century

Dinner was getting cold. The guests, hoping for quick,
Impersonal, random encounters of the usual sort, were sprawled
In the bedrooms. The potatoes were hard, the beans soft, the meat –
There was no meat. The winter sun had turned the elms and houses
yellow:
Deer were moving down the road like refugees, and in the
driveway, cats
Were warming themselves on the hood of a car. Then you turned
And said to me: “Although I love the past, the dark of it,
The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all
Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more,
For in it I see someone in bathrobe and slippers, brown-eyed and poor,
Walking through snow without leaving so much as a footprint
behind.”
“Oh,” I said, putting my hat on,”Oh.”

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Będę kochał
dwudziesty pierwszy wiek” w temacie Mój świat

The Night, The Porch

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing --
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Noc, ganek”
w temacie Oczekiwanie

A Piece of the Storm

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That's all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Skrawek burzy”
w temacie Wstrzymaj się chwilo, jesteś tak piękna!...

In Memory of Joseph Brodsky

It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self
Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads
To a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through;
That it moves, unwinding still, beyond the vault of brightness ended,
And continues to a place which may never be found, where the unsayable,
Finally, once more is uttered, but lightly, quickly, like random rain
That passes in sleep, that one imagines passes in sleep.
What remains of the self unwinds and unwinds, for none
Of the boundaries holds – neither the shapeless one between us,
Nor the one that falls between your body and your voice. Joseph,
Dear Joseph, those sudden reminders of your having been – the places
And times whose greatest life was the one you gave them – now appear
Like ghosts in your wake. What remains of the self unwinds
Beyond us, for whom time is only a measure of meanwhile
And the future no more than et cetera et cetera ... but fast and forever.

przekład Ireny Grudzińskiej-Gross pt. „Pamięci Josifa Brodskiego”
w temacie Poeci poetom

Z tomu „Man and Camel”, 2006




I Had Been a Polar Explorere

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „W młodości byłem
polarnikiem” w temacie Tęsknota

2002

I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.
He leans back in his chair, rubs his hands, strokes
His beard and says, “I’m thinking of Strand, I’m thinking
That one of these days I’ll be out back, swinging my scythe
Or holding my hourglass up to the moon, and Strand will appear
In a jacket and tie, and together under the boulevards’
Leafless trees we’ll stroll into the city of souls. And when
We get to the Great Piazza with its marble mansions, the crowd
That had been waiting there will welcome us with delirious cries,
And their tears, turned hard and cold as glass from having been
Held back so long, will fall, and clatter on the stones below.
O let it be soon. Let it be soon.”

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „2002” w tematach:
Śmierć i Wiersze jak kartki z pamiętnika

Man and Camel

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Człowiek i wielbłąd”
w temacie Przypowieść

Mirror

A white room and a party going on
and I was standing with some friends
under a large gilt-framed mirror
that tilted slightly forward
over the fireplace.
We were drinking whiskey
and some of us, feeling no pain,
were trying to decide
what precise shade of yellow
the setting sun turned our drinks.
I closed my eyes briefly,
then looked up into the mirror:
a woman in a green dress leaned
against the far wall.
She seemed distracted,
the fingers of one hand
fidgeted with her necklace,
and she was staring into the mirror,
not at me, but past me, into a space
that might be filled by someone
yet to arrive, who at that moment
could be starting the journey
which would lead eventually to her.

Then, suddenly, my friends
said it was time to move on.
This was years ago,
and though I have forgotten
where we went and who we all were,
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Lustro”
w temacie Motyw zwierciadła, lustra i odbicia

Moon

Open the book of evening to the page
where the moon, always the moon appears

between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours
will seem to have passed before you reach the next page

where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path
to lead you away from what you have known

into those places where what you had wished for happens,
its lone syllable like a sentence poised

at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name
once more as you lift your eyes from the page

close the book, still feeling what it was like
to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Księżyc”
w temacie Gwiazdy, planety, kosmos w poezji...

My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Moje imię”
w temacie Imiona w poezji

Z „The Harvard Advocate”, Winter 2010




Song

Black fly, black fly
Why have you come

Is it my shirt
My new white shirt

With buttons of bone
Is it my suit

My dark blue suit
Is it because

I lie here alone
Under a willow

Cold as stone
Black fly, black fly

How good you are
To come to me now

How good you are
To visit me here

Black fly, black fly
To wish me good bye.

przekład Agnieszki Kołakowskiej pt. „Pieśń”
w temacie Owady są wszędzie...

Inne wiersze Marka Stranda w tematach: W harmonii z przyrodą, Ruiny - dosłownie
i w przenośni, Pochodnie, świece, znicze - symbolika ognia i poetyckie odniesienia, Spacery poetów, Co się poetom śni...? Motyw dłoni i rąk, Klatki schodowe, korytarze, windy...Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 29.08.11 o godzinie 22:04