founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

March 2012

translation

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cxcix t number 6 CONTENTS

March 2012

POEMS gottfried benn 487 Asters Express Train Caryatid Evenings of Certain Lives Divergences Left the House Fragments 1953 Translated by Michael Hofmann geoffrey brock 502 Alteration Finds paolo febbraro 506 Fable and Moral Translated by Geo≠rey Brock edith södergran 508 A Life Now it is fall Strange Sea Translated by Averill Curdy eugene dubnov 512 Lips Translated by Anne Stevenson and Eugene Dubnov john matthias 514 After Quevedo After “Las Formas Puras,” After Lorca alain borer 519 Sleep Log Translated by Mark Irwin and Alain Borer a.e. housman 524 To my Comrade, Moses J. Jackson, Sco≠er at this Scholarship Translated by A.E. Stallings marina tsvetaeva 528 Bound for Hell Translated by Stephen Edgar roberto sosa 530 The Poor Translated by Spencer Reece paul claudel 532 The Day of Gifts Translated by Jonathan Monroe Geltner jorge luis borges 535 To the One Who is Reading Me Music Box Translated by Tony Barnstone antonio porchia 538 From “Voices” Translated by Gonzalo Melchor said 542 Psalms Translated by Mark S. Burrows

MARINA TSV ETAEVA : EIG HT POEMS marina tsvetaeva 552 From “Poems for Moscow” “Where does such tenderness come from?” From “Poems for Blok” “I am happy living simply” From “An Attempt at Jealousy” “A kiss on the forehead” From “The Desk” From “Poems to Czechoslovakia” Translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine THE POETRY OF KABALLAH peter cole 573 Introduction anonymous 576 Each Day From Those Whose Beauty the Depths Are Lit yehudah halevi 578 Where Will I Find You anonymous 580 Release, Please ya’akov hakohen 581 Prayers for the Protection and Opening of the Heart yosef gikatilla 582 The Nut Garden anonymous 583 Incantation Against Lilith yitzhak luria 584 Hymn for the Third Meal anonymous 586 Peace Be Upon You

contributors 590 back page 605 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio

cover art by michael bierut “100 Dot Pegasus,” 2011

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Poetry t March 2012 t Volume 199 t Number 6

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POEMS

gottfried benn

Asters

Asters — sweltering days old adjuration / curse, the gods hold the balance for an uncertain hour.

Once more the golden flocks of heaven, the light, the trim — what is the ancient process hatching under its dying wings?

Once more the yearned-for, the intoxication, the rose of you — summer leaned in the doorway watching the swallows — one more presentiment where certainty is not hard to come by: wing tips brush the face of the waters, swallows sip speed and night.

GOTTFRIED BENN 487 Express Train

Brown. Brandy-brown. Leaf-brown. Russet. Malayan yellow. Express train Berlin-Trelleborg and the Baltic resorts.

Flesh that went naked. Tanned unto the mouth by the sea. Deeply ripened for Grecian joys. How far along the summer, in sickle-submissiveness! Penultimate day of the ninth month!

Parched with stubble and the last corn-shocks. Unfurlings, blood, fatigue, deranged by dahlia-nearness.

Man-brown jumps on woman-brown.

A woman is something for a night. And if you enjoyed it, then the next one too! O! And then the return to one’s own care. The not-speaking! The urges!

A woman is something with a smell. Ine≠able! To die for! Mignonette. Shepherd, sea, and South. On every declivity a bliss.

Woman-brown drapes itself on man-brown:

Hold me! I’m falling! My neck is so weary. Oh, the sweet last fevered scent from the gardens.

488 POETRY Caryatid

Renege on the rock! Smash the oppressor cave! Sashay out onto the floor! Scorn the cornices — see, from the beard of drunk Silenus from the unique uproar of his blood the wine dribble into his genitals!

Spit on the obsession with pillars: ancient rheumatic hands quake toward gray skies. Bring down the temple by the yearning of your knees twitching with dance.

Spill, spread, unpetal, bleed your soft flowers through great wounds. Dove-hauled Venus girds her loins with roses — see the summer’s last pu≠ of blue drift on seas of asters to distant pine-brown coasts; see this final hour of our mendacious southern happiness held aloft.

GOTTFRIED BENN 489 Evenings of Certain Lives

i

You don’t need always to be scrubbing the tiles, Hendrickje, my eye drinks itself, drinks itself to death — but other drink is in short supply — the little Buddha there, Chinese grove god in exchange for a ladleful of Hulstkamp, please!

Never painted anything in frost-white or ice-skater blue or that Irish green in which the purple shimmers through — always my own monotone, my compulsion to shadows — not pleasant to pursue that path so clearly.

Greatness — where? I pick up the slate-pencil and certain things appear on paper or canvas or whatever the heck else — result: Buddha bronze hocked for booze — but I draw the line at homage under ornamental plants, banquet of the painters’ guild — something for the boardroom!

... Creaking, little sheep squeaking, chromotypes Flemish, Rubensish — for the grandchildren (same idiots!) Ah — Hulstkamp,

490 POETRY hits the spot, midpoint of colors, my shadow brown, stubble aura around heart and eye —

GOTTFRIED BENN 491 ii

The blocked chimney smokes — the Swan of Avon blows his nose — the tree stumps are wet, clammy night, emptiness mingled with draft — enough characters, the world is overpopulated as it is, plentiful peach-fall, four rosebuds per annum — asperged, set to tread the boards by this hand, grown wrinkled and with sluggish veins!

All the Juliets and Ophelias, wreathed, silvered, sometimes murderous — all the soft mouths, the sighs I extracted from them — the original actresses long since turned to smoke, rust, leeched dry, rats’ pudding — Ariel too, away with the elements.

The age takes o≠ its frockcoat. These lousy skulls of lords, their trains of thought that I pushed into extremes — my lords makers of history all of them crowned and sceptered illiterates, great powers of the cosmos — yes, like so many bats or kites!

492 POETRY Sir Goon wrote to me lately: “the rest is silence” — I think that’s one of mine, could only be mine, Dante dead — lacuna of centuries to my logomachic quotes —

what if they didn’t exist, the booty never brought to light, the booths, the sca≠olds, the cymbals never clashed — gaps? Gap teeth maybe, but the great monkey jaws would grind on emptiness, mingled with draft — the tree stumps are wet and the butler snores in porter dreams.

GOTTFRIED BENN 493 Divergences

One says: please no inner life, manners by all means, but nothing a≠ective, that’s no compensation for the insu≠erable di∞culties of outward-directed expression — those cerebralized city-Styxes

when my little prince pokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot it melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst, and it’s no di≠erent now

the contraries are not easy to reconcile but when you survey the provinces the inner life has it by a neck.

494 POETRY Left the House

i

Left the house shattered, it hurt so bad, so many years as a man, compromise, in spite of partial success in intellectual tussle he was never anyone of Olympian allure.

He walked slowly through the dreamscape of the late autumn day, barely distinguishable from early spring, with young willows and a patch of waste ground where blue jays screamed.

Dreamy exposure to phenomena that to nature in its administration of various cycles — young and old alike — are inseparably part of a single order — : so he drank his gin and accepted a dish of sausage soup, free on Thursdays with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance of sorrow and pleasure.

GOTTFRIED BENN 495 ii

He had been reading on the park bench and stared into the gray of the last roses, there were no titans, just shrubs thinned out by fall.

He put down his book. It was a day like any other and the people were like all people everywhere, that was how it would always be, at least this mixture of death and laughter would persist.

A scent is enough to change things, even small flowers stand in some relation to a cedar of Lebanon, then he walked on and saw the windows of the furriers were full of warm things for the winter ahead.

496 POETRY iii

All very well, a gin and a few minutes in the park at noon, with the sun shining, but what when the landlord comes by, there are problems with your tax return, and the girlfriend’s in tears?

Shattered: how far are you allowed to push your I, and see peculiar things as somehow symptomatic? Shattered: to what extent are you obliged to play by the rules — as far as a Ludwig Richter canvas?

Shattered: no one knows. Shattered and you turn equally pained to singular and universal — your little experiment with destiny will end gloriously and forever, but quite alone.

Damned evergreens! Vinyl whines! Gin, sun, cedars — what use are they to help the self reconcile landlord, God, and dream — voices warble and words mock — left the house and closed his reverie.

GOTTFRIED BENN 497 Fragments 1953

A day without tears is a rare occurrence culpable absent-mindedness practically an episode

š

when men still wore starched collars, and stu≠ed cotton wool between their toes hobbled about in pain, pedicure hadn’t been invented, but you would see faces that were worth a second look those were years when something whispered

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

498 POETRY Translator’s Note

This latest sample of Gottfried Benn spans four decades, almost his whole career: from “Express Train,” first published exactly a hun- dred years ago in the quarterly Pan in 1912, the year Benn qualified as a doctor and also started to publish, to poems and drafts from the early- and mid-fifties. But rather than separating them out like the seven colors of a spectrum, it is simpler and most useful to group the first three together, and the second four; a trivium and a qua- drivium. They are respectively early and late in feeling; meridional and hyperborean; sunny and chill; exotic and domestic; boisterous and resigned; an Indian summer, and a dreich and featureless winter (always the two prime atmospheres and auras of Benn). Life is a cycle, divided up into seasons like a year. Sap rises, and leaves fall. “Like the generation of leaves, the lives of mortal men,” Homer says. Youth is always summer — in the special case of the poet, his at once anticipatory and retrospective intelligence, always want- ing complexity and conflict, always wanting more — often a sort of island- or exo-summer, most typically an arrière-garde. Hence the emphasis on Indian summer. Two of the poems have the word “last” in them, and the third a refrain of “once more”: summer for Benn, you understand, is hardly a time of easy and uncomplicated abun- dance. Benn was a creature of habit. He worked complainingly and hard, never made very much money, found it increasingly di∞cult to leave his practice and Berlin, never traveled very far or took very much time o≠. Mediterran — the long, painful open a of the final vowel in German — remained a Nietzschean buzz-word for him, not that he got there very often. Once, in the twenties, he drove with a rich friend (in the rich friend’s car) through France and Spain. But we are not talking Rilke here. Merano in the Tyrol was a favored destination: the presence there of palm trees signaled “the South” to Benn. Though “South” remained a broad church. Unqualified cities like Brussels (where he was posted during wwi) were filed away there, as was, in “Express Train,” Germany’s chilly, nudist Baltic coast. A week here or there — and often in September or October — was about the size of it, for him. Poets can’t be choosers. It was just as well that Benn’s early style and lifelong a∞liation

GOTTFRIED BENN 499 was Expressionist: gaudy, neo-primitive, volatile, provocative, anti- rational. The brain is eclipsed by its older neighbors: the glands, the senses (including the oldest sense, the sense of smell). Expressionism doesn’t count days or verify destinations. It might be the humdrum Baltic — shallowest and newest and saltiest of seas — but it feels like the Aegean, if not the South Pacific, in the poem, and in the poet’s rhapsodic imagination. Expressionism hymns a simpler physis, the body under its own management. Down with the boardroom (hence “my neck is so weary” and “bring down the temple”), away with the little pin-striped simpleton or puritan upstairs! Expressionism is an as-if, or an if-only: if only the body could write or paint! Poems like “Express Train” or “Caryatid” or “Asters” are literary equiva- lents to the brash, paradisiac canvases of Emil Nolde or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Ferdinand Hodler. The last four poems are, so to speak, about life’s “second mo- ment”; they are all about winter and age. “Evenings of Certain Lives” is biographical, about Rembrandt and Shakespeare old; the three remaining poems are autobiographical, from the last five years of Benn’s life. Sunlight, color, rapture, pleasure are all at a premium. Ataraxy is a memory. Great historical figures lead lives no less fraught and empty than ... someone like Benn. The depressant alco- hol dulls pain in lives already depressed. Rembrandt — an invention of the twentieth century, before that he was accounted dowdy — is every bit as housebound and surly and preoccupied as his creator; the Shakespeare to whom Benn gives voice is the Shakespeare post- Tempest, when he has hung up his pencil and doesn’t even care to remember his own lines. What is civilization, these poems seem to ask, what if the cymbals “never clashed”? A head of froth, a meniscus, a gloss o≠ the top, optional, irrelevant. Benn’s view of life, often called nihilistic, seems to me more like momentary or maybe molecular. People are born and die basically alone, and the tiny, tiny minority that do anything of importance (i.e. make art) live just like the rest. Only their insistence on solitude, a gesture of refusal — Rembrandt’s “no” to brilliancy, and “no” to society painting — a lifelong obduracy, tell them apart. They make,

500 POETRY in the end, no di≠erence whatsoever, leave life as they found it. “The great monkey jaws” — those of history — grind on, man is unevolved, unimprovable, inconsolable. Progress is a false god. For the gross of working people, whose horizons are low, and whose ambitions and expectations remain resolutely pragmatic, maybe conditions can be improved, but that isn’t the role of art. (As a doctor, Benn did what he could, though he was a medical pessimist). But for the artist — which was what interested Benn, life without art being entirely value- less — nothing has changed in thousands of years: still solitude, still doubt, still want of recognition; always questioning and at odds with life; always “the insu≠erable / di∞culties of outward-directed expression.” Yeats says the poet “is never the bundle of accident and inco- herence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” Not so Benn, not in these last poems. He is absolutely the bundle seated — if not to breakfast exactly, then at least in the corner of the bar after work, where he downs two or three beers, smokes his Junos, listens to the radio, listens to the chatter of the other customers, scribbles something lugubrious on a pad. It is rare for art to be so perspicuous, to be made from so very little, so to pair grace with dailiness, discretion with unmistakeableness, a shy wistful- ness with humility. He makes Larkin seems like an equestrian — like Byron, like Flashman. — mh

GOTTFRIED BENN 501 geoffrey brock

Alteration Finds

i. delirium, after rimbaud

How many hours I kept that vigil by your side — entire nights, eyes wide, as you so sweetly slept.

What I was wondering: why you yearned to evade the real. No one has prayed harder for anything.

It wasn’t for your life I feared, but for mankind. Did you, in the end, find secrets for changing life?

502 POETRY 2. defaced, after rilke

The head we cannot know, nor its bright fruit, the eyes. And yet the body has its gaze: a lamp turned low.

Or else the breast would cease to dazzle, the hips fail to curve into that smile that begets more than a kiss.

And flesh would lose all life, not flare till there’s no blind it can’t see you behind. You must change your life.

GEOFFREY BROCK 503 3. denial, after seferis

The afternoon grew hotter along our secret shore. We thirsted in the glare but couldn’t drink the water.

On golden sand we traced your name beside the sea. The wind came like a sigh; our writing was erased.

How passionate our life, how full of sex and song, spirit and heart — how wrong! And so we changed our life.

504 POETRY Translator’s Note

“Alteration Finds” began with an attempt to translate a poem — George Seferis’s ³DZȡȞȘıȘ” (1931) — from a language I don’t know at all. By reading other translations, some of which I liked but none of which I loved, I came to love, or imagine that I loved, the original whose contours I glimpsed through the veils of translation. I had read about the original, had heard it read and sung, and had questioned two Greek-speaking friends about certain words and phrases. But having no Greek, I hadn’t read the poem itself, and so it seemed fraudulent to call my version a translation. On the other hand, precisely because I couldn’t consider it a real translation, I felt freer to take liberties. I began to think of it as that naughty hybrid, an “imitation.” I first read Rilke’s 1908 sonnet about the marble torso of Apollo (or rather, translations of it, since I don’t read German either) some dozen years ago, around the time of a painful change — divorce — in my own life. As may happen with poems, this one acquired private meanings related to the circumstances of my original experience of it: the head- less Apollo became, for me, an emblem of the other/lover, whose mind is fundamentally unknowable. Since the original has been translated so often, I allowed myself to stray again into imitation, imposing the Seferis poem as a formal model and whittling away the marble of the original — even ditching Apollo, though I hope his ghost remains. In the Rimbaud section I take a di≠erent kind of liberty, since the original — a snippet of the “Délires I” section of Une saison en enfer (1873), in which the poet gazes on his sleeping lover (Verlaine) and longs to know his mind — is in prose. Seferis again provides the mod- el, and oddly the snippet’s final phrase — changer la vie — became a protest slogan in France in 1968, much as Seferis’s poem became a protest anthem in Greece in the sixties. And Rilke’s final phrase has become something of a slogan itself, of course, an existentialist exhortation that echoes widely in many contexts. Instead of saying what I think the point of all this is, I’ll say some- thing about the title, which, like the sections of this poem, has been torn from its original context, and which, I hope, might fly here like the last shred of an ancien régime flag over a fallen — but perhaps not ruined — city.

GEOFFREY BROCK 505 paolo febbraro

Fable and Moral

He fell and died, the skier, high up there in the snow. And now, spring having come, his father leaves his home, dark in the valley, to throw a hook in the heavy river.

Translated from the Italian by Geo≠rey Brock

506 POETRY Translator’s Note

I’m drawn to this cameo less for the moral than for the rich ambiguity of the fable. On first reading, I saw it chiefly as a poem of grief, saw the father’s casting of a line into the river — which, swollen with snowmelt, must bear with it at least the memory of the son and perhaps his actual body — as a morbid and even pathetic but also tender attempt to recover the irrecoverable. Think of the skier as Icarus, the father as Daedalus trawling the Mediterranean. But that presumes a sympathetic rather than agonistic father-son relationship — a presumption which, if we do think of the Greeks, we might reconsider. Indeed when I asked the poet about this poem, the Greek father he mentioned was not Daedalus but Cronus. — gb

PAOLO FEBBRARO 507 edith södergran

A Life

That the stars are adamant everyone understands — but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave or peace below every gray stone. If happiness never comes, what is a life? A lily withers in the sand and if its nature has failed? The tide washes the beach at night. What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web? What does a dayfly make of its hours? (Two wings creased over a hollow body.)

Black will never turn to white — yet the perfume of our struggle lingers as each morning fresh flowers spring up from hell.

The day will come when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse and all goes still — when nothing remains but the dayfly folded in a leaf. But no one knows it.

508 POETRY Now it is fall when all the golden birds fly home across the blue deep water; On shore I sit rapt in its scattering glitter; departure rustles through the trees. This farewell is vast and separation draws close, but reunion, that also is certain.

My head on my arm I fall asleep easily. On my eyes a mother’s breath, from her mouth to my heart: sleep, child, and dream now the sun is gone. —

EDITH SÖDERGRAN 509 Strange Sea

Implausible fish bloom in the depths, mercurial flowers light up the coast; I know red and yellow, the other colors, —

but the sea, det granna granna havet, that’s most dangerous to look at. What name is there for the color that arouses this thirst, which says, the saga can happen, even to you —

Translated from the Swedish by Averill Curdy

510 POETRY Translator’s Note

I found small trace in Edith Södergran’s work of those elements that usually act upon me, such as the solicitations of sonic e≠ect or a tem- peramental syntax, to draw me into poems. I had read that she was largely responsible for modernizing Swedish poetry, and yet much of her work as I encountered it in translation struck me as a bit old- fashioned, like the early work of Rilke or Yeats. I was attracted to the task of translating a poet whose aesthetic runs so counter to my own, whose own poems may well have been a form of translation since she chose to write in Swedish rather than the German or Russian in which she may have been more at ease. The poetry of her work resides in what she says rather than how it is said; her mood is often declarative and her landscape is the elemental one of lyric poetry, of sea, tree, rose, and stone. Södergran’s poems often seem to arrive from the shore of something vast, whether that is the sea, or mortality, or a poetic ambition so high that it may strike some readers a century later as a politely unmentionable blem- ish because it is so earnest. Gender and illness, as well as circumstances of history, language, and geography — all of these combined to place this poet on the margin, where she persevered to make of her poems a center. Educated as a girl in St. Petersburg, following the political unrest in Russia she and her mother lived for reasons of economy and health at the family’s summer home in the provincial village of Raivola (now Roshchino) near the Finnish-Russian border. Her work was often greeted with indi≠erence, misunderstanding, or worse. And having watched her father die of tuberculosis one year before she received the same diagnosis at sixteen, many of the poems pos- sess an unmistakable urgency as — through fatigue, melancholy, and despair — they reach out for life. — ac

EDITH SÖDERGRAN 511 eugene dubnov

Lips

What is the structure of lips That take care of sounds, That can scream loud and long, That can wait and be silent? Yesterday I was mastering words And kissing lips lightly — Their loving weakness Now remains on my own Hardworking lips, Exacting, as if forever, My terrible punishment.

Translated from the Russian by Anne Stevenson and Eugene Dubnov

512 POETRY Translator’s Note

I began co-translating Eugene Dubnov’s poems in the mid-eighties after John Heath-Stubbs introduced us in London. I had recently returned from a British Council sponsored visit to the ussr (as it was then) where I had met and sympathized with a number of Russian poets whose work I would have liked to translate. Alas, I was stumped by my ignorance of Russian. That Dubnov was in the habit of translating his own poetry into English “cribs” struck me as an opportunity I would be foolish to ignore. We worked together hap- pily in London before he took a teaching position in Oxfordshire and I moved north to Durham and Edinburgh. In the early years of this century Dubnov contacted me again. John Heath-Stubbs and Peter Porter, among his principle translators, had died, but he still wished to publish a collection of his poems in English. Would I be willing to work with him by e-mail? I was happy to do so, and after two or three years we had produced so many translations and revisions of former translations that we decided to put together a collection. “Lips” began its English life as a translation by Peter Porter, which Dubnov asked me to revise. It seemed more sensible to start again and allow the wit of the original to govern the tone of the English poem in which love, taken lightly, becomes a “hardworking” punishment when it comes to writing a poem about it. Although “Lips” seems a simple achievement, it went through many e-mailed drafts. The secret of translation, Eugene and I agree, is to be faithful in English to the original’s tone and meaning. Poetry in Russian tends to be strict as to rhyme and meter; attempting to produce the same form in English can produce strained, unnatural verses. The translation we finally came up with combines, we think, just the right quantities of seriousness and wit. — as

EUGENE DUBNOV 513 john matthias

After Quevedo

In memory of Octavio Paz

not even lost in death the memory of why we burned, and therefore still a fire consuming all obsequious delay, now polvo, dust, of a desire but still alive

and aching, not even lost to you within our common urn, urgent as an ash still burning alma, soul, still and moving toward you, la muerte, my amor —

not even lost in death, memoria, and feeling some reply, alma, memory and ash, ash burning still, still and moving toward you, dust and dust, ash

alma and amor constante más allá de la muerte, constant

even in our common urn, polvo enamorado.

514 POETRY Translator’s Note

This is more of a trespass than a translation. I am by no means a Quevedo scholar and even my knowledge of Spanish is rusty enough to require assistance from existing translations and commentaries. A year ago I wrote an essay called “Grand Old Dirty Old Men,” which ended with a reading of two late books by Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism and An Erotic Beyond: Sade. Late in his life, Paz was haunted by Quevedo’s baroque masterpiece, “Amor constante más allá de la muerte.” Paz finds Quevedo breaking with both Christianity and Platonism in his poem, and in fact “violating” both traditions in a kind of double heresy. Readers not familiar with Spanish baroque poetry may initially think of John Donne when encountering the poem for the first time. But it is perhaps more radical than anything by Donne. Calling the poem blasphemous, Paz is in fact thrilled as well as unnerved by the imagery of mortal desire lasting beyond death, and finds Quevedo’s poem to be itself the urn containing immortal remains still with mortal longings: “Although the body deteriorates into formless matter, that matter is animate. The power that animates it and imbues it with a terrible eternity is love, desire.” My version mixes the dust of the beloved with that of the lover in that urn, and it retains fragments of the original “matter” of the Spanish like tiny pieces of bone in the ash. The second source of my own fascination with the poem is much more distant. Ever since I was a student of Yvor Winters, I have found two of his poems, “The Marriage” and “The Cremation,” as haunting as Paz finds “Amor constante más allá de la muerte.” Winters knew the Spanish baroque tradition well, and he made some translations from its canon of great poems. Here is the end of “The Marriage”:

When flesh shall fall away, and, falling, stand Wrinkling with shadow over face and hand, Still I shall meet you on the verge of dust And know you as a faithful vestige must And, in commemoration of our lust, May our heirs seal us in a single urn, A single spirit never to return.

JOHN MATTHIAS 515 But the two dusts in my Quevedo version do not reduce to “a single spirit,” because it is not “lust” that is being commemorated but “Amor constante” (constant love) “más allá de la muerte” (even beyond death) that is being celebrated, and in a way that should appall even as it stimulates the imagination of a reader who might perhaps have fed on Baudelaire or Poe. That reader must actually try to see the conver- gence, the movement of the particles in the urn as they grope toward each other. Only a baroque style, it seems to me, can achieve this; and I have exaggerated the tortuousness of that style in my hom- age, which, again, is also a trespass. Winters’s “The Cremation” asks in its middle stanza:

And where is that which made you just? Which gathered light about the bone And moved the tongue, in earth’s despite?

In Quevedo it is all there in the urn, and preternaturally alive.

516 POETRY After “Las Formas Puras,” After Lorca

In memory of Anthony Kerrigan

The pure shapes of things shake and are fall ing under the cry of bajo el cri cri and chirping of the six margaritas daisies that I loved but now know deflower when the men bent upon murdering me bend down in cabinets and on cli≠s and in cafes where some flamenco guitarist breaks his fingers on the grave accents / / / breaks his fingers on the acute

\ \

hunting now even in the graves under walls of tall iglesias the well where I am not hides from those who dug the gold from wisdom teeth of the wise and dig it still and dig it also from between my thin skeleton’s bowed ribs but Ah

\ \

will not find me any more but less than six, the moon, de pronto, loss itself disarticulated bones in hiding place pues encore my absence from I am comprendo nonetheless the names of pure shapes of things that shake and are fall ing all loss los nombres under cry cry the pure shaping things out of their somersault out of themselves

JOHN MATTHIAS 517 Translator’s Note

This poem is even less a “proper” translation than the Quevedo version that precedes it. It is dedicated to the memory of Anthony Kerrigan because Tony and I used to kill the time now and then doing what he called, after Lorca, some hechos poéticos, slowly improvised ri≠s or improvisations in which we’d feed each other a line from a text and the other would do something with it and then toss it back — which is not, by the way, what Lorca meant by the term. Kerrigan, of course, was one of the great Spanish language transla- tors of the twentieth century, who played these games with me now and then to amuse himself. We were down the hallway from each other at Notre Dame for about a decade. When I found “After ‘Las Formas Puras,’ After Lorca” in an old notebook recently, I realized that it derived from the hechos game with Tony some twenty years ago. I discovered its actual source in the last stanza of the third poem in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, one of the “Poems of Solitude at Columbia University”: “Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos,” or “Fable of Three Friends to Be Sung in Rounds.” Only a few of the last twelve lines of the “Fable” are consecutively translated, and other lines are either imported from other Lorca poems or inventions based on Lorca’s words and phrases. Still, my working definition of “translation” is as broad as I can make it, and so by a stretch this hecho- derived poem belongs in a group of translations rather than a group of original poems. — jm

518 POETRY alain borer

Sleep Log

Derelict thoughts (scattered over the South Pacific) of one dying in the ship’s hold somewhere between 15– 30 degrees latitude and 135 – 150 degrees southern longitude at the crux of time stretched to its limit.

š

The ocean never finishes in the wake of boats.

An unceasing torment infinitely prolonged that I would not wish on my worst enemy. Especially since my worst enemy is myself.

I cross the South Pacific like a deserted countryside on a winter’s night: not even a beast in sight.

Reduced to its own insularity, I becomes island.

When seasick there’s no place for Narcissus: one cannot drink one’s own likeness.

š

ALAIN BORER 519 In this singular life we can only scout new places.

Other than obligation, what keeps us on this earth?

Every day approaches death — some more than others.

š

In the year 14,000 the Southern Cross will shine over Paris ... We will no longer exist, neither perhaps will Paris ... But I will be here in a certain manner, if only to know it.

There is no black box or recorder for ships. They disappear completely. A ship’s black box is called the co∞n. But the only co∞ns that one sees on the ocean are the ships themselves.

There is also a black box within you. It’s the frailness of humans; they wear that fragility on the outside — Eros, a child, a book.

For boats, there are packages heavier and not hurried: I travel like that, a package in order, but a piece of mail.

š

The universe is curved like a banana.

520 POETRY I am an atheist because God does not believe enough in me.

He was so afraid of death that arriving in old age he felt stupid.

— To search for God without expectation.

š

Life opens, gives and invites you — or it goes to hell.

One must live to write. Our time here is for utterance.

— Sad animal post-cogitum.

š

Linger only with healthy ideas. Salty ones.

Stupor is second nature.

There are those born too soon and those born too late who preserve with haunting smiles the mistakes, the traces. And the one born at the right moment is forever vivid, intensely illuminating each instant.

ALAIN BORER 521 To write is to leave the world’s surface, to descend under the sea; the smallest pencil is my tuba.

One doesn’t report great things from grand events, the one su≠ering from depression thinks. After his world tour, Bougainville extravagantly gave his name to a flower; the botanist La Billardière gave his name to a type of grass — not bad; and you, to what? — A pail for vomit?

Translated from the French by Mark Irwin and Alain Borer

522 POETRY Translator’s Note

“Sleep Log” contains excerpts from six black pages in the middle of Le ciel & la carte: Carnet de voyage dans les mers du Sud à bord de La Boudeuse, preceded and followed by two hundred pages of narration that attempt to describe the Pacific’s vastness and the solitary thoughts of this traveler enclosed in a dark and stinking cabin close to the engine room, constantly rocking up and down, turning to starboard, then to the portside. This traveler is sick comme une bête (as a beast), as they say in French. Alone with a metal bucket in his cabin, gazing through a porthole, Alain Borer meditates on the extreme, what one would call a near-death experience. Le ciel & la carte o≠ers an itinerary to salvation through culture, humor, and poetry. The reverse printing of white text on a black background in “Sleep Log” (Somniloques) heightens the hallucinatory e≠ect of a speaker both in mid-voyage and mid-text. “Sleep Log” also marks the transi- tion from a more discursive and sometimes historical narrative to one that seems to spring somewhat deliriously from the subconscious and signals a kind of descent and return of the spirit, echoing the voice in Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre” or Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, only in a more playful manner. Traveling on a replica of the Boudeuse, the three-mast ship with which Bougainville discovered Tahiti in 1768, Borer embarks in order to meet the “Sea Peoples.” Earlier, Édouard Glissant, an editor at Éditions du Seuil in Paris, had brought back a book about Easter Island, and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio had written a book on Polynesia, but neither of the two famous writers had navigated on the ship. (Thanks here to Claudia Moatti for providing details on the historical background of Le ciel & la carte.) Borer, a renowned authority and author of three books on the poetry and life of Rimbaud, also directed a film, Le Voleur de feu, when he visited many of the places where Rimbaud lived and worked in Ethiopia. He was twenty-seven when he made the film, the same age as Rimbaud when he arrived in Ethiopia. — mi

ALAIN BORER 523 a.e. housman

To my Comrade, Moses J. Jackson, Sco≠er at this Scholarship

As we went walking far and wide Through silent fields and countryside, We watched together star signs brim And rise above the ocean’s rim, And planets too, that fret with light The icy caverns of the Night. These constellations we now mark, When we were not, in formless dark, A poet, centuries before, Would watch from the Italian shore Drop in the sea, and mindful Earth Had made him mortal from his birth, He set on high his music’s bars Among the everlasting stars, To those to come, clear warning sign To place no faith in the divine; For sacred to the pole unfurled Above, and compassing the world, These songs yet su≠ered sad disgrace And almost sank without a trace: Though to our strand this wreckage came, It scarcely owned its author’s name. Mine not to exhort the gods Or stars that vex our mortal odds, But love of virtue quick to fade Makes me seek fame with human aid. A man, I chose a man to stand At this front page and my right hand — Who thrive or perish in my pages, Brief friend, your name should last the ages. I send these lines to you who went Where stars rise in the Orient, From here where constellations sink Below the ocean’s western brink. Take them: for that day will come

524 POETRY To add us to the canceled sum And give our bones to earth to rot (For we have no immortal lot, And souls that will not last forever) And the chain of comrades sever.

Translated from the Latin by A.E. Stallings

A.E. HOUSMAN 525 Translator’s Note

Edmund Wilson’s 1938 essay on A.E. Housman, and W.H. Auden’s sonnet from the same year (perhaps written under the essay’s influ- ence), portray Housman as a tragically divided person, the passion of the poet renounced (“kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer”) for dry-as-dust scholarship and venomous invective (“savage foot- notes on unjust editions”). Wilson saw, in Housman’s turning from his early work on the Latin love elegist, Propertius, to the didactic poet of astronomy, Manilius, an emblem of the poet’s turning away from creative life and the imagination to the sterile re-creation of textual scholarship. Yet in these verses, dedicated to Housman’s Oxford roommate, the formative friend and unrequited love of his life, the poet’s supposedly antithetical interests curiously synthesize. They are composed not in the dactylic hexameter of Manilius but in Propertius’s elegiac couplets. The stars are both astronomical phenomena and the conventional backdrop of lovers. And in fact, Housman’s interest in astronomy was one of his earliest passions; Laurence Housman, in his a≠ectionate biography of his brother, remembers that, as children, Alfred had ar- ranged his brothers on the lawn to show them the relative motions of the earth and moon to each other and the sun. (Alfred was the moon.) Housman is famously supposed to have dismissed Manilius with: “the brightest facet of [his] genius was an eminent aptitude for doing sums in verse.” Generations of critics have taken his pronouncement at face value, perplexed that he would expend such energy on the second rate. But here his attitude to his fellow stargazing poet is sympathetic, even admiring; we are reminded that Housman referred to his own verses as “solitary stars.” (And a renaissance in Manilius studies is rescuing his sidereal epic, The Astronomica, from B-list status.) The shipwreck that “scarcely own[s] its author’s name” is the manu- script (anonymous in antiquity), salvaged from oblivion by Poggio in the 1400s, its fragments pieced together by editors over the ages. Housman does not depict his scholarship as an empty exercise in self- mortification; rather, he presents himself as a hero, seeking virtue and fame in a noble enterprise. A classical poet would traditionally invoke the Muse to stand

526 POETRY by his side — here the muse is Jackson. The dedication is also a love poem, with its promise to immortalize the beloved. Jackson’s going to where stars rise in the Orient is a reference to his moving to India, a permanent separation. The poem places Jackson in the light of the rising sun, while Housman appears on the other side of the globe, in England, that ultima thule where the lights are ever westering. We are put in mind of the sundered companions of mythology, Theseus and Pirithous, the latter of whom had to remain in the underworld as punishment for their exploits there. Housman fans will know this image from his sublime translation of Horace’s “Di≠ugere Nives” (according to Housman, the most beautiful poem in the Latin lan- guage.) Housman ends it:

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain, Diana steads him nothing, he must stay; And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain The love of comrades cannot take away.

In Horace, the chain is literal, and though Pirithous is “dear” there is no “love of comrades”; reading the end of the Manilius dedication, one is struck by the similarity. Housman channels Horace via his own translation, or transformation, of it. This dedication is one of the frankest of his love poems, if “closeted” in Latin, and belongs in the mainstream of his work rather than at its margins. (Even Wilson ac- knowledged that the voice here is straight out of A Shropshire Lad, and Gilbert Murray reckoned these Latin verses the best since antiquity.) My translation risks being a parody, but I aim for sincere imitation. I wonder if Housman would be appalled, or merely wryly bemused, to know that the Latin text of this poem as it is promulgated on the Internet has been adulterated with textual error. No doubt the mindless duplication of the Internet blogger would have earned one of his to-whom-it-may-concern zingers (which he collected in a notebook). “If Mr. ______were a postage stamp he would be a very good postage stamp; but adhesiveness is not the virtue of a critic. A critic is free and detached.” — aes

A.E. HOUSMAN 527 marina tsvetaeva

Bound for Hell

Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured, Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell — We, who have sung the praises of the lord With every fiber in us, every cell.

We, who did not manage to devote Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway Above a cradle — in a flimsy boat, Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away.

Every morning, every day, we’d rise And have the finest Chinese silks to wear; And we’d strike up the songs of paradise Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair,

We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran, Whether we sewed or not) — yet we have been Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan: The world was ours, each one of us a queen.

First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled, Then plaited with a starry diadem; We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled: But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them,

Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden Where apple trees from paradise are found. No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.

Translated from the Russian by Stephen Edgar

528 POETRY Translator’s Note

Because I am a writer of formal verse myself, it is this aspect of poetry which usually draws me to try my hand at translation. The beauty of translation, of course, is that, whereas the original is a unique entity, you may have any number of translated versions of it, so there is room for many approaches. But on this subject Anthony Hecht, in an in- terview with J.D. McClatchy, referred to Galway Kinnell’s remarks about rhyme and meter in his (Kinnell’s) translations of Villon: “I decided against using [them].... It may be that in our day these formal devices have become a dead hand, which it is just as well not to lay on any poetry.” To which Hecht responded: “I think Kinnell is wrong here, both in his theory of translation and of poetry.” And I can only say that I agree. Tsvetaeva is an extremely concise poet. Partly this is perhaps just a function of the Russian language — the absence of articles, the e∞ciency of inflections — though even by comparison with Akhmatova and Mandelstam she does seem to pack a lot into few words. This I found impossible to replicate; I had to give myself some breathing space, some elbow room, and expand the line from tetram- eter to pentameter. One quite extraordinary feature of this poem, in the Russian, is the absence of a single main finite verb. It begins, and ends, with infinitives, and all the other verbs, apart from “sang” in the relative clause in stanza one, are participles, a long involved trail of them in the dative plural, in agreement with “nam,” “for/to us.” In the face of this extreme concision of expression and idiosyncratic grammatical construction, I very nearly gave the game away at the first stanza. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to rework the sense into an English form. But my unconscious must have been working on the job all the while, because that night I woke up at some ungodly hour and, being unable to get back to sleep, began again on that open- ing stanza in my head and arrived at a solution. The following day I was able to work my way through the poem, stanza by stanza. — se

MARINA TSVETAEVA 529 roberto sosa

The Poor

The poor are many and so — impossible to forget.

No doubt, as day breaks, they see the buildings where they wish they could live with their children.

They can steady the co∞n of a constellation on their shoulders. They can wreck the air like furious birds, blocking out the sun.

But not knowing these gifts, they enter and exit through mirrors of blood, walking and dying slowly.

And so, one cannot forget them.

Translated from the Spanish by Spencer Reece

530 POETRY Translator’s Note

Anglican missionaries first arrived in Honduras in 1768. Sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which, in turn, was backed by a royal charter from England, these missionaries introduced themselves with the explicit aim of enlightening the Hondurans, whom they referred to in their tracts as “infidels” and “heathens.” In the nine- teenth century, American banana companies established plantations, and by 1913 these companies controlled most of the production. Today, Honduras is the poorest Spanish-speaking country in the Western Hemisphere. In the cities, legless beggars plead around the rotaries. The hills in the country are denuded and look like poorly- shaved chins. Thousands of Hondurans leave the country every year to find work. In the summer of 2009 I went to San Pedro Sula as an Episcopal priest in training. One night after dinner, I was introduced by my bishop to his favorite poem, Roberto Sosa’s “Los Pobres.” He felt “Los Pobres” captured the tone of long-silenced Hondurans. I had come to work in an orphanage for abused and abandoned girls. There were seventy girls I lived and worked with that summer. The stories of their pasts were terrible. Some had been so malnourished that their intellects were damaged. But after receiving food and per- manent shelter, these girls came to life the way Lazarus must have. Most evenings I spent alone in my room with dictionaries, flash- cards, and lizards. I first memorized Sosa’s poem, then, bit by bit, tried to put it into English. I spoke the poem in Spanish to myself before I completely knew what I was saying. Spanish generally felt lush in my mouth, but the music of “Los Pobres” was sharp and blunt. As I began to comprehend more Spanish, I found the poem’s tune magnifying its harsh intent. The poem became my anthem. I began to want to bring the words into English for others to hear without it becoming one more pillaged thing. I wanted it to be about Sosa and Honduras and the girls and not me. First published in 1969, “Los Pobres,“ in its sparse language, captures the pain of that overlooked country. Stripped of baroque excess, the poem hangs on the page like a crucifix. — sr

ROBERTO SOSA 531 paul claudel

The Day of Gifts

It’s not true that Your saints have won everything: they left me with sins enough. Someday I’ll lie on my deathbed, Lord, ill-shaven and yellow as a lifelong drunk. And I’ll make a general examination of myself, looking back over all my days, And I’ll see that I’m rich after all, ripe and rich with evil in its unnumbered paths and ways. I haven’t lost one single chance, Lord, to make matter for You to pardon. Now I hearten myself with vice, having long ago sloughed o≠ virtue’s burden. Each day has its own kind of crime, plain to see, and I count them like some paranoid miser.

If what you need, Lord, are virgins, if what you need are brave men beneath your standard; If there are people for whom to be Christian words alone would not su∞ce, But who know rather that only in stirring themselves to chase after You is there any life, Well then there’s Dominic and Francis, Saint Lawrence and Saint Cecilia and plenty more! But if by chance You should have need of a lazy and imbecilic bore, If a prideful coward could prove useful to You, or perhaps a soiled ingrate, Or the sort of man whose hard heart shows up in a hard face — Well, anyway, You didn’t come to save the just but that other type that abounds, And if, miraculously, You run out of them elsewhere ... Lord, I’m still around.

532 POETRY And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn’t held a little something back from You, Hasn’t in his free time fashioned something special for You, Hoping that one day the idea will come to You to ask it of him, And maybe this little that he’s made himself, kept back until then, though horrid and tortuous, will please Your whim. It would be something that he’d put his whole heart into, something useless and malformed. Just like that my little daughter once, on my birthday, teetered forward with encumbered arms And o≠ered me, her heart at once full of timidity and pride, A magnificent little duck she had made with her own two hands, a pincushion, made of red wool and gold thread.

Translated from the French by Jonathan Monroe Geltner

PAUL CLAUDEL 533 Translator’s Note

Paul Claudel is virtually unheard of in the English-speaking world today. This is not surprising, since his oeuvre is almost totally un- available in English. He is also unknown, I suspect, because of his vehement religious commitment. His output was vast and formally varied, but it is as a lyric reli- gious poet that Claudel made his greatest contribution to the modern canon. It is in this work, coeval with the dramatic works, that Claudel developed his characteristic method of versification, the long and deeply rhythmical “verset,” which did so much for the development of twentieth-century French prosody. To an English speaker, this resembles Whitman’s style, which is as it should be, for Claudel learned much from the American. Claudel’s spiritual inclinations are not precisely my own, but I see great value in reintroducing a poet as consistently committed to a cath- olic (in the sense of all-encompassing) system of belief as was Claudel. Such poets are extraordinarily rare. George Santayana called them philosophical poets when he identified Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe as the paragons of the type. Claudel is not of the stature of those po- ets. But he speaks with enormous conviction and consistency, while remaining capable of sudden turns and unexpected formulations of ancient ideas and sentiments. This is where his charm finally lies, and not primarily in the cosmic scope of his work or his religious optimism. All of the stanza breaks in “The Day of Gifts” are my own, and margins have been altered to produce specific points of enjamb- ment. It is possible to decrease the margins to a point where most of Claudel’s long versets can fit into a single line, but I feel this would detract from the aesthetic experience of reading the poem, and make it harder to determine a proper vocalization. Nor is it how the poems usually appear. So, if individual versets are going to take up multiple lines anyhow, one might as well take advantage of the fact and make the enjambments contribute as much as possible; in other words, to make of the accidental something intentional. Not to think too deeply on such a minor matter, but you could say that that principle was one Claudel applied throughout life generally, and perhaps to his poems themselves. — jmg

534 POETRY jorge luis borges

To the One Who is Reading Me

You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver (those forces that control your destiny) the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be your irreversible time is that river in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read his brevity? A marble slab is saved for you, one you won’t read, already graved with city, epitaph, dates of the dead. And other men are also dreams of time, not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust like you; the universe is Proteus. Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead, the fatal shadow waiting at the rim. Know this: in some way you’re already dead.

JORGE LUIS BORGES 535 Music Box

Music of Japan. Parsimoniously from the water clock the drops unfold in lazy honey or ethereal gold that over time reiterates a weave eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright. I fear that every one will be the last. They are a yesterday come from the past. But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight garden, what vigils by an unknown sea, and from what modest melancholy, from what lost and rediscovered afternoon do they arrive at their far future: me? Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play I am. I want to be. I bleed away.

Translated from the Spanish by Tony Barnstone

536 POETRY Translator’s Note

Jorge Luis Borges was unapologetic about his sonnets. He liked his rhymes to be true, and he liked to create sentences the size of stanzas in order to emphasize the sonnet’s modular structure. Borges also made it clear that he expected the same dedication and craft from his translators, that he did not want his sonnets translated into loos- ened form or into free verse. (His comment on such translations was simple: “Try harder.”) My love a≠air with Borges’s sonnets goes back to my earlier love a≠air with his fabulist fiction. I love how he uses the sonnet as a ma- chine for thinking, for literary and philosophical games, and I love finding the poems populated by my old friends: the tigers, riddles, labyrinths, and mirrors that recur so often in his prose. Borges is not merely a philosophical poet; he is a visionary one. When the poet addresses “the One Who is Reading Me,” his imagination travels to the future, where a marble tombstone awaits the reader. Paradoxically, the reader is posited to be a dream of time, a chang- ing river draining irreversibly toward the sea (death), and yet also invulnerable because of the certainty that he or she will become dust: who can kill the dust? In “Music Box,” the dripping golden music carries the poet’s imagination to a past Japan of mountain shrines and unknown seas, and in that astral projection the poet finds himself bleeding away into time, like music. How else to capture this vision except in the music box of the sonnet, whose hidden gears turn to make the music chime and keep time? Of course, we can’t keep time in a box; time has a box prepared for us. Understanding this is what allows us to value what life we have. My father tells a story about Borges. One day the great man was walking down the streets of Buenos Aires when a man rushed up to him and exclaimed, “Borges, you are immortal!” Borges, with his characteristic dry wit, replied, “Don’t be so pessimistic.” — tb

JORGE LUIS BORGES 537 antonio porchia

From “Voices”

Some things become such a part of us that we forget them.

š

I want because of what I wanted, and what I wanted, I wouldn’t want again.

š

The passing of a soul is light, extremely light, almost silence.

š

There are pains that have lost their memory and don’t remember why they are painful.

š

Convince me, but without convictions. Convictions no longer convince me.

š

We don’t forgive being as we are.

š

At the last moment, my whole life will last a moment.

š

Man is a thing children learn. A childish thing.

š

538 POETRY Don’t speak to me. I want to be with you.

š

There are those fallen who don’t get up so as not to fall again.

š

The dream that doesn’t feed on dream vanishes.

Translated from the Spanish by Gonzalo Melchor

ANTONIO PORCHIA 539 Translator’s Note

Ever since they were self-published in 1943 by their fifty-eight-year- old author, Antonio Porchia’s writings have defied classification: what are these brief texts? (“Never say I write aphorisms, I would be humiliated,” Porchia is reported to have said.) And how could there be no name for something so utterly recognizable? Roberto Juarroz, the renowned Argentine poet and one of Porchia’s closest friends, once wrote that the “voices,” as Porchia called them, were perhaps simply “depth”: that was all, “depth itself.” Porchia was born in Italy in 1885, but after the death of his father in 1906, emigrated with his mother and six siblings to Argentina. To earn a living and support his family, Porchia worked for many years as a basket weaver and stevedore at the Buenos Aires port. In 1918 he and his brother bought a printing press in the city, where Porchia would be employed for the rest of his working life. His friends were mostly painters and sculptors he met in the working-class neighborhood of La Boca: under their initiative, their “Association of Arts and Letters Impulso” acted as self-publishing im- print for the Voices in 1943 and 1948. Juarroz recalls how when the printed books arrived in the studio they took up too much space; not knowing what to do with them, Porchia donated all the copies to a charitable organization stocking public libraries. Those who knew him describe him as silent, self-e≠acing, infinitely generous. In summer he wore an old pajama jacket; in winter, a sweater and scarf held by a hairpin. Assiduously he would save apples, wine, bread, and salami for his visitors. “He wrote very little, four or five sentences a year,” the sculptor Libero Badii says. “But he worked on each one with a rigor that was not only internal but of a wordsmith.” “Voices is almost a biography,” Porchia once said. “Which almost belongs to everyone.” Borges, in his preface written for the Fayard’s French edition in the late seventies (Porchia was, for a time, relatively known), remarked how in every piece “the reader feels the immediate presence of a man and his destiny.” I think this is key: Porchia’s voices, these odd brief texts, were not written for or toward something, but simply as something: as an inextricable part of his life. If “they occurred to him,” as he put it,

540 POETRY Porchia wrote them down; if they didn’t, he did not. When people asked for them, he gave them away; when an editor tried to “correct” what he thought was “bad” grammar, Porchia took them back. This was not hardheadedness or vanity. As Juarroz says, he “was a being of exemplary humility, but at the same time he had that incontrovertible, unmodifiable something, which makes us think of central trees, the ones the whole forest seems to lean on.” Porchia, Juarroz remembers, was never bothered by money, reputation, or any other worries. One of his favorite sayings was: “know how to wait.”

ANTONIO PORCHIA 541 said

Psalms

lord pray pray loudly against the noise of the human hand which seeks to drown you out and appear on quiet soles so that we might understand your footsteps exert yourself in order to recognize our prayers even when they appear in a di≠erent garment because no prayer ever looses itself from the source of the one praying

542 POETRY lord take up the speech by which i pray to you grant me the gestures which have grown within me in your absence so that i might remain true to my uneducable nature and take your weakness upon me

SAID 543 lord you should always wander and never let yourself settle down because there are no longer any dwelling places only footsteps be loud and penetrating sympathize with me and my stirrings lead me all the way to your bread so that my word might wake

544 POETRY lord stay by me even if i nourish myself from ashes and salt be still and listen to that name which i lend to you because i want to distinguish you from the idols grant me patience to endure those who are vain with their empty words and the converts who are zealous to confirm their opposite and grant that my waiting be full of revolt

SAID 545 lord when you arrive we will be light bread and water the table is set and the door opened come and take your place among us free me of the belief that you are only faithful from a distance and speak with me in the unharried language of animals who from far o≠ lie in wait for us with their unadulterated hunger

Translated from the German by Mark S. Burrows

546 POETRY Translator’s Note

I first met SAID in Munich in May 2010. The occasion was a poetry reading held in the city’s old Rathaus. An attentive audience had gathered, filling every seat in the spacious ceremonial hall; above us, carved shields ornamented the wooden ceiling, represent- ing the towns and cities of the medieval Bavarian kingdom. The reading featured contributors to a volume of poetry entitled Die Ho≠nung fährt schwarz, which literally means “hope rides black,” an idiom slighting those taking public transportation without paying. To describe hope as such a freeloader would startle a proper German, though it is no stranger or less suggestive than Emily Dickinson’s description of it as

the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all -

Midway through the evening, as the invited poets stood one by one to read from their work, the writer who goes by the name SAID came to the podium, a thin volume in hand. As he began to read, I recog- nized a depth of voice resonant in the poems, though I had never heard him before. He had selected a handful of short pieces from his Psalms; I chose the five poems translated here from that collection. In keeping with the genre, his psalms function as a kind of one- sided conversation, that ancient gesture toward transcendence we call prayer. In one of these, this son of a secular Iranian family who had immigrated to Germany as a young student in 1965 begs to

remain true to the god of [his] childhood who o≠ers light and comfort and hears us in that no-man’s land between arriving and fleeing.

What kind of “god” does the poet turn to in these psalms? Not the formal deity worshiped by Muslims, Jews, Christians, and others, and

SAID 547 not the elaborated god staked out in speculative theological dis- course. Rather, this herr or “lord,” the ancient biblical ascription used in most of these poems, is the one beyond names whom humans have turned to across the spectrum of religious cultures in their anguish and fear, in celebration and gratitude. And we, dwellers in this “no- man’s-land,” find ourselves unhoused of certainties, wandering like migrants in a barren and uncharted borderland where — as he puts it — love implores us “to bring forth a harvest.” His psalms lure us to yearn for such a harvest. But these are not psalms of ease. As with many of the ancient psalms in the Hebrew scriptures, SAID’s poems find their voice in the situ- ation of exile, one that is often existential rather than geographical. Is his choice to include ninety-nine poems in this collection an allu- sion to the ancient Muslim tradition ascribing this number of names to Allah? Perhaps, though the herr SAID addresses in these poems, consistently refusing every capitalization, seems unbounded by the ordering of religious convention. His “lord” conforms to Feuerbach’s conviction, so influential on Nietzsche and central to the modernist critique of theism, which views religious language as projections of our human nature. As he concedes in one of these psalms:

look lord you and i we are one truth and when we whisper with each other so we become a bridge for the feet of lovers.

SAID’s psalms call for “whispering” of this sort against the rising noise of intolerance so dominant in our world. His invitation that we “become” such bridges over the wastelands of human hatred and fear, so much of it sponsored by religious absolutists, o≠ers a welcome alternative to the reigning violence of war. The hope that “rides black,” for dwellers in this “no-man’s land” we inhabit, promises nothing less than this, and demands nothing more. — msb

548 POETRY MARINA TSVETAEVA: EIGHT POEMS

New versions from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine

Marina Tsvetaeva with her dog in Savoy, France. marina tsvetaeva

From “Poems for Moscow”

From my hands — take this city not made by hands, my strange, my beautiful brother.

Take it, church by church — all forty times forty churches, and flying up the roofs, the small pigeons;

And Spassky Gates — and gates, and gates — where the Orthodox take o≠ their hats;

And the Chapel of Stars — refuge chapel — where the floor is — polished by tears;

Take the circle of the five cathedrals, my coal, my soul; the domes wash us in their darkgold,

And on your shoulders, from the red clouds, the Mother of God will drop her own thin coat,

And you will rise, happened of wonderpowers — never ashamed you loved me.

March 31, 1916

552 POETRY “I won’t leave you!” Only God can say this — or a peasant with milk in Moscow, winter 1918.

š

My “I don’t want to” is always “I cannot.” In me there is no arbitrari- ness. “I cannot” — and meek eyes.

1919 – 20

Note: All prose quotations are from Marina Tsvetaeva’s critical writings and journals.

MARINA TSVETAEVA 553 “Where does such tenderness come from?”

Where does such tenderness come from? These aren’t the first curls I’ve wound around my finger — I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.

The sky is washed and dark (Where does such tenderness come from?) Other eyes have known and shifted away from my eyes.

But I’ve never heard words like this in the night (Where does such tenderness come from?) with my head on your chest, rest.

Where does this tenderness come from? And what will I do with it? Young stranger, poet, wandering through town, you and your eyelashes — longer than anyone’s.

1916

554 POETRY I don’t eavesdrop, I listen in. Like a doctor to someone’s chest. And, often, you tap, and there is no echo!

š

It was forbidden for the bourgeoisie to use horses for removing snow from the streets. So the bourgeoisie, without a second thought, hired themselves a camel. And the camel hauled the snow. And the soldiers laughed out loud. (I saw this with my own eyes, on Arbat Street.)

1919 – 20

MARINA TSVETAEVA 555 From “Poems for Blok”

Your name is a — bird in my hand, a piece of ice on my tongue. The lips’ quick opening. Your name — four letters. A ball caught in flight, a silver bell in my mouth.

A stone thrown into a silent lake is — the sound of your name. The light click of hooves at night — your name. Your name at my temple — sharp click of a cocked gun.

Your name — impossible — kiss on my eyes, the chill of closed eyelids. Your name — a kiss of snow. Blue gulp of icy spring water. With your name — sleep deepens.

April 15, 1916

556 POETRY The cruel words of Blok about very early Akhmatova: “Akhmatova writes poems as if a man is watching her, but you have to write as if God is watching you.”

1932

To love — is to see a man as God intended him, and his parents failed to make him.

To fall out of love — is to see, instead of him: a table, a chair.

1919 – 20

MARINA TSVETAEVA 557 “I am happy living simply”

I am happy living simply: like a clock, or a calendar. Worldly pilgrim, thin, wise — as any creature. To know

the spirit is my beloved. To come to things — swift as a ray of light, or a look. To live as I write: spare — the way God asks me — and friends do not.

1919

558 POETRY The mysterious disappearance of the photographer on Tverskaya Street, who long and stubbornly took (free) pictures of the Soviet elite.

š

Not long ago, in Kuntsevo, I suddenly crossed myself when I saw an oak. Evidently the source of prayer is not fear, but delight.

1919 – 20

MARINA TSVETAEVA 559 From “An Attempt at Jealousy”

How is your life with that other one? Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars and a long coastline — and the memory of me

is soon a drifting island (not in the ocean — in the sky!) Souls — you will be sisters — sisters, not lovers.

How is your life with an ordinary woman? without the god inside her? The queen supplanted —

How do you breathe now? Flinch, waking up? What do you do, poor man?

“Hysterics and interruptions — enough! I’ll rent my own house!” How is your life with that other, you, my own.

Is the breakfast delicious? (If you get sick, don’t blame me!) How is it, living with a postcard? You who stood on Sinai.

How’s your life with a tourist on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?) is it to your liking?

How’s life? Do you cough? Do you hum to drown out the mice in your mind?

560 POETRY How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising? How’s kissing plaster-dust?

Are you bored with her new body? How’s it going, with an earthly woman, with no sixth sense?

Are you happy? No? In a shallow pit — how is your life, my beloved? Hard as mine with another man?

1924

MARINA TSVETAEVA 561 “A kiss on the forehead”

A kiss on the forehead — erases misery. I kiss your forehead.

A kiss on the eyes — lifts sleeplessness. I kiss your eyes.

A kiss on the lips — is a drink of water. I kiss your lips.

A kiss on the forehead — erases memory.

1917

562 POETRY You can’t buy me. That is the whole point. To buy is to buy oneself o≠. You can’t buy yourself o≠ from me. You can buy me only with the whole sky in yourself. The whole sky in which, perhaps, there is no place for me.

1919

MARINA TSVETAEVA 563 From “The Desk”

Fair enough: you people have eaten me, I — wrote you down. They’ll lay you out on a dinner table, me — on this desk.

I’ve been happy with little. There are dishes I’ve never tried. But you, you people eat slowly, and often; You eat and eat.

Everything was decided for us back in the ocean: Our places of action, our places of gratitude.

You — with belches, I — with books, with tru±es, you. With pencil, I, you and your olives, me and my rhyme, with pickles, you. I, with poems.

At your head — funeral candles like thick-legged asparagus: your road out of this world a dessert table’s striped cloth.

They will smoke Havana cigars on your left side and your right; your body will be dressed in the best Dutch linen.

And — not to waste such expensive cloth, they will shake you out, along with the crumbs and bits of food, into the hole, the grave.

564 POETRY You — stu≠ed capon, I — pigeon. Gunpowder, your soul, at the autopsy. And I will be laid out bare with only two wings to cover me.

Late July 1933

MARINA TSVETAEVA 565 From “Poems to Czechoslovakia”

Black mountain

black mountain blocks the earth’s light. Time — time — time to give back to God his ticket.

I refuse to — be. In the madhouse of the inhumans I refuse to — live. To swim

on the current of human spines. I don’t need holes in my ears, no need for seeing eyes. I refuse to swim on the current of human spines.

To your mad world — one answer: I refuse.

š

They took — suddenly — and took — openly — took mountains — and took their entrails, they took coal, and steel they took, they took lead, and crystal.

And sugar they took, and took the clover, they took the West, and they took the North, they took the beehive, and took the haystack, they took the South from us, and the East.

Vari — they took, and the Tatras — they took, they took our fingers — took our friends —

But we stand up — as long as there’s spit in our mouths! May 9, 1939

566 POETRY Today (September 26, Old Style) on John the Theologian’s feast day, I am forty-eight years old. I congratulate myself. Knock on wood — for getting well, and maybe for forty-eight years of a soul’s uninterrupted existence.

My di∞culty (in writing poems — and perhaps other people’s dif- ficulty in understanding them) is in the impossibility of my goal, for example, to use words to express a moan: nnh-nnh-nnh. To express a sound using words, using meanings. So that the only thing left in the ears would be nnh-nnh-nnh.

September 1940

MARINA TSVETAEVA 567 Translator’s Note

Tsvetaeva, whose early years were spent largely in Western Europe, once said that her “native language was German.” How do we ex- plain this fact about the poet Boris Pasternak called “the most Russian poet of us all”? Poets are not born in a country. Poets are born in childhood. What, then, is Russian about Marina Tsvetaeva?

Tsvetaeva understood audial and linguistic work that play such an enormous role in folk song. Folk song is for the most part a litany, joyful or grieving. There is an element of lamentation, an element of tongue-twister and pun, there are echoes of spell, incantation, even exorcism in a folk song—there is a pure play of sounds—it is always partly hysterical, near the fall into tears or laughter, and partly zaum.* — Vladimir Khodasevich

Was she a “di∞cult” poet? Perhaps. But first we must clarify what “di∞cult” meant for that country:

One of our poets used to say proudly, “Though some of my verses may be obscure they are never prosaic.” There are two kinds of obscurity; one arises from a lack of feelings and thoughts, which have been replaced by words; the other from an abundance of feelings and thoughts, and the inadequacy of words to express them. — Alexander Pushkin

š

One of the first reviews of her debut collection blamed Tsvetaeva for “too muchness,” for an over-abundance of lyricism. Tsvetaeva’s response? “There cannot be too much of lyric because lyric itself is too much.”

*Zaum refers to pure play of language, “beyonsense.”

568 POETRY š

So how does one attempt to translate work that even Russian poets find too hard? Translators usually cite Tsvetaeva’s famous temperament. (“Next time I will be born not on a planet, but on a comet!”) With bravery, they announce their ambition to imitate her music in English — to stay “faithful” to the music. The danger of this “faithful” position is that attempting to imitate the sounds of the great master in a new language produces just that: an imitation that cannot rise to the level of the original. This may oc- cur because of the translator’s lack of skill or because the “receiving” language — English, in this case — is an entirely di≠erent medium, at a very di≠erent point in its development, a point at which the par- ticular sound e≠ects mean entirely di≠erent things. Jean Valentine and I do not claim to do better. In fact, we do not claim to have translated Tsvetaeva. If translation, as most transla- tors are eager to claim, is “a closest possible reading,” then it is not translation, it is notation, midrash: to translate is to inhabit. The meaning of the word eros is to stand outside of one’s body. This we do not claim to have achieved. (We wish we could, one day!) No, we are simply two poets who fell in love with a third and spent two years reading her together. These are fragments, notes in the margin. (Erase everything you have written, Mandelstam says, but keep the notes in the margin.) Jean and I have vastly di≠erent temperaments from this poet. But we are drawn by her magnetism, and so we continue reading her together. Just that: reading lines, fragments, moments; two years of two poets reading a third is an homage. — ik

MARINA TSVETAEVA 569

THE POETRY OF KABBALAH

peter cole

Introduction

The stakes couldn’t be higher: extraction of light from the contain- er of sound; ascent to the Throne of God and direct vision of His Glory; the eradication of coarseness and the forces of darkness; a path to redemption, sometimes through sin; the achievement of erotic union on high — which is to say, the sacred marriage of feminine and masculine aspects within the Deity. “Great is the power of the poem recited for the sake of heaven,” writes one late-seventeenth-century North African Kabbalist poet. “It unites all the [spiritual] qualities like a sacrificial o≠ering, aligns the [heavenly] channels, and gives rise to e≠ulgence in all worlds — above and below.” In this Kabbalistic context, poems not only depict a mystical pro- cess, they produce it. Seeking a return to the primordial harmony destroyed with the catastrophe of creation and Adam’s transgression in Eden, those who compose and utter the lines of mystical hymns take part in the continual reconfiguration of the cosmos. For the letters of the alphabet, or aleph-bet, are, a medieval Iberian Hebrew text tells us, nothing less than “the powers of God ... engraved on the throne.... They are called the angels of the living God.” And according to late-phase Hasidic Kabbalah, the letters of the Torah are each “a palace or chamber inhabited by the divine presence.” Combined in the proper manner, they lead to the revelation of the Infinite’s radiance. As with the gain, however, so with the potential for debilitating strain in the scheme of this at once conservative and truly experi- mental poetics, where the level of risk is raised to an almost impossible pitch. The Talmud warns of the threats that await a person who would hazard the halls of the upper palaces — apostasy, insanity, and death (spiritual or actual). Of the famous four sages who entered that place of esoteric interpretation seeking knowledge of this potent sort, only one returned in peace. Given the danger that attends to Kabbalistic inquiry, why, then, submit oneself to an equivalent peril on the literary plane — the gauntlet of abstractions and the incessant mixing of mythic metaphors that dominate the textual landscapes of Kabbalah? What, apart from a historical and armchair sense of the intense religious experience

PETER COLE 573 of spiritual adepts, does Kabbalah — and specifically the poetry of Kabbalah — have to tell us as readers today? For one, long before Frenchified notions of trace and erasure took hold, a Kabbalistic poetics was drawing attention to aspects of language-in-action that slip readers into (as D.H. Lawrence put it in a wholly di≠erent context) a “dawn-kaleidoscopic” world of ramifying meaning where absence and presence evoke one another. Contemporary literary culture tends to doubt the power of poetry and is suspicious of verse that takes as its subject its own medium. But hymns treating the (implicitly parallel) nature of divine and hu- man creation, and the language that leads to that creation, lie at “the heart of the heart” of Kabbalah’s country. No less an authority than Gershom Scholem — the great twentieth-century scholar of Jewish mysticism and a writer of almost clairvoyant powers — identified “the indissoluble link [in Kabbalah] between the idea of the revealed truth and the notion of language,” calling this perhaps the most im- portant legacy that Judaism bequeathed to the history of religions. He writes of the conviction held by many Kabbalists that

the language — the medium — in which the spiritual life of man is accomplished, or consummated, includes an inner property, an aspect which does not altogether merge or disappear in the relationships of communication between men ... in all such attempts there is something else vibrating.

So it is that Kabbalistic poems in Hebrew and Aramaic, Ladino, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic have moved generations of readers who may have understood only a small part of that literature’s esoteric import. Working like verbal spirit traps, the poems of the Jewish mystical tradition precipitate a sense of transcendence, which becomes palpable long before it is fathomable. That core element Scholem discerned, out of which all other quali- ties of speech and the world are formed, points to the Name of God as the metaphysical origin of language. Hence the Provençal Kabbalist Isaac the Blind’s circa-1200 image of the inverted tree of divine might, whose roots (in heaven) consist of this Name, and the letters of which are branches and leaves that dangle down and appear as flickering flames of words and things. (“The letter,” according to Isaac, “is the element of cosmic writing.”) And so, too, the idea put forth in the thir- teenth century by the Kabbalist and visionary poet Avraham Abulafia

574 POETRY that letters are “the mystery that lies at the basis of the ‘host’ (of all things) ... every letter is a sign (symbol) and indication of creation.” As Abulafia saw it, the mind, hand, pen, ink, and parchment form a continuum analogous to that of the worlds on high and below.

š

There is, to be sure, more to the poetry of Kabbalah than an embrace of language as a pertinent subject for verse, and the poems in the anthology from which this portfolio is drawn are also highly charged carriers of actual practice — crystallizations of both the simplest and most abstruse notions that have occupied Kabbalistic circles from the early Middle Ages and into the twenty-first century. While the con- ceptual range of the poetry seems at first glance rarefied (and in need of being “translated” by readers into a form fit for their own use), the questions that the poems engage could not be more substantial. They cover a broad spectrum of timeless concerns, asking, for in- stance, what it means to maintain a vital connection through speech to the spirit and why consciousness of majesty matters in the world of an ordinary week. From early on, this tradition considers how first things are bound to what comes last, and where the present stands in relation to both. Beginning in the eleventh century — though some would say much earlier — Eros enters the esoteric equation, and the poems take up the question of how that might inform a faithful exis- tence. (In fact, the erotic dimension of Kabbalah becomes so central that coupling, the endlessly complex interplay between masculine and feminine aspects of creation, has been described as being, for Kabbalists, “the secret and foundation of all existence.”) Later, the tradition looks at the ways in which a perception of cosmic exile al- ters our sense of being in place, and where and how darkness and evil figure in this mix. From the start, however, the hymns of the Jewish mystical tradition demonstrate how song — almost magically, and at times with actual magic — can conduct and preserve transfor- mative knowledge, even for those who don’t quite know what they know. Moreover, they show how a vision of the manifold linkage of all things and all degrees of thought and feeling might be registered in the cadence and weave of a line of verse, a series of wedded sounds in the air.

PETER COLE 575 anonymous

Each Day

Each day as dawn approaches, the King sits in majesty and blesses the holy creatures: To you, my creatures, I speak, before you I declare — Creatures who bear the throne of my glory with all your heart, and willingly with your soul — Blessed is the hour of your creation, and exalted is the constellation beneath which I gave you form. May the light of that morning continue to shine when you came into my mind — for you are a vessel of my desire prepared and perfected on that day. Be silent, creatures of my making, so I might hear my children pray.

Notes to individual poems can be found at the end of the portfolio.

576 POETRY From Whose Beauty the Depths Are Lit

When one stands before the throne of glory, he begins reciting the hymn that the throne of glory sings each day:

King of kings, God of gods and Lord of lords, encircled by braided branches of crowns — encompassed by branching commanders of radiance — who covers the heavens with wings of His splendor and in His majesty appears on high; from whose beauty the depths are lit, whose glory flashes across the sky — proud envoys shoot forth from His form, powerful creatures explode from His crown, and princes course from the folds of His robe. All the trees rejoice at His word as the grasses delight in His joy — and His words pour forth as fragrance in flames of issued fire, pro≠ering pleasure to those who search them and peace to those who make them live.

ANONYMOUS 577 yehudah halevi

Where Will I Find You

Where, Lord, will I find you: your place is high and obscured. And where won’t I find you: your glory fills the world.

You dwell deep within — you’ve fixed the ends of creation. You stand, a tower for the near, refuge to those far o≠. You’ve lain above the Ark, here, yet live in the highest heavens. Exalted among your hosts, although beyond their hymns — no heavenly sphere could ever contain you, let alone a chamber within.

In being borne above them on an exalted throne, you are closer to them than their breath and skin. Their mouths bear witness for them, that you alone gave them form. Your kingdom’s burden is theirs; who wouldn’t fear you? And who could fail to search for you — who sends down food when it is due?

578 POETRY I sought your nearness. With all my heart I called you. And in my going out to meet you, I found you coming toward me, as in the wonders of your might and holy works I saw you. Who would say he hasn’t seen your glory as the heavens’ hordes declare their awe of you without a sound being heard?

But could the Lord, in truth, dwell in men on earth? How would men you made from the dust and clay fathom your presence there, enthroned upon their praise? The creatures hovering over the world praise your wonders — your throne borne high above their heads, as you bear all forever.

YEHUDAH HALEVI 579 anonymous

Release, Please

Release, please, this bound one by the power of your right hand. Receive the song of your people, exalt us, Lord, and make us pure. Almighty one, protect those who seek your oneness: Bless them and cleanse them — bestow upon them your merciful justice. Mighty one, holy one, in your goodness guide your assembly. Turn, sole one on high, to those who remember your sanctity, and accept our cry and plea — You who fathom all mysteries.

580 POETRY ya’akov hakohen

Prayers for the Protection and Opening of the Heart

i

May the Name send its hidden radiance to open the gates of deliverance to His servants — and shine in their hearts, which now are shut in silent darkness.

May the great King be moved to act in perfection and righteousness — to open the gates of wisdom for us and waken the love of old, the love of ancient days.

ii

By the power of the hidden Name I-am-that-I-am, and by the dew of Desire and Blessing, the dead will live again ...

iii

I-am is the power of your Name in concealment, and one who knows its mystery dwells in eternity’s instant.

Over the world, it pours forth abundance and favor, and on it all worlds hang, like grapes in a cluster.

Send the dew of blessing, the dew of grace; renew my dispensation, and grant me length of days.

Bring light to my eyes with your teaching, and let not the husks that surround your hosts obstruct me. May Heaven and Adam’s children judge me with mercy.

Sustain me with their strength and fortune — but do not leave me in need of the gifts of men.

YA’AKOV HAKOHEN 581 yosef gikatilla

The Nut Garden

The Nut Garden holds things felt and thought and feeling for thought is always a palace —

Sinai with flames of fire about it, burning though never by fire devoured.

On all four sides surrounded so — entrance is barred to pretenders forever.

For one who learns to be wise, however, its doors are open toward the East:

he reaches out and takes a nut, then cracks its shell, and eats ...

582 POETRY anonymous

Incantation Against Lilith

Veiled in velvet, is she here? Leave o≠, leave o≠: You shall not enter, you shall not emerge. It is neither yours nor your share.

Return ... Return: The sea is swelling; its waves are calling. I hold to the holy portion — I am held in the holiness of the King.

ANONYMOUS 583 yitzhak luria

Hymn for the Third Meal

Prepare the feast of perfect faith, the delight of the Holy King. Prepare the feast of the King.

This is the feast of the Lesser Presence; the Ancient Eminence and Field of Apples assemble with Him for the feast.

š

Sons of the Palace — you who yearn to behold the radiance of the Lesser Presence —

be seated here at this Sabbath table, adorned and crowned with the name of the King.

Exult in your being part of this gathering among the guardian angels’ wings,

and rejoice now within this hour of favor which knows not what anger brings.

584 POETRY Draw near me here — see my power, without the judgments of judgment’s terror.

Those without may not enter, for they are dogs of rancor and gall.

I hereby call to the Ancient of Days to summon His will to drive them away — for when His favor in this room is shown, the husks are rendered null and void.

He drives them into holes in the ground, conceals them deep in caverns of stone.

And so it is now and till twilight— within the Impatient One’s delight.

YITZHAK LURIA 585 anonymous

Peace Be Upon You

Peace be upon you — ministering angels, angels of heaven — from the King who is king of all kings, the Holy One, blessed be He; in peace be your coming — angels of peace, angels of heaven — from the King who is king of all kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.

Bless me with peace — angels of peace, angels of heaven — from the King who is king of all kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, in peace be your leaving — angels of peace, angels of heaven, from the King who is king of all kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.

586 POETRY Notes

Jewish mystical tradition once held that by reciting the visionary hymns known as the “Poems of the Palaces” (or Heikhalot) — of which the first two poems in this portfolio are examples — a man might, if he didn’t fall prey to any number of potentially fatal ob- stacles along the way, ascend through the seven heavens and approach the throne of God. There he could behold the Divine Glory and par- ticipate in the celestial liturgy. Experience in this circa second- to ninth-century ce literature is acoustic rather than psychological in the conventional sense — though this does not mean that emotional struggle and insight aren’t at the core of the work. Central to the quest of these poets who, as the tradition describes them, go down to the chariot, or vehicle of vision, is their verse’s ability to animate what we today would think of as “abstraction” — to set up a palpable, percussive current and timbre linking syllable to syllable and word to word in a progression toward heightened perception and, in some cases, ecstasy.

š

Yehudah HaLevi is perhaps the best-known literary figure in Jewish history. Hardly a Kabbalist, he is nonetheless looked to by later mystical practitioners as a distinguished and discerning precursor because of his Sufi-like surrender to trust in God and His presence.

š

“Release, Please,” most likely composed in Babylonia in the tenth cen- tury, is a plea for strength employing gentleness, or a gentle poem invoking might. Now part of the Sabbath liturgy, it can be read in both straightforward and mystical fashions, as it encodes a forty-two letter name of God within its Hebrew lines.

š

PETER COLE 587 The poems attributed to Ya’akov HaKohen are taken from a longer prayer that Scholem describes as “a mysterious hymn.” It employs symbolism characteristic of the Kabbalah of its day, including men- tion of the kelippot — shards, shells, or husks that embody the forces of evil in the world.

š

The initial word of the thirteenth-century poet Yosef Gikatilla’s Hebrew title (Ginat Egoz — The Garden of Nuts) stands for Gematria (numerology), Notarikon (acronymns or acrostics), and Temurah (per- mutation of the letters, as in anagrams). The implication of this acronym is that the esoteric manipulation of letters is like a garden wherein ultimate nourishment can be found. A case in point is the shift from “east” to “eats,” where wisdom and knowledge of the mystical teachings lead one into the heart of a given word, where the secrets of existence lie. The play isn’t, in fact, in the Hebrew, but the English here presents an opportunity to account for the sort of anagrammatic permutation that runs through so much of this work.

š

The incantation against Lilith appears in the Zohar, a work most likely compiled in the late thirteenth century in north-central Spain. By the eighth century the legend had taken shape that Lilith was Adam’s first wife. Created from the earth with her husband, she refused to give up her equality, fought with him about how they should have sex, then pronounced the four-letter name of God and flew away. In Kabbalistic lore she is both a strangler of children and a seducer of men. Lilith grows jealous of pious couples, whose sexual congress on the Sabbath evening brings about a union of the masculine and femi- nine aspects within the Godhead. Envious of all this, she prowls the earth, looking for husbands and wives who violate the sanctity of their intimacy by having intercourse by lamplight. When she finds

588 POETRY such a couple, she pounces and takes possession of the soul of their o≠spring.

š

Yitzhak Luria left behind him almost nothing in the way of theo- retical, ethical, or confessional prose, and only a handful of poems, but he comes down to us as one of the most vital figures in Jewish history — a myth-maker of major proportions and a charismatic per- sonality whose recalibration of Jewish thought continues to alter the consciousness of Jews and non-Jews alike. Addressed to the baroque countenances of God as he envisioned them, Luria’s three Aramaic hymns for the Sabbath meals “suggest the grandiloquent gestures of a magician,” and, says Scholem, “read like the hymns of a mystery religion.” The third hymn, translated here, is at once a convocation and an exorcism.

š

Among the most beloved components of the Sabbath rites developed in the Galilean town of Safed in the sixteenth century is the rhythmi- cally enchanting and quietly haunting anonymous hymn that begins “Shalom Aleichem” — “Peace Be Upon You” — which was sung in the home after the men of the house returned from the field on Friday evening. The poem is addressed to the Sabbath angels, and it might best be read as a hymn for the peace of the household, which in turn becomes part of the larger harmony of existence.

PETER COLE 589 CONTRIBUTORS

tony barnstone’s * newest project is a folk-rock cd, Tokyo Burn- ing, with musicians John Clinebell and Ariana Hall, based on his book Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (BkMk Press, 2009). gottfried benn (1886 – 1956) served in the German army’s medi- cal corps during wwi and used his clinical experiences as inspiration for his first collections of poetry, Morgue und andere Gedichte (1912) and Fleisch (1917). michael bierut * is a partner in the international design consul- tancy Pentagram, a faculty member at the Yale School of Art and the Yale School of Management, and the author of Seventy-nine Short Es- says on Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). alain borer* is a poet, novelist, art critic, and playwright, as well as an internationally-known specialist on the work of Arthur Rimbaud. His published works include Rimbaud in Abyssinia (William Morrow, 1991), Icare & I don’t (Editions de Seuil, 2007), and Le ciel & la carte (Editions de Seuil, 2010), winner of the Pierre Mac Orlan Prize. jorge luis borges (1899 – 1986), the great Argentine writer of fiction, poetry, and essays, was one of the pioneers of magical realism. geoffrey brock is the author of Weighing Light (Ivan R. Dee, 2005) and the editor of the FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry (2012). He teaches at the University of Arkansas. mark s. burrows’s * new Rilke translation, Prayers of a Young Poet, will appear this year and his translation of SAID’s Psalms in 2013, both from Paraclete Press. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. paul claudel (1868 – 1955) spent his career as a diplomat, serving the French government. A devout Roman Catholic from the age of eighteen, he is best known for his prolific dramatic output, most notably The Tidings Brought To Mary and The Satin Slipper. peter cole’s The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition is forthcoming in April from Yale University Press.

590 POETRY averill curdy’s first book of poems will be published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She lives in Chicago and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. eugene dubnov * was born in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1949 and studied psychology at Moscow University before emigrating to the West in 1971 to become a student at the University of London. stephen edgar has two books forthcoming this year: in Australia, his eighth collection, Eldershaw (Black Pepper), and in the us, The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (Baskerville Publishers). paolo febbraro* is a poet and critic. His collections of verse include Il bene materiale (Libro Scheiwiller, 2008) and Deposizione (LietoColle, 2010). jonathan monroe geltner* is completing a book of speculative fiction and a collection of discursive, lyric essays on cycling in France and America. yosef gikatilla * (1248 – c. 1325) was a Spanish Kabbalist and student of one of the leading Jewish mystics of the day, Avraham Abulafia, who was the founder of prophetic Kabbalah. ya’akov hakohen * belonged to a circle of Jewish mystics that was active in mid-thirteenth-century Castile and Provence. yehudah halevi * (c. 1075 – 1141) is considered to be one of the greatest Hebrew poets. He lived in both Muslim and Christian Spain before rejecting its culture of Jewish-Arab hybridization and leaving for Israel in 1140. His most famous work is the philosophical text called the Kuzari. michael hofmann’s annotated translation of Joseph Roth’s letters was just published by W.W. Norton; Impromptus, his Gottfried Benn translations, is expected later this year from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. a.e. housman * (1859 – 1936) published two books of poetry in his lifetime: A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). More Poems (1936) was released posthumously, as was his Complete Poems (1939). mark irwin is the author of six collections of poetry, two volumes of translation, and a recently completed book of essays on contemporary American poetry entitled “Monster.” American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987 – 2011) will appear next year from Ashland Poetry Press.

CONTRIBUTORS 591 ilya kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor of the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (2010). He lives in San Diego. yitzhak luria* (1534 – 1572) was raised in Egypt and, late in life, came to the Galilee town of Safed. While he left behind almost no writing apart from a handful of poems, he is responsible for the articulation of a highly complex and potent revision of Kabbalah’s principal mythic vision. john matthias has published fourteen books of poems, most recently Trigons (2009) and Collected Shorter Poems (2011), both from Shearsman Books. He is professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and co-editor of Notre Dame Review. gonzalo melchor’s * poetry translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry London and Poetry Review. antonio porchia * (1885 – 1968) worked for many years as a basket weaver and printing-press operator in Buenos Aires. spencer reece is the chaplain to Bishop Carlos Lopez-Lozano of the Reformed Episcopal Church in Spain. said* is a native of Iran and has lived in Germany since 1965. He has published eight volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays, children’s books, and radio plays. Titles appearing in English include Landscapes of a Distant Mother (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and the forthcoming Psalms, translated by Mark S. Burrows (Paraclete Press, 2013). edith södergran (1892 – 1923) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and educated at a German-language girls school there. Before her death at age thirty-one, Södergran published five collections of poetry. roberto sosa * (1930 – 2011) spent his early life working menial jobs to support his family. Sosa published Los Pobres, his first book, in 1969, which won the Adonais Prize in Spain. He edited the magazine Presente and taught literature at a university in Honduras. a.e. stallings’s most recent book is a verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things (Penguin, 2007). Stallings is a 2011 Guggen- heim fellow and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

592 POETRY anne stevenson is an American living in the uk. Her books in- clude Poems 1955 – 2005 (2005) and Stone Milk (2007), both from Bloodaxe Books, and the forthcoming Astonishment. She is recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s 2007 Neglected Masters Award. marina tsvetaeva (1892 – 1941) is considered one of the most im- portant twentieth-century Russian poets. She was born in Moscow and, after many years spent in exile in France, returned to Russia in 1939. With the outbreak of war she was evacuated to Yelabuga, where she committed suicide. jean valentine is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). She lives and works in New York City.

* First appearance in Poetry.

CONTRIBUTORS 593
    

  
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Five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships are awarded annually through a national competition open to young poets. Each fellowship is in the amount of $15,000.

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THE BOHO DANCE

The Boho Dance is an imagined conversation between Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. With poet John Starrs as Whitman and playwright Beau O’Reilly as Ginsberg, comedy and entertainment ensue, with musical accompaniment by Troy Martin.

saturday, march 10, 7:00 pm sunday, march 11, 3:00 pm

POETRY FOUNDATION t 61 WEST SUPERIOR STREET t CHICAGO POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/EVENTS Recent titles by John Matthias at Shearsman Books

Collected Shorter Poems, Vol. 2 !"!#$%"&', ()( !"*#+, , - . /0+, 1(2.33, /+%0 ,4)5)6).55)35 7is is the 8rst volume to be released in an ongoing project collecting all the poems of John Mattthias. Two volumes of shorter poems and one of longer poems will form the complete package and, with this initial release in the year that the poet turned 70, these books will bring back into a print a major body of work that readers on both sides of the Atlantic need to know better. 7e Longer Poems will appear in the latter half of 2012, and the Shorter Poems, Vol. 1 in mid-2013.

Who Was Cousin Alice? and Other Questions !"!#$%"&', 243 !"*#+, , - . /0+, 1((.33 /+%0 ,4)5)6).55.), Who Was Cousin Alice? & Other Questions attempts to answer both the 8rst question posed in the title about John Matthias’ early family memories, and then to raise and engage, in a series of memoirs and critical essays, a large number of others. 7ese range from a search for some answers about his wife’s British family in ‘Kedging in “Kedging in Time”,’ to the literary imaginations of ‘Grand Old Dirty Old Men’, an examination of erotic writing of the old and aging as a manifesta- tion of “late style.” Other essays consider Auden, Roy Fisher, Mul- doon, Berryman, Hass, Pinsky, Michael Anania, and ‘British Poetry at Y2K.’ MARCH EVENTS

Shoot the Canon Poetry presents poets performing covers of and reading dis- coveries from the last 100 years of the magazine, featuring Christian Bök, Peter Gizzi, K. Silem Mohammed, Tracie Morris, Vanessa Place, Sina Queyras, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, and others making it new all over again. thursday, march 1, 6:00 pm poetry foundation | 61 west superior street

Illinois Poets Past and Present Christina Pugh, Susan Hahn, Laurence Lieberman, Ed Roberson, and Kevin Stein read their own work as well as poems by famed Illinois poets of the past — Gwendolyn Brooks, Archibald MacLeish, G.E. Murray, Carolyn Rod- gers, and Carl Sandburg. A reception, featuring live music, follows. Co-sponsored by Fifth Wednesday Journal. friday, march 2, 5:30 pm poetry foundation | 61 west superior street

Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Levine The uk and us Poets Laureate appear together for a reading and conversation moderated by Poetry senior editor Don Share. Co-sponsored with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs with Blue Flower Arts. friday, march 2, 8:30 pm international ballroom north & south hilton chicago hotel | 720 south michigan avenue

POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/EVENTS back page

March 1944

When the nation went to war in 1941, several contributors to Poetry went with it. Even editor Peter De Vries served for a time. After being inducted at Fort Sheridan outside Chicago, he was sent to Camp Joseph T. Robinson in Arkansas, where his work brought him unex- pected attention. “In the course of processing I encountered another o∞cer,” wrote De Vries to business manager Geraldine Udell, “who, glancing at my occupational report, leaned back, sucked on his coke, laced his fingers behind his head and asked for my opinion on every contemporary poet in the land while buck privates pile up behind me like a log jam.” High blood pressure and a persistent sinus infection cut short De Vries’s military career. Poetry’s greatest contribution to the war e≠ort involved the promotion of Liberty Bonds. Appearing alongside this Liberty Bond advertisement from March 1944 is one for a book by respected Canadian poet A.J.M. Smith and one for New World Poems, purportedly written by Chinese-American poet Chen Wei Lu but actually the work of Wisconsin-born Granville Trace and published by the Colony Press, based in the then-utopian community of Atascadero, California, founded by St. Louis publisher Edgar G. Lewis.

Paul Durica

“Back Page” is a monthly feature of artifacts from the last one hundred years of Poetry.