Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (41 page)

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In this that I say

I cease

TO BE

Shadow of an instantaneous name

I shall never know my bond’s undoing

Ustica

Th

e successive suns of summer,1

Th

e succession of the sun and of its summers,

All the suns,

Th

e sole, the sol of sols

Now become

Obstinate and tawny bone,

Darkness-before-the-storm

Of matter cooled.

Fist of stone,

Pinecone of lava,

Ossuary,

Not earth

Nor island either,

Rock off a rockface,

Hard peach,

Sun-drop petrifi ed.

Th

rough the nights one hears

Th

e breathing of the cisterns,

Th

e panting of fresh water

Troubled by the sea.

Th

e hour is late and the light, greening.

Th

e obscure body of the wine

Asleep in jars

1. Ustica is a volcanic desert island in the Sicilian sea. It was a Saracen graveyard.

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Is a darker and cooler sun.

Here the rose of the depths

Is a candelabrum of pinkish veins

Kindled on the sea-bed,

Ashore, the sun extinguishes it,

Pale, chalky lace

As if desire were worked by death.

Cliff s the colour of sulphur,

High austere stones.

You are beside me,

Your thoughts are black and golden.

To extend a hand

Is to gather a cluster of truths intact.

Below, between sparkling rocks

Goes and comes

A sea full of arms.

Vertigos. Th

e light hurls itself headlong.

I looked you in the face,

I saw into the abyss:

Mortality is transparency.

Ossuary: paradise:

Our roots, knotted

In sex, in the undone mouth

Of the buried Mother.

Incestuous trees

Th

at maintain

A garden on the dead’s domain.

Touch

My hands

Open the curtains of your being

Clothe you in a further nudity

O c tav io Pa z
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Uncover the bodies of your body

My hands

Invent another body for your body

Friendship

It is the awaited hour

Over the table falls

Interminably

Th

e lamp’s spread hair

Night turns the window to immensity

Th

ere is no one here

Presence without name surrounds me.

Dawn

Cold rapid hands

Draw back one by one

Th

e bandages of dark

I open my eyes

Still

I am living

At the centre

Of a wound still fresh

Here

My steps along this street

Resound

In another street

In which

I hear my steps

Passing along this street

In which

Only the mist is real

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Oracle

Th

e cold lips of the night

Utter a word

Column of grief

No word but stone

No stone but shadow

Vaporous thought

Th

rough my vaporous lips real water

Word of truth

Reason behind my errors

If it is death only through that do I live

If it is solitude I speak in serving it

It is memory and I remember nothing

I do not know what it says and I trust myself to

How to know oneself living

How to forget one’s knowing

Time that half-opens the eyelids

And sees us, letting itself be seen.

Certainty

If it is real the white

Light from this lamp, real

Th

e writing hand, are they

Real, the eyes looking at what I write?

From one word to the other

What I say vanishes.

I know that I am alive

Between two parentheses.

Charles Tomlinson, 1968

O c tav io Pa z
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Jua n M atos
(b. 1956)

Th

e Illusion of Memory

On a phrase by García Márquez

Th

e exile is not one man alone.

He is the man who departed and the man who arrived.

Th

e man who departed, departed,

and left behind all that was left , which, being left ,

nevertheless is not there.

Where?

His garden.

His school.

His people . . .

Where?

Th

e man who departed, departed,

but those others . . .

Where?

Th

e man who departed

departed alone.

Alone.

But with everything!

Th

e man who arrived,

arrived, and with him, himself.

Th

e man who arrived

came alone.

But in his eyes he brought everything.

Everything.

His life on his back.

Th

e man who arrived

arrived, and with him, himself.

But he came alone.

Alone . . . only himself.

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Th

e Night Was a Pretense of Night

We, those we were, are no longer the same.

—Pablo Neruda

Th

e night was a pretense of night

and you the simulacrum

of the woman I dreamed nightly

but I was not the man I had been that night

nor the one you wished for.

Like a slender necklace reduced to words

I slipped from your altar toward oblivion

like paper scribbled with poems that could not

fi ll the void in your breast or crown your waiting.

In this being without being—surf without sand—

I live without living, tormenting your heart

like death that gnaws but will not

fi nally sever the absurd and empty hours.

Th

e night was a pretense of night

and I the not-I sent to punish you

and sentenced to the shipwreck and the pain

of being no more than the solitude of your nights.

Life was a pretense of life

and I the attempt unmade, the unforged

agonizing arrowhead—deep wound

forever unhealed despite its silence.

Rhina P. Espaillat, 2011

J ua n M at o s
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S w e d i s h

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Gunn a r Ek elöf
(1907–68)

“Th

ere exists something that fi ts nowhere”

Th

ere exists something that fi ts nowhere

And yet is in no way remarkable

And yet is decisive

And yet is outside it all.

Th

ere exists something which is perceived just when it is not

perceived (as silence)

And is not perceived just where it is perceivable

For there it is exchanged (as silence) for another thing.

See the waves under the sky. Storm is surface

And storm our way of seeing.

(What do I care for the waves or the seventh wave.)

Th

ere is an emptiness between the waves:

Look at the sea. Look at the stones of the fi eld.

Th

ere is an emptiness between the stones:

Th

ey did not break loose—they did not throw themselves out,

Th

ey lie there and exist—a part of the rock sheath.

So make yourself heavy—make use of your dead weight,

Let yourself break, let yourself be thrown away, fall,

Ship-wrecked on rocks!

(What do I care about rocks.)

Th

ere are universes, suns and atoms.

Th

ere is a knowledge carefully built on strong piles.

Th

ere is a knowledge, unprotected, built on insecure emptiness.

Th

ere is an emptiness between universes, suns and atoms.

(What do I care about universes, suns and atoms.)

Th

ere is a second viewpoint on everything

In this double life.

Gu n na r E k e l öf
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Th

ere is peace beyond all.

Th

ere is peace behind all.

Th

ere is peace inside all.

Concealed in the hand.

Concealed in the pen.

Concealed in the ink.

I feel peace over everything.

I smell peace behind everything.

I see and hear peace inside everything,

One-colored peace beyond everything.

(What do I care about peace.)

“Th

e knight has rested for a long time”

Th

e knight has rested for a long time

straight in the saddle

high in the mountainous land

so desolate that the eye hesitates

Wonderful stretches of smoky hills that never come near!

Beneath and far off his companions are chattering

Th

e falcon waits on his breast

it has laid its head on his cheek

O strange tenderness in my heart!

—Th

en he raises his hand

and the bird fl ies out

away

He sits there and watches it climb

in gyres always higher and higher

He rests still straight in the saddle

when the night falls

Feared night!

Longed-for night!

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“When one has come as far as I in pointlessness”

When one has come as far as I in pointlessness

Each word is once more fascinating:

Finds in the loam

Which one turns up with an archeologist’s spade:

Th

e tiny word you

Perhaps a pearl of glass

Which once hung around someone’s neck

Th

e huge word I

Perhaps a fl int shard

With which someone who had no teeth scraped his own

Flesh

“So strange to me”

So strange to me

this rose, this thing delicately bursting out

this absent thoughtfulness

or light over a turned-away cheek . . .

As on a spring day

when you sense something and hold it fi rmly

an instant, a second

unchangeable

something that shall never turn to summer

Christina Bratt and Robert Bly, 1963

Gu n na r E k e l öf
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L a r s Gusta fsson
(b. 1936)

San Francisco Sailing Further Underground

When the light falls over the hills

they brighten like fi re, for a last moment

the whole city drinks the light

Th

e fi rst white men who saw Alcatraz

found the island swarming with penguins

solemn comical birds that died easily.

Th

e Chinese were called in by Morgan, ten dollars,

not as a wage but once for all

and they died like fl ies in their railworks

no Chinese women were allowed

but ten or eleven came in any case

all Chinatown from eleven Chinese wombs

and the sick young girls from Canton

were locked in the cellars to die

Kaiser Morton, Lord of the USA

protector of Mexico, donor of the Xmas tree in Union Square

there’s verdigris along his epaulettes

he died easily one winter night

If you are quiet you can hear the Creoles dance

Schooners, galliasses, four-masters, barques

entire city quarters consist of sunken ships

which were fi lled with sand and anchored

in a sisterly manner close against each other

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Th

e whole Embarcadero rests on an underground fl eet.

Pan American Building, Bank of America

the skyscrapers are standing on decks deep down

and under the earth that fl eet is sailing on

Free Fall

year aft er year it goes on

sometimes it seems to slow up

but it never stops

here are big friendly trees

they’re not waiting for me

in the yellowed grass of late summer

the fl ock of crows rises