POETS ON THIS PAGE: W.S. RENDRA * TAKAMURA KOTARO * GIUSEPPI GIOACCHINO BELLI * EUGENIO MONTALE * ITALO CALVINO * RGE GUILLEN * GLORIA FUERTES * CESAR VALLEJO * JORGE DE LIMA * C. P. CAVAFY
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THE WORLD’S FIRST FACE
In the pale moonlight He carries his bride Up that hill, Both of them naked, Bringing nothing but themselves. So in all beginnings The world is bare, Empty, free of lies, Dark with silence — A silence that sinks Into the depth of time. Then comes light, Existence, Man and animals. So in all beginnings Everything is bare, Empty, open. They’re both young, Both have come a long way. Passing through dawns bright with illusion, Skies filled with hope, Rivers lined with comfort, They have come to the afternoon’s warmth, Both of them dripping with sweat — And standing on a barren coral reef. So evening comes, Bringing dreams And a bed Lined with gleaming coral necklaces. They raise their heads: Millions of stars in the sky. This is their inheritance, Stars and more stars, More than could ever blink and go out. In the pale moonlight He carries his bride Up that hill, Both of them naked: The world’s first face.
by W.S. (Willibrordus Surendra) Rendra, 1935–2009
translated from the Indonesian by Burton Raffel
WHALE SPOUTING
When May entered the Black Current of Kinkazan Island the sea suddenly blossomed, shimmered like a dome of blue cellophane. The waves, brilliantly flowing, were wincing under the midday sun coursing ever closer to the land. The sperm whale, after spouting once, dived deep again, pillowed the giant weight of his head on the waters. Enraptured by this warm current, salt-rich and silky, he now lets his mind flow free, losing himself in boundless dreams. That I am not a dolphin, not a grampus, but my very self, a sperm whale, makes me the happiest creature in the world, the whale thinks. Ah, it's no use fighting against the present. The whale knows nothing beyond the moment. He is always reveling on the crest of existence. He doesn't bother about hypothesis, he doesn't get into metaphysics. The whale, intoxicated with dreams on the brink of slumber, has intimations of unknown territory approaching, is half frightened, half relieved. Once more he reared up, and into the May sky spouted his bellyful of the Current, almost a rainbow. The lookout siren is hooting at Ayukawa Port on the Oshika Peninsula, but this colossal optimist is blissfully unaware of it.
by Takamura Kotaro, 1883-1956
translated from the Japanese by James Kirkup and Akiko Takemot
The Coffeehouse Philosopher
People differ the way one coffee bean in a sack will differ from another when they’re spooned into some expresso machine to meet the fate they all come to together. They go round and round, behind, before, always changing place; they’ve barely begun when there they go through that iron door that crushes them into powder, all one. So all the people live on this earth, mixed together by fate, swirled around and changing places, bumping along from birth. not knowing or caring why, some out of breath, some taking it easy, all sinking toward the ground to be gulped down by the throat of death.
–Giuseppi Gioacchino Belli, 1791–1863; translated from the Romanesco dialect of Italian by Miller Williams
GREED
When I watch folks of this world and see how widespread It is for those, that pile up treasure and put on fat, to chafe At the bit and grasp for more, the way they hunger for a safe As broad as the ocean, and so deep, that it’d never touch the seabed, I say to myself: ah, you herd of blind fools, bank away, bank, Ruining your days with anxieties, lose night after night of sleep, Do shady deals and diddle: then what? Old Granpa Time’ll creep In with his scythe, and slice away at your bundle of plans, hank after hank. Death’s hidden away, and hunkers inside the clock-tower; And no one can say: Tomorrow, once more I’ll Still hear midday ring out like today, at this very same hour. What’s the poor pilgrim do when he takes on a rough and tough Journey, knowing he’ll travel but for a little while? He packs a crust or two of bread, and that’s enough.
–Giuseppi Gioacchino Belli, 1791–1863; translated from the Romanesco dialect of Italian by Peter Nicholas Dale
THE SOUL
What are souls? They are a kind of air. Just as winds that blow the plains and hills are sometimes coarse and sometimes light and fair, there are light and ordinary souls. The first are held for royalty, popes and such, for kings and queens and all their aunts and cousins; the other kind, that ain't worth very much, they're for people counted by the dozen. This world is set on such old titles and castes, but there's a fear inside the banquet halls that in the next it'll turn like an apple tart. Because Christ, and Peter his bodyguard, are going to remember as long as God lasts the rank of the man who put him on the cross.
–Giuseppi Gioacchino Belli, 1791–1863; translated from the Romanesco dialect of Italian by Miller Williams
The Confessor (Er confessore)
Father… - Say the confiteor. - I said it.- The act of contrition? - I already done it.- Continue, then. - I said crazy prick To my husband, and I lifted four bits.- Then? - For a pot my cat broke on me I said before I knew it: ‘‘Goddam you!’’ I know, it’s a critter of God! - What else? – Well, I went to bed with a young man that I know.- And what happened there? - A bit of everything.- That is? The usual way, I should imagine. – And from the rear… - Oh, what a ghastly sin! Therefore, because of this young man, return, My daughter, with a heart fully contrite, Tomorrow, at my own house, around midnight.
–Giuseppi Gioacchino Belli, 1791–1863; translated from the Romanesco dialect of Italian by Harold Norse
Robert Hass: Here is the famous poem of 1948. It’s about an eel. Montale caught them as a boy. In the poem, intricately, their murky gold color is caught in light reflected from the chestnut trees of Romagna: It is an image of a world come back to life — an image, by the end of the poem, of the light in an almost mythical woman’s eyes:
THE EEL
The eel, siren of cold seas, who leaves the Baltic for our seas, our estuaries, rivers, rising deep beneath the downstream flood from branch to branch, from twig to smaller twig, ever more inward, bent on the heart of rock, infiltrating muddy rills until one day light glancing off the chestnuts fires her flash in stagnant pools, in the ravines cascading down the Apennine escarpments to Romagna; eel, torch, whiplash, arrow of Love on earth, whom only our gullies or desiccated Pyrenean brooks lead back to Edens of generation; green spirit seeking life where only drought and desolation sting; spark that says that everything begins when everything seems charcoal, buried stump; brief rainbow, iris, twin to the one your lashes frame and you set shining virginal among the sons of men, sunk in your mire -- can you fail to see her as a sister?
By Eugenio Montale; translated from Italian by Jonathan Galassi
FROM `COLLECTED POEMS, FROM 1916-1956″ REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, INC.
The Storm
Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grand's merveilles,
Leurs mains ne servent plus qu' à nous persécuter . . .
(Agrippa D' Aubigné: À Dieu)
The storm that trickles its long March
thunderclaps, its hail, onto the stiff
leaves of the magnolia tree;
(sounds of shaking crystal which startle you
in your nest of sleep; and the gold
snuffed on the mahogany, on the backs
of the bound books, flares again
like a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids)
the lightning that blanches
the trees and walls, freezing them
like images on a negative (a benediction
and destruction you carry carved
within you, a condemnation that binds you
stronger to me than any love, my strange sister):
and then the tearing crash, the jangling sistrums, the rustle
of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night,
the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango. . .and overhead
some gesture that blindly is groping. . .
as when
turning around, and, sweeping clear your forehead
of its cloud of hair,
you waved to me--and entered the dark.
by Eugenio Montale; translated from Italian by Charles Wright
The Lemon Trees
Listen: the laureled poets stroll only among shrubs with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box. What I like are streets that end in grassy ditches where boys snatch a few famished eels from drying puddles: paths that struggle along the banks, then dip among the tufted canes, into the orchards, among the lemon trees. Better, if the gay palaver of the birds is stilled, swallowed by the blue: more clearly now, you hear the whisper of genial branches in that air barely astir, the sense of that smell inseparable from earth, that rains its restless sweetness in the heart. Here, by some miracle, the war of conflicted passions is stilled, here even we the poor share the riches of the world— the smell of the lemon trees. See, in these silences when things let themselves go and seem almost to reveal their final secret, we sometimes expect to discover a flaw in Nature, the world's dead point, the link that doesn't hold, the thread that, disentangled, might at last lead us to the center of a truth. The eye rummages, the mind pokes about, unifies, disjoins in the fragrance that grows as the day closes, languishing. These are the silences where we see in each departing human shade some disturbed Divinity. But the illusion dies, time returns us to noisy cities where the sky is only patches of blue, high up, between the cornices. Rain wearies the ground; over the buildings winter's tedium thickens. Light grows niggardly, the soul bitter. And, one day, through a gate ajar, among the trees in a courtyard, we see the yellows of the lemon trees; and the heart's ice thaws, and songs pelt into the breast and trumpets of gold pour forth epiphanies of Light!
by Eugenio Montale; translated from Italian by William Arrowsmith, Cuttlefish Bones, Norton
from “Cuttlefish Bones”
Bring me the sunflower, let me plant it in my field parched by the salt sea wind, and let it show the blue reflecting sky the yearning of its yellow face all day. Dark things tend to brightness, bodies die out in a flood of colors, colors in music. So disappearing is the destiny of destinies. Bring me the plant that leads the way to where blond transparencies rise, and life as essence turns to haze; bring me the sunflower crazed with light.
by Eugenio Montale; translated from Italian by Jonathan Galassi
From Poems: Montale published by Everyman’s Library, 2020
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Sometimes called fiction, short stories or prose poems, these works are uniquely great:
CITIES & MEMORY 3: Zaira
In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.
As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all of Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
by Italo Calvino; translated from Italian by William Weaver
from Invisible Cities, c1974 by Harcourt Inc.
CITIES & DESIRE 5: Zobeide
From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves asin a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again. This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city’s streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten. New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something of the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape. The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.
by Italo Calvino; translated from Italian by William Weaver
from Invisible Cities, c1974 by Harcourt Inc.
THIN CITIES: ARMILLA
Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, shouwers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructable, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.
Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Armilla cannot be called deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the jets of the taps, the spurts, the splases, the sponges’ suds.
I have come to this explaination: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla have remained in th posession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing.
by Italo Calvino; translated from Italian by William Weaver
from Invisible Cities, c1974 by Harcourt Inc.
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[CLICK TO SEE JORGE GUILLEN’S “THE HORSES” (TR. RICHARD WILBUR)]
I WANT TO SLEEP
I shall be still stronger. Still clearer, purer, so let The sweet invasion of oblivion come on. I want to sleep. If I could forget myself, if I were only A tranquil tree. Branches to spread out the silence. Trunk of mercy. The great darkness, grown motherly, Deepens little by little. Brooding over this body that the soul — After a pause — surrenders. It may even embark from the endless world. From its accidents. And, scattering into stars at the last. The soul will be daybreak. Abandoning myself to my accomplice. My boat, I shall reach on my ripples and mists Into the dawn. I do not want to dream of useless phantoms, I do not want a cave. Let the huge moonless spaces Hold me apart, and defend me. Let me enjoy so much harmony Thanks to the ignorance Of this being, that is so secure It pretends to be nothing. Night with its darkness, solitude with its peace. Everything favors My delight in the emptiness That soon will come. Emptiness, O paradise Rumored about so long: Sleeping, sleeping, growing alone Very slowly. Darken me, erase me. Blessed sleep. As I lie under a heaven that mounts Its guard over me. Earth, with your darker burdens. Drag me back down. Sink my being into my being: Sleep, sleep.
by Jorge Guillen, 1893-1984; translated from the Spanish by James Wright
Prayer
You are here on earth, our Father, for I see you in the pine needle, in the blue torso of the worker, in the small girl who embroiders with bent shoulder, mixing the thread on her finger. Our Father here on earth, in the furrow, in the orchard, in the mine, in the seaport, in the movie house, in the wine, in the house of the doctor. Our Father here on earth, where you have your glory and your hell, and your limbo in the cafes where the rich have their cool drink. Our Father who sits in school without paying, you are in the groceryman, and in the man who is hungry, and in the poet--never in the usurer! Our Father here on earth, reading on a bench of the Prado, you are the old man feeding breadcrumbs to the birds on the walk. Our Father here on earth, in the cigarette, in the kiss, in the grain of wheat, in the hearts of all those who are good. Father who can live anywhere, God who moves into any loneliness, You who quiet our anguish, here on earth, Our Father, yes we see you, those of us who will see you soon, wherever you are, or there in heaven.
by Gloria Fuertes; translated from Spanish by John Haines
THE ETERNAL DICE
God of mine, I am weeping for the life that I live; I am sorry to clutch at your bread; but this wretched, thinking piece of clay is not a crust leavened in your side: you have no Mary-candles to darken! My God, had you been man, you, today, would know how to be God; but you always lived so well, that now you feel nothing of your own creation. The man who suffers you--is God! Today, when there are candles in my dazed eyes, as in the eyes of a condemned man, My God, you will light all your lamps, and we will play with the old dice . . . My God, when the whole universe is thrown, maybe the circled eyes of Death will turn up, like two final aces of clay. My God, in this muffled, dark night, you can’t play anymore, because the earth is already a die nicked and rounded, worn from rolling by chance, and it can stop only in a hollow place, in the hollow of the enormous grave.
by Cesar Vallejo, 1892-1938; translated from Spanish (Peru) by James Wright
THE BIG MYSTICAL CIRCUS
Frederick Knieps, Physician of the Bed-Chamber to the Empress Theresa,
resolved that his son also should be a doctor,
but the youth, having established relations with Agnes, the
tightrope artist,
married her and founded the circus dynasty of Knieps
with which the newspapers are so much concerned.
Charlotte, the daughter of Frederick, married the clown,
whence sprang Marie and Otto.
Otto married Lily Braun, the celebrated contortionist,
who had a saint's image tattooed on her belly.
The daughter of Lily Braun—she of the tattooed belly—
wanted to enter a convent,
but Otto Frederick Knieps would not consent,
and Margaret continued the circus dynasty
with which the newspapers are so much concerned.
Then Margaret had her body tattooed,
suffering greatly for the love of God,
and caused to be engraved on her rosy skin
the Fourteen Stations of our Lord's Passion.
No tiger ever attacked her;
the lion Nero, who had already eaten two ventriloquists,
when she entered his cage nude,
wept like a new-born babe.
Her husband, the trapeze artist Ludwig, never could love her
thereafter,
because the sacred engravings obliterated
both her skin and his desire.
Then the pugilist Rudolph, who was an atheist
and a cruel man, attacked Margaret and violated her.
After this, he was converted and died.
Margaret bore two daughters who are the wonder of Knieps' Great
Circus.
But the greatest of miracles is their virginity,
against which bankers and gentlemen with monocles beat in vain;
their levitations, which the audience thinks a fraud;
their chastity, in which nobody believes;
their magic, which the simple-minded say is the devil's;
yet the children believe in them, are their faithful followers, their
friends, their devoted worshipers.
Marie and Helene perform nude;
they dance on the wire and so dislocate their limbs
that their arms and legs no longer appear their own.
The spectators shout encore to thighs, encore to breasts, encore to
armpits.
Marie and Helene give themselves wholly,
and are shared by cynical men;
but their souls, which nobody sees, they keep pure.
And when they display their limbs in the sight of men,
they display their souls in the sight of God.
With the true history of Knieps' Great Circus
the newspapers are very little concerned.
by Jorge de Lima; translated from Portguese (Brazil) by Dudley Poore
THE RIVER AND THE SERPENT
The river and the serpent are mysterious, my son. On the top of the mountain Were two circles of the Eternal. One circle was the serpent. The other circle was the river: Both precipitated, Both came searching for man, One to purify him, The other to poison him.. Down there they both found The simple man. One offered him the Fish to feed him, The other offered him the fruit to intoxicate him. The river and the serpent are mysterious, my son. From the clowds they precipitated, Both are crawling on the earth Like the two ways of man, For him to choose as his guide. The river and the serpent are mysterious my son: They come from the beginning of things, They run towards the end of everything And sometimes in the water of the river You will find the black serpent. Things were simple, my son, But they became confused: The river that washes you Can also drown you, For under the appearance of the river Slides the serpent. The river and the serpent are mysterious, my son: In the brightening they were two circles, From there they came uncoiled.
by Jorge de Lima; translated from Portguese (Brazil) by John Nist with the help of Yolanda Leite
THE CITY
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
by C. P. Cavafy; translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley
from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.
THE AFTERNOON SUN
This room, how well I know it. Now they’re renting it, and the one next to it, as offices. The whole house has become an office building for agents, businessmen, companies. This room, how familiar it is. The couch was here, near the door, a Turkish carpet in front of it. Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases. On the right—no, opposite—a wardrobe with a mirror. In the middle the table where he wrote, and the three big wicker chairs. Beside the window the bed where we made love so many times. They must still be around somewhere, those old things. Beside the window the bed; the afternoon sun used to touch half of it. . . . One afternoon at four o’clock we separated for a week only. . . And then— that week became forever.
