Leonard Nolens

Leonard Nolens [Belgium/writes in Dutch]
1947

Born in Bree on April 11, 1947 as Leon Helena Sylvain Nolens, the poet graduated from Holger Instituut voor Vertalers en Token in Antwerp. Writing under the name, Leonard Nolens he became one of the major poets of Flanders writing, and has published over a dozen books of poetry, journals and translations. His work has been translated into several languages, with major collections in French, German, Italian and Polish.

Nolens brilliantly addresses a number of classic themes, as if haunted by them: parents, the questioning child, youth portraits, farewell parties, city portraits, friends, loneliness, alcohol, God, money, the dream woman, and dream book. Nolens’ poems invariably distinguish themselves through their polyphonic ways of thinking and imaginary ways of acting. Each poem is a reasoning, each cycle a solid yet explosive behavioural type. Since 1989 Nolens has published four volumes of a highly singular journal, in which the relationship between poetry and identity is further fathomed. Nolens received the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his oeuvre in 1997. In 2004 appeared the fifth edition of his collected poems.

In 2007 Nolens finished the cycle-in-progress Bres (Breach), which he had been working on for more than ten years. The book was awarded with the VSB Poetry Prize, the most prestigious award in the low countries for poetry which carries a stipend of 25,000 euro for the recipient. Bres is generally acknowledged as a landmark in contemporary Dutch poetry.

He is also known for his highly singular journals, in which the relationship between poetry and identity is further fathomed. In 2009, Nolens decided to publish his complete journals as Dagboek van een dichter. 1979-2007 (Journal of a poet. 1979-2007).

Nolens has received numerous other literary awards, including the Jan Capert Prize in 1991 and the Belgian State Prize for Poetry in 1992.

—based on writing by Tom Van Vorde


BOOKS OF POETRY

Twee vormen van zwijgen (Antwerp: Pink Editions & Productions, 1975); Incantatie (Brussels: Manteau, 1977); Hommage (Brussels: Manteau, 1981); Vertigo (Brussels: Manteau, 1983); De gedroomde figuur (Amsterdam: Querido, 1986); Geboortebewijs (Amsterdam: Querido, 1988); Liefdesverklaringen (Amsterdam: Querido, 1990); Tweedracht (Amsterdam: Querido, 1992); Honig en as (Amsterdam: Querido, 1994); En verdwijn met mate (Amsterdam: Querido, 1996); Voorbijganger(Amsterdam: Querido, 1999); Manieren van Leven (Amsterdam: Querido2001); Derwisj (Amsterdam: Querido, 2003); Laat alle deuren op een kier. Verzamelde gedichten (Amsterdam: Querido, 2004); Een dichter in Antwerpen (Amsterdam: Querido, 2005); Een fractie van een kus (Amsterdam: Querido, 2007); Bres (Amsterdam: Querido, 2007) Woestijnkunde (Amsterdam: Querido, 2008)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Selections in Modern Poetry in Translation (1997) and in In a Different Light: Fourteen Contemporary Dutch-language Poets (Brigend, Wales: Poetry Wales Press, 2002); Poets from Flanders: Leonard Nolens, ed. By Tom Van de Voorde (Antwerp: Flemish Literature Fund, n.d.)

Epitaph

I have a love who’s as old as my self.
She cannot die as long as I’m not dead.

She so likes being burdened by my name.
She publishes my flesh and blood till it’s all gone.

She hawks outdated news of me around the world
And blindly sorts the lines I never understood.

I have a love, she’s always in danger
And can only leave when I don’t know the way.

The road that we are on, we roll it slowly up
Into a stone. We’ll lay it one day on our grave.

(from Laat alle deuren op een kier. Verzamelde gedichten, 2004)

—Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent



Love’s Banks

Taking distance and leave is the horny metaphysics
Of men who keep their love hot and moist
In a far-off spot, and so cook their days.
Leaving, slamming doors, is the pure zealotry
Of women who have swallowed their lovers
And make their swelling bodies into sheer religion.

I know those two, they are alone, but for each other.
They have time, the same one, but on grounds that differ
Like that banks of that one widespread stream.
In that water they lie abysmally reflected
Viewing the passing, passing the view.
And not a soul who knows what has got into them both.


(from Laat alle deuren op een kier. Verzamelde gedichten, 2004)

—Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent



Paranoia

They say that poets should keep their tongue in check.
They, they are the fashion journalists who slate my clothes
And tomorrow wear my designs. They are the kitchen inspectors
Who sup on my flesh and spit in my pans.
They are the weed killers and dead doctors of poetry.
But who has clothed the naked and fed the hungry ?

No, the tongue you have stained on your slides is also mine
And what you is actually pretty pathetic.
Your metrical jackets and rhyming britches, count me out.
Your salt-free sonnet snapshots, excuse me, no, merci.

I can’t help it, the sublimest prosody
Comes from the guts, ultimately every soul thinks intestinally
(Unlike my capital letter, here she comes :
She is the C clef of my horizontal staves.)

Perhaps this charms or startles. It wasn’t meant to.
Many of these lines are hammered together with malice and hate.
Even with good intentions, my road leads to hell.
If you suffer you go to hell, there’s no percentage in pain.

Words, seed and cents were made to spend freely.
Never put them in the savings book of the evident form.
The deepest form is in the fellow’s rhythm poetry
With balls, therefore, as Pavese said, and he gulped his death.

(from Laat alle deuren op een kier. Verzamelde gedichten, 2004)

—Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent



The Poet to Himself
Go on, just you try, unclothe me
To the bone, I’ll remain the final cut
Of your suit, the rested rectangle
Of your bed, your handiest form of hope.

And you, you’re nothing but a glimpse
Of me, oh you, my chain-smoking shadow
Between two trains, my moaning phantom

With suitcases, you, my hobbling ghost
Who will wash away through the slow revolving door
Of a derelict station.

Go on, just you try, forget me,
My friend, my frank absent slave.
I am your whip, you bleed from my hours.
I am your work and you are my servant.


(from Laat alle deuren op een kier. Verzamelde gedichten, 2004)

—Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent




Verklärte Nacht

We are sitting naked at table. Your eyes light up the room.
Luminescent, your butterfly hands stir the air as you speak
To me, or quiet in sleep on the black cloth remain.

I touch them every day. Their lifelines know my name.
Their transparent veins conceal the course of my fate, the beat
Of our blood that changes the white of your cheeks to desire’s mottled bloom.

The back door blows open. The first drops of rain rustle through
The trees, sprinkling the wind-shaken window in which you sit glowing,
A light which shows me myself, into whom I may fade and pass.

You pile up the plates, brush the crumbs off an fill up my glass.
From the kitchen I hear the clink of knives and blue porcelain echoing,
Far off. My legs are aching with not being able to go to you.

(from Laat alle deuren op een kier. Verzamelde gedichten, 2004)

—Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent



from Bres

1

We were many then, people like me.
We did not lie athwart in mother.
We lay on father’s top shelf
We lay on nobody’s stomach.
We lay well placed in the gap in the market.
We lay in the distance.
We lay back and liked each other.

We, people like me, were many then.
We were not a fleeting photo.
We were not a dissolving crowd.
We were not casual beings.
We lived in austere houses
Of stone, central cogitation.
We were our won exception.

We were, many of us, like then, me,
And temperament was no curse.
Personality not yet a stigma.
The sexual nature of texts
And gods was still not a scandal.
We were on first-name terms
And every first name was me.


12

We were few.
We were some.
We were others.

We never touched up the Christian lap
Of trade unions, never bumbled democratically
On wings of high fliers to the top of the party—
We played with fire in their sleep.
We became black sheep in cloned pens
Full of baby boomers, we perched like rare white ravens
On a cage full postmodern parrots.

We clung to each other.
We clung to each other like loose sand,
A widespread street gang of daydreamers,
A hermetic clique of hermits.
We lived on our knees
And worshipped the sun of not knowing
And kissed the eternal light of scepsis.
Nowhere were we at the centre.

We were poor and speculated on the exchange
Of intellectual tradition.
We acted with prior inside knowledge
From forgotten ages.
We became heroes to our precursors.
We were jeered at by our successors.
We became, dead earnest, our own laughing stock.

We were the open would
Of a shut book.
We were the closed mouth
Of an open question.


17

We were few.
We were some.
We were a few.
We were others.

We played no part in a riot
Of European stature.
We did not take to the streets.
We did not take a stand.

We pitched a tent of books and canvases.
We, in libraries, swotted modernity.
We real-timed in sheet music the amazing effect
Of silence—it still echoes here.

We carved our statues from study and stone.
They still stand here upright in rows.
They will read themselves aloud there.
They found only later their partners in crime.

We were not a poetic theme of Mao’s.
We thought, we’ll make our own poem.
We thought, we’ll make history here
On the sly.

(from Derwisj, 2003)

—Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent


PERMISSIONS

“Epitaph,” “Love’s Banks,” “Paranoia,” “The Poet to Himself,” and “Verklärte Nacht”
Copyright ©2004 by Leonard Nolens from Laat alle deuren op een kier. Verzamelde gedichten (Amsterdam: Querido, 2004)
English language translation ©Paul Vincent

From Bres
Copyright ©2003 by Leonard Nolens (Amsterdam: Querido, 2003)

English language translations (c) Paul Vincent

Jean-Pierre Rosnay

Jean-Pierre Rosnay [France]
1926-2009

Jean-Pierre Rosnay was born in a Protestant family in Lyon, France on April 8, 1926. His father, was a factory worker, and his mother Violet, died when was only five, and went to live with his aunt until his father remarried. A fragile child, Rosnay learned to fight the neighborhood bullies, something that would remain important throughout his life.

Although his home held few cultural possibilities, his uncle Justin introduced him to poetry, and made him read the classics aloud, since he himself could not read. At the early age of 12, Rosnay left his family, taking refuge on a farm in Saint-Paul-Trois-Chateaux.

At 15½ Rosnay joined the Resistance Movement. When asked for a pseudonym, he suggested Tom Mix, but fellow fighters chose the name "Baby" for his nom de guerre. Part of the first French group of the Secret Army commanded by General Jean Vallette, Baby first fought in Haute-Loire and Lozère. He also wrote poems and song to boost morale, and was surprised to hear some of their performed over radio.

In 1944 Rosnay was charged with murdering Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo army captain, known as the Butcher of Lyon. Betrayed by friends, he was tortured for four months by the Gestapo before he escaped and joined rejoined another Resistance group. He was seriously injured in one of the attacks and saw numerous friends fall.

After the war Rosnay and friends founded a group dedicated to war poetry, JAR, the Jarvistes, "Young Authors Meeting." Among the members were George Moustaki, Guy Bedos, and George Brassens. Eventually, Rosnay turned to reading poetry on radio and television, and establishing the famed Poets' Club, which he emceed, beginning each broadcast with "Good evening friends, good evening!" Eclectic in poetry selection and without poetic hierarchies, its programs offered everything from humorous poems, fables for children, music and spoken word combinations, established poets and unknown figures.

Rosnay published eight collections of poetry, including Rafales, La Foire aux ludions, Comme un bateau prend la mer, poèmes, Les Diagonales, Fragment et relief, and Danger falaises instables. The poet also wrote three novels, essays, and pamphlets.

Rosnay died in 2009.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Rafales (Paris: Éditions IPO, 1950); La Foire aux ludions (Paris: J.A.R., 1951); Comme un beateau prend la mer, poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); Les Diagonales (Paris: Gallimard, 1960); Fragment et relief (Paris: Club des Poètes, 1994); Femmes [with illustrations by Robert Petit-Lorraine] (Paris: Club des Poètes, 1994); Ab imo pectore: choix de poèmes et 7 inéits (Paris: Alberto Tallone, 1995); Danger falaises instables [illustrations by Sacha Putov] (Paris: Club des Poètes, 2002)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

When a Poetry Sees a Chestnut Tree, trans. by J. Kates (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009)


France

The all said My France
or France Forever
And each one plucked another feather
When the enemy attacked
He found the picket-lines intact
And sentries

They all said My France
or France Forever
I was in love with nothing to say
not yet sixteen to love with you
France remember

They all said My France
or France Forever
What could I say I was too young
I took up the sentry's gun
And now it's over

France
excuse me for reminding you
At times I feel very much alone

They all said My France
or France Forever

—Translated from the French by J. Kates



Legend

An inquisitive monarch, wanting to know what his court was thinking, disguised himself as a beggar one day and knocked at the door of his own castle.

They hanged him so efficiently that he never learned if he died for having pestered himself or for having pestered other people.

This occurred when history was written from mouth to ear. Men fought to have something to tell their children on winter nights, women spun wool, and on tavern mantels huge pipes spoke to whoever looked at them of the style of innkeeper.

—Translated from the French by J. Kates

The Canoes

I lift up my eyes
and I see sky on the rooftops
Then I notice I haven't lifted my eyes
and I have seen the sky
I would swear it on my life
I write out loud
what I think under my breath
I write that an Irishman is smiling in the fog
and that he seems like an angel
freshly barbered
I remember quite exactly
my first address
spilt milk
far sighted
Madame Barquet
and the flaxen morning
my mother disappeared
I talk with soldiers
who died in battles
everyone's forgotten
I swim in rivers I have
never seen
Fifteen-year-old girls cross the sun
in red canoes
I lift up my eyes and see the sky in the trees
Then I notice I haven't lifted my eyes
and I have seen the sky
I would swear it on my life

—Translated from the French by J. Kates

____

English language poems copyright (c) 2009 by J. Kates. Reprinted from When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009). Reprinted by permission.

Aldo Palazzeschi

Aldo Palazzeschi (Aldo Giurlani) [Italy]
1885-1974

Born to a bourgeois family invovled in textiles, Aldo Giurlani (who later took the name of his maternal grandmother, Palazzeschi), was born in Florence in 1885. After high school he studied in technical school and graduated in 1902 in accounting.

The young Aldo, however, had a strong interest in theater, and began attending the Tommaso Salvini acting school, directed by Luigi Risi. There he became friends with the Italian poet, Marino Moretti. Palazzeschi joined the company of Virgilio Talli, and debuted on stage in 1906.

The year before, Palazzeschi published his first book of poetry I cavalli bianchi (The White Horses), followed in 1907 with Lanterna, and 1908, with :riflessi. It was his Poemi of 1909 that led to his meeting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and joining with the Futurists. He was, however, not entirely aligned with the group's ideological stances and left the movement concerning Italy's involvement in World War I, which he opposed.

Nonetheless, it was during his fervent commitment to the group when he produced two of his most important works, the book of Futurist poetry L'Incendario (The Arsonist, 1910) and the Futurist fiction, Il codice di Perelà (Man of Smoke) published the following year.

Between the Wars, Palazzeschi became involved with journalism and wrote out extensively against Fascism. Although he continued to publish poetry anthologies in the 1920s and 1930s, he devoted more of his energies to writing fiction, which continued for the rest of his life. Among his many fictions are Sorelle Materassi (1934), a work that was made into a film, I fratelli Cuccoli (1948), Roma (1953), Il doge (1967), Stefanino (1969), and Storia di un'amicizia (1971).

He died in Fatebenefratelli Hospital on August 17, 1974.


BOOKS OF POETRY

I cavalli bianchi (Florence: G. Spinelli, 1905); Lanterna (Florence: Stabilimento Tipografico Aldino, 1907); :riflessi (Florence: Edizioni Cesare Blanc, 1908); Poemi, ed. by Cesare Blanc (Florence: Stabilimento Tipografico Aldino, 1909); L'Incendario (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di "Poesia," 1910, second ed., 1913); Poesie (1904-1909) (Florence: Vallecchi, 1925); Poesie (Milan: Preda, 1930); Poesie (1904-1914) Florence: Vallecchi, 1942); Opere giovanili (Milan: Mondadori, 1958); Cuor mio (Milan: Mondadori, 1968);Poesie, ed. by S. Antonielli (Milan: Mondadori, 1971); Via delle cento stelle (Milan: Mondadori, 1972); Tutte le Poesie, ed. by Adele Dei (Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori, 2002)



So Let Me Have My Fun!

Canzonetta

Twee twee twee,
froo froo froo,
eehu eehu eehu,
uhee uhee uhee!
The poet’s having fun,
he’s insane,
he’s out of control!
Don’t insult him,
let him have his fun –
poor guy,
these little pranks
are his only pleasure.

Cocca docca,
docca cocca,
cock-a-doodle-doo!
What are these vulgarities,
these oafish strophes?
Liberties, liberties,
poetic liberties!
They’re my passion.

Farafarafarafa,
Tarataratarata,
Paraparaparapa,
Laralaralarala!
Know what this is?
It’s very advanced stuff,
nothing silly –
it’s the chaff
of other poems.

Booboobooboo,
Foofoofoofoo,
Friu!
Friu!
But if they’re deprived
of any sense,
why does he write them,
the blockhead?

Bilobilobilobilobilo,
blum!
Filofilofilofilofilo,
flum!
Biloloo. Filoloo.
Uuu.
It isn’t true that they have no meaning.
They do mean something.
They mean...
well, it’s like when someone
gets to singing
without really knowing the words.
It is very déclassé.
Yet this is how I like to play.

Aaaaa!
Eeeee!
Iiiii!
Ooooo!
Uuuuu!
A! E! I! O! U!
But, young man,
tell me something –
isn’t it a bluff,
to feed
this raging fire
with such paltry stuff?

Whisk... Whusk...
Shoo shoo shoo,
koku koku koku.
How’s anyone ever going to understand?
Such exaggerated claims as these −
now it sounds like you’re writing in Japanese.

Abee, alee, alaree.
Reereereeree!
Ree.
Leave him to babble,
better yet if there’s no end.
His fun will cost him quite a bit –
he’ll be called an ass for it.

Labala
Falala
Falala
& so lala
Lalala lalala.
Certainly it’s a major risk
to write things such as this
these days, when professors wait
at every gate.

Ahahahahahahah
Ahahahahahahah
Ahahahahahahah.
So I’m entirely correct,
the times have changed quite a bit −
men no longer expect
anything from poets,
so let me have my fun!

—Translated from the Italian by Nicholas Benson

(from L'Incendario, 1910)


The Hand

You all know very well
what a hand is.
A hand!
Who among you hasn’t seen one?
But you’d have no way of knowing
what a hand no one’s ever seen
consists of.

In a corner of my room
there’s a plush sofa,
to which I give myself every evening
punctually,
always at the same time,
for my terrible reason.
It is the hour of the hand.
The sofa is that of the hand.
It embraces me, engulfs me, absorbs me,
it is my nest, my sofa,
and I let myself go
with fearful trepidation,
with habitual
morbid anticipation.
Ever since a certain evening,
each evening at the same time.

In this room
wanders, gropes around,
lives without rest
a hand that can’t be seen,
that only rests
when I am lying on the sofa.
Huge, soft hand,
fatally strong,
yet sensual.
Why does it roam about my room?
Hasn’t it caressed me
enough already?
Was it amputated from someone
and abandoned here, useless
but with a great need to caress?
Such a strong hand
and yet affectionate,
hand that well knows how to caress,
that seems that of a gentle giant
skilled, through innate generosity,
in giving the most tender caress.

Have you ever thought
of the sweetness
the caress of a gentle giant
might bring?
That hand that could crush you,
but instead gives you a caress.
And you know well
that one squeeze would be enough,
but you let yourself go.

The hand caresses me and caresses me,
and I give myself up entirely
to such delight.
I’m in its power by now;
and it runs its hand through my hair
and strokes
my forehead, my temples,
my half-closed eyelids,
it twists back my neck,
(I’m blind with anger)
it presses the skin,
rifles through me as though searching,
harder, harder,
and suddenly it grabs me
by the skin of my neck
tightly
like a stray cat.
I can no longer see the room,
I can no longer feel the sofa,
only the grip of that hand
on my neck.
And now it’s taking me away.
I know well by now
where it’s taking me,
I’ve taken this road
many times,
every evening the same.

It’s dark out,
the lazy gaslamps are lit,
the streets are wet,
spotted with muddy earth.
At the corner of the street
pimps in packs,
packs of whores.
Here we are in your street,
between the whorehouse and the tavern.
Along the dark alleyway
I feel myself scrape the earth,
mouth against mud, against the wall.
We pass the only door
of the only tavern,
the only gate
of the desolate, solitary whorehouse,
to which you’ve been guiding me all along,
sweaty hand!
Tell me, were you amputated
from a huge whore
in this castle hall?

The whores waiting, as you know,
for the client’s gaze
come to me all content.
− ‘Evening, blondie!
− ‘Evening, you made it!
− How skinny you are!
− Did you come here just to make a ruckus?
− Know how to play Lischino?
− You must have tiny balls!
Flaccid, half-naked,
forcing their breasts to ride
heavily
on their florid stomachs,
they buzz about me,
these whores;
and I stand there watching them
serenely.
− You’re like the baby Jesus!
− Stop that staring, I can’t take it anymore.
− C’mon, get up, we’ll take you on!
They thrust me between them,
bouncing me back and forth,
they sing in chorus as though gone mad
the most obscene refrain,
legs spread,
and drunk out of their minds they scream:
− C’mon, get down!
They raise all their skirts,
those defeated old whores.
− C’mon, get down and beg!
− Hey, listen!
I am that gentleman...
the one who lives in the castle!
(somehow, at that moment,
I remember)
− Hahahahahaha!
− Up there...
− Hahahahahaha!
− That gentleman...
− My god! (I don’t remember
the name anymore!)
In that castle...
− Hahahahahaha!
− It’s wonderful! Wonderful!
− You’re a sad and crazy little man!
− No, no, I am that gentleman...
by the name of... of...
I don’t remember anymore!
Who brought me here?
− You came by yourself!
− What a wimpy little face!
− Who brought me here!
− The devil take you back!
− You’d like the excuse!
− He just wants a feel!
− Just a feel!
− Throw him down the stairs!
− Toss him out, he’s trash!
− The pain’ll do him good!
− Who knows what to do with ‘em,
these gentlemen!
− They’ve caught him in the act!
They throw me down the stairs,
the infuriated whores,
and they chase behind me.
When I feel myself go,
and I’m on the edge of the precipice,
the hand steadies me, it steadies me.
And outside the pimps are shouting at me
from the corner in the lazy lamplight,
the whores follow me
like so many wild dogs.
They all shout at me and insult me!
My flesh is torn,
possessed by the hand,
pursued and battered.

My eyes weep
green and red tears
and can no longer see,
my mouth won’t stop running blood
racked by blows of coughing.
I no longer hear anything but their scorn,
the shouting of those people,
the howls of the prostitutes
and pimps; they’ve all spilled outside,
they’re chasing and chasing me.

Now the hand takes me back,
it makes me quickly escape
the terrible fury
of all those people.
I glimpse my road
through the country,
it seems I can smell the sea,
I can see my gate,
the shadow of my beautiful castle
in my terrible agony.
Those sharp fingernails rip
my nape to shreds,
(I no longer have the strength
to breathe,
I give in)
and the penetrating nails
open all the doors,
rip after rip,
to the deepest corner of my brain;
here it is: my death!
I truly feel that I’m dying.
The hand slowly, so slowly
lays me down on the plush sofa.

I rise transfigured,
I go to look at myself in the mirror,
my face has a strange pallor,
my eyes are shining.
My shut mouth
is bloodless.
My flared nostrils
tremble with excitement.
Was I dreaming? No.
I don’t sleep, I dream every evening,
all year around,
of that street,
for that hand that wraps me
in its sweet spire,
drags me through the mud,
and leaves me there to die.
But I could get away from that hand.
You’ll say to me:
Set that sofa on fire!
At that particular time,
go for a walk,
you mustn’t lie down there,
you’re suffering so, poor man!
Change the room you sleep in.
It’s true, it’s true,
my good people, my dears,
pardon me,
it’s like... a bad habit
I can’t give up
when I feel myself caressed
by that hand,
and I let myself go,
and I know just where
and how far.

Think, just think
of the desperation
for one such as me,
compelled to leave my castle
every evening,
to submerge myself
in filth
like the most vulgar man.
Each evening, to feel myself pulled away
like a child
by the singing of his wetnurse
through so many golden doors
in the kingdom of fairies!
Who are my fairies?
Which are my doors?
Every evening, to have to feel
what it’s like to die!

And returning to my beautiful castle,
to fear that I will encounter
the glances of my family,
because those I am dear to understand
just where I’ve been!
Certainly Cherubina has understood by now,
she looks at me without saying anything
when I return, and thinks:
what a bad husband!
And Stellina and Cometuzza
look at me with eyes so full of mercy,
they may as well be saying:
little brother,
where have you been?

—Translated from the Italian by Nicholas Benson

(from L'Incendario, 1910)


The Dance

It’s what one does: a party is called for
once in a while.
The dance is an old custom,
it can’t be abolished.
For some the dance is a duty.
How could I close up my hall
the whole of carnival?
Not to others, to be clear, but to me,
because my dance is only for me.
Two or three times a winter
there’s a dance at my castle.
I don’t send out any invitations,
all those who should be there
should know well enough already.

What a martyrdom, to have to think
of all the preparations,
and then to have to prepare!
A general dusting
of all the rooms,
so everything’s well cleaned,
to make a good impression,
necessary for one like me,
even if no one will see.
Get the music ready,
the candles, the buffet,
what a bore!
And the evening arrives,
all the doors are thrown open,
the lamps are lit at ten.
They pile up silently
in a long line,
the carriages, and the ladies
descend, and rush
to take their places in the hall.
With eyes half-shut
I watch all this to and fro,
this hurried arrival,
this coming and going on the stairs.
And meanwhile I get myself ready
in gala costume,
the most handsome red outfit,
eccentric and tailored
(and it’s not even a masked-ball!).
To have to put on a face
for the party, to appear just so,
only to return at midnight
just as before.

All eyes are on me,
as amidst my hushed crowd
the king enters.
The ladies brush me
with their deepest curtseys,
trying to show me
as well as they can
their little worlds,
that you can just half-see
in partial nudity.
I look around me a little,
try to affect a smile
between forbearance
and indifference,
as I arm myself with patience.
I do a turn around the hall
with my studied smile, unchanging,
useful for dallying with the ladies
without looking them in the face,
greeting one and all, and I think:
now all these ladies
will want to dance
the quadrille of honor.
Alright, let’s go.
Quadrille of honor.
I don’t choose a lady,
just place myself in the center of the hall
with half-shut eyes,
and see twirling about me
hundreds of faces.
I lose myself in the whirl
of such a variety of people.

At my soirées,
all styles
have a place,
even circle and square dances,
all styles are ok,
beginning with mine
(and it’s not even a masked-ball).
Final turn.

My role is done.
I leave my guests
and open the buffet.
Come in, come on in,
I’m opening the hall,
the tables are laid,
come in, come on in,
there’s every godly thing,
every gluttonous excess,
wines and liquors by the jug;
you may quench thirst and hunger
just like pigs.
I’m withdrawing to my rooms,
weary and annoyed,
a dance is always annoying for me,
even when it’s just for me,
but it’s what one does:
a party is called for once in a while.

—Translated from the Italian by Nicholas Benson

(from L'Incendario, 1910)

____

English language translation copyright (c) 2010 by Nicholas Benson.

Anja Utler

Anja Utler [Germany/lives Austria]
1973

Born in Schwandorf, Germany in 1973, Anja Utler studied eastern Slavonic languages, as well as elocution, in Regensburg, Norwich, and St. Petersburg.

Her first volume of poetry, asfsagen, was published in 1999, followed by münden - entzügeln (engulf - enkindle) in 2004. The year before, she received her doctorate for her thesis on women Russian modernist poets.

That same year she was awarded the Leonce-und-Lena-Preis, an award devoted to outstanding younger poets. That award jury described her poetry as "sensual sound constructions, on paper as in recitation, without being pure sound-poetry. Rather, they are language games of psychological world perception, that out of the substance of their words create shafts of illumination through which our curiosity, but also our bafflement in the exploration of language, feel their way."

British publisher-critic Tony Frazer has written of her work: "An astonishing work for a young poet, startlingly assured in the way that it bores down into the language and allows the language itself to become an actor in the unfolding of the poem's 'story,' rather than simply an accomplice."

More recent books include brinnen (2006) and jana, vermacht (2009). In 2010 Burning Deck published Kurt Beals' translation of Utler's engulf - enkindle. She also edited Heiß auf dich. 100 Lock- und Liebesgedichte (2002).

For the last several years, Utler has lived in Vienna, where her work is published by Edition Korrespondenzen.


BOOKS OF POETRY

asfsagen (Lintig-Meckelstedt: Bunte Raben Verlag, 1999); münden - entzügeln (Vienna: Edition Korrespondenzen, 2004); brinnen (Vienna: Edition Korrespondenzen, 2006); jana, vermacht (Vienna: Edition Korrespondenzen, 2009)

IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATION

Selections in Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry in Translation, edited by Thomas Wohlfarth and Tobias Lehmkuhl (Newcastle, Australia: Giramondo Publishing Company, 2004); selections in 16 New (to American Readers) Poets (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck/Anyart, 2008); engulf - enkindle, trans. by Ku rt Beals (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck/Anyart, 2010)



that seem to be one: partial extraction
(second movement)


I

as if thinned

raw: is the clearing is bristling and bare
to the sun: the eyes graze over ravel, scrap, as if
loose as if: scraping until: the eye catches
in clusters of liverwort: lifewort
stalks - as they're known, known too as -
agrimony, is grown over with: prickling
fruits that it: claws into the foreign tissue it
knits it - it's said - back together, skins over
as if: it adhered, blued the: hide to the sclera,
tarsi, cornea should: be severed be
sanded see: how the stalks, stranded
at forest's edge, glow


II

the slagheaps, seen

from afar: these plains whose: backbone whose
ridge has to bend to: bring up from the soil
- so it's called - scraps of stone that - one
knows - were of no use - depleted - now they are
made smooth beneath sheets of grass: an even peak that
enwraps them like gravel in roots: the steles that: shoot out
so to speak that: are windwheels on wings that
radiate: light to be focused reflected through air (...)

now and then still: beset from below the sapped
cavity crusting over that: darkens - no doubt -
in earth-smoke in dead nettles grows wild and - over
the face, as a shadow, like lightning - pours out






III

all but - untangles

just blindly to fool: finger through them the: shoots
that: spear, splay towards each other
the: needles, swept through: to have cut
through them stepped through - it's said - seedling cultures
of spruces and spruces shot up so they: cross
hook their branch tips in tangles dig through them to
feather out: suddenly

stand at the clearing - there: windwheels spread far
from each other they: circle on grass: lift themselves clear -
and not see: these twigs in the back, broken through how
they: tremble still prick: up the neck



IV

as if divested

stands - standing - not run through, no not
even scraped through the: protective tissue
propped up against limestone cliff railings is braced
against: edging - know that: will not topple
will not; fall towards it - towards this basin
where it: backs up - chocked - slags, does not
even know of the pine trunks that: bend - far off,
waterstressed - spilling their
seed: into their, lapping image their own
aiming far: past the eyes



V

exposed - nearing

not even: entangled by breath yet just: haltingly
enter enduring the: mudflats this clay crust,
silicious, congeals - two days now fished dry -
grazed: to the ground - the feet scrape -
are enflanked: by clay veins that: enmire them like
bushels: of fish remnants gills - overlooked - that
already freeze crackle, but soft, in the early frost




VI


yet: as if averted

given: breath but - still shaking - to want to be
washed in the: oxbow - be waterlogged - palpate its
pools that are: welted, are waste they: seethe
tremble towards: poplar trunk - finger - would
lick want to colonize it as to: age in its
blazes- know: so they're called: cuts in the bark -
palpable clefts so: porous, so scaly they: shelter the
stagnant zones: deadened around calloused
fingertips they: bead up - numb - and roll off



VII


quickened

sure: to leave that behind - bleary - eddy,
the: riverscape, rushing stream so-called:
the poplars, meanders, wild bank growth
that: snare, rip, sink now - swiftly -
through the mist over the bristling field at once: plunges
drives: into the throat triggers - once more - the urge to cough



VIII

escaped, to turn back would be: - blinded -
the stems standing ripped open upward
have splayed: into dilated pupils just roughly
outlines so; they loom they spill down to the
riverbed flee behind bend after bend - carried off
it's said - glisten, to each other: as if from afar



IX

simply: in walking to count that off - mutely -
the waterforms landforms the aquiculture
roughly and further to follow the hollows, damned
and demarcated, over the field and farther almost: to the riverbed
narrow, the soaking seam already: markedly
wooded stands most of: poplars of alders that
shadow the: nettles, for instance, the lower shrub
growth the herb growth that can barely be taken in
colonized by bristly, woodenly budding (..)
believe they: are unnamed - not even grazed
by the eyes - remain standing


—Translated from the German by Kurt Beals

(from münden - entzüngeln, 2004)


_____
English language copyright ©2010 by Kurt Beals. Reprinted from engulf — enkindle, trans. by Kurt Beals (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck/Anyart, 2010). Reprinted by permission.

João Cabral de Melo Neto

João Cabral de Melo Neto [Brazil]
1920-1999

Born in Recife, Brazil in 1920, Melo Neto is the acknowledged leader of the Brazilian poets of his generation. His early work was a reaction, in part, to the intense verbal experimentation and the ethnocentrism of the early Brazilian modernists. Influenced by Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, as well as by Americans and French writers such as Marianne Moore and Paul Valéry, Melo Neto worked toward a highly personal, vaguely surrealist poetry. His first book, Pedro do Sono, was privately published in Recife in 1942.

Following this book, however, he moved quickly away from that poetic position, working toward a new theory of poetic process. Over the next several years, Melo Neto began to see poetry as a highly and personal and self-conscious act, stressing the formal, geometic aspects of his writing. Having moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1942, three years later he joined the diplomatic serivce, and in 1945 was assigned to his first diplomatic post in Barcelona, Spain. In 1950 he was sent to the Brazilian mission in London, and over the next several years, served there until he was appointed the head of Brazil's Ministry of Agriculture in 1961. During these years some of Melo Neto's major works appeared, including Psicologia da composição (Pyschology of composition), O cão sem plumas (The dog without feathers), O rio (The river), which won the Premio José Anchieta award for poetry, Paisagens com figuras (Landscapes in with figures), Morte e vida servina ("Death and Life of a Severino"), and Quaderna (Fourspot).

Morte e vida servina, in particular, marked a turn from the more intellectualized works of form to issues of social consciousness, exemplied in this verse drama drawn from Northeastern Brazilian folk traditions and stories. Melo Neto, himself saw this as a synthesis, expressed in "Education by Stone," whereby he worked to get the more elemental aspects of nature and culture.

In the mid-1960s, Melo Neto returned to diplomatic service, spending periods of time in Geneva, Barcelona, and Paraguay. He was appointed ambassador to Senegal in 1972, and began ambassador to Honduras, in 1982. During this period he continued to write and publish new books. He was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1968. In 1988 he returned to Rio de Janeiro. He was awarded the Camões Prize in 1991, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1992, and the State of São Paulo Literary Prize the same year.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Pedra do sono (Recife: privately printed, 1942); Os três mal-amados (published in Revista do Brazil, 1943); O engenheiro (Rio de Janeiro: Amigos da Poesia, 1945); Psicologia da composição com a fábula de Anfion e Antiode (Barcelona: O Livro Inconsútil, 1947); O cão sem plumas (Barcelona: O Livro Inconsútil, 1950); Poemas reunidos (Rio de Janeiro: Ordenou, 1954); O rio ou relação da viagem que faz o Capibaribe de sua nascente à cidade do Recife (São Paulo: Comissão do IV Contenário da Cidade de São Paulo, 1954); Pregão turistico (Recife: Aloísio Magelhães, 1955); Duas águas (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio); Aniki Bobó (Recife: Aloísio Magalhães, 1958); Quaderna (Lisbon: Guimarães, 1960); Dois parlamentos (Madrid: Editora do Autor); Terceira feira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1961); Poemas escolhidos (Lisbon: Portugália, 1963); Antologia poética (Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1965); Morte e vida serverina (São Paulo: Teatro da Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 1965); Morte e vida severino e outros poemas em voz alta (Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1966); A educação pela pedra (Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1966); Funeral de um lavrador (São Paulo: Editora Musical Arlequim, 1967); Poesias completas (1940-1965) (Rio de Janeiro: Sabiá, 1968); Museum de tudo (1966-1974) (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1975); A escola das facas (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1980); Poesia critica (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1982); Auto do frade (José Olympio, 1984); Argestes (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1985); Os melhores poemas de João Cabral (Rio de Janeiro: Global, 1985); Crime na Calle Relator (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1987); Museu de tudo e depois (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1988); Poemas pernambucanos (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1988); Sevilha andando (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1989); Primeiros poemas (Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)


ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Selections in Modern Brazilian Poetry, ed. by John Nist (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1962); The Rebounding Stone, trans. by A. B. M. Cadaxa (London: Outposts, 1967); selections in An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry, ed. by Elizabeth Bishop (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press [University Press of New England], 1972; Selected Poetry 1937-1990, ed. by Dejal Kadir (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press [University Press of New England], 1994


Priandello II

I know there are millions of men
mixing themselves up this moment.
The director took hold of all consciousnesses
and keeps them in this bag of hornets.
Then, he multiplied them
not quite as bread was multiplied
by ten, by forty thousand.
His gesture was as if distributing flowers.
A mong, a pianist, a wagon driver was my lot.
I was a failed artist
who had exhaused all the backstages
I felt as tired as the horses
of those who are not heroes
I will be a monk
a wagon driver and a pianist
and I shall have to hang myself three times.

─Translated from the Portuguese by Richardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg


Daily Space

In the daily space
the shadow eats the orange
the orange throws itself into the river,
it's not a river, it's the sea
overflowing from my eye.

In the daily space
born out of the clock
I see hands not words,
late at night I dream up the woman,
I have the woman and the fish.

In the daily space
I forget the home the sea
I lose hunger memory
I kill myself uselessly
in the daily space.

─Translated from the Portuguese by W. S. Merwin

(Pedra do sono, 1942)



Within the Loss of Memory
To José Guimarães de Araújo

Within the loss of memory
a blue woman reclined
hiding in her arms one
of those cold birds
that the moon floats late at night
on the naked shoulders of the portrait.

And from the portrait two flowers grew
(two eyes two breats two clarinets)
that at certain hours of the day
grew prodigiously
so that the bicycles of my desperation
mgiht run over her hair.

And on the bicycles that were poems
my hallucinated friends arrived.
Seated in apparent disorder
swallowing their watches with regularity
while the hierophant armed as horseman
uselessly moved his one arm.

─Translated from the Portuguese by Djelal Kadir

(Pedra do sono, 1942)


I
(Landscape of the Capibaribe River)

§ The city is crossed by the river
as a street
is crossed by a dog,
a piece of fruit
by a sword.

§ The river called to mind
a dog's docile tongue,
or a dog's sad belly,
or that other river
which is the dirty wet cloth
of a dog's two eyes.

§ The river was
like a dog without feathers.
It knew nothing of the blue rain,
of the rose-colored fountain,
of the water in a water glas,
of the water in pitchers,
of the fish in the water,
of the breeze on the water.

§ It knew the crabs
of mud and rust.
It knew silt
like a mucous membrane.
It must have known the octopus,
and surely knew
the feverish woman living in oysters.

§ The river
never opens up to fish,
to the shimmer,
to the knifely unrest
existing in fish.
It never opens up in fish.

§ It opens up in flowers,
poor and black
like black men and women.
It opens up into a flora
as squalid and beggarly
as the blacks who must beg.
It opens up in hard-leafed
mangroves, kinky
as a black man's hair.

§ Smooth like the belly
of the pregnant dog,
the river swells
without ever bursting.
The river's childbirth
is like a dog's,
fluid and invertebrate.

§ And I never saw it seethe
(as bread when rising
seethes).
In silence
the river bears its bloating poverty,
pregnant with black earth.

§ It yields in silence:
in black earthern capes,
in black earthen boots or gloves
for the foot or hand
that plunges in.

§ As sometimes happens
with dogs, the river
seemed to stagnate.
Its waters would turn
thicker and warmer,
flowing with the thick
warm waves
of a snake.

§ It had something
of a crazy man's stagnation.
Something of the stagnation
of hospitals, prisons, asylums,
of the dirty and smothered life
(dirty, smothering laundry)
it trudged through.

§ Something of the stagnation
of decayed palaces,
eaten
by mold and mistletoe.
Something of the stagnation
of obese trees
dripping a thousand sugars
from the Pernambuco dining rooms
it trudges through.

§ (It is there,
with their backs to the river,
that the city's "cultured families"
brood over the fat eggs
of their prose.
In the complete peace of their kitchens
they viciously stir
their pots
of sticky indolence.)

§ Could the river's water
be the fruit of some tree?
Why did it seem
like ripened water?
Why the flies always
above it, as it about to land?

§ Did any part of the river
ever cascade in joy?
Was it ever, anywhere,
a song or fountain?
Why then
were its eyes painted blue
on maps?

─Translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith

(O cão sem plumas, 1950)



Written with the Body

Such is her composition
and articulate syntax
that she is apprehended
only in the sum, never in parts.

There is no single term
where attention is arrested;
or that, however significant,
exclusively holds her key.

Nor can she be parsed
like a sentence; impossible
to derive a praphrase
from what in her is sense.

And just as, only complete
is she capable of revelation,
only another body, complete,
has the faculty to apprehend her.

Only a body in its completeness
undivided by analysis
can egage in the corps a corps
needed by whomever, not reducing,

wants to capture all the themes
inscribed in that body-phrase
that she, composure intact,
reveals with such intensity.


§

Seen from afar, lika Mondrian
reproduced in a magazine,
she betrays only the indifferent
perfection of geometry.

Up close, however, the original,
seen before as cold correctness,
free of the interfering camera
of distance and its lense;

up close, however, the close eye
free of extreneous retinas;
up close, when sight is tactile;
to the quick and naked eye

one can discern in her
an unsuspected energy
revealed by the Mondrian
when seen in the canvas.

Yet in one respect
she differs from a Mondrain:
what in her is vibrant
and goes unnoticed from afar

can forego the flame of colors
without which a Mondrian is static,
can vibrate with the white texture
of wholesome skin, or canvas.

When he is dressed with only
her smooth nakedness
he feels more than undressed:
feels more completely so.

§
He is, in fact, undressed
save for the clothese which she is
but these he does not wear:
internal ones slip off.

When the body dresses itself
with she-clothes, with she-silk
it feels itself more defined
than it does when wearing clothes.

It feels itself more than undressed
for its secret skin
soon unravels and it assumes
her skin, which she lets him borrow.

But the borrowed skin also
does not last long as clothes
for very easily she too
unravels and is divested

until she's left with nothing,
neither skin, nor silk:
all is mingled, common
nakedness, without boundaries.


§
She is, when she is not here,
held by an outside memory.
Outside: as if she were held
by an external type of memory.

A memory for the body,
external to it, like a purse.
Like a purse, certain gestures
cause it to touch the body.

A memory external to the body
not the one growing inside;
and that, since intended for the body,
carries corporeal presences.

So it is within this memory
that she, unexpectedly, is embodied
in the presence, thingness, volume
of a body, solidly there

and that is now dense volume
in the arms and held by them,
and that is now hollow volume
that surrounds and shelters the body

as something that was both dense
and hollow at the same time
that the body had, where it was
as if the having and the being were one.

─Translated from the Portuguese by Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg

(Serial, collected in Terceira feira, 1961)


Education by Stone

An education by stone: through lessons,
to learn from the stone: to go to it often,
to catch its level, impersonal voice
(by its choice of words it begins its classes).
The lesson in morals, the stone's cold reistance
to flow, to flowing, to being hammered:
the lesson in poetics, its concrete flesh:
in economics, how to grow dense compactly;
lessons from the stone, (from without to within,
dumb primer), for the routine speller of spells.

Another education by stone: in the backlands
(from within to without and pre-didactic place).
In the backlands stone does not know how to lecture,
and, even if it did would teach nothing:
you don't learn the stone, there: there, the stone,
born stone, penetrates the soul.

─Translated from the Portuguese by James Wright

(A educação pela pedra, 1966)



PERMISSIONS

"Pirandello II," "Daily Space," "Within the Loss of Memory," "Landscape of the Capibaribe River," and "Education by Stone"
Reprinted from Selected Poetry, 1937-1990, edited by Djeal Kadir, and trans. by Ricardo de Silveira Lobo Sternberg, W. S. Merwin, Djelal Kadir, Richard Zenith, and James Wright (Middleton: Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). Copyright ©1994 by Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission of the University Press of New England.

For a performance of Melo Neto's "Morte e vida severina" by the author in Portuguese, click:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_uWP-XJlQk

J. V. Foix

J.[osep] [Arseni] V.[icenç] Foix [Spain/writes in Catalan]
1893-1987

Born in Barcelona in 1893, Foix grew up the son of a businessman who ran two bakery shops. He attended grade school in Sarrià and high school at the Colegi Ibéric in Barcelona. At the University of Barcelona, he studied law, but dropped out to help with the family business and─keeping it fact from his conservative parents─to write.

His early influences included the major Catalonian poets, Mossèn Jacint Verdaguer, Joan Maragall, and Miguel Costa i Llobera, as well as the contemporay French and Spanish-language poets such as Rubén Dario, Charles Riba, and Gabriel Ferrater. And the influence of these poets is revealed in his early works of the 1930s such as Gertrudis, KRTU, and Sol, i de dol.

But already this early work was closely involved with visual images, and by the time of his publication of Les Irreals Omegues in 1949 Foix reveals the influences of modernism shared by his artist friends Joan Miró and Salvado Dalí, as well as his colleague Josep Junoy, with whom he experimented with visual poetry, and his poet friend Paul Eluard. And throughout his long career, Foix would combine surrealist-like images and radical visual and lingusitic experimentations. Despite his attraction to the avant-garde, however, Foix preferred to be free of labels, describing hismself as an "investigator in poetry."

Foix continued to write up until the time of his death, assuring his centrality in the tradition of Catalan literature throughout the century.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Gertrudis (Barcelona: L'Amic de les Arts, 1927); KRTU (Barcelona: L'Amic de les Arts, 1932); Sol, i de dol (Barcelona: L'Amic de les Arts, 1936); Les Irreals Omegues (Barcelona: L'Amic de les Arts, 1949); Còpia d'un lletra tramesa a na Madrona Puignau, de Palau Ça Verdera (Barcelona: Dau al Set, 1951); On He Deixat les Claus... (Barcelona: L'Amic de les Arts, 1953); Del "Diari 1918" (Baracelona: Horta, 1956); Onze Nadas i un Cap d'Any (Barcelona: L'Amic de les Arts, 1960); Antología lírica, edited by Enrique Badosa (Madrid: Rialp, 1963); L'Estrella d'en Perris (Barcelona: Fontanella, 1963); Obres poètiques de J. V. Foix (Barcelona: Nauta, 1964); Escenificació de cinc poemes (Barcelona: Rocas, 1965); Els llooms transparents (Baracelona: Edicions 62, 1969); Antología de J. V. Foix (bilingual edition in Catalan and Astilian), edited by Enrique Badosa (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1969); Darrer comunicat (Barcelona: Edicions62, 1970); Allò que no diu La Vanguardia (Barcelona: Proa, 1970); Mots i maons; o, A cascú el seu (Barcelona: L'Amic de les Arts, 1971); Tocant a mà (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1972); Desa aquests llibres al calaix de baix (Barcelona: Natua, 1972); Antología poètica (Barcelona: Proa, 1973); Obres completes, 3 volumes (Barcelona: Edicions 52, 1974, 1979, 1985); Una Lleu sorra (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1975); Set sonets (Barcelona: Ferrer, 1984); Poemes i dibuixos (Barcelona: Taller de Picasso, 1984); XL sonets (Barcelona: Asociacion de Bibliofilos de Barcelona, 1986); Album Foix (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1990).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

As for Love, trans. by M. L Rosenthal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); When I Sleep, Then I See Clearly, trans. by David H. Rosenthal (New York: Persea, 1988)


Bring on the Oars...

Bring on the oars, my family's always been wanderers,
The sun hangs on my chest amid coral beads
And I say, on board, that I long for peaks and valleys,
For cows milked in a barn while snow falls outside.

Wolves have never scared me; at home
I chase warlocks by torchlight
And, covered with sacks, I sleep beside horses
Or knead, with dead arms, unleavenable bread.

It is I who trod the young vine and stared at that old lady,
And I dive into cold gorges if the lad splits asunder
Or embrace the moon in its difficult meanderings.

One must take risks on land and sea, and in new art,
Kiss a soaked body beneath cinnamon trees
And drop dead at thirty-threee, just like Alexander!

─Translated from the Catalan by David H. Rosenthal


When I spied my rival in the distance, motionlessly awaiting me on the beach, I wondered if it was him, my horse, or Gertrude. As I approached, I realized it was a stone phallus, gigantic, erected in the far-off past. Its shadow covered half the sea and an indecipherable legend was inscribed at the base. I went closer so I could copy it, but before me, lying open on the burning sand, was only my umbrella. Upon the sea, without shadow of ships or clouds, floated those enormous gloves worn by the mysterious monster who chased you toward evening beneath the Ribera's plane trees.

─Translated from the Catalan by David H. Rosenthal


Practice

It's absurd: they said I had to address you, and that at the very hour when sun, sea, and flesh weave dense arborescences and our ghosts wander through this miraculous jungle, I had to deliver a monologue without noticing that there were just a few dozen mummies before me, tragically sentenced to withstand the termite forever. You are by no means unknown to me. I've seen you in funeral processions at the parish storm door and within your moldy chambers, lying on mysterious slipcovered sofas. But I can imitate your faces, if need be, and like yours, my tight-stretched skin is a mask that allows me to behave with the idiocy of one who speaks because his fellow listens. It's absurd, it's absurd. No matter what I might useleslsy seek to tell you, a flash of eyes across the sky makes it intelligible to our joyous shadow, which it guides through the jungle our carnal figurations have deserted. My pedantry, then, will humbly recite another's texts. In the jagged blanks between paragraph and paragraph, between author and author, o sister mummies, perhaps you will find those footprints revealing which way my Philips went.

1

An outside spool unwinds thousands and thousands of yards of black gauze before my eyes. The portrait on the wall I'll never get to hang straight again: Is it Blake? Is it Lenin? Is it my father at thirty-five?

2

After passing through a dense forest of deflated tires, I finally got to touch his shoulder. He has glass eyes and a curly beard like the one on that giant at Poldo's house in Solsona.

3

A sofa on a riverbank is truly a marvel. A man bowed beneath the weight of a huge R slowly advances. He places the initial on the sofa, which teeters and falls into the river. But the river's made of glass and splits in a jagged crack from one bank to the other. If I lie down to touch it and see how thick it is, my hand will start bleeding. A voice makes the poplars tremble deep inside like theater props, and it calls out: MARTA! I simultaneously repeat the name (Could I be the only one who shouted it?): That R must have been an M; it is an M; no, it's an R. If only the man who brought it would return! But he's ashamed to be seen in shirtsleeves now that the curtain's risen.

4

If it weren't in such bad shape, we'd take the Ford out of its corner and go for a spin. But it doesn't have wheels! Nevertheless, Ernest Maragall hangs a clay angel above the radiator, clutching a piece of paper in its oustretched hands: Gloria in excelsis Deo. That's no Ford, it's a Mathis 717171. If it runs smoothly we'll go pick up Feliça (?), Maria Pepa and Niup (?). There's a dance at the Sant Gervasi Atheneium. But we're all naked and Maragall, jerking my head as though he wanted to strangle me, keeps repeating: "I never wear sport jackets! I never wear sport jackets!"

5

"It's not a horse. Among the grapevines, you say? But with a sea this hairy, the moon's whinnies are only audible at midnight, beneath Garraf's tunnels."

6

The coconut-vendor put on a false mustache so big it made me weep with fear. He took my hand and led me to the back of the stable where the horses slept. To keep me quiet, he showed me, through a cobwebbed crack, the vague landscape where a thousand silver rivers die in the sea,and he filled my hands with olives.

─Translated from the Catalan by David H. Rosenthal


Beyond the Centuries, Immobile

Walls of lime, inaccessible,
The insistent sea, inexorable turquoise
Filling the docile beach with day and night,
With setting suns and tree-trimmed moons;
And you, and I, immobile throught the centuries
At the shadowy foot of an eternal column.
We no longer gaze at each other with fiery pupils,
Nor do we, absent, peer into others' eyes
─Permanent transients
Amind white adverse walls
And the nets that conceal abysses behind doors─.
They bear in their hands the most useless of tools,
And pass by, and return,
And strew black feathers upon the sand.
The aroma of fresh-baked bread drifts through caverns,
Our bodies' pink marble,
Far-off latent snow-capped peaks,
Tar's high-billowing fragrant smoke,
And sleepwalkers, present in their timeless passing,
Are the breath of all:
A school of fish bursts into sparks,
Then thrashes in the hollow left by receding waves
Or echoless pulsing in the One Supreme Beat,
Tossing our nets from the tip of the Cape.

El Port de la Selva, August 1931

─Translated from the Catalan by David H. Rosenthal


PERMISSIONS

"Bring on the Oars...," "[When I spied my rival]," "Practice," and "Beyond the Centuries, Immobile"
Reprinted from When I Sleep, Then I See Clearly, trans. by David H. Rosenthal (New York: Persea, 1988). Copyright ©1985 by J. V. Foix. English language copyright ©1988 by David Rosenthal. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc.

Four short poems by J. V. Foix translated by Susan Lantz, click below:
http://www.postroadmag.com/9/etcetera/4ShortPoems.phtml

Some prose poems translated from J. V. Foix's Catalan by Johannes Beilharz: http://www.jbeilharz.de/foix/prose_poems.html

O[scar] V[ladislas] de L[ubicz] Milosz

painting of Milosz by Julien Champagne

O.[scar] V.[ladislas] de L.[ubicz] Milosz [Lithuania / France]
1877-1939

Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1877. The country home of his parents and the surrounding landscape of dark forests and ruined châteaux were to have an influence on his writing for the rest of his life. At the age of twelve, his parents sent him to Paris, where he was educated in European languages as well as in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

His youth was spent in travel, experiences from which he used throughout his writing. His first poems, published in 1899, were collected in Le Poème des Décadences, written out of his experiences as a member of the Paris circle of writers and artists who frequented the Cloiserie des Lilas. Milosz continued to frequent that café for the rest of his life, long after it had lost its special status and had become a place for tourists.

For ten years after World War I, Milosz was minister-resident for Lithuania, and wrote several historical and political treatises on the problems of his home country and the Baltic States. He also gathered three collections of Lithuanian folklore. But in 1930, he became a French citizen. He died on March 2, 1939, the eve of World War II. His poetry is filled with the sense of Paris and pre-World War II Parisian life, sensual, and dark, clearly influenced by the writings of Baudelaire and Gautier. Milosz was also a scholar, and wrote metaphysical tracts and dramas.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Le Poème des Décadences (Paris: Girard et Villerelle, 1899); Les Sept Solitudes (Paris: Henry Jouve, 1906); Les Éléments (Paris: Bibliothèque de L'Occident, 1911); Poèmes (Paris: Éditions Figuière, 1915); Adramandoni (Paris: M. Duncan, 1918); La Confession de Lemuel (Paris: La Connaissance, 1922); Poèmes: 1895-1927 (Paris: J. O. Fourcade, 1929); Dix-sept Poëmes de Milosz (Tunis: Éditions de Mirages, 1937); Poèmes (Paris: Cahiers des Poètes Catholiques, 1938).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Fourteen Poems, trans. by Kenneth Rexroth (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1983); The Noble Traveller, edited by Christopher Bamford (Hudson, New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1985).


When she comes...

When she comes─will her eyes be grey or green,
Green or grey on the river?
The hour will be new in a future so old,
New, but not very new...
Old hours where everything has been said, everything seen, everything dreamed!
I pity you if you know it.

There will be today and the city noises,
Just like today and every day─hard problems!─
And smells─depending on the season─of September or April
And a false sky and some clouds in the river;

And some words─depending on the moment─gay or sobbing
Under skies that rejoice or weep,
For we will have lived and feigned so much again and again,
When she comes with her eyes like a rainy river.

There will be (voice of weariness, laughter of impotence)
The senile, the sterile, the dry present moment,
The throbbing of eternity, sister of silence,
The present moment, just like the present.

Yesterday, ten years ago, today, a month from now,
Horrible words, dead thoughts, which mean nothing,
Drink, sleep, die,─we must escape from ourselves
In one way or another...

─Translated from the French by Kenneth Rexroth

(from Les Sept Solitudes, 1906)


Monkey Dance

To the tune of a little mocking music, frisking
Breathlessly, and weeping, weeping like the pouring rain,
Jump, jump, my soul, old monkey, to the Barbara organ,
Little old raggmuffin, sly, romantic and tender animal.

With your tail like leafless autumn, pretentiously twisted
In a question mark against the empty twilight sky,
Wipe your tears, gallant monkey, melancholy and ridiculous,
Monkey scabby with dead love, monkey toothless with lost days.

Another tune, give us another tune! You know the low dives,
The leprous slums, the autumn street fairs, the sour fish and chips.
You make the malnourished girls laugh,─o dirty, frightful, skinny,
Piteous, epileptic monkey, animal of pure homesickness.

Give us another tune, too bad it's the last!─And let it be that sordid
Last waltz, the requiem of dead thieves, echoing music
Which says, "Goodbye memory, love and coconuts..."
While the poor rain gurgles in the old and heavy mud.

─Translated from the French by Kenneth Rexroth

(from Les Sept Solitudes, 1906)


November Symphony

It will be exactly like this life. The same room.
Yes, my child, the same. At dawn the bird of time in the foliage
Pale as a corpse. Then the servants will get up,
And you will hear the frozen noises, in the hollow basins

Of the fountains. O terrible, terrible youth! O empty heart!
It will be exactly like this life. There will be
The poor voices, the voices of winter in old slums,
The glass mender singing his own duet,

The broken grandmother under a dirty bonnet
Crying out the names of fish, the man with the blue apron
Who spits into a hand worn by the wheelbarrow
And yells nobody knows what, like the Angel of Judgment.

It will be exactly like this life. The same table.
The Bible, Goethe, the ink and the smell of time,
The paper, white woman who reads thoughts,
The pen, the portrait. My child, my child!

It will be exactly like this life!─The same garden,
Deep, deep, thick, dim. And towards noon
People will enjoy themselves at being reunited there
Who never met and who do not know

One from another. You will have to dress
As if for a party and go in the night
Of the lost, all alone, without love and without lamp.
It will be exactly like this life. The same parkway:

And (in the autumn afternoon), at the turn of the parkway,
There where the beautiful road goes down shyly, like the woman
Who goes to pick the flowers of convalescence─listen, my child,
We shall meet again, here as of old,

And you have forgotten, the color your dress was then,
But I, I have known only little moments of happiness.
You will be garbed in pale violet, beautiful sorrow!
And the flowers of your hat will be small and sad,

And I will not know their names, for in this life I have known
Only the name of one sad small flower, the forget-me-not,
The old sleeper in the ravines of the land of hide and seek,
The orphan flower. Yes, yes, deep heart, like this life.

And the dim path will be there, all damp
In the echo of waterfalls. And I will tell you
About the city upon the water, and about Rabbi Bacharach,
And about the nights of Florence. There will also be

The sinking wall and down there where the smells
Of the old, old rain and the leprous weeds drowse,
Cold and fat, the hollow flowers shake there
In the dumb stream.

─Translated from the French by Kenneth Rexroth

(from Poèmes, 1915)


Psalm of the King of Beauty

From the Isles of Separation and the Empire of the Depths, hear the rising voice of the harps of the suns. Peace flows over our heads. The place where we now stand, Malchut, is the heart of Height.

The fruitful tears pour forth as I think of my Father and the worlds of gold shed a light of beauty on the depths. Royal head yet resting on my heart, what a fear of numbers you decipher in the memory of night! Queen, be truly a woman in supremem compassion. All white with pity for greatness, think of the Creator, most abandoned of all. The spot where we now stand, Malchut, is the heart of Height.

Facing the saintly toil of the constellations, can you not feel your heart torn asunder, Malchut, Malchut, wife, mother too of generations? Space, a swarm of sacred bees, flies towards the Adramand of ecstatic perfumes. The spot where we now stand, Malchut, is the heart of Height.

For the motionless Absolute is the secret desire of that which moves. A solar regent and pious Sower of seed destined to be born and die, I love only what is permanent. I myself, I who am but a small personification, I desire ardently to become transmuted. Here in the abyss, nothing is situated, nothing is situated! All reality exists only in the love of the Father. The place where we now stand, Malchut, is the heart of Height.

Peace on earth, oh my spouse, oh woman! Peace in all the unreal empire, peace for the gentle souls for which you make the seven strings of the rainbow sing! When I contemplate, oh Queen, your overturned face, I have the deep feeling that all my thoughts are born in your sweet heart. The place where we now stand, Malchut, is the heart of Height.

And yet, and yet I would wish to fall asleep on this throne of Time and to fall from the depths to the heights in the divine abyss! To be seated forever motionless among the sages. To forget that the word HERE was lacking in my language. For I, who constantly create in order to deserve the Nothing, I am the desire of the end, Malchut, of the end and of the end of all ends. Oh, to retire to rest, dead spouse, in my heart, and then to be reborn for the Father's eternal day! The place where we now stand, Malchut, is the heart of Height.

─Translated from the French by Edouard Roditi


PERMISSIONS

"When she comes...," "Monkey Dance," and "November Symphony"
Reprinted from Fourteen Poems, trans. by Kenneth Rexroth (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1983). Copyright ©1952, 1983 by the Kenneth Rexroth Trust. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

"Psalm of the King of Beauty"
Reprinted from The Noble Traveller, edited by Christopher Bamford (Hudson, New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1985). Copyright ©1985 by The Lindisfarne Press. Reprinted by permission of The Lindisfarne Press.

Gottfried Benn

Gottfried Benn [Germany]
1896-1956

The son of a Lutheran minister and a mother of French-Swiss extraction, Gottfried Benn was raised in the small German village of Mansfeld, in an area which is now part of Poland. There he was educated privately and in the Gymnasium at Frankfurt an der Order, living in the same boarding-house as did the poet Klabund. In 1903, following his father's desires, he entered the University of Marbach, studying theology and philosophy. But he soon switched to medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Akademie, a part of the University of Berlin, and, upon graduating, focused on venereolgy and dermatology as a medical doctor until the end of World War I.

In 1912, upon his graduation from medical school Benn was called to active military duty, but fell ill from the strenuous training. During this period, in utter mental and physical exhaustion, he wrote the work Morgue und andere Gedichte (Morge and Other Poems), which focuses on the kind of haunted visions and depersonalization of contemporary man that characterized much of Expressionist writing. The reaction to his poems, filed with drug-addicts, prostitutes, alcoholics, and other low-life figures, was one of outrage from bourgeois readers. During this period he met and entered into an intimate relationship with the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, and dedicated his second book, Söhne (published in 1913) to her.

Upon discharge from the military, Benn became employed as an assistant at the Pathological Institute of Westend Hospital, where he performed hundreds of autopsies. The result of this employment and the mental anguish from which he suffered and expressed in his poetry, he left that position, becoming a ship's physician in the spring of 1913. However, Benn suffered from sea-sickness, and, in New York, left the ship, attending a performance of Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera, and ultimately returning to Berlin. The ship to which he was to have been assigned sank with no survivors.

His third collection of poetry, Fleisch (Flesh), was published in 1917. This book carried further his prevailing sentiments of melancholy and cynicism. Over the next several years, his poetry continued to appear in expressionist journals, where he came to be recognized as a major avant-garde writer. But his work continued to move toward Nietzschean ideas that saw art as an escape from nihilism and sought, as solace to the suffering of mankind, beliefs underlying ancient mythologies and their primal urges. In 1916 Benn published a collection of short tales, Gehirne (Brains) which explored the psyche and its pulls between the Dionysian and Apollonian elements, ideas which he would further develop in his 1920 essay Das moderne Ich (The Modern Self).

These ideas, popular in their day, at first seemed simply to be a part of his unorthodox poetics; but with the rise of National Socialism, which shared many of these underlying beliefs, it became apparent that Benn was on a dangerous intellectual path. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he greeted Hitler's rise to power enthusiastically, expressing his shared values of the Nazi eugenics program and other concepts of the "German folk" on radio and in essays. Several of his Expressionist friends, now in exile in Russia and elsewhere, reproached him, further isolating his from the literary avant-garde. With Hitler's appointment to the head of German government in 1933, Heinrich Mann, the president of the literary academy, called for the Socialist-Communist coalition to overthrow Hitler. Benn supported Hitler, and Mann and his brother Thomas were expelled and, ultimately, forced to leave the country. Klaus Mann and others now questioned Benn's cooperation with Hitler's regime. Benn fought back through radio speeches. But he soon was himself denounced as a Jew, and was forbidden a health certificate to practice medicine.

When his new collection, Ausegwählte Gedichte was published in 1936, in celebration of his fiftieth birthday, the book was denounced by the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps and was reprinted in Nazi journals. In 1938 he was officially ousted from his membership in the Reichsschrifttumskammer and threatened with penalties if he continued writing.

After the War, Benn was further attacked by figures such as Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Döblin for his involvement with the Nazi regime. But he still had many friends, and with their support and the publication of his collection Statische Gedichte (Static Poems, 1948) and his lengthy autobiographical essay Doppelleben (Double Life) in 1950, he began to rehabilitate his career. In 1961 he won the Georg Büchner Prize of Poetry, upon which he delivered his famous essay, Probleme der Lyrik (Problems for Poetry). His final volumes, Destillationen (Distillations, 1953) and Apréslude (Afterlude, 1955) continued the expression of despair and disillusionment of his major poetry. Today Benn is recognized as one of the greatest of German poets, perhaps the best since Rilke.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Morgue und andere Gedichte (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Meyer, 1912); Söhne: Neue Gedichte (Berlin-Wilmersdorf, 1913); Fleisch: Gesammelte Lyrik (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Aktion, 1917); Betäubung: Fünf neue Gedichte (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Meyer, 1925); Spaltung: Neue Gedichte (Berlin: Meyer, 1925); Das Unaufhörliche: Oratorim [text by Benn, music by Paul Hindemith (Mainz: Schott, 1931); Zweiundzwanzig Gedichte: 1936-1943 (Berlin: privately printed, 1953); Statische Gedichte (Zurich: Arche, 1948); Fragmente: Neue Gedichte (Weisbaden: Limes, 1951); Destillationen: Neue Gedichte (Weisbaden: Limes, 1953); Apréslude (Weisbaden: Limes, 1955); Gesammelte Gedichte 1912-1956 (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1956); Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden. Band 3: Gedichte (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959-1961).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Selected Poems (London: Oxford Press, 1970); Primal Vision: Selected Writings of Gottfried Benn, edited by E. B. Ashton (New York: New Directions, 1971); Gottfried Benn: Prose, Essays, Poems, edited by Volkmar Sander (New York: Continuum, 1987).


Poplar

Restrained,
with branch and young shoot undisclosed
to cry the louder out into the blue of sky—:
trunk only, all enclosure,
tall and shivering,
a curve.

Medlar is fugitive,
killer of seed,
and when have blessing clefts of lightning
roared round my shaft,
disuniting,
casting far and wide
the thing once tree?
Who ever saw a wood of poplars?

Individual
restless at night and through the day
over the gardens' mignonetted
sweet deliquescence gaping wide
that sucks its root and gnaws its bark
insignia of cries on its crowned brow it offers
dead space opposing,
to and fro

(from Fleisch, 1917)

—Translated from the German by Christopher Middleton


Palau

"Evening is red on the island of Palau
and the shadows sink—"
sing, from woman's chalices too
it is good to drink,
deathly the little owls cry
and the death-watch ticks out,
very soon it will be
Lemures and night.

Hot these reefs. From eucalypti there flows
a tropical palm concoction,
all that still holds and stays
also longs for destruction
down to the limbless stage,
down to the vacuum,
back to the primal age,
dark ocean's womb.

Evening is red on the island of Palau:
in the gleam of these shadows
these issues rising from twilight and dew:
"Never and Always";
all the deaths of the earth
are fords and ferries,
what to you owes its birth
surrounded with strangeness—

Once with sacrificial
fat on the pine-wood floor
your bed of flames would travel
like wine to the shore,
megaliths heaped around
and the graves and the halls,
hammer of Thor that's bound
for the Aesir, crumbled, falls—

As the gods surcease,
the great Caesars decline,
from the cheek of Zeus
once raised up to reign—
sing, already the world
to the strangest rhythm is swung,
Charon's coin, if not curled,
long tasted under the tongue—

Coupling, Sepias your seas
and coral animate,
all that still holds and sways
also longs to disintegrate,
evening is red on the island of Palau,
eucalyptus glaze
raises in runes from twilight and dew:
Never and Always.

(from Spaltung: Neue Gedichte, 1925)

—Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger

Monologue

Their colons fed with mucus, brains with lies
these chosen races, coxcombs of a clown,
in pranks, astrology and flight of birds
construing their own ordure! Slaves—
from icy and from burning territories,
gross with vermin more and more slaves come,
hungry and whiplash-driven hordes of them:
Then all that's personal, the downy cheek,
with scurf and scab, swells to a prophet's beard!

Ah, Alexander and Olympia's offspring,
that least of all! They wink whole Hellesponts,
and skim all Asia! Puffed up, pustules
with vanguard, covert squadrons and with minions
that none may prick them! Minions: the best seats
for wrestling and in court! Let no man prick them!
Minions, joyriders, bandages, broad streamers—
broad streamers fluttering from dream and world:
the clubfoot sees the stadiums destroyed,
skunks trample underfoot the lupin fields
because the scent makes them suspect their own:
Nothing but excrement! The obese
course after the gazelle,
the windswift one, the lovely animal!
Inverse proportion enters everything:
The puddle plumbs the source, the worm the ell,
toad squirts his liquid in the violet's mouth,
and—hallelujah!—wets his pot on stones:
The reptile horde as history's monument!
The Ptolemaic line as tic-tac language,
the rat arrives as balm against the plague.
Most foul sings murder. Gossips wheedle
obscenity from psalms.

And this earth whispers discourse with the moon,
then round its hips it hangs a Mayday feast
then lets the roses pass, then stews the corn,
forbids Vesuvius erupt, won't let the cloud
become a caustic that would prick and shrivel
the beats' base form whose fraud contrived this state—
oh, all the play on earth of fruit and rose
is given up to evil's usury,
brain-fungus, and the gorge's speckling lies
of the above-named sort, proportion inverse!


To die means leaving all these things unsolved,
the images unsure, and hungry dreams
abandoned in the rifts between the worlds—
but action means: to serve vulgarity,
aid and abet iniquity, means loneliness
and dropping furtively the great solution
that visions are and the desire of dreams,
for gain, for gold, promotion, posthumous fame,
while giddily like a moth, indifferent
as a petard the end is near and bodes
a meaning that is different—

A sound, a curve, a chink of blue almost,
reverberated through the park one night
as I stood there—: a song,
only an outline, casual, three notes heard,
and occupied all space and made the night
so full, the garden full of apparitions,
created so the world and bedded me
prostrate within the stream of things, the sad
sublime infirmity of being's birth—:
a sound, only a curve—: but being's birth—
only a curve, proportion it restored
and comprehended all things, act and dreaming...

A garland interwined of scarlet brains
whose flowers grown from scattered fever-seed
shout to each other, keeping separate:
'the coloration form' and 'edges frayed,
the last thread snapping' and 'a hard cold contour,"
these spicy pickles of the protoplasm,
Here transformation starts: the beasts' base form
shall so decay the very word corruption
will smell for it too much of heaven—the vultures
are gathering now and famished hawks are poised!

(from Statische Gedichte, 1948)

—Translated from the German by Christopher Middleton


Chopin

Not very forthcoming in conversation,
opinions were not his forte,
opinions don't get to the center;
when Delacroix expounded a theory
he became restive, he for his part was unable
to explicate his Nocturnes.

Weak as a lover;
shadows at Nohant,
where George Sand's children
would not accept
his pedagogic advice.

Consumptive, of the kind
with hemorrhages and cicatrization,
the kind that drags on for years;
quiet death
as opposed to one
with paroxysms of pain
or one by the firing-squad:
They moved his grand piano (Erard) up to the door
and Delphine Potocka
sang for him at his dying hour
a violet song.

To England he went with three pianos:
Pleyel, Erard, Broadwood,
played for twenty minutes
at Rothschild's, the Wellingtons, at Stratford House,
and to countless garters;
darkened by weariness and approaching death,
he went home
to the Square d'Orleans.

Then he burnt his sketches
and manuscripts;
no residues please, no fragments or notes
they grant such revealing insights—
and said at the end:
"My endeavors are as complete
as it was in my power to make them."

Every finger was to play
with the force appropriate to its structure;
the fourth is the weakest
(mere siamese twin to the middle finger).
When he began they rested
on E, F sharp, G sharp, B, C.

The man who has ever heard
certain Preludes by him,
whether in country houses or
in a mountain landscape
or on a terrace, through open doors,
a sanatorium's for instance,
will hardly forget it.

Never composed an opera,
no symphony,
only these tragic progressions
out of artistic conviction
and with a slender hand.

(from Statische Gedichte, 1948)

—Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger


September

I

You leaning there over the fence with phlox
(splintered by rainstorm,
with a strange animal smell),
who are pleased to walk over stubble
and to accost old folk
gathering balm-apples,
breathe with joy and sadness
smoke over ploughland—

rising walls want there
roof before the snow and winter come,
to shout a "You're wasting your time"
at lime-slaking laborers,
but, hesitant, restrain yourself,

thickset rather than tall in build,
with dirty pumpkin also bare at your shoe,
fat and faceless this toady growth—


Descender from the plains,
ultimate moon of all flames,
from tumescences of fruit and flower
dropping, darkened your face already—
fool or baptist,
summer's fool, echoer, necrologue,
or foresong of glaciers,
anyway nutcracker,
sedge-cutter,
ponderer of platitudes—

Snowfall ahead of you,
high silence, barren
the far unplantable distance:
that far your reach extends,
but, leaning over the fence,
throngs of beetles and plants now,
all life-desiring things,
spiders and fieldmice—


II

You, rowan-veiled
by early autumn,
stubblephantom,
cabbage-whites in your breath,
let the hands of many clocks revolve,
clamor with vesper bells,
gong
the golden persistent hour
that so firmly continues to tan,
into a trembling heart!

You:—world of difference!
Only gods rest thus
or the robes
of untoppleable Titans,
long-created,
embroidered so deeply
the butterflies and flowers
into their orbits!

Or a slumber of pristine kind,
when no awakening was,
only golden warmth and purple berries,
nibbled by swallows, eternal ones,
that never fly away—
This note strike, gong
this hour,
for
when you fall silent,
downward the forest-edges press,
thick with poplars, already cooler.

(from Statische Gedichte, 1948)

—Translated from the German by Christopher Middleton


PERMISSIONS

"Poplar," "Palau," "Monologue," "Chopin," and "September"
Reprinted from Primal Vision: Selected Writings of Gottfried Benn, Edited by E. B. Ashton
(New York: New Directions, 1958). Copyright ©1958 by New Directions. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.

For an interview with Gottfried Benn, click the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6R4w3YaDQc

Gottfried Benn reads "Palau" at the link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=libwz3HYGvA&feature=related