READIN

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

🦋 Fratres:

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time [are] not worthy [to be compared] with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected [the same] in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

-- The letter of St. Paul to the Romans
Chapter â…§: 18-22
King James version

For an epigraph, Pasos quotes from the Vulgate version of the above verses of Romans; but he prefaces the quotation with "Fratres:" -- "Brethren:", which is not part of these verses. Paul's letter is addressed to his brethren the Roman Christians, so this insertion makes good sense. And if you read Pasos' poem as a continuation of Paul's address to his brethren, then the familiar second-person plural is clear from context.

This morning I had what seems to me like a good idea for a non-literal translation of the poem's third stanza:

Give me a motor, a motor stronger than man's heart.
Give me a robot's brain, let me be murdered painlessly.
Give me a body, metal body without and within another metal body,
just like the leaden soldier's who never dies,
never begs oh Lord, your grace, let me not be disgraced among your works
like the soldier of mere flesh, our feeble pride,
who will offer, for your day, the light of his eyes,
who will take, for your metal, take a bullet in his chest,
who will give, for your water, give back his blood.
Who wants to be like a knife, like one no other knife can ever wound.

posted morning of June 4th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

🦋 Landscapes

I picked up Ferlinghetti's Landscapes of Living and Dying again this weekend and found myself entranced again by the crystal clarity of his images and by the sparse beauty of his syllables.

For years the old Italians have been dying
all over America
For years the old Italians in faded felt hats
have been sunning themselves and dying
You have seen them on the benches
of the park in Washington Square
the old Italians in their black high button shoes
the old men in their old felt fedoras

with stained hatbands

have been dying and dying

day by day

posted evening of May 10th, 2011: Respond
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Friday, March 25th, 2011

🦋 Labor History: centennial, current

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--

—Robert Pinsky, Shirt

posted evening of March 25th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, February 17th, 2011

🦋 Song for his Disappeared Love

Thanks are due Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson of Montevidayo for making available these recordings of Raúl Zurita and his translator Daniel Borzutsky, appearing together at Notre Dame last month. They are reading from Zurita's book Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), newly published in translation.

Pegado, pegado a las rocas, al mar y a las montañas.
Murió mi chica, murió mi chico, desaparecieron todos.

Desiertos de amor.

posted evening of February 17th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, February 14th, 2011

🦋 Romantic beauty

A few things have reminded me lately of José Cárdenas Peña's poetry. Here is a translation that I spent some time on last summer.

El delincuente Si sólo fuese el grito del agua, o el rodar de una piedra que no encuentro acomodo a la orilla del llanto. Si sólo fuese la herida corrosiva de los pasos sin nombre en los días que mueren, o la processión lenta de las horas (centinelas del miedo). Si sólo fuese el puñado de hierba lo que cubre a la sangre, aventada al olvido, para poder decir: es el final.

Too Late If only it were just the scream the water's scream, the restless turning of a stone which finds no spot to nestle by the banks of the storm. If only it were just the wound, corrosive wound, that nameless passage, flow of dead time; the soft procession of the hours (sentinels of fear). If only that bundle of herbs, the ones we use to bind our wounds, could be scattered to oblivion, that we might say: it is over.

Cárdenas Peña seems like a good poet for Valentine's Day as he is just about as Romantic as they come. Wikipædia says that he was "infatuated with beauty, with masculine beauty; he passed his thankless days in Platonic admiration of young men's bodies. The contemplation of physical beauty, the slow and sensuous writing of his poetry, the dialogues which he carried out with himself in cheap hotels and in the beds of the poorhouse -- perhaps these were the three fundamental activities of his life."

posted evening of February 14th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, January 8th, 2011

🦋 Socket Wrench

David Bonta (blogger at Via Negativa) has published a book of Odes to Tools with Phœnecia Publishing -- some beautiful thoughts about the things we use.

Ode to a Socket Wrench

Better than all power tools
Is the socket wrench:

Its accomodating nature
Its chrome-plated steel
Its handling of torque.

posted morning of January 8th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

🦋 Christ in Elqui

I bought a book last night on the strength of its cover -- The magnificent cover photo (a still from Buñuel's Simon of the Desert) made me pick it up and read the back cover, made me buy the book and start reading... It is an homage to Nícanor Parra's Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui, about a young man from Chile's Elqui Valley who discovers that he is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Very dry humor and lovely prose.

Here is a bit of linguistic confusion I found entertaining -- early in the novel the narrator is talking about Christ's difficulties with his good-for-nothing apostles, who are always stuffing themselves, guzzling liquor and smoking -- he compares this with the Messiah's ascetic ways using a quick shift from third to first person, which is made more subtle and confusing by Spanish's imperfect tense.

In Spanish, the first person singular imperfect and the third person singular imperfect are usually (maybe always?) the same. So when Letelier writes

Él, por su parte, que debía ser luz para el mundo, no fumaba ni bebía. Con un vaso de vino al almuerzo, como exhortaba en sus prédicas, era suficiente. Y apenas probaba la comida, porque entre mis pecados, que también los tengo, mis hermanos, nunca figuró la gula. Tanto así que a veces, por el simple motivo de que se olvidaba de hacerlo, se pasaba días completos sin ingerir alimentos.

posted afternoon of November 9th, 2010: 3 responses
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Thursday, October 28th, 2010

🦋 Composición y traducción

Versos sin sentido

por Jeremy Osner

Esas palabras se dicen a mí mismo
Como los ecos que vibranse entre las nubes
Pero también debéis escuchar, escuchad
al voz de vuestra Diosa propia.
Cuando vos sentís familiar me decid.
Vamos mañana tal vez al paisaje de nuestras ilusiones
o a una ruina postapocalíptica similar, nos
desaparezcase la iglesia, la iglesia de los padres, la iglesia de ayer.

from Criminal

by José Cárdenas Peña

If only it were just the scream
the water's scream,
the rolling stone
abandoned, with no place to lay its head
against the storm.
If only it were just
the wound, corrosive wound,
the nameless passage,
flow of dead time:
the soft procession of the hours,
sentinels of fear.
If only it were the handful of herb
the herb which mates with blood
winnowed through memory
now it can say:
it is over,
the statue, the labyrinth,
angel's shadow, world which never is.

But behind this silent
anguished nostalgia,
behind you yourself
o wounded shadow who calls me,
swells the violence
the destruction over cliffs
over conquered ragged armies, ashes, dust.
And still I know the damage,
in this moment of my hapless lineage;
this ghost or god who from my birthplace
from my rubble rises up
this dove of the final flood,
and around me your words
your tongues of fire
baptismal conch
pouring out on your mirror of drunkenness
handful of naked salt
of biblical questions:
the mud, the signal, seed of man
your voice, your name, your sorrow;
the shape of just one tear
wept out for the dead
for fallen moorish idols
blood which teaches me to feel,
who cannot catch it, fend it off
as the sky fends off his luminous abyss,
the sea her piscene stigmata.
...

posted evening of October 28th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, October 25th, 2010

🦋 Memento homo

Another poem from Los contados días.

At times I bear
as an enormous cross, love
mounted on this coffin, my corpse.
Shipwrecked and alone,
I crash like a thunderbolt, like a star.
Reborn from my anterior dyings,
to go on dying all around,
dying in a tree's ear
or at the hand of a dream.
I fell from void, just
like oblivion falls among the ruins,
I was thrust
into the beauty of the earth:
was clay before the brightness and the joy.

...
I pass from the bird to the rose,
by blood and by fæces,
between forgetfulness and dust.
My soul cries out for its species of pride,
its desolate labyrinth,
its universe of shadow.

But my mind won't stop
measuring out the ashes from my eye
...

And that the world remains the world
and that the land is bathed
in the purple of blood;
the flood's diluted in another flood,
the Gods break away from our grasp
our prayer is trapped
trapped in our throats
a nail, a catastrophe.

And still it's beautiful
raising up this cathedral of sighs
...

posted evening of October 25th, 2010: Respond

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

🦋 These Precious Evenings

Here is a poem by a Mexican poet named José Cárdenas Peña, "Los contados días".

This wandering groping
like I'm walking into ruins:
this turning my face to the wind
without expecting a response from the wind;
instinctive phrasing, to live and to hope
without contact:
this clamour to God,
this doubt and this love, this blasphemy;

this dread of being lonely,
of the death that is not death;
it hurts me, hurts like a wound,
like my own native land,
like an angel's wing --
like my crime, like her bleak silence...

And when at last I scream Here! Here I am!,
so cleaves in two my naked, naked heart.

(I posted the original of this poem in the comments to a LanguageHat entry about free verse and memorization.)

posted evening of October 22nd, 2010: Respond
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