Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Amy Clampitt (1920-1994) – poetka amerykańska, wiersze pisała już w szkole średniej, ale po studiach przez 40 lat pracowała jako sekretarka, bibliotekarka, tłumaczka i redaktorka. Pierwszy tomik swoich wierszy „The Kingfisher” (1983) opublikowała w wieku 63 lat. Spotkał się on z entuzjastycznym przyjęciem przez czytelników i krytykę literacką, a sama autorka zaczęła robić błyskotliwą karierę jako poetka, otrzymując wszystkie najważniejsze w USA nagrody i wyróżnienia literackie, m. in. stypendia Guggenheimów, Academy of American Poets, MacArthur Prize. Znany amerykański literaturoznawca i krytyk literacki Harold Bloom na łamach pisma "The Yale Review" zaliczył erudycyjne i wzorcowe pod względem stylistycznym wiersze Amy Clampitt do obowiązkowego kanonu poezji amerykańskiej XX wieku. Następne książki poetyckie Amy Clampitt, to: “The Summer Solstice” (1983), „What the Light Was Like” (1984), “Archaic Figure” (1987), “Manhattan: An Elegy, and Other Poems” (1990),
“A Silence Opens” (1994) i - wydana pośmiertnie - “The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt” (1997). Ta ostatnia, 500-stronicowa, opublikowana w prestiżowym nowojorskim wydawnictwie Alfred A. Knopf, uznawana jest za jedną z najważniejszych pozycji we współczesnej poezji amerykańskiej. W niezwykle wysublimowanych językowo i wielowarstwowych w treści utworach, autorka łączy tradycje najwyżej cenionej poezji europejskiej (Rainer Maria Rilke, Osip Mandelsztam) i amerykańskiej (Walt Whitman, Emilly Dickinson, Wallace Stevens). Operująca często zaskakującą metaforyką i aluzją, penetruje rzadko odwiedzane przez artystów obrzeża ( terra incognita ) świata zmysłowego i intelektualnego, wymykające się często z ram słownego opisu.

The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
A step
down and you're into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you'll never get out of here.
But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they're set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
that either
a First Cause said once, "Let there
be sundews," and there were, or they've
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in that cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.

A Silence

past parentage or gender
beyond sung vocables
the slipped-between
the so infinitesimal
fault line
a limitless
interiority

beyond the woven
unicorn the maiden
(man-carved worm-eaten)
God at her hip
incipient
the untransfigured
cottontail
bluebell and primrose
growing wild a strawberry
chagrin night terrors
past the earthlit
unearthly masquerade

(we shall be changed)

a silence opens

*

the larval feeder
naked hairy ravenous
inventing from within
itself its own
raw stuffs'
hooked silk-hung
relinquishment

behind the mask
the milkfat shivering
sinew isinglass
uncrumpling transient
greed to reinvest

*

names have been
given (revelation
kif nirvana
syncope) for
whatever gift
unasked
gives birth to

torrents
fixities
reincarnations of
the angels
Joseph Smith
enduring
martyrdom

a cavernous
compunction driving
founder-charlatans
who saw in it
the infinite
love of God
and had
(George Fox
was one)
great openings

Beach Glass

While you walk the water's edge,
turning over concepts
I can't envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty—
driftwood and shipwreck, last night's
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
ot touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass—
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almadén and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it,
I'm afraid) Phillips'
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin.
The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Szkło na plaży”
na stronie Plaża, dzika plaża...

Gradual Clearing

Late in the day the fog
wrung itself out like a sponge
in glades of rain,
sieving the half-invisible
cove with speartips;
then, in a lifting
of wisps and scarves, of smoke-rings
from about the islands, disclosing
what had been wavering
fishnet plissé as a smoothness
of peau-de-soie or just-ironed
percale, with a tatting
of foam out where the rocks are,
the sheened no-color of it,
the bandings of platinum
and magnesium suffusing,
minute by minute, with clandestine
rose and violet, with opaline
nuance of milkweed, a texture
not to be spoken of above a whisper,
began, all along the horizon,
gradually to unseal
like the lip of a cave
or of a cavernous,
single, pearl-
engendering seashell.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Stopniowe przejaśnienie”
na stronie Wiersze na różne pory dnia

Inne wiersze Amy Clampitt na stronach: Kwiaty i Jesień przychodzi za wcześnieMarta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 24.06.12 o godzinie 05:37

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

D . J. (Dennis Joseph) Enright (1920 - 2002) – poeta angielski, jeden z czołowych przedstawicieli The Movement - ruchu literackiego w Anglii na przełomie lat 50-tych
i 60-tych, programowo przeciwstawiającego się panującej w latach 40-tych i 50-tych poetyce neoromantyzmu (innym reprezentantem tego ruchu był Philip Larkin).
Enright debiutował tomem wierszy pt. „Season Ticket (1948), po którym opublikował jeszcze dziewiętnaście książek poetyckich: „The Laughing Hyena and Other Poems” (1953), “Bread rather than Blossoms” (1956), “Some Men Are Brothers”(1960), “Addictions” (1962), “The Old Adam” (1965), “Unlawful Assembly” (1968), “Daughters of Earth” (1972), “The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood” (1973), “Sad Ires” (1975), “Paradise Illustrated” (1978), “A Faust Book” (1979), “Collected Poems” (1981), “Instant Chronicles: A Life” (1985), “Collected Poems 1987” (1987), “Selected Poems 1990” (1990), “Under the Cicumstances: Poems and Proses” (1991), “Old Men and Comets” (1993), “Telling Tales: Paradise Illustrated & A Faust Book” (1997), “Collected Poems 1948–1998” (1998). Pisał również powieści, dla dorosłych
i dzieci, a także eseje krytyczno-literackie. Był wykładowcą na uniwersytetach angielskich (m.in. Birmingham, Leeds, University of Warwick) i przede wszystkim za granicą (Egipt, Japonia, Berlin Zachodni, Bangkok, Singapur), gdzie przebywał przez ponad dwadzieścia pięć lat. Po powrocie do Anglii współredagował miesięcznik "Encounter" (1970-72) i był jednym z szefów wydawnictwa Chatto and Windus (1973-1982). Po polsku ukazał się tom: D. J. Enright: Raj w obrazkach. Wybór, przekład
i opracowanie Piotr Sommer. Biuro Literackie Port Legnica, Legnica 2003. Patrz recenzję Adama Poprawy „Być osobno ze światem” w temacie Recenzje o publikacjach –
- naszych oraz innych autorów.

A Polished Performance

Citizens of the polished capital
Sigh for the towns up country,
And their innocent simplicity.
People in the towns up country
Applaud the unpolished innocence
Of the distant villages.
Dwellers in the distant villages
Speak of a simple unspoilt girl,
Living alone, deep in the bush.
Deep in the bush we found her,
Large and innocent of eye,
Among gentle gibbons and mountain ferns.
Perfect for the part, perfect,
Except for the dropsy
Which comes from polished rice.
In the capital our film is much admired,
Its gentle gibbons and mountain ferns,
Unspoilt, unpolished, large and innocent of eye.

Prime Minister

Slowly he ticks off their names
On the long list:
All the young political men
As he was once himself.
He thinks of how he despised the others
— the apolitical,
the English-educated
the students he called 'white ants
In their ivory tower'.
Not so long ago, in fact,
He coined that happy phrase 'white ants'.
How he despised them, all they cared for
Was lectures, essays and a good degree!
A small thing these days
— he tells himself —
To be arrested.
Incredulously he remembers
Not once was he arrested, somehow.
Slowly he ticks off the names
On the list to be arrested.
Tonight, isn't it? Yes.
Between 2 and 4 when the blood runs slow.
The young political men,
Full of fire, hot-blooded.
— For a moment,
He thinks he sees his own name there.
'Red ants,' he hisses,
Thrusting the list at a waiting policeman.

Dreaming in the Shanghai Restaurant

I would like to be that elderly Chinese gentleman.
He wears a gold watch with a gold bracelet,
But a shirt without sleeves or tie.
He has good luck moles on his face, but is not disfigured with fortune.
His wife resembles him, but is still a handsome woman,
She has never bound her feet or her belly.
Some of the party are his children, it seems,
And some his grandchildren;
No generation appears to intimidate another.
He is interested in people, without wanting to convert them or pervert them.
He eats with gusto, but not with lust;
And he drinks, but is not drunk.
He is content with his age, which has always suited him.
When he discusses a dish with the pretty waitress,
It is the dish he discusses, not the waitress.
The table-cloth is not so clean as to show indifference,
Not so dirty as to signify a lack of manners.
He proposes to pay the bill but knows he will not be allowed to.
He walks to the door like a man who doesn't fret about being respected, since he is;
A daughter or granddaughter opens the door for him,
And he thanks her.
It has been a satisfying evening. Tomorrow
Will be a satisfying morning. In between he will sleep satisfactorily.
I guess that for him it is peace in his time.
It would be agreeable to be this Chinese gentleman.

Wiersze D. J. Enrighta w przekładzie Piotra Sommera w tematach: Moja biblioteka, Raj, wyspy szczęśliwe..., Bajki, O przemijaniu..., Powroty, Owady są wszędzie, Buddyzm i kultura Dalekiego Wschodu, Przemoc w majestacie prawa, W zamieci słowa, Szczęście, Poezja codzienności, Dziecko jest chodzącym cudem..., Ogłoszenia bardziej i mniej poetyckie, Przypowieść, Pamięć – M. F.Marek F. edytował(a) ten post dnia 18.11.09 o godzinie 12:29

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Carol Rumens (ur. 1944) – jedna z najbardziej znaczących poetek angielskich średniego pokolenia. Debiutowała w 1973 r. tomem wierszy pt. „Strange Girl in Bright Colour”. Następnie opublikowała: „A Necklace of Mirrors” (1978), “Unplayed Music” (1981), “Star Whisper” (1983), “Direct Calling” (1985), “The Greening of Snow Beach” (1988), “From Berlin to Heaven” (1989), “Thinking of Skins” (1987), “Selected Poems” (1987), “Best China Sky” (1995), "The Miracle Diet" (1998), “Holding Pattern” (1998), Hex”(2002), "Poems: 1968-2004" (2004), "Blind Spots" (2008).
Kierowała działem poezji w prestiżowych angielskich pismach literackich: Quarto (1982-1984) i Literary Review (1984-1988), prowadziła zajęcia Creative Writing na uniwersytetach w Belfaście i Hull. Zredagowała dwie antologie angielskiej poezji kobiecej: „Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry” (1988)
i “New Women Poets” (1990). Uprawia też twórczość prozatorską i eseistykę, a także tłumaczy poezję z języka rosyjskiego na angielski, m. in. Aleksandra Błoka, Osipa Mandelsztama i współczesnych poetów rosyjskich (tomy: „The Poetry of Perestroika”, 1991); „After Puszkin”, 2000; „Yevgenii Rein: Selected Poems” (2001).
W 2004 r. poetka gościła w Polsce i wzięła udział w Festiwalu Literackim „Port Wrocław”.

Double Bed

She goes upstairs early,
lies wretched in the double bed,
letting its cool space ease her.
The curtains strain a think daylight.
People move faintly beneath.

Tired out, she enters soon
those inner vastnesses
where wishes are almost naked,
pursuing new shapes
of desire, new solitudes.

She wakes fractiously
as the bed rearranges its sinews
for a heavier transport.
He brings her cold flesh
and delicate flattery:

she's not all innocence.
It's just that, by daylight,
they inhabit different angles,
no longer wave and smile
from each other's mirrors.

So, not unkindly,
he turns his back
(he can never sleep facing her)
and she will lie staring
at the dark for hours,

motionless, disarrayed
in the space he has left her.
It is too narrow to sleep in,
but impossible to leave,
she thinks, without robbing
him.

And If It Was

If it was only for you
all along, all the time, all the way,
and nothing was left of our brightest exchange
of brain-light and blood-sugar; if
it turned out to be just for the flirt and the flak, the great luck
when it worked, when we came, and I caught
the whiff of your sweat, like human sweat,
and your glow, saw your feathers and hair
flare like an Inca head-dress, though
no more than a match-flame, over and out, not catching
anyone’s fire but mine, any time but now,
would you forgive me, words?

Your Summer Arm

Was it an odd sort of cricket
climbing my oak dresser? No -
an emerald shield bug, you said,
watching as I tried to slide

a piece of A4 paper
beneath its crooked legs.
When a foot caught, and tore,
I thought we both might cry.

*

Where is grass to comfort that green?
Those sweet, young shoots
I slipped from their sheaths
and chewed with wobbly teeth?

Now, as we curl into bed,
outside in the whistling damp
the husk I dismembered today
begins to decay in the leaves.

*

This whirring of thoughts,
rustle of pages,
mean nothing to you
anymore.

Your breathing is so quiet
I'd hardly know you were there
if it wasn't for the glowing limb
buried in my hair.

Direct Train

The North Wales coast looked desirable in passing:
it always does. "What a lovely seaside," two
shy elderly travellers remarked. And I wanted to say,
"it's not, when you're beside it!"
and point out the proximity of railway to beach,
not to mention the A55 and the miserable concrete walkways,
not to mention the typical prom, with its burger café and shelter…
I merely glanced at the lovely illusion (to feel
nostalgic already would be ridiculous),
and noted the sullen herds of flat-topped caravans flowing
the sea-less side of the tracks at Abergervele.

There was the usual hubbub of "Change at Chester."
after that, settling into the painless curve,
the steady, southerly glide, I could soften a little,
and say to myself, "England, utterly England,"
suddenly wishing it summer, so London would still lie cradled
and canopied in a safety-net of daylight:
(there's something sad in arriving alone, at night,
and for a stay so short, a long weekend's-worth
I'll hardly notice, sitting at the computer
or pushing myself out to embarrassing literary soirees).

And as usual I felt that the place I truly desired
lay only within that inconsequential series
of miniature, minimal places which are the sum of travel,
and yet it was no solution to keep on leaving
one country for another, since this gave too much importance
to place, worked up a lot of un-needed sensations
hard to resist or out-grow, despite the years of practice
dividing my time, as they say. I don't want my time divided:
I want it always to be three o'clock, that most
indivisible time, in a field whose bushy, brown horizon
moves so much slower than the impatient embankment,
with terraced houses nearby, and a horse, and a grubby canal
- a time that not even December can spirit into nightfall.

And I want to be saying "England, utterly England"
in a voice that doesn't imply I have locks and keys there:
rather, I'm gliding like blood, in complex circles, sensing
London down on my left like a gritty boot,
and the North Wales coast at my right shoulder-blade
with its little fleece of waves, stuck out like a curious wing
I sprouted once by mistake, imagining I could fly.

Weeds

In gardens, it's the unwanted
babies that grow best and biggest,
swarming our beds of frail
legitimate darlings with roots
like wire and crude, bright flower-heads.

They seem oblivious to the fury of steel prongs
earthquaking around them.
If they fall today, tomorrow
they'll stand all the greener.

Too soon, the beautiful lives
we've trembled over with sprays
of pesticide, friendly stakes,
and watering-cans at sunset,
give in, leaving us helpless.

The weeds, the unfavoured ones,
stare at us hungrily,
and since it is hard to live
empty of love, we try
to smile; we learn to forgive them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lcG51_p5KQ

Wiersze Carol Rumens w przekładzie Jerzego Jarniewicza na stronach:
Angelologia i dal…, Samotność, Powroty, Lot nasz podniebny…Ten post został edytowany przez Autora dnia 07.08.13 o godzinie 07:00

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Lewis Allan

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

1936

7 sierpnia 1930 r. w miejscowości Marion (Stan Indiana w USA) doszło do linczu
na dwóch Murzynach: Thomasie Shipp i Abramie Smith – oskarżonych o morderstwo
na białych Amerykanach. Zdjęcie z tego wydarzenia, autorstwa Lawrence’a Beitlera,
w tysiącach egzemplarzy obiegło wkrótce całą Amerykę i wywołało falę protestu przeciwko zbrodniom i przemocy na tle rasistowskim. Linch na dwóch czarnoskórych więźniach w Marion zainspirował żydowskiego nauczyciela, poetę i muzyka Abla Meeropola, do napisania pieśni „Strange Fruit”, którą opublikował pod pseudonimem Lewis Allan w piśmie „The New York Teacher” w 1936 r. i do której też sam skomponował muzykę. Utwór na wiele lat stał się wielkim przebojem, pieśnią protestu przeciwko dyskryminacji rasowej w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Śpiewany był przez wielu wybitnych wykonawców, m. in. przez światowej sławy czarnoskórą piosenkarkę jazzową Billy Holliday. Patrz: Frank O”Hara „W dzień śmierci Lady Day’ na stronie Poezja i muzyka.



Lincz na Thomasie Shipp i Abramie Smith, fot. Lawrence BeitlerKrzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 14.10.09 o godzinie 10:10

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

A. R. (Archie Randolph) Ammons (1926-2001) – jeden z najbardziej znanych
i najwyżej cenionych, obok Johna Ashbery’ego, poetów amerykańskich XX wieku,
autor ponad dwudziestu tomów poezji, laureat większości najważniejszych nagród literackich w Stanach Zjednoczonych, w tym dwukrotnie National Book Award. Debiutował w 1955 r. tomem wierszy pt. „Ommateum: With Doxology”, w którym widoczne są jeszcze reminiscencje z jego chemiczno-biologicznych studiów, literaturę studiował tylko przez trzy semestry na uniwersytecie w Berkeley. Inne jego książki poetyckie to: „Expressions of Sea Level” (1964), “Corsons Inlet” (1965), “Tape for the Turn of the Year” (1965), “Northfield Poems” (1966), ”Selected Poems” (1968), “Uplands” (1970), “Briefings: Poems Small and Easy” (1971), “Collected Poems: 1951-1971” (1972), “Sphere: The Form of a Motion” (1974), “Diversifications” (1975), ”Highgate Road” (1977), “The Selected Poems: 1951-1977” (1977), “The Snow Poems” (1977), ”Selected Longer Poems” (1980), “A Coast of Trees” (1981), “Worldly Hopes” (1982), ”Lake Effect Country” (1983), “The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition” (1986), “Sumerian Vistas” (1987), “The Really Short Poems” (1991), “Garbage” (1993), “The North Carolina Poems” (1994), “Brink Road” (1996), ”Glare” (1997); pośmiertnie: “Bosh and Flapdoodle” (2005) i “Selected Poems” ( 2006). Poezja A. R Ammonsa jest bardzo zróżnicowna pod względem formalnym i stylistycznym, obok krótkich, nawet kilkuwyrazowych, miniatur poetyckich pisał długie, nawet całoksiążkowe, poematy, zawiłą i hermetyczną metaforykę zastąpiła z czasem poezja pisana prostym, codziennym językiem, wypranym z wszelkich tradycyjnie poetyckich środków wyrazu, duży wpływ na język poetycki Ammonsa wywarł też buddyzm, mitologia chińska oraz filozofia tzw. „najcichszej sekty” – szkoły Tai Chi I., która zalecała całościową medytację, nie tylko poprzez ciało, mózg i serce, ale pełną istotą człowieka. Jak pisze Paweł Marcinkiewicz - tłumacz i chyba najlepszy w Polsce znawca jego twórczości:
„W wierszach Ammonsa jest obecny stan sensorycznego napięcia, wywołanego taką medytacją: to, co niematerialne, wyrażone jest w języku krajobrazu i jego cech fizycznych doznawanych przez zmysły. Dusza to pewna okolica, którą można przemierzyć, myślenie to zbieranie kamieni, na które jesteśmy skazani, a czystość to otworzenie bram jaźni i wyzwolenie się od świadomości, aby wszechobecny duch mógł znaleźć w nas swój dom.” (Okolice A. R. Ammonsa).

Z tomu „Collected Poems: 1951-1971”, 1972:

Mountain Talk

I was going along a dusty highroad
when the mountain
across the way
turned me to its silence:
oh I said how come
I don’t know your
massive symmetry and rest:
nevertheless, said the mountain,
would you want
to be
lodged here with
a changeless prospect, risen
to an unalterable view:
so I went on
counting my numberless fingers.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Rozmowa z górą”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą”

Eyesight

It was May before my
attention came
to spring and

my word I said
to the southern slopes
I've

missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:

don't worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or if

you can climb, climb
into spring: but
said the mountain

it's not that way
with all things, some
that go are gone

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Wzrok”
w temacie Nim przyjdzie wiosna...

Hymn

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Hymn”
w temacie Hymn

Corsons Inlet

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned

along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:
I allow myself eddies of meaning:
yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
you can find
in my sayings
swerves of action
like the inlet's cutting edge:
there are dunes of motion,
organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance
in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting
beyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of
primrose
more or less dispersed;

disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows
of dunes
irregular swamps of reeds

though not reeds alone, but grass bayberry, yarrow, all . . .
predominantly reeds:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines:
as

manifold events of sand
change the dune's shape that will not be the same shape
tomorrow,

so I am willing to go along, to accept
the becoming
thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends establish
no walls:

by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek
to undercreek: but there are no lines though
change in that transition is clear
as any sharpness: but "sharpness" spread out,
allowed to occur over a wider range
than mental lines can keep:

the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:
black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk
of air
and, earlier, of sun,
waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,
caught always in the event of change:
a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals
and ate
to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,
picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy
turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

risk is full: every living thing in
siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small
white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears
the shallows, darts to shore
to stab - what? I couldn't
see against the black mudflats a frightened
fiddler crab?

the news to my left over the dunes and
reeds and bayberry clumps was
fall: thousands of tree swallows
gathering for flight:
an order held
in constant change: a congregation
rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable
as one event,
not chaos: preparations for
flight from winter,

cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps
beaks
at the bayberries
a perception full of wind, flight, curve,
sound:
the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:
the "field" of action
with moving, incalculable center:

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
snail shell:
pulsations of order
in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together
and against, of millions of events: this,
so that I make
no form of
formlessness:

orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override
or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain
the top of a dune,
the swallows
could take flight some other fields of bayberry
could enter fall
berryless) and there is serenity:

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes:

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work:
I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Corsons Inlet”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą

Small Song

The reeds give
way to the

wind and give
the wind away

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Mała piosenka”
w temacie Miniatury poetyckie

Z tomu „The Selected Poems”, 1986:

Winter Scene

There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:

except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,

in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch

quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Zimowa scenka”
w temacie Zima

Giving up Words with Words

Isn’t it time to let things be:
I don’t pick up the drafts-book,
I ease out of the typewriter room:

bumblebees’ wings swirl
free of the fine-spun of words:
the brook blinks

a leaf down-bed, shadow mingling,
tumbling with the leaf,
with no help from me: do things let alone

go to pieces: is rescue written
already into the motions of coherence:
have words all along

imitated work better done undone:
one thinks not ruthlessly to bestir again:
one cases off harsh attentions

to watch the dew dry, the squirrel stand
(white belly prairie-dog erect)
the mayfly cling daylong to the doorscreen

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicz pt. „Słowa zaniechane słowami”
w temacie Być poetą

Z tomu „The Really Short Poems”, 1991:

Reflective

I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Refleksowy”
w temacie Motyw zwierciadła, lustra i odbicia

Z tomu „Brink Road”, 1996:

Magic

The wind across
the street blusters
a leaf over
snow till it

scampers up a

tree, flips
head down, fluffy
tail
straight up.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Czary”
w temacie Miniatury poetyckie

Changing Stations

The all-night rain running
off and soaking through
into the narrows
tore up the brooks, leaned

slates of shale
against the banks and, cutting some
bank away, rearranged chip shale
into new mounds, tiled close,

as if by hand, by
water mortar (what a sound) but now
the brook's so still,
pane clear, a treetop scrap of

birds like stubborn leaves
shines shaking in the brookbed
filled
with a deeper ditch of sky.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Zmiana miejsc”
w temacie Rzeki, potoki, strumienie...

Inne wiersze A. R. Ammonsa w tematach:
Czynności i zajęcia, poza pisaniem wierszy, Owady są wszędzie..., Góry, poezja
i my, Potrawy i napoje..., Buddyzm i kultura Dalekiego Wschodu, O przemijaniu...,
O liściach, Homo automobilus..., Spotkania , Chodzę lasem..., Powroty.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 24.04.10 o godzinie 09:45

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Al (Alfred) Purdy (1918-2000) – poeta kanadyjski, w czasie II wojny światowej
był żołnierzem armii kanadyjskiej, po wojnie do końca 1950 r. pracował jako robotnik sezonowy w Onario, ostatecznie zamieszkał w małym miasteczku Ameliasburgh
i poświęcił się pracy literackiej. Debiutował w 1944 r. książką pt.„The Enchanted Echo”, potem wydał jeszcze: “Pressed in Sand” (1955), “Emu, Remember!”(1956), “The Crafte So Longe to Lerne”(1959), “The Blur in Between” (1962). Rozgłos przyniósł mu jednak dopiero tom pt. „Poems for All the Annettes”( 1962). Od jego wydania rozpoczyna się szybka i błyskotliwa jego kariera literacka. W sumie wydał przeszło 40 książek,
w większości tomy poezji, ważniejsze z nich to: „The Cariboo Horses” (1965),
„Sex & Death” (1973), „Being Alive” (1978), „The Stone Bird” (1981), „Bursting into Song” (1982), „The Stone Bird. Collected Poems 1956-1986” (1986), “The Woman on the Shore”(1990), “A Splinter in the Heart” (1990), „Naked With Summer in Your Mouth” (1993), “Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems” (1996),
“To Paris Never Again” ( 1997). Al. Purdy otrzymał wszystkie najważniejsze kanadyjskie nagrody literackie i uważany jest dzisiaj za jednego z najwybitniejszych poetów kanadyjskich XX wieku. Poeta zmarł w kwietniu 2000 r., w wieku 82 lat, pół roku później ukazał się retrospektywny zbiór jego wierszy, który sam jeszcze przygotował do druku: „Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. Harbour Publishing, Toronto 2000. Z niego też pochodzą prezentowane niżej utwory.

Listening To Myself

see myself staggering through deep snow
lugging blocks of wood yesterday
an old man
almost falling from bodily weakness
- look down on myself from above
then front and both sides
white hair - wrinkled face and hands
it's really not very surprising
that love spoken by my voice
should be when I am listening
ridiculous
yet there it is
a foolish old man with brain on fire
stumbling through the snow

- the loss of love
that comes to mean more
than the love itself
and how explain that?
- a still pool in the forest
that has ceased to reflect anything
except the past
- remains a sort of half-love
that is akin to kindness
and I am angry remembering
remembering the song of flesh
to flesh and bone to bone
the loss is better

At Evergreen Cemetery

The still grey face and withered body:
without resistance winter enters in,
as if she were a stone or fallen tree,
her temperature the same as the landscape's -
How she would have complained about that,
the indignity of finally being without heat,
an insult from the particular god she believed in,
and worse than the fall that killed her -
Now a thought flies into the cemetery
from Vancouver, another from Edmonton,
- and fade in the January day like fireflies.
I suppose relatives are a little slower
getting the evening meal because of that -
perhaps late for next day's appointments,
the tight schedule of seconds overturned,
everything set a little back or ahead,
the junctures of time moving and still:
settling finally into a new pattern,
by which lovers, hurrying towards each other
on streetcorners, do not fail to meet -
Myself, having the sense of something going
on without my knowledge, changes taking place
that I should be concerned with,
sit motionless in the black car behind the hearse,
waiting to re-enter a different world.

The Dead Poet

I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh
painting a woman inside a woman
whispering a faint lullaby
that sings in my blind heart still

The others were lumberjacks
backwoods wrestlers and farmers
their women were meek and mild
nothing of them survives
but an image inside an image
of a cookstove and the kettle boiling
- how else explain myself to myself
where does the song come from?

Now on my wanderings:
at the Alhambra's lyric dazzle
where the Moors built stone poems
a wan white face peering out
- and the shadow in Plato's cave
remembers the small dead one
- at Samarkand in pale blue light
the words came slowly from him
- I recall the music of blood
on the Street of the Silversmiths

Sleep softly spirit of earth
as the days and nights join hands
when everything becomes one thing
wait softly brother
but do not expect it to happen
that great whoop announcing resurrection
expect only a small whisper
of birds nesting and green things growing
and a brief saying of them
and know where the words came from

Married Man's Song

When he makes love to the young girl
what does the middle-aged long-married
man say to himself and the girl?
- that lovers live and desk clerks perish?

When neons flash the girl into light and shadow
the room vanishes and all those others
guests who checked out long ago
are smiling
and only the darkness of her may be touched
only the whiteness looked at
she stands above him as a stone goddess
weeping tears and honey
she is half his age and far older
and how can a man tell his wife this?

Later they'll meet in all politeness
not quite strangers but never friends
and hands touched elsewhere may shake together
with brush of fingers and casual eyes
and the cleanser cleans to magic whiteness
and love survives in the worst cologne
(but not girls' bodies that turn black leather)
for all believe in the admen's lies

In rare cases among the legions of married men
such moments of shining have never happened
and whether to praise such men for their steadfast virtue
or condemn them as fools for living without magic
answer can hardly be given

There are rooms for rent in the outer planets
and neons blaze in Floral Sask
we live with death but it's life we die with
in the blossoming earth where springs the rose
In house and highway in town and country
what's given is paid for blood gifts are sold
that stars' white fingers unscrew the light bulbs
the bill is due and the desk clerk wakes
outside our door the steps are quiet
light comes and goes from a ghostly sun
where only the darkness may be remembered
and the rest is gone

The Last Picture in the World

A hunched grey shape
framed by leaves
with lake water behind
standing on our
little point of land
like a small monk
in a green monastery
meditating
almost sculpture
except that it's alive
brooding immobile permanent
for half an hour
a blue heron
and it occurs to me
that if I were to die at this moment
that picture would accompany me
wherever I am going
for part of the way

Realism 2

after Czeslaw Milosz

Paintings certainly do have
"lastingness"
as Milosz tells us,
but you can add sculpture as well,
and various other works of art,
in fact nearly every human artifact.
As for the people in the painting,
he can "join them" as he says,
even though it's a mental exercise
rather than actual joining,
a trick of the mind - :
but the instant he moves
inside Bruegel's "Winter Landscape"
the "tiny figures skating" stop,
nothing moves,
and when he joins "the choral singing"
in another painting silence falls,
and whatever poetry is vanishes

Something much more mysterious:
take a human action,
choose some kind of incident,
then cut it off before and after,
of course you don't "have it,"
but the very fact something occurred
even once makes it eternal,
it cannot be altered or denied:
therefore when Mozart
took a sound out of his head
and with a quill pen
transposed the sound to paper
where it lay silently
and making it infinitely "replica-able"
(a palimpsest of silent sound):
the molecules of eternity
cannot desert Don Giovanni
the silent music rehearses
in another dimension
with millions of guest conductors

Therefore I invite Czeslaw Milosz
to join me in listening
to The Marriage of Figaro
and stand with me silently
at the graveside in Vienna
and mourn
while they scatter the quicklime
departing as silently
but leaving behind
that essential darkness
from which light is born

1995

przekład Waldemara Kontewicza pt. „Realizm 2”
w temacie Inspiracje, nawiązania i parafrazy literackie




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCBKlGbsL-o
Yours, Al. The Life and Poetry of Al Purdy - wyk. Gordon Pinsent

Wiersze Ala Purdy’ego, w przekładzie Mike’a Cygalskiego, na stronach:
Czas, zegary..., Autoportret w lustrze wiersza, W harmonii z przyrodą,
Blaski i cienie małżeństwa, O przyjaźni w poetyckich strofachMarta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 15.09.11 o godzinie 06:43

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Derek Walcott (ur. 1930) – urodził się i wychował w Saint Lucia na Antylach,
państwie-wyspie na Morzu Karaibskim w Ameryce Środkowej, studiował łacinę, język francuski i hiszpański na University College of the West lndies w Mona na Jamajce oraz teatrologię w New York University. Był nauczycielem na różnych wyspach Morza Karaibskiego: St. Lucii, Grenadzie, Jamajce. Od początku lat osiemdziesiątych wykłada literaturę i teatrologię na amerykańskich uniwersytetach: Columbia, Boston University, Harvard. Pierwszy tomik poezji „25 Poems”(1948) wydał w wieku 18 lat jako uczeń szkoły średniej, za 200 dolarów, które dostał od swojej matki. Dzisiaj jest autorem przeszło 20 książek poetyckich, m. in. "In a Green Night. Poems 1948-1960" (1962), "Selected Poms" (1964), "The Castaway and Other Poems" (1965), "The Gulf" (1970), "Another Life" (1970), "Sea Grapes" (1976), "The Star-Apple Kingdom" (1979), "Fotunate Traveller" (1981), "Midsummer" (1984), "The Arkansas Testament" (1987), "Omeros" (1990), "The Bounty" (1997), "Walker and The Ghost Dance" (2004), The Prodigal" (2004).
Jest też autorem ok. 30 sztuk teatralnych i tomu esejów literackich. Pisze teksty piosenek, współpracował m. in. z Paulem Simonem przy musicalu „The Capeman”, wystawianym na Broadwayu w 1997 roku. Jest laureatem wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich, w tym literackiej Nagrody Nobla za 1992 rok. Jest członkiem honorowym The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Po polsku ukazał się tom Derek Walcott: Mapa nowego świata. Wiersze wybrane. Wybór
i redakcja Magda Heydel. Wydawnictwo Znak, Kraków 2008. Recenzja z tej książki, Jerzego J. Kolarzowskiego pt. „Geniusz z Małych Antyli” w temacie Recenzje o publikacjach – naszych oraz innych autorów

As John to Patmos

As John to Patmos, among the rocks and the blue, live air, hounded
His heart to peace, as here surrounded
By the strewn-silver on waves, the wood's crude hair, the rounded
Breasts of the milky bays, palms, flocks, and the green and dead

Leaves, the sun's brass coin on my cheek, where
Canoes brace the sun's strength, as John, in that bleak air,
So am I welcomed richer by these blue scapes, Greek there,
So I shall voyage no more from home; may I speak here.

This island is heaven--away from the dustblown blood of cities;
See the curve of bay, watch the struggling flower, pretty is
The wing'd sound of trees, the sparse-powdered sky, when lit is
The night. For beauty has surrounded
Its black children, and freed them of homeless ditties.

As John to Patmos, in each love-leaping air,
O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear
What I swear now, as John did;
To praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead.

Z tomu "In a Green Night. Poems 1948-1960" (1962)

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Jak Jan na Patmos”
w temacie W harmoni z przyrodą”

Bleecker Street, Summer

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and langour,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom
of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!

When I press summer dusks together, it is
a month of street accordions and sprinklers
laying the dust, small shadows running from me.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.
I would undress you in the summer heat,
and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

Z tomu "Selected Poems" (1964)

przekład Adama Szostkiewicza pt. "Ulica Bleecker, lato
w temacie Szukanie lata

Return to d'Ennery; Rain

Imprisoned in these wires of rain, I watch
This village stricken with a single street,
Each weathered shack leans on a wooden crutch,
Contented as a cripple with defeat.
Five years ago even poverty seemed sweet,
So azure and indifferent was this air,
So murmurous of oblivion the sea,
That any human action seemed a waste,
The place seemed born for being buried there.
The surf explodes
In scissor-birds hunting the usual fish,
The rain is muddying unpaved inland roads,
So personal grief melts the general wish.

The hospital is quiet in the rain.
A naked boy drives pigs into the bush.
The coast shudders with every surge. The beach
Admits a beaten heron. Filth and foam.
There in a belt of emerald light, a sail
Plunges and lifts between the crests of reef,
The hills are smoking in the vaporous light,
The rain seeps slowly to the core of grief.
It could not change its sorrows and be home.

It cannot change, though you become a man
Who would exchange compassion for a drink,
Now you are brought to where manhood began
Its separation from “the wounds that make you think.”
And as this rain puddles the sand, it sinks
Old sorrows in the gutter of the mind;
Where is that passionate hatred that would help
The black, the despairing, the poor, by speech alone?
The fury shakes like wet leaves in the wind,
The rain beats on a brain hardened to stone.

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when
Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave
Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask,
O God, where is our home? For no one will save
The world from itself, though he walk among men,
On such shores where the form
Murmurs oblivion of action, who raise
No cry like herons stoned by the rain.

The passionate exiles believe it, but the heart
Is circled by sorrows, by its horror
And bitter devotion to home.
The romantic nonsense ends at the bowspirit, shearing
But never arriving beyond the reef-shore foam,
Or the rain cuts us off from heaven’s hearing.

Why blame the faith you have lost? Heaven remains
Where it is, in the hearts of these people,
In the womb of their church, though the rain’s
Shroud is drawn across its steeple.

z tomu "Selected Poems" (1964)

przekład Adama Szostkiewicza pt. "Powrót do D'Ennery; deszcz"
w tematach: W czasie deszczu nudzą się dzieci... i Powroty

Star

If, in the light of things, you fade
real, yet wanly withdrawn
to our determined and appropriate
distance, like the moon left on
all night among the leaves, may
you invisibly delight this house;
O star, doubly compassionate, who came
too soon for twilight, too late
for dawn, may your pale flame
direct the worst in us
through chaos
with the passion of
plain day.

Z tomu "The Gulf" (1970)

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. „Gwiazda”
w temacie Gwiazdy, planety, kosmos w poezji...

Dark August

So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.

Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.

She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,

she does not come out.
Don't you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly

to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,

so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,

all with not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then

I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
The black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you.

Z tomu "Sea Grapes" (1976)

przekład Andrzeja Szuby pt. „Ponury sierpień”
w temacie W czasie deszczu nudzą się dzieci...

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Z tomu "Sea Grapes" (1976)

przekład Pawła Piaseckiego pt. „Miłość po miłości”
w temacie Autoportret w lustrze wiersza

Volcano

Joyce was afraid of thunder
but lions roared at his funeral
from the Zurich zoo.
Was it Trieste or Zurich?
No matter. These are legends, as much
as the death of Joyce is a legend,
or the strong rumour that Conrad
is dead, and that Victory is ironic.
On the edge of the night-horizon
from this beach house on the cliffs
there are now, till dawn,
two glares from the miles-out-
at-sea derricks; they are like
the glow of the cigar
and the glow of the volcano
at Victory's end.
One could abandon writing
for the slow-burning signals
of the great, to be, instead,
their ideal reader, ruminative,
voracious, making the love of masterpieces
superior to attempting
to repeat or outdo them,
and be the greatest reader in the world.
At least it requires awe,
which has been lost to our time;
so many people have seen everything,
so many people can predict,
so many refuse to enter the silence
of victory, the indolence
that burns at the core,
so many are no more than
erect ash, like the cigar,
so many take thunder for granted.
How common is the lightning,
how lost the leviathans
we no longer look for!
There were giants in those days.
In those days they made good cigars.
I must read more carefully.

Z tomu "Sea Grapes" (1976)

przekład Andrzeja Szuby pt. "Wulkan"
w temacie Wulkany: wewnętrzny żar bierności

I jeden z ostatnich utworów Dereka Walcotta dedykowany nowo
wybranemu prezydentowi Stanów Zjednoczonych Barackowi Obamie:

Forty Acres

for Barack Obama

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's
receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.



Chicago, 7 listopada 2008 r., trzy dni po wygranych wyborach prezydenckich w USA,
Barack Obama otrzymuje w prezencie tom wierszy Dereka Walcotta wraz z utworem
„Forty Acres”.

Inne wiersze Dereka Walcotta w tematach:
Nobliści, Ameryka wczoraj i dziś, Wspomnienia, Miasto, Być poetą..., Motyw wyspy,
Błoto, które sięga niebios..., Spacery poetów, Zaśpiewam ci pieśń/Marynistyka,
Lekcja geografii...Marta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 20.09.11 o godzinie 06:21

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Mary Jo Bang (ur. 1946)- zaliczana jest do ścisłej czołówki we współczesnej poezji amerykańskiej, jest autorką pięciu znaczących tomów wierszy: „Apology for Want” (1997), “Louise in Love” (2001), “The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of the Swans” (2001), “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon” (2004), “Elegy” (2007). Za ten ostatni otrzymała jedną z najbardziej prestiżowych nagród literackich w USA: National Book Critics Circle Award . Wykładała literaturę na kilku uczelniach amerykańskich, obecnie uczy na Washington University w St. Louis. Od 1995 roku jest redaktorką znanego pisma literackiego "The Boston Review".
Na język polski wiersze Mary Jo Bang tłumaczy Paweł Marcinkiewicz. Poetka dwukrotnie gościła w Polsce: w maju 2007 r. na zaproszenie Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza i Centrum Kultury "Zamek" w Poznaniu oraz w listopadzie 2008 r., kiedy była gościem festiwalu Ars Cameralis Silesiae Superioris w Katowicach i krakowskiego Oddziału Stowarzyszenia Pisarzy Polskich.



Mary Jo Bang i dr Paweł Marcinkiewicz na wieczorze autorskim poetki
w Oddziale Stowarzyszenia Pisarzy Polskich w Krakowie, 25 listopada 2008 r.

Szerzej o poezji Mary Jo Bang pisze Paulina Ambroży-Lis w bardzo dobrym,
rzetelnym artykule pt. „Operacja na otwartym sercu, czyli poezja Mary Jo Bang” ,
czytaj w temacie Zbliżenia – eseje o poezji i poetach.

Z tomu “Apology for Want”, 1997





Real Time

Made of brown Bakelite, this clock is different:
it speaks. The soft yellow face sputters
like frying bacon. Instead of an elegant k-tick-tick

there’s intermittent talk – firm denial of rumor
couched in a message. It insists
its occupation is unimportant:

neither dripping faucet nor ocean’s teapot
of eroding waves. Time from this clock quite simply
slips over an edge

like the breakfast egg from a hot pan
that lands gently on a leaf of buttered toast.
Today, I’m less than a murmur

barely more than a hum. Clock doesn’t care
where I’m going , skidding bruised on cracked ice.
Only wants to know where I’ve been,

with whom I spent the endless nights. Begs me to name
the beating heart, in the tigerwood box just next to it.

Granite City, Montana

A ghost town begs you to stare –
empty stone foundations, bleak clapboard

blown of years ago, perhaps gone
to better use: to dust covering mountain

and mine, or a layer of bedrock
for the gullied road that rises straight up

from Philipsburg. Granite hugging granite
its passion spent, landscape

of fretted rock bristling with lichen
grown ripe on pure air and indolence.

The glare of an electric bulb echoes
the barren future: nights of cold bed sheets

camouflaged in the wax and wane
of corrugated tin. And still captive

in the bulb’s wavering halo , miner ghosts
of the men who rodeempty ore buckets

down the mountain on Saturday nights
to the reborn in the dishelleved bed

of a tent city bordello. My bare legs graze
thorned scrub brush. The branches

hold tight imperfect berries-droplets
poised over dark earth,

brighter blood, belated warning: It is over.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Miasteczko Granit, Montana”
w temacie Miasto

Z tomu "Louise in Love", 2001





Kiss, Kiss, said Louise,
by Way of a Pay Phone

To the other who'd been left behind.
The city was unlucky in cloudy and chance of.
Routing the enemy, following a route.
What does it mean, Mary Louise,
that the mall in Midcreek will open in May?
They were getting away
to nature, conveyance as a form of diffidence.
Every avenue, said Ham, still ends at perception.
There is a point, said Louise, when one will act or won't
even know what she's missed.
She was wearing a wig and suit of blue serge
and looked somewhat like that section
of a symphony written in the alphabet soup
of C and B-neath. The road was a ribbon
on the bright canyon bed. Clever twin, said Louise,
to those who know how to follow
a scheme that avoids the end of the senses
before there can be a begun. She saw: a blue car leaving

...

at three; a blue car returning at four; an odd-looking man
leaning against an ornamental Japanese pine.
They topped at the house on the top of the hill,
lit like a candle-house cake. I hope, Ham said,
there's a fire station deep in this forest.
Forest? What forest? she said.
Don't you see—
it's a fantastic sea where nothing but nothing can save us.

The Diary of a Lost Girl

Four diphtheria deaths, then fire, now five named lakes
with tranquil looks. Yet rampantly mad.
A lunatic shriek from a ruffian
child. One oar wrestled a mob of shore fringe, another,
the wet underbirth. And madness,
was it afflicted by demons? Or stricken of God? Or vision,
thrown on an empty mirror, and there you were?
Later, upstairs—the lakes packed away
in pearly cases, the coppery spin of a high skyward
arrayed against a leaded window—the chiasmic
question recurred. She recalled shy little lessons
from a girl named Renee on the unattainable freedoms
of the flesh. In the dining room, they would crumple
over the table like paper angels
if anyone raised an eyebrow.
Otherwise, they leaned against scenery—looking down
at their Bonniedale shoes
as if they were in love with nothing else.

Z tomu "The Eye Like a Strange Balloon", 2004




Three Trees

The aqua green goes with the pink
in a way no one knows what will happen.
Every step is a dangerous taking.
Amazing the time span of a trunk
(a door opens in it and suddenly,
someone is asking how this came to be).
The green curtain is a pressed chime
which when rung rings in a dogwood
white as if a storm were approaching
its green extreme.

Brick crumbles into living pond particle
while a bent hook holds back
the last dissolve.
An uneasy leap over a sharky sea.
Gravity plays its little emotive role.
It’s Elm Street all over
again, ragged walkways lead to Toon Town.
Hello kids. Hello Jimmy Neutron.
The blanket rises, and under it,
a fetishistic pompadour

green, greener and paler than bluebird.
But hush, the nuclear power plant
is about to blow unless
Jimmy can locate the elusive button.
A siren and standing-by fire truck.
It looks like a lost cause until presto,
a messenger. A racketing aside.
The day is dragged here and there but still
can’t be saved. BAM. Immediately
the next second clicks into the skyscape
apocalypse. In the dust, a celluloid woman
mows a multilayered lawn.
The arch overhead reads, O Art
Still Has Truth Take Refuge. Where? There.
There, there, says someone.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Trzy drzewa”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą

Doll

In the dream there’d been difficulty—
tidal wave topside while elsewise
the cat had to be taken away and left yet again
on a farm framed by a row
of small houses. A tangled mass hissed and we woke
and went on and found a pay phone,
called the weather station. Wondered what
was for lunch. A starboard lurch made us wonder
again whether we’d been right all along.
I went in to take a nap
and beheld that the bed held a doll and her blanket.
Her mesh thigh-highs reminded me of Cabaret—
the film, not the play.
Lying there the day dissolved until
another formed fresh
and I woke facing the hill.
The hill climbed to the top
of the mountain. Was rock and a ragged moonscape.
The fate-reader had said, This
is your sylph, and had pointed to a sliver
pared from the larger piece. And this, she had pointed
to the gargantuan rest, is patience, that game you play.
Little zombie of the inner eye.
Little shudder of the frighted mind.
The landscape was Siberian Birch, bark white
against blue. The fragment in the window, as always,
incomplete and perfect
as only the partial can be.
It is here I would have told her
I loved her
but couldn’t. It is here, baby doll in blanket
and bed against a wall with the mountain as message
we spent the night in a place called Small Pleasure.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Lalka”
w temacie Co się poetom śni...?

Z tomu "Elegy", 2007




The Opening

1.
Open the door and look in.
Everything is in place.
The flickering heart
The owlet eyes are locked on.
A serpentine hair hangs over an ear.
A hand comes up to touch it.
A rhythmic hum runs ahead of the wave.
Someone turns her head
And hopes, no, lopes across the lawn.

2.
Open the door and look in.
The black magic cat is clawing the sofa.
The midnight lamp is loosing some light.
Someone is getting undressed.
Her pajamas are pressed
And she’s getting into a bed of flowers.
Ophelia is lying in the bog in the park,
A moment’s orphan in the afterdark.
Sing me a song, Pet, I beg of you.

3.
Open the door and look in.
The Vivian Girls are reading the books
Their countenances were cut from.
It’s like a mirror. The parent and the penguin
Child. Two men with two suitcases.
The hand mirror making its lake
Last as long as it can.
The self looking the depth
Of Wallace Stevens’ wife on the dime.

4.
Open the door and look in.
A murder, some mayhem, the night
News. A cloak on a hook in a closet.
There’s no rug on the floor and the wood
Feels warm. There may have been an arson.
Mistakenly Released Suspect Still Missing
In Dogville or Dogtown or the Down-and-out
Sorry state of things now. Listen,
Brenda Lee is singing, I’m sorry.

5.
Open the door and look in. Look
Down the page to the footnote. To the fine print.
To the FedEx box on the bedside and
The floral print jammies that are jarring
Against the previous-era paper on the wall.
Some ice-cream topper Jimmies
To top off the night. Red Yellow Blue White.
The deer-leg lamp, says Jessica, really does work
And with that, she twirls the shade like a top.

6.
Open the door and look in.
A pin under the bed.
A dust layer on the desk top.
The minutia and the microbe, the fear of failing
To ward off the inevitable, It will be done.
Whatever the It is. The static of darkness,
The dissolve of the moment.
The mouse crawls out of its house,
Remembers where it last ate a grub.

7.
Open the door, Mother, and look in.
The babies in their boxes are sleeping like beetles
In ladybug red, each with a Santa hat.
They’re all at the border of risk,
All about to vanish into the past
Of the unvarnished after.
A longer word for gone. Girl.
Boy. Girl. Boy. Girl. Boy.
If we turn out the lights, they will keep.

8.
Open the door and look in.
In her pajamas, she looks thin.
Pale skin, short nails, hail on the rooftop
And window glass. January is ant dark
Every morning and early in the late afternoon.
With a gloom aspect like a seascape
That was smoke damaged above a fire grate.
The wrapped-mummy mood mutes
The emo that spins like a Catherine Wheel.

9.
Open the door and look back.
Over your shoulder. A peach-cheek
Love bird on a cage roost
Is swinging back and forth.
He’s nature, but he also seems nervous.
The traffic din music comes floating in.
He’s nature, but he also seems nervous.
Sing us a song, Pet, and he does. He sings of arson
In Alexandria, of Helen of Tragic of Troy.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

How could I have failed you like this?
The narrator asks

The object. The object is a box
Of ashes. How could I not have saved you,

A boy made of bone and blood. A boy
Made of a mind. Of years. A hand

And paint on canvas. A marble carving.
How can I not reach where you are

And pull you back. How can I be
And you not. You’re forever on the platform

Seeing the pattern of the train door closing.
Then the silver streak of me leaving.

What train was it? The number six.
What day was it? Wednesday.

We had both admired the miniature mosaics
Stuck on the wall of the Met.

That car should be forever sealed in amber.
That dolorous day should be forever

Embedded in amber.
In garnet. In amber. In opal. In order

To keep going on. And how can it be
That this means nothing to anyone but me now.

przekład Pawła Marcinkiewicza pt. „Krajobraz z upadkiem Ikara”
w temacie Samobójstwo w wierszach...

Inne wiersze Mary Jo Bang w tematach: Poetycka garderoba..., Świecie nasz,
O przemijaniu, Śmierć, s. 5, s. 8, Poezja i fotografia, Czym jest wiersz?, Poezjomalowanie..., ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”..., Wiersze na różne pory dnia, O czytaniu i czytelnikach, Poetyckie studium przedmiotu, Poezja codzienności, Wspomnienia - M. K.Ten post został edytowany przez Autora dnia 07.08.13 o godzinie 07:06

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Kevin Hannan (ur. 1954) – urodził się w Teksasie w rodzinie irlandzko-polskiej,
ojciec był Irlandczykiem, a matka pochodziła z Polonii amerykańskiej.
Ukończył slawistykę na Uniwesytecie Teksańskim, tam też uzyskał stopień doktora. Studiował też w Moskwie, Sankt Petersburgu i Pradze. Od 2002 r. mieszka w Polsce,
był lektorem języka angielskiego w prywatnej szkole w Bielsku-Białej, obecnie zatrudniony jest na stanowisku profesora kontraktowego w Katedrze Literatury
i Kultury Amerykańskiej Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego.

cherry trees are much
frequented in paradise

this physical plane
knows nothing
more exotic
than cherries hanging
heavy in ripeness
over deserted summer roads
my appetite will not be sated

Bielsko-Biała
Corpus Christi, 30 May 2002

czereśnie częściej spotyka się w raju

na tej fizycznej przestrzeni
nic bardziej
egzotycznego
niż czereśnie co wiszą
tak dojrzałe aż ciężkie
latem nad pustą drogą
nie nasycę pragnienia

temptation in the quiet of night

cotton bolls of snow float weightless
upon naked bony branches
contorting with a howling wind

beneath these bundles
there is no cold
just a childhood memory
of distant blackland
baked dry in July sun

as the path ends in dark solitude
he glances back across a shoulder
shall he crouch
beneath those branches
to test his endurance

St. Petersburg
21. I. 2004

pokusa

bawełniane kulki śniegu tańczą lekko
na nagich kościstych gałęziach
co walczą z jęczącym wiatrem

pod ubraniem
nie ma zimna
jedynie pamięć dzieciństwa
o ziemi dalekiej i czarnej
spalonej lipcowym słońcem

gdy ścieżka się urywa w mroku samotności
on spogląda za siebie
czy ma się skulić
pod tym drzewem
by sprawdzić jak długo wytrwa

przeł. Agata Budzińska

Inny wiersz Kevina Hannana „America” w temacie Ameryka wczoraj i dziśKrzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 12.06.09 o godzinie 20:17

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Michael Ondaatje (ur. 1943) – poeta i prozaik kanadyjski, urodził się na Cejlonie (obecnie Sri Lanka) w rodzinie mającej dość złożony rodowód: portugalski, holenderski, tamilski i singaleski. W wieku 11 lat wyemigrował z rodziną do Anglii, osiem lat później do Kanady. Debiutował tomikiem poezji „The Dainty Monsters” (1967), potem opublikował następne: „The Man with Seven Toes” (1969),
„The collected works of Billy the Kid” (1970), “Rat Jellly” (1972), “There’s a Trick with
a Knife I’m Learning to Do. Poems 1963-1978” (1976), “The cinnamon peeler. Selected Poems (1982), “Secular Love” (1985), “The Cinnamon Peeler. Selected Poems” (1989), “Handwriting: Poems” (1998).
Jest też autorem głośnych powieści: “In the Skin of a Lion” (1987, wyd. polskie:
W lwiej skórze, 1998), „The English Patient” (1992, wyd. polskie: Angielski pacjent, 1994), „Anil's Ghost” (2000, wyd. polskie: Oczy Buddy, 2004). Za powieść „Angielski pacjent” Ondaatje otrzymał Nagrodę Bookera (The Man Booker Prize for Fiction) –
- najbardziej prestiżową nagrodę literacką w Wielkiej Brytanii. W 1996 roku powieść
ta posłużyła za kanwę scenariusza do filmu fabularnego o tym samym tytule (reż. Anthony Minqhella), który otrzymał 9 Oskarów, m. in. za najlepszy film roku.
Michael Ondaatje również wyreżyserował kilka filmów fabularnych, jest autorem monografii o Leonardzie Cohenie oraz redaktorem wielu antologii literackich.

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler's wife. Smell me.

Zbieracz cynamonu

Gdybym był zbieraczem cynamonu,
dosiadałbym twego łoża,
a na poduszce
zostawiał pył żółtej kory.

Cuchnęłyby piersi twoje i ramiona,
nie mogłabyś przejść przez rynek,
nie wzbudzając w ludziach myśli o profesji moich palców,
które zawisły nad tobą. Ślepcy

wiedzieliby, do kogo podchodzą,
choćbyś się kąpała
w rynienkach z deszczówką, w strumieniach monsunu.

Tutaj na wyższym udzie
na tym gładkim pastwisku
niedaleko twoich włosów
lub fałdki
która biegnie przez twoje plecy. Ta kostka.
Znana będziesz pośród obcych
Jako żona zbieracza cynamonu.

Nie mogłem spojrzeć na ciebie
przed ślubem,
nigdy cię nawet nie dotknąłem
- twoja gorliwa, wścibska matka, brutalni bracia.
Zagrzebałem dłonie
w szafranie, maskowałem je
nad dymem płonącej smoły,
pomagałem zbieraczom miodu...

*

Kiedy pewnego razu pływaliśmy razem,
dotknąłem cię w wodzie,
a nasze ciała cieszyły się wolnością,
przytuliłaś mnie, nie zważając na zapach.
Wdrapałaś się na brzeg i powiedziałaś:

Tak właśnie dotykasz inne kobiety
żonę kosiarza traw, córkę palacza wapna.
I szukałaś na swoich ramionach
śladów nieobecnych perfum
i wiedziałaś
co to za łaska
być córką palacza wapna
po którym nie zostaje nawet ślad,
jakby w akcie miłosnym nikt do ciebie nie wymówił słowa
jakby ktoś cię skaleczył, nie dając w zamian rozkoszy blizny.

Dotknęłaś
brzuchem moich dłoni
w suchym powietrzu i powiedziałaś:
To ja jestem cynamonem, żoną
zbieracza. Powąchaj mnie.

tłum. Jerzy Jarniewicz

Korowacz cynamonu

Gdybym był korowaczem cynamonu
dosiadłbym twego łoża
i zostawił żółty kurz kory
na twej poduszce.

Twe piersi i ramiona by cuchnęły
nie przeszłabyś przez targowiska
bez zapewnień moich palców
unoszących się nad tobą. Ślepcy

na pewno by się potykali o przechodniów
chociaż byś się kąpała
pod rynnami deszczu, monsunami.

Górna część twego uda
przy tej gładkiej polanie
w sąsiedztwie twych włosów
albo bruzda
co przecina twe plecy. Ta kostka.
Będziesz znana wśród obcych
jako żona korowacza cynamonu.

Prawie nie mogłem zerknąć na ciebie
przed ślubem
nie tknąłem cię
- twoja czujna matka, twoi grubiańscy bracia.
Posypałem me dłonie
szafranem, zamaskowałem je
nad dymiąca smołą,
pomogłem bartnikom...

Gdy raz pływaliśmy
dotknąłem cię w wodzie
a nasze ciała pozostawały wolne,
mogłaś tulić mnie i oślepnąć od zapachu.
Wspięłaś się na brzeg i powiedziałaś

to tak dotykasz inne kobiety
żonę kosiarza trawy, córkę wypalacza wapna.
I zajrzałaś w swe dłonie
szukając zgubionych perfum
i wiedziałaś
jak dobrze
być córką wypalacza wapna
pozostawioną bez więzi
jak gdyby nic nie powiedziano w akcie miłości
jak gdyby raniono bez przyjemności piętnowania.

Dotknęłaś
twoim brzuchem moich dłoni
w suchym powietrzu i powiedziałaś
jestem żoną korowacza
cynamonu. Powąchaj mnie.

tłum. Justyna Drobnik

Inne tłumaczenie Zofii Małkowiak pt.”Cynamonowy pan”
w temacie Zapach w poezji.

Elizabeth

Catch, my Uncle Jack said
and oh I caught this huge apple
red as Mrs Kelly's bum.

It's red as Mrs Kelly's bum, I said
and Daddy roared
and swung me on his stomach with a heave.
Then I hid the apple in my room
till it shrunk like a face
growing eyes and teeth ribs.

Then Daddy took me to the zoo
he knew the man there
they put a snake around my neck
and it crawled down the front of my dress
I felt its flicking tongue
dripping onto me like a shower.
Daddy laughed and said Smart Snake
and Mrs Kelly with us scowled.

In the pond where they kept the goldfish
Philip and I broke the ice with spades
and tried to spear the fishes;
we killed one and Philip ate it,
then he kissed me
with the raw saltless fish in his mouth.

My sister Mary's got bad teeth
and said I was lucky, hen she said
I had big teeth, but Philip said I was pretty.
He had big hands that smelled.

I would speak of Tom', soft laughing,
who danced in the mornings round the sundial
teaching me the steps of France, turning
with the rhythm of the sun on the warped branches,
who'd hold my breast and watch it move like a snail
leaving his quick urgent love in my palm.
And I kept his love in my palm till it blistered.

When they axed his shoulders and neck
the blood moved like a branch into the crowd.
And he staggered with his hanging shoulder
cursing their thrilled cry, wheeling,
waltzing in the French style to his knees
holding his head with the ground,
blood settling on his clothes like a blush;
this way
when they aimed the thud into his back.

And I find cool entertainment now
with white young Essex, and my nimble rhymes.

przekład Jerzego Jarniewicza pt. „Elżbieta”
w temacie Wspomnienia

Postcard from Piccadilly Street

Dogs are the unheralded voyeurs of this world.
When we make love
The spaniel shudders
Walks out of the room,
She's had her fill of children now

But the bassett - for whom
We've pretty soon got to find a love object
Apart from furniture or visitors' legs -
Jumps on the bed and watches.

It is a catching habit having a spectator
And appeals to the actor in both of us,
In spite of irate phone calls from the SPCA
Who claim we are corrupting minors
(the dog being one and a half).

We have moved to elaborate audiences now.
At midnight we open the curtains
Turn out the light
And imagine the tree outside
Full of sparrows
With infra red eyes.

przekład Jerzego Jarniewicza pt. „Pocztówka z Piccadilly Street”
w temacie Sierściuchy

Early Morning, Kingston to Gananoque

The twenty miles to Gananoque
with tangled dust blue grass
burned, and smelling burned
along the highway
is land too harsh for picnics.
Deep in the fields
behind stiff dirt fern
nature breeds the unnatural.

Escaping cows canter white
then black & white
along the median, forming out of mist.
Crows pick at animal accidents,
with swoops lift meals —
blistered groundhogs, stripped snakes
to arch behind a shield of sun.

Somewhere in those fields
they are shaping new kinds of women.

przekład Jerzego Jarniewicza pt. „Wczesnym rankiem,
z Kingston do Gananoque” w temacie Wiersze z podróży

King Kong meets Wallace Stevens

Take two photographs -
Wallace Stevens and King Kong
(Is it significant that I eat bananas as I write this?)

Stevens is portly, benign, a white brush cut
striped tie. Businessman but
for the dark thick hands, the naked brain
the thought in him.

Kong is staggering
lost in New York streets again
a spawn of annoyed cars at his toes.
The mind is nowhere.
Fingers are plastic, electric under the skin.
He's at the call of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Meanwhile W. S. in his suit
is thinking chaos is thinking fences.
In his head the seeds of fresh pain
his exorcising, the bellow of locked blood.

The hands drain from his jacket,
pose in the murderer's shadow

przekład Jerzego Jarniewicza pt. „King Kong spotyka Wallace’a Stevensa”
w temacie O smokach i innych potworach

Inne wiersze Michaela Ondaatje’go w tematach: Owady są wszędzie, Drzwi,
Motyw zwierciadła, lustra i odbicia, Motyw ojca, Pierzaści bracia mniejsiRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.05.11 o godzinie 13:42

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

August Kleinzahler (ur. 1949) – jeden z najwybitniejszych współczesnych poetów amerykańskich, studiował w Horace Mann School, na University of Winconsin oraz na University of Victoria (British Columbia), gdzie jednym z jego nauczycieli był Basil Bunting.
W latach 1971-1979 mieszkał w Victotii i Montrealu. Początkowo publikował swoje wiersze
w małych, niskonakładowych wydawnictwach angielskich, kanadyjskich i amerykańskich. Obecnie mieszka w San Francisco. Jest autorem 10 książek - 9 tomów poezji: “A Calendar of Airs” (1978), “Storm over Hackensack” (1985), “Earthquake Weather” (1989), “Like cities, like storms” (1992), “Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow” (1995), “Green Sees Things in Waves” (1999), “Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club” (2000), “The Strange Hours Travelers Keep” (2004 - nagrodzony International Griffin Poetry Prize), “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City” (2008) oraz tomu prozy “Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained” (2004). Regularnie pisze felietony i recenzje muzyczne w „San Diego Weekly Reader”, wykłada też gościnnie literaturę na amerykańskich uniwersytetach. W 2007 roku był gościem na XII Festiwalu Literackim Port Wrocław, który był poświęcony współczesnej poezji amerykańskiej.
Po polsku jego wiersze ukazały się w „Literaturze na Świecie” nr 1-2/2006 oraz w antologii autorskiej Piotra Sommera: O krok od nich. Przekłady z poetów amerykańskich. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2006.

Z tomu “Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club:
Poems 1975-1990”, 2000



Where Souls Go

No telling where: down the hill
and out of sight—
soapbox derby heroes in a new dimension.
Don't bother to resurrect them
unless some old newsreel clip
catches them shocked
with a butter knife in the toaster.
Countless snaps and episodes in space
once you hit the viewfinder that fits.
It's a lie anyway, all Hollywood—
the Mind is a too much thing
cleansing itself like a great salt sea.
Rather, imagine them in the eaves

among pigeons
or clustered round the D train's fan
as we cross the bridge to Brooklyn.
And make that a Friday night
July say. We are walking past
the liquor store to visit our love.
Two black boys are eating Corn Doodles
in the most flamboyant manner possible.
She waits, trying
to have the best song on as we arrive.
The moon is blurred.
Our helicopters are shooting at fieldworkers.
The Mets are down 3-1 in the 6th.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Dokąd idą dusze”
w temacie Trochę o duszy

Meat

How much meat moves
Into the city each night
The decks of its bridges tremble
In the liquefaction of sodium light
And the moon a chemical orange

Semitrailers strain their axles
Shivering as they take the long curve
Over warehouses and lofts
The wilderness of streets below
The mesh of it
With Joe on the front stoop smoking
And Louise on the phone with her mother

Out of the haze of industrial meadows
They arrive, numberless
Hauling tons of dead lamb
Bone and flesh and offal
Miles to the ports and channels
Of the city's shimmering membrane
A giant breathing cell
Exhaling its waste
From the stacks by the river
And feeding through the night

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Mięso”
w temacie Potrawy i napoje...

Z tomu “Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow”, 1995



East of the Library,
Across from the Old Fellows Building

That bummy smell you meet
off the escalator at Civic Center, right before
you turn onto McAllister,
seems to dwell there, disembodied,
on a shelf above the sidewalk.

The mad old lady with lizard skin
bent double
over her shopping cart
and trailing a cloud of pigeons
is nowhere in sight.

A pile of rags here and there
but no one underneath.
An invisible shrine
commemorating what?
Old mattresses and dusty flesh,

piss and puked-on overcoats, what?
Maybe death,
now there’s a smell that likes to stick around.
You used to find it in downtown Sally Anns
and once

in a hospital cafeteria, only faintly,
after a bite of poundcake.
But here it lives,
cheek by jowl with McDonald’s,
still robust after a night of wind

with its own dark little howdy-do
for the drunks and cops,
social workers and whores,
or the elderly couple from Zurich
leafing cooly through their guidebook.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Na wschód od biblioteki,
naprzeciwko Odd Fellows Building” w temacie Zapach w poezji

Z tomu “Green Sees Things in Waves”, 1998



Before Dawn on Bluff Road

The crow’s raw hectoring cry
scoops clean an oval divot
of sky, its fading echo
among the oaks and poplars swallowed
first by a jet banking west
then the Erie-Lackawanna
sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel
through the cliffs to the river
and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff,
full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt.

You can hear it in the dark
from beyond what was once the amusement park.
And the wind carries along as well,
from down by the river,
when the tide’s just so,
the drainage just so,
the chemical ghost of old factories,
the rotted piers and warehouses:
lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros.,
formaldehyde from the coffee plant,
dyes, unimaginable solvents—
a soup of polymers, oxides,
tailings fifty years old
seeping through the mud, the aroma
almost comforting by now, like food,
wafting into my childhood room
with its fevers and dreams.
My old parents asleep,
only a few yards across the hall,
door open—lest I cry?

I remember
almost nothing of my life.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Przed świtem na Bluff Road”
w temacie Wspomnienia

Someone Named Gutierrez: A Dream, A Western

Outside the cantina
with you in the backseat of a ruined DeSoto,
torn upholstery, vinyl mange
and the big old radio's static frying
what could only be a Dixie Cups tune.
Things had gone terribly bad,
and Slim, who drove us the whole long way
through chaparral and dust,
was in there now, with them,
asking for the money he had no right to,
had no right to even ten years back
when the fire was, or so he says.
They nearly killed him then,
the fool, the braggart, the Suicide Kid,
just itching after a good old-timey
late afternoon cowboy send-off,
blood and gold and glinting side arms,
with us stuck back there yet, hove-to
in the backseat like two kids
waiting for Dad.
When you touched me,
the lightest of touches, the most unforeseen,
carelessly along the wrist.
I nearly came unglued.
I mean, I knew about Ramone,
that lovely boy - and for so long,
the two of you. I cherish that photo still,
your white tam-o'-shanter, his red TransAm.
Then I became water.
Then, from what had once been my chest,
a plant made of light effloresced.
Thus, our adventure began, our slow-motion
free-fall through the vapors and oils.
I stammered at your white flesh.
And that,
that's when the shooting began.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Człowiek nazwiskiem Gutierrez: sen, western”
w tematach: Co się poetom śni...? i Homo automobilus...

Z tomu “The Strange Hours Travelers Keep”, 2004



The Tartar Swept

The Tartar swept across the plain
In their furs and silk panties
Snub-nose monkey men with cinders for eyes
Attached to their ponies like centaurs
Forcing the snowy passes of the Carpathians
Streaming from defiles like columns of ants
Arraying their host in a vasty wheel
White, gray, black and chestnut steeds
10,000 each to a quadrant
Turning, turning at the Jenuye’s command
This terrible pinwheel
Gathering speed like a Bulgar dance
Faster and faster

Until it explodes, columns of horsemen
Peeling away in all the four directions
Hard across the puszta
Dust from their hooves darkening the sky
They fall upon village and town
Like raptors, like tigers, like wolves on the fold
Mauling the zsa-zsas
And leaving them senseless in puddles of goaty drool
Smashing balalaikas
Ripping the ears off hussars and pissing in the wounds
They for whom the back of a horse
Is their only country
For whom a roof and four walls is like unto a grave
And a city, ptuh, a city
A pullulating sore that exists to be scourged
Stinky dumb nomads with blood still caked
On shield and cuirass
And the yellow loess from the dunes of the Takla Makan
And the Corridor of Kansu
Between their toes and caught in their scalps
Like storm clouds in the distance
Fast approaching
With news of the steppes, the lagoons and Bitter Lakes

Edicts, torchings, infestation
The smoke of chronicles
Finding their way by the upper reaches
Of the Selinga and the Irtysh
To Issyk-Kul, the Aral, and then the Caspian
Vanquishing the Bashkirs and Alans
By their speed outstripping rumor
Tireless mounts, short-legged and strong
From whose backs arrows are expertly dispatched
As fast as they can be pulled from the quiver
Samarkand, Bukhara, Harat, Nishapur
More violent in every destruction
This race of men which had never before been seen
With their roving fierceness
Scarcely known to ancient documents
From beyond the edge of Scythia
From beyond the frozen ocean
Pouring out of the Caucasus
Surpassing every extreme of ferocity
From the Don to the Dniester
The Black Sea to the Pripet Marshes
Laying waste the Ostrogoth villages
Taking with them every last cookie
Then dicking the help
These wanton boys of nature
Who shot forward like a bolt from on high
Routing with great slaughter
All they could come to grips with
In their wild career
Their beautiful shifting formations
Thousands advancing at the wave of a scarf
Then doubling back or making a turn
With their diabolical sallies and feints
Remorseless and in poor humor
So they arrived at the gates of Christendom

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coSZg9HgQ5M
August Kleinzahler, m. in. czyta swój wiersz „The Tartar Swept“

Inne wiersze Augusta Kleinzahlera w tematach: Autoportret w lustrze wiersza, Nihilizm..., Wiersze z podróży, Poezja codzienności, Urodziny, imieniny i inne ważne dni..., Turpizm, Poetyckie studium przedmiotu, Sierściuchy, Motyw wiatru w poezji/ Kalendarz poetycki na cały rokRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 01.03.11 o godzinie 02:48

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Yusef Komunyakaa (ur. 1947) – jeden z najbardziej znanych i cenionych współczesnych poetów amerykańskich, weteran wojny w Wietnamie, czego reminiscencje zawarł w głośnych tomach wierszy: „Toys in a Field" (1986) i „Dien Cai Dau” (1988), za tę drugą otrzymał Dark Room Poetry Prize. Znane są jego fascynacje jazzem, uprawia publicystykę muzyczną, ale też o jezzie napisał tom wierszy „Copacetic” (1984). Tytuł w slangu jazzowym oznacza stan wewnętrznego wyciszenia i zadowolenia. Zredagował dwie antologie poezji o jazzie: „The Jazz Poetry Anthology” (1991) i „Second Set” (1998). Innym polem jego poetyckich penetracji – po małżeństwie z australijską pisarką – jest kultura aborygenów. Za jeden z tomów wierszy, poświęcony tej problematyce, „Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems” (1994) otrzymał Nagrodę Puliztera. W sumie wydał 14 książek poetyckich, wykłada creative writing na Uniwersytecie Princeton.
Po polsku ukazał się tom wierszy: Yusef Kamunyakaa: Pochwała miejsc ciemnych.
Wybór, przekład i wstęp Katarzyna Jakubiak. Wyd. Znak. Kraków 2005.
Poeta gościł w Polsce dwukrotnie: we wrześniu 2005 roku na festiwalu „Zawsze poezja” w Krakowie oraz na promocji polskiego wydania swoich wierszy w „Traffic Club” w Warszawie, a także w czerwcu 2009 roku, kiedy uczestniczył w wieczorach autorskich w Częstochowie, Wrocławiu i Krakowie.


Yusef Komunyakaa i Katarzyna Jakubiak – autorka wyboru i tłumaczka wierszy
z tomu „Pochwała miejsc ciemnych”, Warszawa „Traffic Club”, 12 września 2005 r.

Z tomu „Dien Cai Dau”, 1988




Camouflaging the Chimera

We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird’s target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts

from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.

In our way station of shadows
rock apes tried to blow our cover,
throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons

crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,

till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk

wrestling iron through grass.
We weren’t there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,

ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man’s eyelid.

przekład Katarzyny Jakubiak pt. „Kamuflaż Chimery”
w temacie Wojna

Z tomu „Magic City”, 1992




The Smoke House

In the hickory scent
Among slabs of pork
Glistening with salt,
I played Indian
In a headdress of redbird feathers
& brass buttons
Off my mother's winter coat.
Smoke wove
A thread of fire through meat, into December
& January. The dead weight
Of the place hung around me,
Strung up with sweetgrass.
The hog had been sectioned,
A map scored into skin;
Opened like love,
From snout to tail,
The goodness
No longer true to each bone.
I was a wizard
In that hazy world,
& knew I could cut
Slivers of meat till my heart
Grew more human & flawed.

przekład Katarzyny Jakubiak pt. „Wędzarnia”
w temacie Potrawy i napoje...

My Father's Love Letters

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams"
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Listy miłosne mojego ojca”
w temacie Motyw ojca

Slam, Dunk, & Hook

Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury's
Insignia on our sneakers,
We outmaneuvered to footwork
Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot
Swish of strings like silk
Ten feet out. In the roundhouse
Labyrinth our bodies
Created, we could almost
Last forever, poised in midair
Like storybook sea monsters.
A high note hung there
A long second. Off
The rim. We'd corkscrew
Up & dunk balls that exploded
The skullcap of hope & good
Intention. Lanky, all hands
& feet...sprung rhythm.
We were metaphysical when girls
Cheered on the sidelines.
Tangled up in a falling,
Muscles were a bright motor
Double-flashing to the metal hoop
Nailed to our oak.
When Sonny Boy's mama died
He played nonstop all day, so hard
Our backboard splintered.
Glistening with sweat,
We rolled the ball off
Our fingertips. Trouble
Was there slapping a blackjack
Against an open palm.
Dribble, drive to the inside,
& glide like a sparrow hawk.
Lay ups. Fast breaks.
we had moves we didn't know
We had. Our bodies spun
On swivels of bone & faith,
Through a lyric slipknot
Of joy, & we knew we were
Beautiful & dangerous.

przekład Katarzyny Jakubiak pt. „Slam, Dunk, & Hook”
w temacie Sport w poezji – poezja w sporcie

Z tomu “Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems”, 1994




Unnatural State of the Unicorn

Introduce me first as a man.
Don’t mention superficial laurels
the dead heap up on the living.
I am a man. Cut me & I bleed.
Before embossed limited editions,
before fat artichoke hearts marinated
in rich sauce & served with imported wines,
before antics & Agnus Dei,
before the stars in your eyes
mean birth sign or Impression,
I am a man. I’ve scuffled
in mudholes, broken teeth in grinning skull
like the moon behind bars. I’ve done it all
to be known as myself. No titles.
I have principals. I won’t speak
on the natural state of the unicorn
in literature or self-analysis.
I have no birthright to prove,
no insignia, no secret
password, no fleur-de-lis.
My initials aren’t on a branding iron.
I’m standing here in unpolished
shoes & faded jeans, sweating
my manly sweat. Inside my skin,
loving you, I am this space
my body believes in.

przekład Katarzyny Jakubiak pt. „Naturalny staż jednorożca”
w temacie Autoportret w lustrze wiersza

Praising Dark Places

If an old board laid out in a field
Or backyard for a week,
I’d lift it up with a finger,
A tip of a stick.
Once I found a scorpion
Crimson as a hibernating starfish
As if a rainbow edged underneath;
Centipedes and unnameable
Insects sank into loam
With a flutter. My first lesson:
Beauty can bite. I wanted
To touch scarlet pincers—
Warriors that never zapped
Their own kind, crowded into
A city cut off from the penalty
Of sunlight. The whole rotting
Determinism just and inch beneath
The soil. Into the darkness
Of opposites, like those racial
Fears of the night, I am drawn again,
To conception & birth. Roots of ivy
& farkleberry can hold a board down
To the ground. In this cellular dirt
& calligraphy of excrement,
Light is a god-headed
Law & weapon.

przekład Katarzyny Jakubiak pt. „Pochwała miejsc ciemnych”
w temacie Ciemność


Z tomu “The Vintage Book of African American Poetry”,
ed. by Michael S. Harper & Anthony Walton, 2000



Untited Blues
(after a photograph by Yevgeni Yevtushenko)

I catch myself trying
to look into the eyes
of the photo, at a black boy
behind a laughing white mask
he’s painted on. I
could’ve been that boy
years ago.
Sure, I could say
everything’s copacetic,
listen to a Buddy Bolden cornet
cry from one of those coffin-
shaped houses called
shotgun. We could
meet in Storyville,
famous for quadroons,
with drunks discussing God
around a honky-tonk piano.
We could pretend we can’t
see the kitchen help
under a cloud of steam.
Other lurid snow jobs:
night & day, the city
clothed in her see-through
French lace, as pigeons
coo like a beggar chorus
among makeshift studios
on wheels—Vieux Carré
belles having portraits painted
twenty years younger.
We could hand jive
down on Bourbon & Conti
where tap dancers hold
to their last steps,
mammy dolls frozen
in glass cages. The boy
locked inside your camera,
perhaps he’s lucky—
he knows how to steal
laughs in a place
where your skin
is your passport.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Blues bez tytułu”
w temacie Człowiek czarnoskóry w poezji

Z tomu „Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems”, 2001




Facing It

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

przekład Julii Fiedorczuk pt. „Twarzą w twarz”
w temacie Motyw twarzy

Facing It – czyta Yusef Komunyakaa

Inne wiersze Yusefa Komunyakaa'i w tematach: Motyw wiatru w poezji, Chodzę lasem..., Powroty, Erotyka, Przemoc w majestacie prawa, W harmonii z przyrodą – R. M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IGCZghv-PQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoeklklM85s
Yusef Komunyakaa we Wrocławiu, wieczór autorski
w Księgarni Naukowej „Kapitałka”, 4 czerwca 2009 r.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 28.09.09 o godzinie 13:23

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961) – amerykański poeta, powieściopisarz, założyciel
i redaktor naczelny pisma ”Partisan Review”. Po studiach na Uniwersytecie Wisconsin, zamieszkał w Noym Jorku, gdzie obok aktywności literackiej, prowadził działalność polityczną, sympatyzując z ruchami lewicowymi. Opublikował tomy poezji: “Angel Arm”(1929), “Poems” (1935), “Dead Reckoning: A Book of Poetry” (1938), “Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearin” (1940), “Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems” (1943), “Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems”(1948) “New and Selected Poem”(1956). W Polsce wydano jego głośną powieść kryminalną “ The Big Clock” (1946; „Wielki zegar. Przeł. Iwona Chamska i Violetta Dobosz. Wyd. C&T, Toruń 2005), która była dwukrotnie ekranizowana.

Aphrodite Metropolis

Harry loves Myrtle--He has strong arms, from the warehouse,
And on Sunday when they take the bus to emerald meadows he doesn't say:
"What will your chastity amount to when your flesh withers in a little while?"
No,
On Sunday, when they picnic in emerald meadows they look at the Sunday paper:
GIRL SLAYS BANKER-BETRAYER
They spread it around on the grass
BATH-TUB STIRS JERSEY ROW
And then they sit down on it, nice.
Harry doesn't say "Ziggin's Ointment for withered flesh,
Cures thousands of men and women of motes, warts, red veins,
flabby throat, scalp and hair diseases,
Not expensive, and fully guaranteed."
No,
Harry says nothing at all,
He smiles,
And they kiss in the emerald meadows on the Sunday paper.

Evening Song

Sleep, McKade.
Fold up the day. It was a bright scarf.
Put it away.
Take yourself to pieces like a house of cards.

It is time to be a grey mouse under a tall building.
Go there. Go there now.
Look at the huge nails. Run behind the pipes.
Scamper in the walls.
Crawl towards the beckoning girl, her breasts are warm.
But here is a dead man. A murderer?
Kill him with your pistol. Creep past him to the girl.

Sleep, McKade.
Throw one arm across the bed. Wind your watch.
You are a gentleman, and important.
Yawn. Go to sleep.

The continent turning from the sun is quiet.
Your ticker waits for tomorrow morning
And you are alive now.
It will be a long time before they put McKade under the sod.
Sometime, but not now.
Sometime, though. Sometime, for certain.

Take apart your brain,
Close the mouths in it that have been hungry,
They are fed for a while.
Go to sleep, you are a gentleman. McKade, alive and sane.
A gentleman of position.

Tip your hat to the lady.
Speak to the mayor.
You are a personal friend of the mayor's, are you not?
True. A friend of the mayor's.
And you met the Queen of Roumania. True.

Then go to sleep.
Be a dog sleeping in the old sun.
Be a poodle drowsing in the old sun, by the Appian Way.
Be a dog lying the meadow watching soldiers pass on the road.
Chase after the woman who beckons.
Run from the policeman with the dagger. It will split your bones.
Be terrified.
Curl up and drowse on the pavement of Fifth Avenue in the old sun.
Sleep, McKade.
Yawn.
Go to sleep.

Love 20¢ The First Quarter Mile

All right. I may have lied to you and about you, and made a few
pronouncements a bit too sweeping, perhaps, and possibly forgotten
to tag the bases here or there,
And damned your extravagence, and maligned your tastes, and libeled
your relatives, and slandered a few of your friends
O.K.,
Nevertheless, come back.

Come home. I will agree to forget the statements that you issued so
copiously to the neighbors and the press,
And you will forget that figment of your imagination, the blonde from Detroit;
I will agree that your lady friend who lives above us is not crazy, bats,
nutty as they come, but on the contrary rather bright,
And you will concede that poor old Steinberg is neither a drunk, nor
a swindler, but simply a guy, on the eccentric side, trying to get along.
(Are you listening, you bitch, and have you got this straight?)

Because I forgive you, yes, for everything.
I forgive you for being beautiful and generous and wise,
I forgive you, to put it simply, for being alive, and pardon you, in short, for being you.

Because tonight you are in my hair and eyes,
And every street light that our taxi passes shows me you again, still you,
And because tonight all other nights are black, all other hours are cold
and far away, and now, this minute, the stars are very near and bright

Come back. We will have a celebration to end all celebrations.
We will invite the undertaker who lives beneath us, and a couple of
boys from the office, and some other friends.
And Steinberg, who is off the wagon, and that insane woman who lives
upstairs, and a few reporters, if anything should break.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Miłość,
20 centów za pierwsze ćwierć mili” w temacie Miłość

End of the Seer’s Convention

We were walking and talking on the roof of the world,
In an age that seemed, at that time, an extremely modern age,
Considering a merger, last on the agenda, of the Seven Great
Leagues that held the Seven True Keys to the Seven
Ultimate Spheres of all moral, financial, and occult life.

“I foresee a day” said one of the delegates, an astro-analyst
from Idaho, "when men will fly through the air, and talk across space;
They will sail in ships that float beneath the water;
They will emanate shadows of themselves upon a screen, and
the shadows will move, and talk, and seem as though real."

"Very interesting, indeed” declared a Gypsy delegate.
"But I should like to ask, as a simple reader of tea-leaves and palms:
How does this combat the widespread and growing evil of the police?"

The astrologer shrugged, and an accidental meteor fell from
his robes and smoldered on the floor.
"In addition” he said, "I foresee a war,
And a victory after that one, and after the victory, a war Again”

"Trite” was the comment of a crystal-gazer from Miami Beach.
"Any damn fool, at any damn time, can visualize wars, and
more wars, and famines and plagues.
The real question is: How to seize power from entrenched
and organized men of Common Sense?"

"I foresee a day” said the Idaho astrologer, "when human
beings will live on top of flag-poles,
And dance, at some profit, for weeks and months without
any rest,
And some will die very happily of eating watermelons, and
nails, and cherry pies."

"Why," said a bored numerologist, reaching for his hat,
"can't these star-gazers keep their feet on the ground?"
"Even if it's true," said a Bombay illusionist, "it is not, like
the rope-trick, altogether practical."

"And furthermore, and finally," shouted the astrologer, with
comets and halfmoons dropping from his pockets,
and his agitated sleeves,
"I prophesy an age of triumph for laziness and sleep, and
dreams and utter peace.
I can see couples walking through the public parks in love,
and those who do not are wanted by the sheriff.
I see men fishing beside quiet streams, and those who do not
are pursued by collectors, and plastered with liens."
“This does not tell us how to fight against skepticism” muttered a puzzled mesmerist, groping for the door.
"I think” agreed a lady who interpreted the cards, "we are
all inclined to accept too much on faith”.
A sprinkling of rain, or dragon's blood,
Or a handful of cinders fell on the small, black umbrellas they
raised against the sky.

przekład Juliusza Żuławskiego pt. „Ostatnia narada jasnowidzów”
w temacie W świecie wróżb, zaklęć i sił tajemnychRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 23.01.10 o godzinie 10:36

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

(John) Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) – jeden z najwybitniejszych poetów amerykańskich XX wieku. Urodził się w Pittsburgu, jego ojciec był profesorem teologii i filologii klasycznej, Robinson odebrał gruntowne wykształcenie, uczył się w szkołach średnich w Niemczech
i Szwajcarii, dużo podróżował, nauczył się biegle kilku języków obcych, w tym hebrajskiego, greki i łaciny, studiował w Stanach Zjednoczonych na kilku uczelniach, m. in. medycynę.
W 1906 roku poznał Unę Call Kuster, którą poślubił w 1913 roku i żył z nią do jej śmierci
w 1950 roku w słynnym kamiennym domu Tor House w miejscowości Carmel nad Pacyfikiem.
Czytaj też w tematach: Dom i Kobiety ich życia i twórczości.
Opublikował następujące tomy poezji: “Flagons and Apples” (1912), „Californians” (1916), “Tamar and Other Poems” (1924), “The Women at Point Sur” (1927), “Cawdor and Other Poems” (1928.), “Dear Judas and Other Poem” (1929), “Thurso's Landing and Other Poems” (1932), “Give Your Heart to the Hawks and other Poems” (1933), “ Solstice and Other Poems” (1935), “Such Counsels You Gave To me and Other Poems” (1937), “The Double Axe and Other Poems” (1948). “Hungerfield and Other Poems” (1954). Po śmierci poety ukazały się jeszcze: “The Beginning and the End and Other Poems” (1963) i “Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems” (1965).
Poezja Jeffersa, którą z uwagi na liczne wątki naturalistyczne porównuje się często
do wierszy Walta Whitmana, w istocie kreuje zgoła odmienną wizję świata: pesymistyczną
i katastroficzną, obraz świata, zagrożonego przez rozwój cywilizacji, ale też i samą ewolucję przyrody. W utworach pisanych długą frazą można odnaleźć sporo odniesień do literatury antycznej: greckiej i rzymskiej, a także do Biblii.
W Polsce najpełniejszy jak dotąd wybór poezji Jeffersa ukazał się z górą 40 lat temu
w przekładzie i pod redakcją Zygmunta Ławrynowicza – przedwcześnie zmarłego poety
i tłumacza, przebywającego na emigracji w Londynie: John Robinson Jeffers: Wiersze. Wybór, przekład i słowo wstępne Zygmunt Ławrynowicz. PIW, Warszawa 1968. Wiersze Jeffersa tłumaczyli też Stanisław Barańczak (Od Walta Whitmana do Boba Dylana. Antologia poezji amerykańskiej. Przełożył i opracował Stanisław Barańczak. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1998) i Czesław Miłosz, który odwiedził nawet poetę w jego sławnym kamiennym domu nad Pacyfikiem (Czesław Miłosz: Przekłady poetyckie. Wyd. Znak, Kraków 2005; Wiersze i ćwiczenia. Świat Książki, Warszawa 2008), pojedyncze przekłady (są na naszym forum): Adama Szostkiewicza i Leszka Elektorowicza.

Boats in a Fog

Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but luck nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.

A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
A throbbing of engines moved in it,
At length , a stone’s throw out, between the rocks and the vapor,
One by one moved shadows
Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing each other
Following the cliff for guidance,
Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-fog
And the foam on the shore granite.
One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me,
Out of the vapor and into it,
The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient and cautious,
Coasting all round the peninsula
Back to the buoys in Monterey harbor. A flight of pelicas
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets in nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the equally
Earnest elements of nature.

dwa przekłady tego wiersza: Zygmunta Ławrynowicza pt. „Kutry we mgle” w temacie
Marynistyka i Czesława Miłosza pt. „Statki we mgle” w temacie Popatrz na mgłę,
ileż cudów ukrywa...

Fire on the Hills

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.

dwa przekłady tego wiersza: Zygmunta Ławrynowicza pt. „Pożar w górach” w temacie
Cztery żywioły i Czesława Miłosza pod tym samym tytułem w temacie Piękno

The Continent’s End

At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.

I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral sowings that flower the south,
Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours that has followed the evening star.

The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline.

It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone.

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin vapor and watched you change them,
That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock, shift places with the continents.

Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

dwa przekłady tego wiersza: Zygmunta Ławrynowicza pt. „Kres kontynentu”
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą i Czesława Miłosza pod tym samym tytułem
w temacie Zaśpiewam ci pieśń

Vulture

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling
high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit
narrowing,
I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-
feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, 'My dear bird, we are wasting time
here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you.' But how
beautiful
he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the
sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak
and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life
after death.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Sęp” w temacie
Pierzaści bracia mniejsi

Hurt Hawks

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.
I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. „Zranione jastrzębie” w temacie
Pierzaści bracia mniejsi

The Eye

The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific-
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of
faiths -
Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea-look west at the hill of water: it is half the
planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never
close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.

przekład Zygmunta Ławrynowicza pt. „Oko” w temacie Lekcja geografii...

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-
dence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Siej blask, ginąca republiko”
w temacie Ameryka wczoraj i dziś

Love the Wild Swan

"I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings."
- This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

przekład Czesława Miłosza pt. „Kochaj dzikiego łabędzia”
w temacie Być poetą...

Tor House

If you should look for this place after a handful
of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast
cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers
had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten
thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth
of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild
sea-fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun
and our moon were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like
a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in
the world.
My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not
dancing on wind
With the mad wings and the day moon.

przekład Czesława Miłosza pt. „Tor House” w temacie Dom

Inne wiersze Robinsona Jeffersa w tematach:
Wiersze „zaangażowane”, Ameryka wczoraj i dziś, Szukanie lata, Pierzaści bracia mniejsi, O przemijaniu, W świecie wróżb, zaklęć i sił tajemnych, W czasie deszczu nudzą się dzieci..., W głąb siebie.../ Prawda i kłamstwo, Śmierć, Smutek czy radość..., Przemoc w majestacie prawa, Kobiety ich życia i twórczościRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 13.06.11 o godzinie 14:31

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) – poetka amerykańska, pierwsza kobieta uhonorowana Nagrodą Pulitzera w dziedzinie poezji, posługiwała się pseudonimem Nancy Boyd, znana była ze swobody obyczajów i niekonwencjonalnego stylu życia, wielu bulwersujących opinię publiczną romansów, również z kobietami, jej partnerami życiowymi byli m. in.: holenderski przemysłowiec Eugene Jan Boissevain oraz angielska aktorka Wynne Matthison. Jest autorką wierszy pisanych zarówno w klasycznej konwencji modernistycznej (np. sonetów), jak i śmiałych, pełnych zmysłowości, erotyków, również o miłości homoseksualnej.
Szerzej o życiu i twórczości Edny St. Vincent Millay w artykule Dariusz Pawlickiego „Poetka z Nowej Anglii” w temacie Zbliżenia – eseje o poezji i poetach.

Love is not All

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nXua0iaD2I

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Nie, miłość nie jest wszystkim”
w temacie Miłość

Alms

My heart is what it was before,
A house where people come and go;
But it is winter with your love,
The sashes are beset with snow.

I light the lamp and lay the cloth,
I blow the coals to blaze again;
But it is winter with your love,
The frost is thick upon the pane..

I know a winter when it comes:
The leaves are listless on the boughs;
I watched your love a little while,
And brought my plants into the house.

I water them and turn them south,
I snap the dead brown from the stem;
But it is winter with your love,
I only tend and water them.

There was a time I stood and watched
The small, ill-natured sparrows' fray;
I loved the beggar that I fed,
I cared for what he had to say,

I stood and watched him out of sight:
Today I reach around the door
And set a bowl upon the step;
My heart is what it was before,

But it is winter with your love;
I scatter crumbs upon the sill,
And close the window, —and the birds
May take or leave them, as they will.

przekład Macieja Woźniaka pt. „Jałmużna” w temacie Schyłek miłości...

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry --
We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable --
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry --
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Recuerdo” w temacie Wspomnienia

What lips my lips have kissed…

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Czyje ja usta całowałam

Czyje ja usta całowałam, po co.
W czyich ramionach budziłam się rano
Już nie pamiętam; jednak deszcz za ścianą
Pełen jest duchów, które teraz nocą
O szyby dzwonią słuchając, czy wspomnę;
I niepokoi serce jakiś obcy
Żal, że ci moi zapomniani chłopcy
W nocy nie przyjdą już ze łzami do mnie.

Podobnie drzewo, zimą tak samotne,
Nie zna tych ptaków, co już poznikały,
Lecz wie, że całe jest objęte ciszą -
Nie znam ja żadnej z miłości ulotnych,
Lecz wiem, że lato raz we mnie śpiewało
I że tych pieśni więcej nie usłyszę.

przełożył Juliusz Żuławski

dwa inne przekłady tego wiersza: Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Ust całowanych - czyje były, gdzie i po co” w temacie Z wyspy Lesbos i nie tylko... i Macieja Woźniaka pt. „Czyje usta na mych ustach, kto całował...” w temacie Erotyka.

Inny wiersz Edny St. Vincent Millay w temacie ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”.Krzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 26.11.09 o godzinie 10:03

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) – poeta i pisarz amerykański, trapista, autor przeszło 70 książek, poświęconych problemom ekumenizmu, zbliżenia najważniejszych wyznań na świecie i odnowy duchowej człowieka. Jego twórczość literacka i społeczne zaangażowanie w dużym stopniu przyczyniły się do umocnienia wpływów religii chrześcijańskiej na świecie. Poezja Thomasa Mertona znana jest w Polsce głównie z tomu: Wybór wierszy. Tłum. Joanna Gromek, Krystyna Horodyska-Poborska, Jerzy Illg,Tadeusz Kęsik, Jan Leszcza, Czesław Miłosz, Jerzy S. Sito, Tadeusz Sławek, Teresa Truszkowska. Wyd. Znak, Kraków 1986.

Landscape

A Personage is seen
Leaning upon a cushion
Printed with cornflowers.

A Child appears
Holding up a pencil.

“This is a picture

Says the Child to the Personage)
Of the vortex.”

“Draw it your own way,”
Says the Personage.

(Music is heard
Pure in the island windows,
Sea-music on the Child’s
Interminable shore, his coral home.)

Behind a blue mountain
Covered with chickenfoot trees,
The molten sun appears,
A heavy, painted flower.

A Personage is seen
Leaning upon the mountain
With the sun in one hand
And a pencil in the other.

“This is a picture
(Says the Personage to the Child)
Of the beginning of the world.”

“Or of its end!” cries the Child
Hiding himself in the cushions.

2

A Woman appears
Leaning upon the Child’s shoulder.
He looks up again.

“This is my Mother
(Says the Child to the Personage)
Older than the moon.”

(Grecian horses are heard
Returning from the foam
Of the pure island’s windows,
And the Child’s horizons.)

“My Mother is a world
(Says the Child to the Personage)
Printed with gillyflowers.”

“Paint her your own way”
(Says the Personage to the Child).
And, lifting up his pencil,
He crosses out the sun.

Stranger

When no one listens
To the quiet trees
When no one notices
The sun in the pool.

Where no one feels
The first drop of rain
Or sees the last star

Or hails the first morning
Of a giant world
Where peace begins
And rages end:

One bird sits still
Watching the work of God:
One turning leaf,
Two falling blossoms,
Ten circles upon the pond.

One cloud upon the hillside,
Two shadows in the valley
And the light strikes home.
Now dawn commands the capture
Of the tallest fortune,
The surrender
Of no less marvelous prize!

Closer and clearer
Than any wordy master,
Thou inward Stranger
Whom I have never seen,

Deeper and cleaner
Than the clamorous ocean,
Seize up my silence
Hold me in Thy Hand!

Now act is waste
And suffering undone
Laws become prodigals
Limits are torn down
For envy has no property
And passion is none.

Look, the vast Light stands still
Our cleanest Light is One.

In Silence

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

przekład Tadeusza Sławka pt. “W ciszy”
w temacie Cisza w poezji

An Elegy for Ernest Hemingway

Now for the first time on the night of your death
your name is mentioned in convents, ne cadas in
obscurum.

Now with a true bell your story becomes final. Now
men in monasteries, men of requiems, familiar with
the dead, include you in their offices.

You stand anonymous among thousands, waiting in
the dark at great stations on the edge of countries
known to prayer alone, where fires are not merciless,
we hope, and not without end.

You pass briefly through our midst. Your books and
writing have not been consulted. Our prayers are
pro defuncto N.

Yet some look up, as though among a crowd of prisoners
or displaced persons, they recognized a friend
once known in a far country. For these the sun also
rose after a forgotten war upon an idiom you made
great. They have not forgotten you. In their silence
you are still famous, no ritual shade.

How slowly this bell tolls in a monastery tower for a
whole age, and for the quick death of an unready
dynasty, and for that brave illusion: the adventurous
self!

For with one shot the whole hunt is ended!

przekład Artura Międzyrzeckiego pt. "Elegia dla Ernesta Hemingwaya"
w tematach: Elegia i Treny, epitafia i inne wiersze o tematyce żałobnej

Inne wiersze Thomasa Merona w tematach: Poezja religijna, Zaśpiewam ci pieśń, Człowiek i jego charakter, Powroty, Przypowieść, Motyw dłoni i rąk, Poeci poetomMarta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 29.04.11 o godzinie 06:01

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

John Montague (ur. 1929) – poeta amerykański, od czwartego roku życia mieszkał
w Irlandii, potem w Paryżu, gdzie pracował jako korespondent pisma „Irish Times”
i poznał swoją pierwszą żonę, Madeleine, francuską arystokratkę. Swój pierwszy tom wierszy „Forms of Exile” (Postacie wygnania) wydał w 1958 roku we Francji. W 1970 roku wrócił do Stanów Zjednoczonych, gdzie otrzymał stanowisko profesora na University College Cork. Zamieszkał w miasteczku Grattan Hill razem ze swoją drugą żoną, Evelyn, późniejszą bohaterką poematu „The Great Cloak” (Wielki płaszcz, 1978). Obecnie mieszka w Nowym Jorku z trzecią żoną, pisarką Elizabeth Wassell. Poza wyżej wymienionymi tomami wierszy, wydał jeszcze: „Poisoned Lands” (Zatrute lądy, 1961), „A Chosen Light” (Wybrane światło, 1967), „Tides” (Przypływy, 1970), „The Rouh Field” (Niebezpieczne pole, 1972), „A Slow Dane” (Powolny taniec, 1975), „The Dead Kingdom” (Martwe królestwo, 1984), „Mount Eagle” (Górski orzeł, 1989), „The Love Poems” (Wiersze o miłości, 1992), „Time in Armagh” (Czas w Armagh” (1993).
Jest też autorem dwóch antologii poezji irlandzkiej: „Faber Book of Irish Verse” (Księga Faber wierszy irlandzkich, 1974) i „Bitter Harvest” (Gorzkie żniwa, 1989).
W jego wierszach widoczne są wpływy kultury staroirlandzkiej, poezji modernistycznej oraz takich twórców amerykańskich, jak: Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg i Charles Olson. Zaliczany jest do ścisłej czołówki współczesnych poetów zarówno amerykańskich,
jak i irlandzkich. Otrzymał wiele prestiżowych nagród literackich, m. in. The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize (2000).

There are Days

There are days when
one should be able
to pluck off one's head
like a dented or worn
helmet, straight from
the nape and collarbone
(those crackling branches!)

and place it firmly down
in the bed of a flowing stream.
Clear, clean, chill currents
coursing and spuming through
the sour and stale compartments
of the brain, dimmed eardrums,
bleared eyesockets, filmed tongue.

And then set it back again
on the base of the shoulders:
well tamped down, of course,
the laved skin and mouth,
the marble of the eyes
rinsed and ready
for love; for prophecy?


The Golden Hook

Two fish float:

one slowly downstream
into the warm
currents of the known

the other tugging
against the stream,
disconsolate twin,

the golden
marriage hook
tearing its throat.


A Lost Tradition

All around, shards of a lost tradition:
From the Rough Field I went to school
In the Glen of the Hazels. Close by
Was the bishopric of the Golden Stone;
The cairn of Carleton's homesick poem.

Scattered over the hills, tribal-
And placenames, uncultivated pearls.
No rock or ruin, dun or dolmen
But showed memory defying cruelty
Through an image-encrusted name.

The heathery gap where the Rapparee,
Shane Barnagh, saw his brother die -
On a summer's day the dying sun
Stained its colours to crimson:
So breaks the heart, Brish-mo-Cree.

The whole landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited;
But fumbled, like a blind man,
Along the fingertips of instinct.

The last Gaelic speaker in the parish
When I stammered my school Irish
One Sunday after mass, crinkled
A rusty litany of praise:
Tá an Ghaeilge againn arís . . .

Tír Eoghain: Land of Owen,
Province of the O'Niall;
The ghostly tread of O'Hagan's
Barefoot gallowglasses marching
To merge forces in Dun Geanainn

Push southward to Kinsale!
Loudly the war-cry is swallowed
In swirls of black rain and fog
As Ulster's pride, Elizabeth's foemen,
Founder in a Munster bog.
We have the Irish again.

White Water

for Line McKie

The light, tarred skin
of the currach rides
and receives the current,
rolls and responds to
the harsh sea swell.
Inside the wooden ribs
a slithering frenzy; a sheen
of black-barred silver-
green and flailing mackerel:
the iridescent hoop
of a gasping sea trout.
As a fish gleams most
fiercely before it dies,
so the scales of the sea-hag
shine with a hectic
putrescent glitter:
luminous, bleached—
white water—
that light in the narrows
before a storm breaks.

przekład Andrzeja Szuby pt. „Jasna woda”
w temacie Marynistyka

All Legendary Obstacles

All legendary obstacles lay between
Us, the long imaginary plain,
The monstrous ruck of mountains
And, swinging across the night,
Flooding the Sacramento, San Joaquin,
The hissing drift of winter rain.

All day I waited, shifting
Nervously from station to bar
As I saw another train sail
By, the San Francisco Chief or
Golden Gate, water dripping
From great flanged wheels.

At midnight you came, pale
Above the negro porter's lamp.
I was too blind with rain
And doubt to speak, but
Reached from the platform
Until our chilled hands met.

You had been traveling for days
With an old lady, who marked
A neat circle on the glass
With her glove, to watch us
Move into the wet darkness
Kissing, still unable to speak.

przekład Andrzeja Szuby pt. „Wszystkie legendarne przeszkody”
w temacie Miłość.

Inne wiersze Johna Montague’a w tematach: O rybach i innych mieszkańcach wód,
S. O. S. dla naszej planety..., Wspomnienia, Antyczne korzenie cywilizacji,
O przemijaniu, Wiersze z podróży Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.05.11 o godzinie 13:47

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Erica Jong (ur. 1942) – amerykańska poetka, powieściopisarka i eseistka, jedna
z czołowych postaci ruchu feministycznego we współczesnej literaturze, autorka tomów wierszy: „Fruits & Vegetables” (1971, 1997), „Half-Lives” (1973), „Loveroot” (1975), „At the Edge of the Body” (1979), “Ordinary Miracles” (1983), “Becoming Light: New and Selected” (1991) oraz kilku powieści, z których największy rozgłos przyniosła jej “Fear of Flying” (1973, wyd. pol. “Strach przed lataniem”, 1998). W powieści tej nazwała swoje pokolenie „pokoleniem odbitej piłeczki”. W swojej twórczości porusza złożone problemy relacji między kobietą a mężczyzną, wkraczając niejednokrotnie na drażliwe tematy seksualnego i erotycznego tabu, utwory jej przepełnione są nierzadko swoistą ironią i wyrazistym poczuciem humoru.

The End

The congealed snow
of an old love affair.

A fistful of water--
& my hand closed
to contain you.

Still,
you leak through.

Where have you gone to?
What spring has thawed
the ice around my heart?

Old refrigerator
with your door pried off,
you bake in the sun.

I open my hand
& my palm gleams pink
as a peppermint lozenge.

There are dry old riverbeds,
a lifeline
deep as sleep.

There are beads of sweat--
all mine.

There is no more trace
of you.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Koniec”
w temacie Schyłek miłości...

Knives

The women he has had are all faces
without eyes.
He has entered them blind
as a cut worm.
He has swum their oceans
like a wounded fish
looking for home.

At nights when he can't sleep,
he dreams of weaving
backward up that river
where the banks
are fringed with mouths,
& weedy hair
grows amid the dark crusts
of ancient blood.

Tonight he is afraid & lonely
in a city of meat & knives.
I would go under his knife
& move so willingly
that his heart
might turn to butter
in his mouth.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Noże”
w temacie Portret (super) męski

His Silence

He still wears the glass skin of childhood.
Under his hands, the stones turn mirrors.
His eyes are knives.

Who froze the ground to his feet?
Who locked his mouth into an horizon?
Why does the sun set when we touch?

I look for the lines between the silences.
He looks only for the silences.

Cram this page under his tongue.
Open him as if for surgery.
Let the red knife love slide in.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Jego milczenie”
w temacie Milczenie

The Purification

Because she loved her husband
she found a lover.
Because she betrayed her husband with false fidelity
she went to bed with her lover.
Because she was no longer falsely faithful
she now felt honest.
Because she was honest
she told her lover she loved him.
Because she was honest
she told her lover she also loved her husband.
Because she was honest
her dishonest lover left her.
Because her lover left her
she felt betrayed.
Because she felt betrayed
she went back to her husband.
Now they had something in common.

przekład Teresy Truszkowskiej pt. „Oczyszczenie”
w temacie Blaski i cienie małżeństwa.
W tym samym temacie inny wiersz Erici Jong pt. Rozwód”.Marta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 23.02.10 o godzinie 09:16

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Nancy Burke

My Father's Rose Garden

My father grew roses
Whenever he lived he planted them -
Large rose bushes od different colours,
Scents and names.
He made paths, put in a birdbath,
Worked on the garden as if it were
Versailles - his passion and his pride.
He created it as
A thing of beauty and harmony.

His wife objected,
Spending all that time and money -
For what at your age, she said.
He was retired then
In his last house
And every morning he rose early
To go out and work among his roses.

At midday the sun was hot,
The roses an oasis of perfume
Where local sparrows splashed
In the shimmering sun.

It made him happy, I suppose,
To look at this - his last creation.

One winter evening he was gone
And the next summer the roses,
Left without that careful tending,
Wilted in the heat, as flowers will.

His wife sold the house to others.

What was the point of all that work,
So ephemeral, so quickly lost?
One might well ask
What is the point of any
Carefull effort at creation
When, eventually,
The insatiable earthe
Will cover everything
And leave no trace.

Wiersz ten w przekładzie Ewy Elżbiety Nowakowskiej znajduje się w temacie Motyw ojca - M.M.Michał M. edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.08.09 o godzinie 20:00

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Medbh McGuckian (ur. 1950) – jedna z najbardziej znanych i cenionych współczesnych poetek irlandzkich. Urodziła się Belfaście, tam kształciła się w prywatnej szkole Ojców Dominików oraz na Queen's University, gdzie jednym z jej wykładowców był Seamus Heaney. Debiutowała w 1980 roku, a pierwszy tomik wierszy „The Flower Master” (Mistrz kwiatów) opublikowała w 1982 roku.
Wydała też m. in.: „The Greenhouse” (Zielony dom, 1983), “Venus and the Rain” (Wenus i deszcz, 1984), “On Ballycastle Beach” (Na plaży w Ballycastle , 1988), „Marconi's Cottage” (Chata Marconiego, 1991), „Captain Lavender” (Kapitan Lawenda, 1994), „The Face of the Earth” (Twarz Ziemi, 2002), “The Book of the Angel” (Księga anioła, 2004). Jest laureatką wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich, m., in. Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Ireland Arts Council Award za tomik „The Flower Master”), Cheltenham Prize) za tomik “On Ballycastle Beach” , Forward Poetry Prize za wiersz
"She is in the Past, She Has This Grace". Jako pierwsza kobieta otrzymała stanowisko "writer-in-residence" na Uniwersytecie Queen's w Belfaście, a później też na University of Ulster w Coleraine oraz w Trinity College w Dublinie. Na język polski wiersze Medbh McGuckian tłumaczył Andrzej Szuba w „Literaturze na Świecie” nr 10-11/2007 oraz
w tomiku: The Princess of Parallelograms - Księżniczka równoległoboków. Muzeum Książki Artystycznej w Łodzi "Correstudio", 1998.

The Butterfly Farm

The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead:
Its silence like the green cocoon of the car-wash,
Its passion for water to uncloud.

In the Japanese tea house they believe
In making the most of the bright nights:
That the front of a leaf is male, the back female.

There are grass stains on their white stockings;
In artificial sun even the sound are disposable;
The mosaic of their wings is spun from blood.

Cyanide in the killing jar relaxes the Indian moon moth,
The pearl-bordered beauty, the clouded yellow,
The painted lady, the silver-washed blue.

z tomu “The Flower Master”, 1982

From the Dressing-Room

Left to itself, they say, every foetus
would turn female, staving in, nature
siding then with the enemy that
delicately mixes up genders. This
is an absence I have passionately sought,
brightening nevertheless my poet’s attic
with my steady hands, calling him my blue
lizard till his moans might be heard
at the far end of the garden. For I like
his ways, he’s light on his feet and does
not break anything, puts his entire soul
into bringing me a glass of water,

I can take anything now, even his being
away, for it always seems to me his
writing is for me, as I walk springless
from the dressing-room in a sisterly
length of flesh-coloured silk. Oh there
are moments when you think you can
give notice in a jolly, wifely tone,
tossing off a very last and sunsetty
letter of farewell, with strict injunctions
to be careful to procure his own lodgings:
that my good little room is lockable,
but shivery, I recover at the mere
sight of him propping up my pillow.

z tomu “Venus and the Rain” 1984

The Albert Chain

Like an accomplished terrorist, the fruit hangs
from the end of a dead stem, under a tree
riddled with holes like a sieve. Breath smelling
of cinnamon retires into its dream to die there.
Fresh air blows in, morning breaks, then the mists
close in; a rivulet of burning air
pumps up the cinders from their roots,
but will not straighten in two radiant months
the twisted forest. Warm as a stable,
close to the surface of my mind,
the wild cat lies in the suppleness of life,
half-stripped of its skin, and in the square
beyond, a squirrel stoned to death
has come to rest on a lime tree.

I am going back into war, like a house
I knew when I was young: I am inside,
a thin sunshine, a night within a night,
getting used to the chalk and clay and bats
swarming in the roof. Like a dead man
attached to the soil which covers him,
I have fallen where no judgment can touch me,
its discoloured rubble has swallowed me up.
For ever and ever, I go back into myself:
I was born in little pieces, like specks of dust,
only an eye that looks in all directions can see me.
I am learning my country all over again,
how every inch of soil has been paid for
by the life of a man, the funerals of the poor.

I met someone I believed to be on the side
of the butchers, who said with tears, “This
is too much.” I saw you nailed to a dry rock,
drawing after you under the earth the blue fringe
of the sea, and you cried out “Don't move!”
as if you were already damned. You are muzzled
and muted, like a cannon improvised from an iron
pipe. You write to me generally at nightfall,
careful of your hands, bruised against bars:
already, in the prime of life, you belong
to the history of my country, incapable
in this summer of treason, of deliberate treason,
charming death away with the rhythm of your arm.

As if one part of you were coming to the rescue
of the other, across the highest part of the sky,
in your memory of the straight road flying past,
I uncovered your feet as a small refuge,
damp as winter kisses in the street,
or frost-voluptuous cider
over a fire of cuttings from the vine.
Whoever goes near you is isolated
by a double row of candles. I could escape
from any other prison but my own
unjust pursuit of justice
that turns one sort of poetry into another.

z tomu „Captain Lavender”, 1994

She is in the Past, She Has This Grace

My mother looks at her watch,
As if to look back over the curve
Of her life, her slackening rhythms:
Nobody can know her, how she lost herself
Evening after evening in that after,
Her hourly feelings, the repetition,
Delay and failure of her labour
Of mourning. The steps space themselves
Out, the steps pass, in the mists
And hesitations of the summer,
And within a space which is doubled,
One of us has passed through the other,
Though one must count oneself three,
To figure out which of us
Has let herself be traversed.

Nothing advances, we don’t move,
We don’t address one another,
I haven’t opened my mouth
Except for one remark,
And what remark was that?
A word which appeases the menace
Of time in us, reading as if
I were stripping the words
Of their ever-mortal high meaning.

She is in dark light, or an openness
That leads to a darkness,
Embedded in the wall
Her mono-landscape
Stays facing the sea
And the harbour activity,
Her sea-conscience being ground up
With the smooth time of the deep,
Her mourning silhouetted against
The splendour of the sea
Which is now to your left,
As violent as it is distant
From all aggressive powers
Or any embassies.

And she actively dreams
In the very long ending of this moment,
She is back in her lapping marshes,
Still walking with the infinite
Step of a prisoner, that former dimension
In which her gaze spreads itself
As a stroke without regarding you,
Making you lower your own gaze.

Who will be there,
At that moment, beside her,
When time becomes sacred,
And her voice becomes an opera,
And the solitude is removed
From her body, as if my hand
Had been held in some invisible place?

z tomu “The Face of the Earth”, 2002

Hand Reliquary, Ave Maria Lane

God knows that there is no proof
that part returns to wholeness
simply because miracles happen
at a single church-going.

Her verdant branches labelled
with the names of the five senses,
the garden not ours, she prayed
for her illness to last beyond the grave,

and be the unsealer of that tree.
She might have been dead for a week,
though she went on with her deep
dying, her womb a transparent crystal

turning into a brown relic
even before her death. The blinding
beauty of her hood opening
acted upon me as my own ghost

would do, sounding silk,
as with a lifting gesture
she tore off flesh from her hand,
driving wide her middle finger

into the palm of the other.
Till being a vessel, Christ appeared to her
as a dish filled with carved-up bread
so unnaturally sweet, so lightly crushed,

she could quench the tall language
of his image in her mouth,
which was the breast-wound, always on the point
of being taken, in his female side.

z tomu “The Book of the Angel”, 2004

The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter

Lordship is the same activity
Whether performed by lord or lady.
Or a lord who happens to be a lady,
All the source and all the faults.

A woman steadfast in looking is a callot,
And any woman in the wrong place
Or outside of her proper location
Is, by definition, a foolish woman.

The harlot is talkative and wandering
By the way, not bearing to be quiet,
Not able to abide still at home,
Now abroad, now in the streets,

Now lying in wait near the corners,
Her hair straying out of its wimple.
The collar of her shift and robe
Pressed one upon the other.

She goes to the green to see to her geese,
And trips to wrestling matches and taverns.
The said Margery left her home
In the parish of Bishopshill,

And went to a house, the which
The witness does not remember,
And stayed there from noon
Of that day until the darkness of night.

But a whip made of raw hippopotamus
Hide, trimmed like a corkscrew,
And anon the creature was stabled
In her wits as well as ever she was biforn,

And prayed her husband as so soon
As he came to her that she might have
The keys to her buttery
To take her meat and drink.

He should never have my good will
For to make my sister for to sell
Candle and mustard in Framlyngham,
Or fill her shopping list with crossbows,

Almonds, sugar and cloth.
The captainess, the vowess,
Must use herself to work readily
As other gentilwomen doon,

In the innermost part of her house,
In a great chamber far from the road.
So love your windows as little as you can,
For we be, either of us, weary of other.

z pisma “Poetry” No 1/2007

Inne wiersze Medbh McGuckian, w przekładzie Andrzeja Szuby, w tematach”:
Głosy i dźwięki, szepty i krzyki, Kobiecy portret, Blaski i cienie małżeństwa,
Rzeki, potoki, strumienie..., Czynności i zajęcia, poza pisaniem wierszy,
Dziecko jest chodzącym cudem... – K. A.Krzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 31.08.09 o godzinie 12:18