Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Brian Patten (ur. 1946) - poeta angielski. Urodził się i wychował na przedmieściach Liverpoolu, w środowisku robotniczym. Edukację szkolną zakończył w 15 roku życia, wtedy też zaczął drukować swoje pierwsze wiersze. Przez półtora roku redagował pismo literackie „Underdog”, w którym publikował swoje utwory i swoich przyjaciół, m. im. Rogera McGougha
i Adriana Henriego. W klubach i pubach organizował spotkania autorskie, na których prezentowana była poezja młodych liverpoolskich autorów w połączeniu z muzyką, piosenką i komentarzami. Prezentacja utworów poetyckich na spotkaniach narzucała ich styl, dostosowany do odbioru ze słuchu, operujący prostym, potocznym językiem z dużą
dawką humoru. Wiersze Pattena wcześniej znane były z jego mistrzowskich recytacji, niż
z publikacji. Po krótkim epizodzie liverpoolskim, poeta zaczął podróżować, zarówno po Anglii, jak i za granicę, m. in. do Francji i Hiszpanii. Po powrocie do Liverpoolu, pisywał przez jakiś czas felietony o muzyce młodzieżowej i kontynuował swoje spotkania autorskie w pubach, college’ach, salach koncertowych. Zaczął też pisać dla radia, telewizji i teatru. Obok poezji, także powieści i bardzo cenione, również za granicą, książki dla dzieci. Mieszka w Londynie, ale często ucieka do swego wiejskiego domu w Kornwalii. Najważniejsze jego książki poetyckie, to: „Little Johnny's Confession” (1967), „Notes to the Hurrying Man” (1969), „The Irrelevant Song” (1970; 1975), „The Mersey Sound. Revised” (1974), “Vanishing Trick” (1976), “Grave Gossip” (1979), “Love Poems” (1981), “Storm Damage” (1988), “Thawing Frozen Frog” (1990), “Impossible Parents” (1994), “Storm Damage” (1995), “Armada” (1996), “The Blue and Green Ark: An Alphabet for Planet Earth” (1999), “Juggling with Gerbils” (2000), “The Story Giant: (2001), “The Impossible Parents Go Green” (2001), “Ben's Magic Telescope” (2003), “The Monster's Guide to Choosing a Pet” (2005), “The Puffin Book of Modern Children's” (2006), “Selected Poems” (2007), “Collected Love Poems” (2007).
Po polsku wiersze Briana Pattena opublikowano w książce: Piotr Sommer: Antologia nowej poezji brytyjskiej. Przełożyli Jarosław Anders, Piotr Sommer, Bohdan Zadura. Czytelnik, Warszawa 1983.Wydano też wybór jego wierszy w tomie: Brian Patten: Teraz będziemy spać, leżeć bez ruchu lub ubierzemy się na powrót. Wybór, opracowanie i posłowie Jerzy Jarniewicz. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2011 oraz książki dla dzieci: Brian Patten: Słoń i kwiat. Prawie bajki. Przełożył Piotr Sommer. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2009 i Brian Patten: Skaczący Myszka. Przełożył Piotr Sommer. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2011.

Z tomu "Little Johnny's Confession", 1967

Little Johnny's Confession

This morning
being rather young and foolish
I borrowed a machinegun my father
had left hidden since the war, went out,
and eliminated a number of small enemies.
Since then I have not returned home.

This morning
swarms of police with trackerdogs
wander about the city
with my description printed
on their minds, asking:
”Have you seen him,
He is seven years old,
likes Pluto, Mighty Mouse
and Biffo The Bear,
have you seen him, anywhere?”

This morning
sitting alone in a strange playground,
muttering Youve blundered Youve blundered
over and over to myself
I work out my next move
but cannot move;
the trackerdogs will sniff me out,
they have my lollypops.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Wyznanie Małego Johnny”
w temacie Patologia wokół nas

Maud, 1965

Maud, where are you Maud?
With your long dresses and peachcream complexion;
In what cage did you hang that black bat night?
What took place in the garden? Maud, it is over,
You can tell us now.

Still lyrical but much used, you wander about the suburbs
Watching the buses go past full of young happy people,
Wondering where the garden is, wherever can it be,
And how can it be lost. Maud, it's no use.

Can it be that you got yourself lost
And are living with an out of work musician,
You share a furnished room and have an old wireless
That tells you the latest bad news.
What's happening Maud?

Do you wear a Mary Quant dress
And eat fish and chips alone at night?
Where are you? and are you very lost,
Very much alone? Do you have stupendous dreams
And wake with one hand on your breast, and
The other on your cunt?
Do you cry for that garden, lost among pornographic
suggestions,
Where the concrete flowers neither open nor close;
Who poured weedkiller over your innocence?

We could not find that garden for you,
Even if we tried.
So, come into the city Maud,
Where the flowers are too quickly picked
And the days are murdered as if they were enemies.

Maud, is that you I see
Alone among the office blocks,
Head bowed, young tears singing popsorrow
On your cheeks?

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Maud, 1965”
w temacie Kobiecy portret

After Breakfast

After breakfast,
Which is usually coffee and a view
Of teeming rain and the Cathedral old and grey but
Smelling good with grass and ferns
I go out thinking of all those people who've come into this
room
And have slept here
Sad and naked
Alone in pairs
Who came together and
Were they young and white with
Some hint of innocence?
Or did they come simply to come,
To fumble then finally tumble apart,
Or, were they older still, past sex,
Lost in mirrors, contemplating their decay and
What did the morning mean to them?

Perhaps once this room was the servants quarter.
Was she young with freckles, with apple breasts?
Did she ever laugh?
Tease the manservant with her 19th Century charms
And her skirts whirling,
Did she look out through the skylight
And wish she were free, and
What did she have for breakfast?

Waking this morning I think
How good it would be to have someone to share breakfast
with.
Whole families wakingl
A thousand negligees, pyjamas, nightgowns
All wandering down to breakfast

How secure 1 and
Others coming out the far end of dawn
Having only pain and drizzle for breakfast,
Waking always to be greeted with the poor feast of daylight.

How many halflives
Sulking behind these windows
From basement to attic
Complaining and asking
Who will inherit me today?
Who will I share breakfast with?
And always the same answer coming back?
The rain will inherit you? lonely breakfaster!

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Po śniadaniu”
w tematach” Samotność i W wynajętych pokojach

Z tomu „Notes to the Hurrying Man”, 1969

Portrait of a Young Girl Raped at a Suburban Party

And after this quick bash in the dark
You will rise and go
Thinking of how empty you have grown
And of whether all the evening's care in front of mirrors
And the younger boys disowned
Led simply to this.

Confined to what you are expected to be
By what you are
Out in the frozen garden
You shiver and vomit -
Frightened, drunk among trees,
You wonder at how those acts that called for tenderness
Were far from tender.

Now you have left your titterings about love
And your childishness behind you
Yet still far from being old
You spew up among flowers
And in the warm stale rooms
The party continues.

It seems you saw some use in moving away
From that group of drunken lives
Yet already ten minutes pregnant
In twenty thousand you might remember
This party
This dull Saturday night
When planets rolled out of your eyes
And splashed down in suburban grasses.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Portret młodej dziewczyny zgwałconej
na podmiejskiej prywatce” w tematach: Patologia wokół nas
i Upokorzenie, wstyd, hańba...

You Come to me Quiet as Rain Not Yet Fallen

You come to me quiet as rain not yet fallen
Afraid of how you might fail yourself your
dress seven summers old is kept open
in memory of sex, smells warm, of boys,
and of the once long grass.
But we are colder now; we have not
Love’s first magic here. You come to me
Quiet as bulbs not yet broken
Out into sunlight.

The fear I see in your now lining face
Changes to puzzlement when my hands reach
For you as branches reach. Your dress
Does not fall easily, nor does your body
Sing of it won accord. What love added to
A common shape no longer seems a miracle.
You come to me with your age wrapped in excuses
And afraid of its silence.

Into the paradise our younger lives made of this bed and room
Has leaked the world and all its questioning
and now those shapes terrify us most
that remind us of our own. Easier now
to check longings and sentiment,
to pretend not to care overmuch,
you look out across the years, and you come to me
quiet as the last of our senses closing.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. "Przychodzisz do mnie spokojna jak deszcz
co jeszcze nie spadł" w temacie Miłości sprzed lat

Z tomu „The Irrelevant Song”, 1972

These Songs Were Begun One Winter

This song was begun underneath the thumb
Of one who’s thickened by the cold
Listless, longer, bolder than perhaps he ought to be
Forgive quiet and then lie down here lengthways on the floor
Hoping that the blood with flow again

Easily forgot, what was lifted first felt
An anchor to the blood
Howling at the moon as the stars are falling fast
Leaves Wind Earth and Rain
We look forward to look back

przekład Jerzego Jarniewicza pt. „Te piosenki powstały pewnej zimy”
w temacie Wspomnienia

Poem Written in the Street on a Rainy Evening

Everything I lost was found again.
I tasted wine in my mouth.
My heart was like a firefly; it moved
Through the darkest objects laughing.

There were enough reasons why this was happening
But I never stopped to think about them.
I could have said it was your face,
Could have said I’d drunk something idiotic,

But no one reason was sufficient,
No one reason was relevant.
My joy outshone dull surroundings.

A feast was spread; a world
Was suddenly made edible.
And there was forever to taste it.

przekład Jerzego Jarniewicza pt. „Wiersz napisany na ulicy w pewien
deszczowy wieczór” w temacie Szczęście

Z tomu "The Vanishing Trick", 1976

No Taxis Available

It is absurd not knowing where to go.

You wear the streets like an overcoat.
Certain houses are friends, certain houses
Can no longer be visited.
Old love-affairs lurk in doorways, behind windows
Women grow older. Neglection blossoms.

You have turned down numerous invitations,
Left the telephones unanswered, said ‘No’
To the few that needed you.
Stranded on an island of your own invention
You have thrown out messages, longings.

How useless it is knowing that where you want to go
Is nowhere concrete.
The trains will not take you there,
The red buses glide past without stopping,

No taxis are available.

przekład Jerzego Jarniewicza pt. „I za cholerę żadnej
taksówki” w temacie Poezja codzienności

One Another's Light

I do not know what brought me here
Away from here I've hardly ever been and now
Am never likely to go again.

Faces are lost, and places passed
At which I could have stopped,
And stopping, been glad enough.

Some faces left a mark,
And I on them might have wrought
Some kind of charm or spell
To make their futures work,

But it's hard to guess
How one person on another
Works an influence.
We pass, and lit briefly by one another's light
Hope the way we go is right.

przekład Jerzego Jarniewicza pt. "We wzajemnym świetle"
w temacie Wstrzymaj się chwilo, jesteś tak piękna!...

Z tomu "Armada”, 1996

Our Lives Had Grown So Empty

Remember the hibiscus we planted last spring?
Well, it flowered.
There is no other news.

przekład Andrzeja Szuby pt. „Nasze życie stało się takie puste”
w temacie ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”...

Inessential Things

What do cats remember of days?

They remember the ways in from the cold,
the warmest spot, the place of food.
They remember the places of pain, their enemies,
the irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil,
the usefulness of dust.
They remember the creak of a bed, the sound
of their owner’s footsteps,
the taste of fish, the loveliness of cream.
Cats remember what is essential of days.
Letting all other memories go as of not worth
they sleep sounder than we,
whose hearts break remembering so many
inessential things.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. "Rzeczy nieważne"
w temacie Sierściuchy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wvzqg2jbU

Inne wiersze Briana Pattena w tematach: Śmierć, Wątki szekspirowskie w poezji, Przypowieść, O przemijaniu..., Mów do mnie.../Potrawy i napoje..., Erotyka, s. 9,
s. 12, To (nie) jest rozmowa na telefon..., Metamorfozy, Bajki, Sierściuchy, Poezja codzienności, Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok, Nagość/Wstrzymaj się chwilo, jesteś
tak piękna!..., Miej serce i patrzaj w serce, Nudzę się, nudzę piekielnie..., Magia kina, Uroda i kosmetyki, czyli poetycko o pielęgnacji i upiększaniu ciała, Pożądanie, fantazje erotyczneRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 24.08.11 o godzinie 22:42

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) – poeta amerykański, trzykrotny laureat
Nagrody Pulitzera (1933, 1953, 1959), National Book Award (1953) i wielu innych nagród literackich. W 1911 roku rozpoczął studia prawnicze na Harvard Law School
w Cambridge, Massachusetts, które przerwała I wojna światowa. Brał w niej udział początkowo jako kierowca ambulansu, potem jak kapitan artylerii. Studia ukończył
po wojnie w 1919 roku. Przez jakiś czas był wykładowcą prawa na Harvardzie.
W latach 1923-1928 mieszkał w Paryżu, gdzie nawiązał kontakty z przedstawicielami awangardy artystycznej, m. in. z Jeanem Cocteau, Pablo Picassem, Johnem O’Hara.
Po powrocie do Ameryki łączył pracę prawnika i piastowanie stanowisk publicznych
z działalnością literacką. Przez wiele lat był bibliotekarzem Kongresu, uważanym do dzisiaj za jedną z najbardziej znaczących osób w amerykańskim bibliotekarstwie.
W czasie II wojny światowej pracował w dyplomacji, m. in. jako asystent sekretarza stanu do spraw kultury zaangażowany był w organizację UNESCO. Po wojnie powrócił do pracy akademickiej i twórczości literackiej. Obok poezji pisał też powieści, dramaty, eseje i słuchowiska radiowe. Jest autorem jednego z najgłośniejszych manifestów poetyckich XX wieku pt. „Ars poetica”. Ważniejsze książki poetyckie: “Songs for
a Summer's Day” (1915), “Class Poem” (1915), „Tower of Ivory” (1917), “The Happy Marriage” (1924), „The Pot of Earth” (1925), “Nobodaddy “(1926), “The Hamlet
of A. Macleish” (1928), “Streets in the Moon” (1928), “Einstein” (1929), “New Found Land New Found Land” (1930), “Conquistador” (1932), “Elpenor” (1933), “Actfive” (1948), “Songs for Eve” (1954), "The Wild Old Wicked Ma and Other Poems (1968), “New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976” (1976).

An Eternity

There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White the peach bough.

Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.

Poem in Prose

This poem is for my wife.
I have made it plainly and honestly:
The mark is on it
Like the burl on the knife.

I have not made it for praise.
She has no more need for praise
Than summer has
Or the bright days.

In all that becomes a woman
Her words and her ways are beautiful:
Love's lovely duty,
the well-swept room.

Wherever she is there is sun
And time and a sweet air:
Peace is there,
Work done.

There are always curtains and flowers
And candles and baked bread
And a cloth spread
And a clean house.

Her voice when she sings is a voice
At dawn by a freshening spring
Where the wave leaps in the wind
And rejoices.

Wherever she is it is now.
It is here where the apples are:
Here in the stars,
In the quick hour.

The greatest and richest good,
My own life to live in,
This she has given me --

If giver could.

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

Two Poems from the War

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Ars poetica” w tematach:
Kierunki, szkoły, manifesty poetyckie i Czym jest wiersz?Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 17.12.09 o godzinie 12:00

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

David Herbert Lawrence (1885 –1930) – jeden z najbardziej oryginalnych twórców literackich XX wieku: poeta, prozaik, dramaturg, eseista i krytyk literacki. Jego śmiałe i kontrowersyjne poglądy na zagadnienia społeczne i obyczajowe, częste konflikty z cenzurą, były przyczyną jego dobrowolnej banicji. Zasłynął ze swej wrogości do ruchów feministycznych i otwartego wypowiadania się o wolności seksualnej. Był bisekusalistą. Zmarł w wieku 45 lat w wyniku powikłań gruźlicy.
Autor tomów poezji: “Love Poems and others” (1913), “Amores” (1916), “Look! We have come through!” (1917), “New Poems”, (1918), “Bay: a book of poems” (1919), “ Tortoises” (1921), “Birds, Beasts and Flowers” (1923), “The Collected Poems of D H Lawrence” (1928), “Pansies” (1929); pośmiertnie: “Nettles” (1930), „Last Poems” (1932), “Fire and other poems” (1940), “The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence” (1964), “The White Horse” (1964), “D. H. Lawrence: Selected Poems”. 1972).
Wiersze Lawrence’a tłumaczyli na język polski m. in. Stanisław Helsztyński, Wacław Iwaniuk, Stanisław Barańczak i Leszek Elektorowicz. Najpełniejszy ich wybór składa się na tom David Herbert Lawrence: Poezje wybrane. Wybrał, przełożył i posłowiem opatrzył Leszek Elektorowicz. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1976.

In a Boat

See the stars, love,
In the water much clearer and brighter
Than those above us, and whiter,
Like nenuphars.

Star-shadows shine, love,
How many stars in your bowl?
How many shadows in your soul,
Only mine, love, mine?

When I move the oars, love,
See how the stars are tossed,
Distorted, the brightest lost.
—So that bright one of yours, love.

The poor waters spill
The stars, waters broken, forsaken.
—The heavens are not shaken, you say, love,
Its stars stand still.

There, did you see
That spark fly up at us; even
Stars are not safe in heaven.
—What of yours, then, love, yours?

What then, love, if soon
Your light be tossed over a wave?
Will you count the darkness a grave,
And swoon, love, swoon?

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. „W łodzi”
w temacie Gwiazdy, planety, kosmos w poezji...

”And Oh, That the Man I Am Might Cease To Be”

No, now I wish the sunshine would stop.
and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on
the balconies
and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out
between two valves of darkness;
the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled
sound
obliterating everything.

I wish that whatever props up the walls of light
would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down,
and it would be thick black dark for ever.
Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,
nor death, which quivers with birth,
but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable.

What is sleep?
It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill,
but it does not alter me, nor help me.
And death would ache still, I am sure;
it would be lambent, uneasy.
I wish it would be completely dark everywhere,
inside me, and out, heavily dark
utterly.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. „“I och, by człowiek, którym jest,
mógł przestać być” w temacie Ciemność

Tortoise Family Connections

On he goes, the little one,
Bud of the universe,
Pediment of life.
Setting off somewhere, apparently.
Whither away, brisk egg?

His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings,
And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin.

A mere obstacle,
He veers round the slow great mound of her --
Tortoises always foresee obstacles.

It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice:
'This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg.'

He does not even trouble to answer: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?'
He wearily looks the other way,
And she even more wearily looks another way still,
Each with the utmost apathy,
Incognisant,
Unaware,
Nothing.

As for papa,
He snaps when I offer him his offspring,
Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him,
Because he is irascible this morning, an irascible tortoise
Being touched with love, and devoid of fatherliness.

Father and mother,
And three little brothers,
And all rambling aimless, like little perambulating pebbles scattered in the garden,
Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old tins.

Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances, of course,
Though family feeling there is none, not even the beginnings.

Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless
Little tortoise.

Row on then, small pebble,
Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled sunshine,
Young gaiety.

Does he look for a companion?

No, no, don't think it.
He doesn't know he is alone;
Isolation is his birthright,
This atom.

To row forward, and reach himself tall on spiny toes,
To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth, afraid of the night,
To crop a little substance,
To move, and to be quite sure that he is moving:
Basta!
To be a tortoise!
Think of it, in a garden of inert clods
A brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself --
Adam!

In a garden of pebbles and insects
To roam, and feel the slow heart beat
Tortoise-wise, the first bell sounding
From the warm blood, in the dark-creation morning.

Moving, and being himself,
Slow, and unquestioned,
And inordinately there, O stoic!
Wandering in the slow triumph of his own existence,
Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in chaos,
And biting the frail grass arrogantly,
Decidedly arrogantly.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. „Stosunki rodzinne żółwi”
w temacie W poetyckim terrarium

Whales Weep Not!

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. „Nie płaczcie, wieloryby!”
w temacie O rybach i innych mieszkańcach wód

Gloire de Dijon

When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.

She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Gloire de Dijon“
w temacie Miłość

In Trouble and Shame

I look at the swaling sunset
And wish I could go also
Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.

I wish that I could go
Through the red doors where I could put off
My shame like shoes in the porch,
My pain like garments,
And leave my flesh discarded lying
Like luggage of some departed traveller
Gone one knows not whither.

Then I would turn round,
And seeing my cast-off body lying like lumber,
I would laugh with joy.

przekład Jerzego Pietrkiewicza pt. „Troska i wstyd”
w temacie Upokorzenie, wstyd, hańba...

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

przekłady: Leszka Elektorowicza pt. „Fortepian” w temacie Wspomnienia
i Wacława Iwaniuka pt. "Pianino" w temacie Dzieciństwo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PapzbXDs2QA

Inne wiersze Davida Herberta Lawrence’a w tematach Miłość , Owady są wszędzie..., Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam, Pierzaści bracia mniejsi, Zaśpiewam ci pieśń, S. O. S. dla naszej planety..., Między dobrem a złem, Los i przeznaczenie, ”Niebo jest u stóp matki”, Erotyka, Dla nas śpiewa pustynia..., Schyłek miłości, W poetyckim terrarium, Szalonej Nocy Sylwestrowej!!!, Świat chwiejnych cieniKrzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 03.02.12 o godzinie 17:18

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Thomas Stearns Eliot

The Journey Of The Magi

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Wiersz w przekładach: Antoniego Libery oraz Krzysztofa Boczkowskiego
znajduje się w temacie Trzej Królowie przychodzą z darami - M.M.Michał M. edytował(a) ten post dnia 03.01.10 o godzinie 23:34

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) – urodził się w Brooklynie, w Nowym Jorku,
w żydowskiej rodzinie emigranckiej, przybyłej z Rumunii. Kiedy miał dziewięć lat, jego rodzice rozwiedli się, co pozostawiło trwały ślad w jego psychice i wywarło wpływ na dalsze życie. Pomimo, że był wybitnie uzdolniony, miał spore problemy z uzyskaniem wyższego wykształcenia. Studiował na Uniwersytecie Columbia i Wisconsin-Madison,
w końcu, w 1935 r. uzyskał licencjat z filozofii na Uniwersytecie Nowojorskim. Wyższych stopni naukowych nigdy nie uzyskał, pomimo tego był przez jakiś czas zatrudniony jako wykładowca akademicki. W 1937 roku opublikował w kwartalniku „Partisan Review” opowiadanie pt. „In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”, które zostało bardzo dobrze przyjęte przez krytykę literacką. W tym samym roku ożenił się z Gertrude Buckman, jedną z recenzentek opowiadania, a opowiadanie wraz z wyborem wierszy ukazało się rok później pod tym samym tytułem jako debiutacki tomik poety. Małżeństwo z Gertrude przetrwało zaledwie sześć lat, również drugi związek małżeński z dużo młodszą od niego pisarką Elizabeth Pollett zakończył się szybko rozwodem. W obu przypadkach powodem rozpadu związków była nasilająca się choroba psychiczna poety, a także jego uzależnienie od alkoholu i narkotyków. Rosła natomiast jego sława i uznanie w środowisku literackim. Oprócz poezji, pisał też opowiadania i sztuki teatralne, a o jego twórczości z uznaniem wypowiadały się takie autorytety literackie, jak: Thomas Stearns Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, John Berryman i Vladimir Nablokov. W 1959 roku wydał swój drugi tom poezji „Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems”. W tym samym roku został laureatem Nagrody Bollingen – najmłodszym z dotychczasowych. Był redaktorem pism „Partisan Review” i „New Republic”, wykładał na wyższych uczelniach, m. in. na University of Wisconsin, University of New York, Bennington College, Kenyon College
i Princeton University. Jednak jego choroba psychiczna oraz uzależnienie od alkoholu
i narkotyków coraz bardziej izolowały go od społeczeństwa. Ostatnie lata życia spędził w samotności, pozbawiony regularnych dochodów i własnego mieszkania, z długami
i swoimi uzależnieniami, ledwo wiązał koniec z końcem, mieszkał w tanich hotelach, dnie spędzał na ławce w parkach o niezbyt dobrej renomie, np. w nowojorskim
Bryant Park, wśród meneli, alkoholików i narkomanów. Taki wyniszczający tryb życia,
w połączeniu z intensywną pracą twórczą, doprowadził do ataku serca.
Dalmore Schwartz zmarł w wieku 53 lat, w pokoju Hotelu Columbia na Manhattanie. Zwłoki poety odkryto dopiero dwa dni po jego śmierci, kolejne trzy dni leżały one jako NN w kostnicy, zanim je zidentyfikowano.
Jego pamięci poświęcono kilka utworów artystycznych, najbardziej znane to: piosenka „European Son” napisana i wykonana przez Lou Reeda z zespołem "The Velvet Underground", elegia Johna Berrymana pt. „Dream Song 149” z jego książki „The Dream Songs” (1969) oraz wyróżniona Nagrodą Pulitzera, powieść Saula Bellowa „Humboldt's Gift" (1975), oparta częściowo na faktach z życia pisarza i jego przyjaźni ze Schwartzem.
Bez wątpienia, jeden z najwybitniejszych i najbardziej oryginalnych poetów XX wieku w Polsce pozostaje, jak dotąd, mało znany. Kilka jego wierszy ukazało się w antologii Poeci języka angielskiego. Wybór i opracowanie Henryk Krzeczkowski, Jerzy S. Sito, Juliusz Żuławski. PIW, Warszawa 1977 oraz w niskonakładowej i trudno dostępnej książce Grzegorza Musiała Ameryka, Ameryka! Antologia wierszy poetów amerykańskich po 1940 roku. Wyd. Pomorze, Bydgoszcz 1994.

America, America!

I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it,
the lights, the stars, and the bridges
I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic
-of the peoples' hearts, crossing it
to new America.

I am burdened with the truck and chimera, hope,
acquired in the sweating sick-excited passage
in steerage, strange and estranged
Hence I must descry and describe the kingdom of emotion.

For I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city)
and the cemetery (in the city)
And rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the
heart and mind
This is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.

It is true but only partly true that a city is a "tyranny of
numbers"
(This is the chant of the urban metropolitan and
metaphysical self
After the first two World Wars of the 20th century)

--- This is the city self, looking from window to lighted
window
When the squares and checks of faintly yellow light
Shine at night, upon a huge dim board and slab-like tombs,
Hiding many lives. It is the city consciousness
Which sees and says: more: more and more: always more.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Ameryka, Ameryka!”
w temacie Być poetą...

The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.

“Call us what you will: we are made such by love.”
We are such studs as dreams are made on, and
Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.

Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,
After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze?
For it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell,
And it is not only heart, at harp o’clock,
It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread
Toward Arcturus - and returning as suddenly…

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Umysł to starożytna i sławna stolica”
w temacie Umysł i potęga myśli

Baudelaire

When I fall asleep, and even during sleep,
I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking
Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial,
Having no relation to my affairs.

Dear Mother, is any time left to us
In which to be happy? My debts are immense.
My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment.
I know nothing. I cannot know anything.
I have lost the ability to make an effort.
But now as before my love for you increases.
You are always armed to stone me, always:
It is true. It dates from childhood.

For the first time in my long life
I am almost happy. The book, almost finished,
Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument
To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.

Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me.
Satan glides before me, saying sweetly:
“Rest for a day! You can rest and play today.
Tonight you will work.” When night comes,
My mind, terrified by the arrears,
Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence,
Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.”
Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself
With the same resolution, the same weakness.

I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.
I am sick of having colds and headaches:
You know my strange life. Every day brings
Its quota of wrath. You little know
A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems,
The most fatiguing of occupations.

I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a caf, near the post office,
Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes,
The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write
“A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write
“A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history
Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart?

Although it costs you countless agony,
Although you cannot believe it necessary,
And doubt that the sum is accurate,
Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. „Baudelaire”
w temacie Autoportret w lustrze wiersza

Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day

Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school
in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn . . .)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

przekład Jarosława Marka Rymkiewicza pt. „Dla Rhody”
w tematach: Spacery poetów i Czas, zegary...

In The Naked Bed, In Plato's Cave

In the naked bed, in Plato's cave,
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.
The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram
Slid slowly forth.
Hearing the milkman's clop,
his striving up the stair, the bottle's chink,
I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,
And walked to the window. The stony street
Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand,
The street-lamp's vigil and the horse's patience.
The winter sky's pure capital
Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes.

Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose
Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves' waterfalls,
Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.
A car coughed, starting. Morning softly
Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,
Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.
The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,
Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet
With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of the beginning
Again and again,
while history is unforgiven.

przekład Zbigniewa Herberta pt. „Na łóżku nagim, w jaskini Platona”
w temacie W głąb siebie...

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water's clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
--The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

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

Inne wiersze Delmore’a Schwartza w tematach: Co się poetom śni...?,
”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”.../Zima – R. M.Ten post został edytowany przez Autora dnia 11.06.13 o godzinie 10:26

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) – amerykański poeta, tłumacz i krytyk literacki. Urodził się Nashville w stanie Tennessee, w 1938 roku ukończył studia filologiczne na Uniwersytecie Vanderbilta, gdzie następnie podjął pracę jako asystent. Po dwóch latach otrzymał już etat profesora na uniwersytecie w Teksasie. Bardzo szybko dał się poznać jako błyskotliwy krytyk literacki. W 1942 roku opublikował swój pierwszy tom wierszy „Blood for Stranger”. Wkrótce został zmobilizowany do wojska i rozpoczął służbę jako nawigator w lotnictwie bombowym. Temat wojny był potem wiodącym w jego twórczości. Po wojnie współredagował czasopismo „Nation”, a w 1947 roku otrzymał etat profesora na Woman's College University w Północnej Karolinie. Ceniony był głównie jako krytyk literacki, uznany za najbardziej przenikliwego
i groźnego krytyka swego pokolenia. Równolegle uprawiał własną twórczość poetycką
i translatorską. Największy rozgłos przyniosła mu książka „The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Poems and Translations” (1962), za którą otrzymał National Book Award. Zginął w 1965 roku, w wieku 51 lat, potrącony o zmierzchu przez samochód. Ponieważ cierpiał na depresję i miał za sobą nieudaną próbę samobójczą, również w tym wypadku doszukiwano się samobójstwa. Wersja ta nie została jednak nigdy potwierdzona.
Wiersze Randalla Jarrella tłumaczyli na polski: Michał Sprusiński, Grzegorz Musiał, Stanisław Barańczak i Leszek Elektorowicz. Ukazały się one w tomach: Randall Jarrell: Mężczyzna spotyka kobietę. Tłumaczył, wyboru dokonał i słowem wstępnym poprzedził Michał Sprusiński. PIW, Warszawa 1976; Grzegorz Musiał: Ameryka, Ameryka! Antologia wierszy poetów amerykańskich po 1940 roku. Wyd. Pomorze, Bydgoszcz 1994 ; Stanisław Barańczak: Od Walta Whitmana do Boba Dylana. Antologia poezji amerykańskiej. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1998 oraz w prasie literackiej.

A Country Life

A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
The field is yellow as egg-bread dough
Except where (just as though they'd let
It live for looks) a locust billows
In leaf-green and shade-violet,
A standing mercy.

The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."
If someone came by I could ask,
Around here all of them must know -
And why they live so and die so -
Or why, for once, the lagging heron
Flaps from the little creek's parched cresses
Across the harsh-grassed, gullied meadow
To the black, rowed evergreens below.

They know and they don't know.
To ask, a man must be a stranger -
And asking, much more answering, is dangerous;
Asked about it, who would not repent
Of all he ever did and never meant,
And think a life and its distresses,
Its random, clutched-for, homefelt blisses,
The circumstances of an accident?

The farthest farmer in a field,
A gaunt plant grown, for seed, by farmers,
Has felt a longing, lorn urbanity
Jailed in his breast; and, just as I,
Has grunted, in his old perplexity,
A standing plea.

From the tar of the blazing square
The eyes shift, in their taciturn
And unavowing, unavailable sorrow.
Yet the intonation of a name confesses
Some secrets that they never meant
To let out to a soul; and what words would not dim
The bowed and weathered heads above the denim
Or the once-too-often washed wash dresses?

They are subdued to their own element.
One day
The red, clay face
Is lowered to the naked clay;
After some words, the body is forsaken
The shadows lengthen, and a dreaming hope
Breathes, from the vague mound, Life;
From the grove under the spire
Stars shine, and a wandering light
Is kindled for the mourner, man.
The angel kneeling with the wreath
Sees, in the moonlight, graves.

przekład Michała Sprusińskiego pt. "Na wsi"
w temacie A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech

The Black Swan

When the swans turned my sister into a swan
I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
A swan's red beak; and the beak would open
And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon.

Out on the lake, a girl would laugh.
"Sister, here is your porridge, sister,"
I would call; and the reeds would whisper,
"Go to sleep, go to sleep, little swan."
My legs were all hard and webbed, and the silky

Hairs of my wings sank away like stars
In the ripples that ran in and out of the reeds:
I heard through the lap and hiss of water
Someone's "Sister... sister," far away on the shore,
And then as I opened my beak to answer

I heard my harsh laugh go out to the shore
And saw - saw at last, swimming up from the green
Low mounds of the lake, the white stone swans:
The white, named swans... "It is all a dream,"
I whispered, and reached from the down of the pallet

To the lap and hiss of the floor.
And "Sleep, little sister," the swan all sang
From the moon and stars and frogs of the floor.
But the swan my sister called, "Sleep at last, little sister,"
And stroked all night, with a black wing, my wings.

przekład Michała Sprusińskiego pt. "Czarny łabędź"
w tematach: Pierzaści bracia mniejsi i Metamorfozy

90 North

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,
I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides
I sailed all night - till at last, with my black beard,
My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

There in the childish night my companions lay frozen,
The stiff fur knocked at my starveling throat,
And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling,
Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.

- Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence
Of the unbroken ice. I stand here,
The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare
At the North Pole . . .
And now what? Why, go back.

Turn as I please, my step is to the south.
The world - my world spins on this final point
Of cold and wretchedness: all lines, all winds
End in this whirlpool I at last discover.

And it is meaningless. In the child's bed
After the night's voyage, in that warm world
Where people work and suffer for the end
That crowns the pain - in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

I reached my North and it had meaning.
Here at the actual pole of my existence,
Where all that I have done is meaningless,
Where I die or live by accident alone -
Where, living or dying, I am still alone;
Here where North, the night, the berg of death
Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,
I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness - that the darkness flung me -
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

przekład Grzegorz Musiała pt. „90 Noth” w tematach:
”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”... i Co się poetom śni...?

Losses

It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes - and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)

In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores -
And turned into replacements and worke up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
We read our mail and counted up our missions -
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school -
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."
The said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.

It was not dying - no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"

dwa przekłady pt. "Straty": Michała Sprusińskiego w temacie
Wojna i Leszka Elektorowicza w temacie Między zyskiem a stratą

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Śmierć strzelca
z wieżyczki bombowca” w tematach: Wojna i Śmierć

A Man Meets a Woman in the Street

Under the separated leaves of shade
Of the gingko, that old tree
That has existed essentially unchanged
Longer than any other living tree,
I walk behind a woman. Her hair's coarse gold
Is spun from the sunlight that it rides upon.
Women were paid to knit from sweet champagne
Her second skin: it winds and unwinds, winds
Up her long legs, delectable haunches,
As she sways, in sunlight, up the gazing aisle.
The shade of the tree that is called maidenhair,
That is not positively known
To exist in a wild state, spots her fair or almost fair
Hair twisted in a French twist; tall or almost tall,
She walks through the air the rain has washed, a clear thing
Moving easily on its high heels, seeming to men
Miraculous...Since I can call her, as Swann couldn't
A woman who is my type, I follow with the warmth
Of familiarity, of novelty, this new
Example of the type,
Reminded of how Lorenz's just-hatched goslings
Shook off the last remnants of the egg
And, looking at Lorenz, realized that Lorenz
Was their mother. Quaking, his little family
Followed him everywhere; and when they met a goose,
Their mother, they ran to him afraid.

Imprinted upon me
Is the shape I run to, the sweet strange
Breath-taking contours that breathe to me: "I am yours,
Be mine!"
Following this new
Body, somehow familiar, this young shape, somehow old,
For a moment I'm younger, the century is younger.
the living Strauss, his moustache just getting gray,
Is shouting to the players: "Louder!
Louder! I can still hear Madame Schumann-Heink -"
Or else, white, bald, the old man's joyfully
Telling conductors they must play Elektra
Like A Midsummer Night's Dream - like a fairy music;
Proust, dying, is swallowing his iced beer
And changing in proof the death of Bergotte
According to his own experience; Garbo,
A commissar in Paris, is listening attentively
To the voice telling how McGillicuddy me McGillivray,
And McGillivray said to McGillicuddy-no, McGillicuddy
Said to McGillivray-that is, McGillivray...Garbo
Says seriously: "I vish dey'd never met."

As I walk behind this woman I remember
That before I flew here-waked in the forest
At dawn, by the piece called Birds Beginning Day
That, each day, birds play to begin the day-
I wished as men wish: "May this day be different!"
The birds were wishing, as birds wish-over and over,
With a last firmness, intensity, reality -
"May this day be the same!"
Ah, turn to me
And look into my eyes, say: "I am yours,
Be mine!"
My wish will have come true. And yet
When your eyes meet my eyes, they'll bring into
The weightlessness of my pure wish the weight
Of a human being: someone to help or hurt,
Someone to be good to me, to be good to,
Someone to cry when I am angry
that she doesn't like Elektra, someone to start on Proust with.
A wish, come true, is life. I have my life.
When you turn just slide your eyes across my eyes
And show in a look flickering across your face
As lightly as a leaf's shade, a bird's wing,
That there is no one in the world quit like me,
That if only...If only...
That will be enough.

But I've pretended long enough: I walk faster
And come close, touch with the tip of my finger
The nape of her neck, just where the gold
Hair stops, and the champagne-colored dress begins.
My finger touches her as the gingko's shadow
Touches her.
Because, after all, it is my wife
In a new dress from Bergdorf's, walking toward the park.
She cries out, we kiss each other, and walk arm in arm
Through the sunlight that's much too good for New York,
The sunlight of our own house in the forest.
Still, though, the poor things need it...We've no need
To start out on Proust, to ask each other about Strauss.
We first helped each other, hurt each other, years ago.
After so many changes made and joys repeated,
Our first bewildered, transcending recognition
Is pure acceptance. We can't tell our life
From our wish. Really I began the day
Not with a man's wish: "May this day be different,"
But with the birds' wish: "May this day
Be the same day, the day of my life."

przekład Michała Sprusińskiego pt. „Mężczyzna spotyka kobietę
na ulicy w temacie” Pożądanie, fantazje erotyczne

Inny wiersz Randalla Jarrella w tematach:
"Okrutną zagadką jest życie".../Angelologia i dal... Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 29.09.11 o godzinie 13:17

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)*

Letter to New York

For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „List do Nowego Jorku”
w temacie Listy poetyckie

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Bezsenność”
w temacie Noce bezsenne...

A Miracle for Breakfast

At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
--like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
--I saw it with one eye close to the crumb--

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

dwa przekłady tego wiersza pt. „Cud na śniadanie”:
Krzysztofa Boczkowskiego w temacie Potrawy i napoje...
i Ludmiły Marjańskiej w temacie Wiersze na przebudzenie...

*notka o poetce, inne jej wiersze i linki wcześniej w tym temacieRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 15.01.10 o godzinie 09:25

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) – amerykańska poetka i powieściopisarka. Urodziła się
w New Jersey. Gdy miała dwanaście lat jej rodzina przeniosła się do Pensylwanii,
gdzie jej dziadek, Henry M. Hoyt, był gubernatorem. Uczęszczała do szkół prywatnych. Od dzieciństwa cierpiała na depresję, co mogło być obciążeniem dziedzicznym, zważywszy że jej matka była hipochondryczką, jeden z braci popełnił samobójstwo, drugi próbował je popełnić i również siostra zmarła w niewyjaśnionych okolicznościach. Elinor prowadziła dość burzliwy i ekstrawagancki styl życia, na przekór swojej rodzinie o poglądach purytańskich. Jako młoda dziewczyna uciekła z Philipem Hichbornem,
za którego później wyszła za mąż i miała z nim syna. Małżeństwo okazało się jednak nieudane, podobnie jak i drugie z siedemnaście lat od niej starszym prawnikiem Horacym Wylie, które odbiło się w kręgach jej rodziny i znajomych wielkim skandalem. Trzecim jej mężem był znany poeta, pisarz i krytyk literacki William Rose Benet.
Była bardzo popularną poetką. Pierwszy tomik wierszy „Numbers” wydała prywatnie
w czasie swego pobytu w Anglii w 1912 roku. Największą sławę przyniósł jej tom „Nets to Catch the Wind” (1921). Potem ukazały się jeszcze: “Black Armour” (1923); pośmiertnie: “Trivial Breath” (1928), “Angels and Earthly Creatures” (1929), “Collected Poems” (1932). Elinor Wylie zmarła na udar mózgu w 1928 r., w wieku 43 lat.

Sea Lullaby

The old moon is tarnished
With smoke of the flood,
The dead leaves are varnished
With colour like blood.

A treacherous smiler
With teeth white as milk,
A savage beguiler
In sheathings of silk

The sea creeps to pillage,
She leaps on her prey;
A child of the village
Was murdered today.

She came up to meet him
In a smooth golden cloak,
She choked him and beat him
to death, for a joke.

Her bright locks were tangled,
She shouted for joy
With one hand she strangled
A strong little boy.

Now in silence she lingers
Beside him all night
To wash her long fingers
In silvery light.

Love Song

Lovers eminent in love
Ever diversities combine;
The vocal chords of the cushat-dove,
The snake's articulated spine.

Such elective elements
Educate the eye and lip
With one's refreshing innocence,
The other's claim to scholarship.

The serpent's knowledge of the world
Learn, and the dove's more naïve charm;
Whether your ringlets should be curled,
And why he likes his claret warm.

Pretty Words

Poets make pets of pretty, docile words:
I love smooth words, like gold-enamelled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish,
And tender ones, like downy-feathred birds:
Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds,
Come to my hand, and playful if I wish,
Or purring softly at a silver dish,
Blue Persian kittens fed on cream and curds.

I love bright words, words up and singing early;
Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;
Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees,
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

Wild Peaches

I

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we'll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We'll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
You'll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut's dark gold colour.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We'll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

II

The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass
Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold.
The misted early mornings will be cold;
The little puddles will be roofed with glass.
The sun, which burns from copper into brass,
Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold
Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold
Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass.

Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winter's over.
By February you may find the skins
Of garter snakes and water moccasins
Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear.

III

When April pours the colours of a shell
Upon the hills, when every little creek
Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake
In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell,
When strawberries go begging, and the sleek
Blue plums lie open to the blackbird's beak,
We shall live well -- we shall live very well.

The months between the cherries and the peaches
Are brimming cornucopias which spill
Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black;
Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches
We'll trample bright persimmons, while you kill
Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback.

IV

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There's something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There's something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom's breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

przekład Ludmiły Marjańskiej pt. „Dzikie brzoskwinie”
w temacie Raj, wyspy szczęśliwe, arkadia

The Puritan's Ballad

My love came up from Barnegat,
The sea was in his eyes;
He trod as softly as a cat
And told me terrible lies.

His hair was yellow as new-cut pine
In shavings curled and feathered;
I thought how silver it would shine
By cruel winters weathered.

But he was in his twentieth year,
Ths time I'm speaking of;
We were head over heels in love with fear
And half a-feared of love.

My hair was piled in a copper crown --
A devilish living thing --
And the tortise-shell pins fell down, fell down,
When that snake uncoiled to spring.

His feet were used to treading a gale
And balancing thereon;
His face was as brown as a foreign sail
Threadbare against the sun.

His arms were thick as hickory logs
Whittled to little wrists;
Strong as the teeth of a terrier dog
Were the fingers of his fists.

Within his arms I feared to sink
Where lions shook their manes,
And dragons drawn in azure ink
Lept quickened by his veins.

Dreadful his strength and length of limb
As the sea to foundering ships;
I dipped my hands in love for him
No deeper than the tips.

But our palms were welded by a flame
The moment we came to part,
And on his knuckles I read my name
Enscrolled with a heart.

And something made our wills to bend,
As wild as trees blown over;
We were no longer friend and friend,
But only lover and lover.

"In seven weeks or seventy years --
God grant it may be sooner! --
I'll make a hankerchief for you
From the sails of my captain's schooner.

We'll wear our loves like wedding rings
Long polished to our touch;
We shall be busy with other things
And they cannot bother us much.

When you are skimming the wrinkled cream
And your ring clinks on the pan,
You'll say to yourself in a pensive dream,
'How wonderful a man!'

When I am slitting a fish's head
And my ring clanks on the knife,
I'll say with thanks as a prayer is said,
'How beautiful a wife!'

And I shall fold my decorous paws
In velvet smooth and deep,
Like a kitten that covers up its claws
To sleep and sleep and sleep.

Like a little blue pigeon you shall bow
Your bright alarming crest;
In the crook of my arm you'll lay your brow
To rest and rest and rest.

Will he never come back from Barnegat
With thunder in his eyes,
Treading as soft as a tiger cat,
To tell me terrible lies?

przekład Ludmiły Marjańskiej pt. „Ballada purytańska”
w tematach: Prawda i kłamstwo i Ballady Marta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 17.01.10 o godzinie 09:09

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

C. K. Williams

Shock

Furiously a crane
in the scrapyard out of whose grasp
a car it meant to pick up slipped,
lifts and lets fall, lifts and lets fall
the steel ton of its clenched pincers
onto the shuddering carcass
which spurts fragments of anguished glass
until it's sufficiently crushed
to be hauled up and flung onto
the heap from which one imagines
it'll move on to the shredding
or melting down that awaits it.

Also somewhere a crow
with less evident emotion
punches its beak through the dead
breast of a dove or albino
sparrow until it arrives at
a coil of gut it can extract,
then undo with a dexterous twist
an oily stretch just the right length
to be devoured, the only
suggestion of violation
the carrion jerked to one side
in involuntary dismay.

Splayed on the soiled pavement
the dove or sparrow; dismembered
in the tangled remnants of itself
the wreck, the crane slamming once more
for good measure into the all
but dematerialized hulk,
then luxuriously swaying
away, as, gorged, glutted, the crow
with savage care unfurls the full,
luminous glitter of its wings,
so we can preen, too, for so much
so well accomplished, so well seen.

Wiersz w przekładzie Mai Wodeckiej, pt. "Szok",
w temacie Homo automobilus, czyli jadę samochodem...,
inne wiersze C. K. Williamsa,
po angielsku - w tym temacie, wcześniej: na str. 5 oraz na str. 6,
po polsku - linki do pozostałych tematów - w tym samym temacie, na str. 6 - M.M. Michał M. edytował(a) ten post dnia 24.01.10 o godzinie 02:10

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Leonard Nathan (1924-2007) – amerykański poeta, tłumacz i krytyk literacki, absolwent i wykładowca na Uniwersytecie Kalifornijskim w Berkeley, autor tomów poezji: „Western Reaches” (1958), „Glad and Sorry Seasons” (1964), “The Matchmaker's Lament (1967), “The Day the Perfect Speakers Left” (1969), “Flight Plan” (1971), “The Likeness: Poems out of India” (1975), “Teachings of Grandfather “Dear Blood” (1980), “Holding Patterns” (1982), “Carrying On: New and Selected Poems” (1985), “The Poet's Work” (1991), “Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher” (1996), “The Potato Eaters” (1998), “Tears of the Old Magician” (2003), “Restarting the World” (2006). Przyjaźnił się z Czesławem Miłoszem, przy którego współpracy tłumaczył poezję polską na angielski, m. in. Aleksandra Wata („With the Skin: Poems of Aleksander Wat”, 1989) i Anny Świrszczyńskiej (“Talking to My Body: Poems of Anna Swir”, 1996). Należał do najwybitniejszych poetów amerykańskich ubiegłego stulecia, wielokrotnie nagradzany za swą twórczość, m. in. nagrodą National Institute of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship, Phelan Award for Narrative Poetry.

Toast

There was a woman in Ithaca
who cried softly all night
in the next room and helpless
I fell in love with her under the blanket
of snow that settled on all the roots
of the town, filling up
every dark depression.

Next morning
in the motel coffee shop
I studied all the made-up faces
of women. Was it the middle-aged blonde
who kidded the waitress
or the young brunette lifting
her cup like a toast?

Love, whoever you are,
your courage was my companion
for many cold towns
after the betrayal of Ithaca,
and when I order coffee
in a strange place, still
I say, lifting, this is for you.

1996

przekład Czesława Miłosz pt. „Toast” w tematach:
W wynajętych pokojach i Toasty wierszem wznoszone

Bladder Song

On a piece of toilet paper
Afloat in the unflushed piss,
The fully printed lips of a woman.

Nathan, cheer up! The sewer
Sends you a big red kiss.
Ah, nothing’s wasted, if it’s human.

1996

przekład Czesława Miłosza pt. „Pieśń pęcherza”
w temacie Turpizm

The Potato Eaters

Sometimes, the naked taste of potato
reminds me of being poor.

The first bites are gratitude,
the rest, contented boredom.

The little kitchen still flickers
like a candle-lit room in a folktale.

Never again was my father so angry,
my mother so still as she set the table,

or I so much at home.

1998

Abd Have You Also Wished

And have you also wished to leave the world
of unforgiving surface and hard time,
to enter mist and climb an autumn slope,
becoming all but invisible below
a gray and dripping baldachin of boughs
that lead to the little clearing in the woods
where much will be revealed, what love and dreams
had promised before you woke and had to leave?
And have you, even as you wished this all,
passionately wished it, nevertheless continued
in the old direction, stretching out
and out to dust, foregone and trampled flat,
because you were told to once or because - who knows -
you said you would, or something shallow as that?

2006

When I First Saw

When I first saw my new-born son, I saw
life would be somewhat different now for me,
as Schopenhauer warned us that it would
if we gave in to mere biology.
Of course, there was pity—pity, seed of love,
but there was more: a grown-up feel, quite new,
of separation. I saw it when my son
looked at his own first son; when he was first
shown me, I guess my father felt it too.
And so the hunter, after his freelance chase,
comes home to find another mouth to feed,
and, watching the woman lift it to her breast,
feels useless, yes, but more responsible,
and growls and frowns, and kneels to skin the kill.

2006Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 27.03.12 o godzinie 12:31

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Lawrence Raab (ur. 1946) – amerykański poeta i krytyk literacki, urodził się
w Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ukończył Middlebury College w Vermont i Syracuse University, wykładał na wyższych uczelniach, m. in. na American University
w Waszyngtonie i Williams Colege w Williamstown, gdzie mieszka od 1976 roku. Opublikował książki poetyckie: „The Collector of Cold Weather” (1976), „Other Children” (1987), „What We Don’t Know About Each Other” (1993), „The Probable World” (2000), „Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems” (2003), „The History
of Forgetting Poets” (2009). Jest laureatem wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich,
m. in. National Poetry Series (1992) i Guggenheim Fellowships (2007).

Visiting the Oracle

It's dark on purpose
so just listen.

Maybe I inhabit a jar, maybe a pot,
maybe nothing. Only this
loose end of a voice
rising to meet you.
It sounds like water.
Don't think about that.

Let your servants climb back down the mountain
by themselves. I'll listen.
I'll tell you everything
I discover, but I can't
say what it means.

Someone will always
assure you of the best of fortunes,
but you know better.

And keep this in mind: The answer
reveals itself in time
like the clue that fits
perfectly and explains everything
after the crime has been solved.

Then you will say: I should have known.
It was there all along
and never even concealed,
like the story of the letter
overlooked by the thief because
it had not been hidden.
That's the trick, of course.

You don't need me.

z tomu “The Collector of Cold Weather”, 1976

In the Island

After a night of wind we are surprised
by the light, how it flutters up from the back of the sea
and leaves us at ease. We can walk along the shore
this way or that, all day. Sit in the spiky grass
among the low whittled bushes, listening
to crickets, to the whisk of the small waves,
the rattling back of stones. “Observation,”
our Golden Nature Guide instructs, is the key to science.
Look all around you. Some beaches
may be quite barren except for things washed up.”
A buoy and a blue bottle, a lightbulb
cloudy but unbroken. For an hour
my daughter gathers trinkets, bits of good luck.
She sings the song she’s just invented:
Everybody knows when the old days come.
Although it is October, today falls into the shape
of summer, that sense of languid promise
in which we are offered another
and then another spell of flawless weather.
It is the weather of Sundays,
the weather of memory, and I can see
myself sitting on a porch looking
out at water, the discreet shores
of a lake. Three or four white pines
were enough of a mystery, how they shook
and whispered, how at night I felt them
leaning against my window, like the beginning
of a story in which children must walk
deeper and deeper into a dark forest,
and are afraid, yet calm, unaware
of the arrangements made for them to survive.
My daughter counts her shells and stones,
my wife clips bayberry from the pathway. I raise
an old pair of binoculars, follow the edge of the sky
to the lighthouse, then down into the waves as they
fold around rocks humped up out of the sea.
I can turn the wheel and blur it all
into a dazzle, the pure slips and shards of light.
“A steady push of wind,” we read in the book,
“gives water its rolling, rising and falling motion.
As the sea moves up and down, the wave itself
moves forward. As it nears the shore friction
from the bottom causes it to rise higher
until it tips forward in an arc and breaks.”
On the table in front of the house
is the day’s collection: sea-glass
and starfish, a pink claw, that blue bottle—
some to be taken home, arranged in a box,
laid on a shelf, later rediscovered, later
thrown away, casually, without regret,
and some of it, even now, to be discarded,
like the lesser stones, and the pale
chipped shells which are so alike
we can agree that saving one or two will be enough.

z tomu “Other Children”, 1987

Marriage

Years later they find themselves talking
about chances, moments when their lives
might have swerved off
for the smallest reason.
What if
I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning?
What if you’d been out,
as you were when I tried three times
the night before?
Then she tells him a secret.
She’d been there all evening, and she knew
he was the one calling, which was why
she hadn’t answered.
Because she felt—
because she was certain—her life would change
if she picked up the phone, said hello,
said, I was just thinking
of you.
I was afraid,
she tells him. And in the morning
I also knew it was you, but I just
answered the phone
the way anyone
answers a phone when it starts to ring,
not thinking you have a choice.

z tomu “What We Don’t Know About Each Other”, 1993

The Sudden Appearance of a Monster at a Window

Yes, his face really is so terrible
you cannot turn away. And only
that thin sheet of glass between you,
clouding with his breath.
Behind him: the dark scribbles of trees
in the orchard, where you walked alone
just an hour ago, after the storm had passed,
watching water drip from the gnarled branches,
stepping carefully over the sodden fruit.
At any moment he could put his fist
right through that window. And on your side:
you could grab hold of this
letter opener, or even now try
very slowly to slide the revolver
out of the drawer of the desk in front of you.
But none of this will happen. And not because
you feel sorry for him, or detect
in his scarred face some helplessness
that shows in your own as compassion.
You will never know what he wanted,
what he might have done, since
this thing, of its own accord, turns away.
And because yours is a life in which
such a monster cannot figure for long,
you compose yourself, and return
to your letter about the storm, how it bent
the apple trees so low they dragged
on the ground, ruining the harvest.

z tomu “What We Don’t Know About Each Other”, 1993

przekład Czesława Miłosza pt. „Nagłe zjawienie się potwora w oknie”
w temacie O smokach i innych potworach

The Poem that Can't Be Written

is different from the poem
that is not written, or the many

that are never finished - those boats
lost in the fog, adrift

in the windless latitudes,
the charts useless, the water gone.

In the poem that cannot
be written there is no danger,

no ponderous cargo of meaning,
no meaning at all. And this

is its splendor, this is how
it becomes an emblem,

not of failure or loss,
but of the impossible.

So the wind rises. The tattered sails
billow, and the air grows sweeter.

A green island appears.
Everyone is saved.

”The New Yorker” 2009, Aprlil 6

przekład Krzysztofa Stachnika pt. „Wiersz którego
nie da się napisać” w temacie Czym jest wiersz?Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 28.01.10 o godzinie 18:11

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) – poeta amerykański, uważany za ojca poezji śpiewanej.
Urodził się w Springfield, w stanie Illinois. Ojciec jego był lekarzem, rodzina dość zamożna, mieszkała w luksusowej dzielnicy Springfield, w sąsiedztwie domu Johna Petera Altgelda - gubernatora Illinois. Osoba gubernatora i miejsce, gdzie się wychowywał Vachel znalazły odzwierciedlenie w kilku jego utworach poetyckich, m. in. w wierszu „The Eagle Forgotten".
W latach 1897-1900, za namową rodziców, Vachel studiował medycynę w Hiram College w Ohio. Nie czuł jednak powołania do zawodu lekarskiego i porzucił studia medyczne, aby uczyć się rysunku i malarstwa w Art Institute of Chicago (1900-1903) i od 1904 roku w New York School of Art. Studia plastyczne zwróciły też jego uwagę na film jako nowy rodzaj sztuki, co zaowocowało napisaniem przez niego jednej z pierwszych na świecie książek z zakresu teorii filmu pt. „"The Art of the Moving Picture" (1915). Podczas pobytu w Nowym Jorku Lindsay zajął się na poważnie poezją. Początkowo próbował sprzedawać swoje wiersze na ulicach. Od 1906 roku rozpoczął piesze wędrówki po Stanach Zjednoczonych, a nawet i poza ich granice do Meksyku, w trakcie których popularyzował swoją twórczość. Oferował czytanie swojej poezji za nocleg i posiłki, ewentualnie za półdniowe odpracowanie gościny. Wędrówki te kontynuował przez większość swojego życia, pokonał setki mil, stając się z czasem jednym z najbardziej znanych i popularnych poetów amerykańskich. Pomimo artystycznej sławy jego sytuacja finansowała pogarszała się coraz bardziej. W 1924 roku osiadł
w Spokane, w stanie Waszyngton, gdzie przez 5 lat mieszkał w skromnym pokoju hotelowym.
W 1925 roku ożenił się z 22 lata młodszą od siebie Elizabeth Connor, z którą miał dwoje dzieci.
W wyniku pogarszającej się sytuacji finansowej i złego stanu zdrowia, popadł w depresję.
5 grudnia 1931 roku odebrał sobie życie, zatruwając się lizolem.
Najbardziej znane tomy poezji Vachela Lindsay’a to: “Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread” (1912),
„The Congo and Other Poems” (1914), “Collected Poems” (1925), “Every Soul Is a Circus” (1929), “Selected Poems” (1931).
Na język polski jego wiersze tłumaczyli: Józef Czechowicz, Bohdan Drozdowski, Stanisław Helsztyński, Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski, Czesław Miłosz, Robert Stiller. Ukazał się tom Vachel Lindsay: Wiersze wybrane. Przełożył i opracował Robert Stiller. PIW, Warszawa 1977.

Simon Legree . A Negro Sermon.

(To be read in your own variety of negro dialect.)

Legree’s big house was white and green.
His cotton-fields were the best to be seen.
He had strong horses and opulent cattle,
And bloodhounds bold, with chains that would rattle.
His garret was full of curious things:
Books of magic, bags of gold,
And rabbits’ feet on long twine strings.
BUT HE WENT DOWN TO THE DEVIL.

Legree he sported a brass-buttoned coat,
A snake-skin necktie, a blood-red shirt.
Legree he had a beard like a goat,
And a thick hairy neck, and eyes like dirt.
His puffed-out cheeks were fish-belly white,
He had great long teeth, and an appetite.
He ate raw meat, ‘most every meal,
And rolled his eyes till the cat would squeal.
His fist was an enormous size
To mash poor niggers that told him lies:
He was surely a witch-man in disguise.
BUT HE WENT DOWN TO THE DEVIL.

He wore hip-boots, and would wade all day
To capture his slaves that had fled away.
BUT HE WENT DOWN TO THE DEVIL.

He beat poor Uncle Tom to death
Who prayed for Legree with his last breath.
Then Uncle Tom to Eva flew,
To the high sanctoriums bright and new;
And Simon Legree stared up beneath,
And cracked his heels, and ground his teeth:
AND WENT DOWN TO THE DEVIL.

He crossed the yard in the storm and gloom;
He went into his grand front room.
He said, “I killed him, and I don’t care.”
He kicked a hound, he gave a swear;
He tightened his belt, he took a lamp,
Went down cellar to the webs and damp.
There in the middle of the mouldy floor
He heaved up a slab, he found a door—
AND WENT DOWN TO THE DEVIL.

His lamp blew out, but his eyes burned bright.
Simon Legree stepped down all night—
DOWN, DOWN TO THE DEVIL.
Simon Legree he reached the place,
He saw one half of the human race,
He saw the Devil on a wide green throne,
Gnawing the meat from a big ham-bone,
And he said to Mister Devil:

“I see that you have much to eat—
A red ham-bone is surely sweet.
I see that you have lion’s feet;
I see your frame is fat and fine,
I see you drink your poison wine—
Blood and burning turpentine.”

And the Devil said to Simon Legree:
“I like your style, so wicked and free.
Come sit and share my throne with me,
And let us bark and revel.”
And there they sit and gnash their teeth,
And each one wears a hop-vine wreath.
They are matching pennies and shooting craps,
They are playing poker and taking naps.
And old Legree is fat and fine:
He eats the fire, he drinks the wine—
Blood and burning turpentine—
DOWN, DOWN WITH THE DEVIL;
DOWN, DOWN WITH THE DEVIL;
DOWN, DOWN WITH THE DEVIL.

przekład Czesława Milosza pt. „Szymon Legree – przypowieść murzyńska”
w tematach: Przypowieść i Za bramą piekieł, czyli motyw diabła w poezji

On the Garden-wall

Oh, once I walked a garden
In dreams. 'Twas yellow grass.
And many orange-trees grew there
In sand as white as glass.
The curving, wide wall-border
Was marble, like the snow.
I walked that wall a fairy-prince
And, pacing quaint and slow,
Beside me were my pages,
Two giant, friendly birds.
Half-swan they were, half peacock.
They spake in courtier-words.
Their inner wings a chariot,
Their outer wings for flight,
They lifted me from dreamland.
We bade those trees good-night.
Swiftly above the stars we rode.
I looked below me soon.
The white-walled garden I had ruled
Was one lone flower -- the moon.

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Na murach ogrodu”
w temacie Ogród przedziwny

The Lion

The Lion is a kingly beast.
He likes a Hindu for a feast.
And if no Hindu he can get,
The lion-family is upset.

He cuffs his wife and bites her ears
Till she is nearly moved to tears.
Then some explorer finds the den
And all is family peace again.

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Lew” w tematach:
Sierściuchy i Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam

What the Rattlesnake Said

The moon's a little prairie-dog.
He shivers through the night.
He sits upon his hill and cries
For fear that I will bite.

The sun's a broncho. He's afraid
Like every other thing,
And trembles, morning, noon and night,
Lest I should spring, and sting.

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Co powiedział grzechotnik”
w temacie W poetyckim terrarium

The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly

Once I loved a spider
When I was born a fly,
A velvet-footed spider
With a gown of rainbow-dye.
She ate my wings and gloated.
She bound me with a hair.
She drove me to her parlor
Above her winding stair.
To educate young spiders
She took me all apart.
My ghost came back to haunt her.
I saw her eat my heart.

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Pajęczyca i duch much”
w temacie Owady są wszędzie

The Mouse that gnawed the Oak-tree Down

The mouse that gnawed the oak-tree down
Began his task in early life.
He kept so busy with his teeth
He had no time to take a wife.

He gnawed and gnawed through sun and rain
When the ambitious fit was on,
Then rested in the sawdust till
A month of idleness had gone.

He did not move about to hunt
The coteries of mousie-men.
He was a snail-paced, stupid thing
Until he cared to gnaw again.

The mouse that gnawed the oak-tree down,
When that tough foe was at his feet --
Found in the stump no angel-cake
Nor buttered bread, nor cheese, nor meat –

The forest-roof let in the sky.
"This light is worth the work," said he.
"I'll make this ancient swamp more light,"
And started on another tree.

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Mysz gryząca dąb”
w temacie Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam

What the Hyena Said

The moon is but a golden skull,
She mounts the heavens now,
And Moon-Worms, mighty Moon-Worms
Are wreathed around her brow.

The Moon-Worms are a doughty race:
They eat her gray and golden face.
Her eye-sockets dead, and molding head:
These caverns are their dwelling-place.

The Moon-Worms, serpents of the skies,
From the great hollows of her eyes
Behold all souls, and they are wise:
With tiny, keen and icy eyes,
Behold how each man sins and dies.

When Earth in gold-corruption lies
Long dead, the moon-worm butterflies
On cyclone wings will reach this place -
Yea, rear their brood on earth's dead face.

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Co powiedziała hiena”
w tematach Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam i Turpizm

The Empty Boats

Why do I see these empty boats, sailing on airy seas?
One haunted me the whole night long, swaying with every breeze,
Returning always near the eaves, or by the skylight glass:
There it will wait me many weeks, and then, at last, will pass.
Each soul is haunted by a ship in which that soul might ride
And climb the glorious mysteries of Heaven's silent tide
In voyages that change the very metes and bounds of Fate —
O empty boats, we all refuse, that by our windows wait!

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Puste łodzie”
w temacie Marynistyka

The Potato’s Dance

"Down cellar," said the cricket,
"I saw a ball last night
In honor of a lady
Whose wings were pearly-white.
The breath of bitter weather
Had smashed the cellar pane:
We entertained a drift of leaves
And then of snow and rain.
But we were dressed for winter,
And loved to hear it blow
In honor of the lady
Who makes potatoes grow--
Our guest, the Irish lady,
The tiny Irish lady,
The fairy Irish lady
That makes potatoes grow.
"Potatoes were the waiters,
Potatoes were the band,
Potatoes were the dancers
Kicking up the sand:
Their legs were old burnt matches,
Their arms were just the same,
They jigged and whirled and scrambled
In honor of the dame:
The noble Irish lady
Who makes potatoes dance,
The witty Irish lady,
The saucy Irish lady,
The laughing Irish lady
Who makes potatoes prance.
"There was just one sweet potato.
He was golden-brown and slim:
The lady loved his figure.
She danced all night with him.
Alas, he wasn't Irish.
So when she flew away,
They threw him in the coal-bin
And there he is to-day,
Where they cannot hear his sighs--
His weeping for the lady,
The beauteous Irish lady,
The radiant Irish lady
Who gives potatoes eyes."

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Taniec kartofli”
w temacie Na wesoło



Dom rodzinny Vachela Lindsay’a w Springfield, obecnie muzeum jego życia i twórczości

Wiersze Vachela Lidsay’a są także w tematach: Przypowieść, Kwiaty, Góry, poezja i my, Jak wysłowić konia czerń...?, Sierściuchy, Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam, O smokach i innych potworach, Owady są wszędzie, Kołysanki, nie tylko dla dzieci, W poetyckim terrarium, Latarnie - symbolika i poetyckie konteksty, Pochodnie, świece, znicze, O krasnoludkach, skrzatach, elfach i innych małych duszkach, Miłość, Najpiękniejsze łąki, WyboryMarek F. edytował(a) ten post dnia 22.11.11 o godzinie 12:41

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Glyn Hughes (ur. 1935) – poeta angielski, studiował w Regional College of Art
i na uniwersytecie w Manchesterze, gdzie uzyskał uprawnienia nauczyciela plastyki. Przez wiele lat uczył w szkołach, college’ach, uniwersytecie, a także w zakładzie karnym w Manchesterze. Mieszkał na przemian w Anglii (West Yorkshire) oraz
w Grecji. Wydał tomy poezji: „The Stanedge Bull” (1966), “Neighbours: Poems 1965-1969” (1970), “Rest the Poor Struggler: Poems 1969-1971” (1972), “Alibis and Convictions” (1978), “Best of Neighbours: New and Selected Poems” (1979), “Dancing Out Of The Dark Side” (2005) “Two Marriages” (2007). Od lat 80-tych pisze też powieści. Jest laureatem wielu nagród literackich, m. in. Arts Council of Wales Poetry Prize (1970), Arts Council of Wales Poetry Prize (1982), Guardian Fiction Prize (1982), James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1990), Whitbread Novel Award (1990).
Wiersze Glyna Hughesa, w przekładzie Piotra Sommera i Jarosława Andersa, ukazały się w książce: Piotr Sommer: Antologia nowej poezji brytyjskiej. Czytelnik, Warszawa 1983.

Z tomu „Dancing Out Of The Dark Side”, 2005

House

When I came here I had to un-nail the door
and break into its dark. Rain
dripping for years had rotted the floor.
I possessed first a smell of soot and ashes.
I let light in, and, twice, I married,

and left here for Greece
where often I’d blink at the light
and long for some, for this dark place,
just as the Greeks did as a matter of fact,
closing shutters and lurking in siestas.

Did I marry that one for her darkness,
did I turn to another for her light?
Then that light too became ashes.
Shadows of marriage haunt the corners
of house, woods, villages and hills.

Today I took our carpets where the cars
of other townsfolk loop around the tip
on this Bank Holiday: a clearance fiesta.
That house I once let light into is soon restored.
Visible, the wood and stone. Bare boards.

I re-discover the long-walled-up fireplaces.
Tonight – a glass of whisky in my hand –
for the first time again I can smell ashes.

The Centipede

In one brilliant moment there is your own soul’s breath
searing in baby flesh
and dipping into curious things,
puddles and leaves.

A small hand is gripping your finger,
pulling you into the garden,
where the blossom he taps to see the snowy flutter
is that entranced moment that lasts beyond life
and might have come before it: an infinite
moment that waited for its entrance here.

Dig - dig here. He shows you a centipede -
the vital lightening, a single flame
of gold he’s never seen before.

And neither, you realise, have you.
What the something is that fills your nothingness
is not his showing you how to dig,
but how to love.

Green

Once I sat all day in field and lane
to paint the everywhere pouring green.
Slept out in it on month-long wanderings:
green sprinkled with daisies, and the buttercups' candelabras,
and poppies, with their black hearts, and their red,
that seem so bold but are the frailest flowers,
living one day, collapsing in my hands.
Green crushed under the cattle's hooves and tongues,
strained out of the bodies of flies,
and smearing its juice on the farmer's cart.
Green through which birds hurtle and dive.
Green ripening to yellow sinking from the tip
of the corn slowly as the days turn by.
Green associated with mothers:
it was my mother's name.

I came out of the fields
a green man covered in a cling of seeds
rubbed off the hedgerows. Not quite sane
and awkward in the pubs on summer evenings.
With my smeared paintings,
wanting to be a peasant
as Van Gogh tried to be a priest:
a tunnel, a narrow gate mistaken for a way.

Milton’s Ghost

I am in the pub taproom where Milton did his ironing
In the quiet hours, but mostly Mrs Buckley’s
and hung it on a “maiden” by the fire
that he had lit and polished the brasses.
Milton Appleyard is who I mean.
A tough and self-contained ex-farmer
fallen on bad, or was it good, times,
he hand-washed and ironed
the undies of his dumpy odalisque
and served her in her hidden place
(their teeth in mild bleach by the bed, fancy that)
then fetched beer in a jug
where Buckley dared not enter and Mrs didn’t
among starched underwear and blouses.
He swept it, scrubbed it, ruled it,
choosing never to leave his bed and board
except to bring warm eggs in from the grass
or hang out washing above the roaming hens.

I catch it fortunately in its near-silence
and warmth of embers trapped from last night.
An hour like those that made their honeymoon;
that time when calls of poultry, curlews, larks
and Buckley’s grumbles invaded their window.
One pint of beer in the early evening
and I could almost live here again –
just as I almost did in the past,
like Milton with “my feet under the table”,
as welcome as any for my wit and my money.
The moor outside, and this taproom-kitchen -
“the poor man’s study”, as one dialect poet wrote -
is still the same; a stone floor, and a flagged ceiling,
and through the peephole window a damp green light
where crows tossed in the breaths
of thermals over the wood are dancing
but are really just blown on threads of air.

They have nests to steady them somewhere
and I, a pint of Lees’ dark bitter in my hand,
hold a dim thought of not being chucked out at eleven,
of not being chucked out ever - Milton’s ghost.

Z tomu “Two Marriages”, 2007

* * *

We would rise and make love out of the sea;
the sea’s blue and its spray fell from us,
my second, Greek wife and I.
Imagine a heat where nothing moves.
Though day and light must have increased and declined
yet I did not perceive it, nor
see change of life nor shadow on the herbage,
nor clouds, nor colour beyond the blue,
much blue, and varied gold and white,
nor sound beyond the even murmurs,
that therefore was no sound,
of insects in far trees beyond the sand
and out of this silence, from time to time, a lunge
of the sea lifting, weary perhaps, anyway gentle,
feminine I would say, strong, graceful,
with a rhythmic mounting, then a falling back,
that Yeats might term “a shudder in the loins”.

And we two making love. I’ll not describe that;
who can? Only before and after are we aware.
Metaphors will have to do. The sea.
Those images I have described.
The sea still heard, from behind our rock,
in perfect rhythm for us, its sigh and fall,
but endless, heard after we had tired,
no not tired but emptied - shared exhaustion’s bliss -
and slept in one another’s sandy arms.
Wake with eyes turned from the truth
of light. Kiss salt from off her hips.
Naked on this beach she’s divested
of her bird-bright elegance from Harrod or Biba,
Paris or London, but not her beauty.
These images I retain today: her pearl skin
and long, Minoan waist
that I’d only seen in Cretan sculptures:
pale stone, like her flesh, unreddening, smooth,
delightful to trace one’s fingers on -
and one’s lips, if museums would let one do it.

After love she’s detached. Yet not detached, really.
Consummated, with an inner stillness.
Men are thought to be so too, but I never was
any less aware nor desiring of her.
Truthfully, she was more aware of me than before - just, not looking.
I wanted it to last for ever,
and little, if I’m honest, did I feel more than that,
not consciously. Of course, I did take in
her beauty (that again), carrying towels and her beach-bag
by the shore of that thrilling leap of the sea -
the pale foam sprinkled, then all dying away -
strolling long-legged for a beer
(that is, an Amstell for me, for she drinks water)
for psomi and octopothia
under a cane-roofed, light-dappled taverna
where the northern tourists have arrived
(for this is early nineteen-seventy-four),
basted with sun oil for the roasting.

Though the quality of a moment at the time
has sometimes escaped me, yet I knew
that this was happiness at aged thirty nine -
more than I’d dreamed of at twenty. (And fitter, too.)
Did I deserve such happiness
of being given to, like this, and loved like this?
At that time I assumed it. Now, I think I didn’t.
Then again: when did love start?
Was it when hit by the glamour of her life:
an international shining, first in Hammersmith?

There seemed no place I’d stop in pursuit of feelings.
But what you know is, you’re a different person,
one that you hadn’t guessed you were,
one maybe better or worse; but clearly
there are as many selves to be as there are loves.

Inne wiersze Glyna Huhgesa, w polskim tłumaczeniu, w tematach:
Przemoc w majestacie prawa, W harmonii z przyrodą, Homo automobilus...,
Zima, Między sacrum a profanum..., Poezja codzienności, Być poetą.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 10.02.10 o godzinie 12:07

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) – angielski poeta i prozaik, laureat literackiej Nagrody
Nobla w 1907 roku. Urodził się i wychował w Indiach. Ojciec jego był znanym pisarzem
i rysownikiem, profesorem i rektorem Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Bombaju, kuratorem miejscowego muzeum, matka - dziennikarką. W 1871 roku pod opieką wuja, znanego malarza, wyjechał wraz ze swoją siostrą do Anglii, gdzie ukończył szkołę średnią
w Davon, przygotowującą do dalszej nauki w elitarnych akademiach wojskowych.
Po powrocie zrezygnował jednak z kariery wojskowej i urzędniczej, poświęcając się dziennikarstwu i literaturze. Jako poeta debiutował tomem wierszy „Schoolboy” (1881), potem wydał tom „Departmental Ditties” (1886). Rozgłos przyniosła mu jednak twórczość prozatorska, zwłaszcza napisane podczas czteroletniego pobytu w Stanach Zjednoczonych powieści: „The Jungle Book” (1894; polskie wyd. „Księga dżungli”, 1922) i „The Second Jungle Book” (1895; polskie wyd.: “Druga księga dżungli”, 1923). Za najwybitniejszy utwór uważa się powieść „Kim” (1901; polskie wyd.: „Kim”, 1926). W 1907 roku przyznano mu Nagrodę Nobla w dziedzinie literatury, za „zmysł obserwacyjny, dojrzałość idei i wybitny talent prozatorski". W swoim życiu dużo podróżował, zwiedził m. in. Amerykę, Australię
i Nową Zelandię. Następnie zakupił dom w hrabstwie Sussex i osiadł na stałe w Anglii. Ostatnie 20 lat życia zmagał się z chorobą nowotworową przewodu pokarmowego i jelit. Zmarł w 1936 roku, w wieku 71 lat.
Jego wiersze tłumaczyli na język polski m. in.: Artur Chojecki, Józef Czechowicz, Marian Hemar, Hanna Januszewska, Stanisław Helsztyński, Maciej Słomczyński, Andrzej Nowicki, Ludmiła Marjańska, Robert Stiller.

The Return

Peace is declared, and I return
To 'Ackneystadt, but not the same;
Things 'ave transpired which made me learn
The size and meanin' of the game.
I did no more than others did,
I don't know where the change began;
I started as a average kid,
I finished as a thinkin' man.

If England was what England seems
An' not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass, an' paint,
'Ow quick we'd drop 'er! But she ain't!

Before my gappin' mouth could speak
I 'eard it in my comrade's tone;
I saw it on my neighbour's cheek
Before I felt it flush my own.
An' last it come to me--not pride,
Nor yet conceit, but on the 'ole
(If such a term may be applied),
The makin's of a bloomin' soul.

Rivers at night that cluck an' jeer,
Plains which the moonshine turns to sea,
Mountains that never let you near,
An' stars to all eternity;
An' the quick-breathin' dark that fills
The 'ollows of the wilderness,
When the wind worries through the 'ills--
These may 'ave taught me more or less.

Towns without people, ten times took,
An' ten times left an' burned at last;
An' starvin' dogs that come to look
For owners when a column passed;
An' quiet, 'omesick talks between
Men, met by night, you never knew
Until--'is face--by shellfire seen--
Once--an' struck off. They taught me, too.

The day's lay-out--the mornin' sun
Beneath your 'at-brim as you sight;
The dinner-'ush from noon till one,
An' the full roar that lasts till night;
An' the pore dead that look so old
An' was so young an hour ago,
An' legs tied down before they're cold--
These are the things which make you know.

Also Time runnin' into years--
A thousand Places left be'ind--
An' Men from both two 'emispheres
Discussin' things of every kind;
So much more near than I 'ad known,
So much more great than I 'ad guessed--
An' me, like all the rest, alone--
But reachin' out to all the rest!

So 'ath it come to me--not pride,
Nor yet conceit, but on the 'ole
(If such a term may be applied),
The makin's of a bloomin' soul.
But now, discharged, I fall away
To do with little things again....
Gawd, 'oo knows all I cannot say,
Look after me in Thamesfontein!

If England was what England seems
An' not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass, an' paint,
'Ow quick we'd chuck 'er! But she ain't!

przekład Józefa Czechowicza pt. „Powrót wojsk”
w temacie Wojna

Recessional

(Victorian Ode)

God of our fathers, known of old --
Lord of our far-flung battle line --
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine --
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies --
The Captains and the Kings depart --
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away --
On dune and headland sinks the fire --
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe --
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law --
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard --
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.

przekład Stanisława Helsztyńskiego pt. „Hymn pokory”
w temacie Hymn

Mandalay

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat -- jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:
Bloomin' idol made o'mud --
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd --
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

When the mist was on the rice-fields an' the sun was droppin' slow,
She'd git 'er little banjo an' she'd sing “Kulla-lo-lo!”
With 'er arm upon my shoulder an' 'er cheek agin' my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an' the hathis pilin' teak.
Elephints a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence 'ung that 'eavy you was 'arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

But that's all shove be'ind me -- long ago an' fur away,
An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay;
An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
"If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else."
No! you won't 'eed nothin' else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay . . .

I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and --
Law! wot do they understand?
I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be --
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego pt. „Mandalay”
w temacie Oczekiwanie

The Way Through the Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods…
But there is no road through the woods.

przekład Andrzeja Nowickiego pt. „Droga przez las”
w temacie Chodzę lasem...

Hunting-Song of the Seeonee Pack

As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --
Once, twice and again!
And a doe leaped up, and a doe leaped up
From the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup.
This I, scouting alone, beheld,
Once, twice, and again!

As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --
Once, twice and again!
And a wolf stole back, and a wolf stole back
To carry the word to the waiting Pack,
And we sought and we found and we bayed on his track
Once, twice and again!

As the dawn was breaking the Wolf-Pack yelled
Once, twice and again!
Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!
Eyes that can see in the dark -- the dark!
Tongue -- give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!
Once, twice and again!

przekład Roberta Stillera pt. „Pieśń łowiecka stada z Sioni”
w temacie Polowania i łowy

Inne wiersze Rudyarda Kiplinga w tematach:
Listy poetyckie, Godność i honor, Przemoc w majestacie prawa,
Zaśpiewam ci pieśń/ Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam/ Turpizm.Krzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 05.03.11 o godzinie 10:30

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Ciarán Carson (ur. 1948) – irlandzki poeta, prozaik i muzyk. Urodził się i wychował
w Belfaście, gdzie mieszka do dzisiaj. Tam ukończył studia na Queen’s University, pracował jako urzędnik, nauczyciel i konsultant ds. folkloru i sztuki irlandzkiej w Arts Council of Northem Irelamd. Od 1998 roku jest profesorem literatury angielskiej na Queen’s University, gdzie założył i jest dyrektorem Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Jako poeta debiutował tomikiem „The New Estate” (1976), który pozostał raczej niezauważony przez krytykę literacka. Dopiero następny tom wierszy „The Irish for No” (1987), wydany po jedenastu latach, przyniósł mu szersze uznanie. Kolejne publikacje ugruntowały mu pozycję jednego z najwybitniejszych współczesnych poetów irlandzkich. Wydał: „The New Estate and Other Poems” (1988), “Belfast Confetti” (1990), “First Language” (1993), “Opera Et Cetera” (1996), “The Twelfth of Never" (2001), “Breaking News” (2003), “For All We Know” (2008), “Collected Poems” (2008), “Wake Forest” (2009). Pomimo, że biegle włada językiem irlandzkim, pisze i publikuje tylko po angielsku.
W Polsce ukazał się tom wierszy Ciarán Carson: Tak, tak. Wybrał i przełożył Piotr Sommer. Centrum Sztuki – Teatr Dramatyczny. Legnica 1998. Poeta dwukrotnie gościł w Polsce: we wrześniu 2000 roku na spotkaniach poetyckich „Port Legnica 2000” i w lutym 2008 roku, kiedy na zaproszenie British Council odbył cykl spotkań autorskich w Warszawie, Krakowie, Łodzi i Gdańsku w ramach programu kulturalnego „Faces & Places – New British Writing”.

Turn Again

There is a map of the city which shows the bridge that was
never built.
A map which shows the bridge that collapsed; the streets
that never existed.
Ireland’s Entry, Elbow Lane, Weigh-House Lane, Back lane,
Stone-Cutter’s Entry –
Today’s plan is already yesterday’s - The streets that were
there are gone.
And the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security
reasons.
The linen backing is falling apart - the Falls Road hangs by a
thread
When someone asks me where I live, I remember where I
used to live.
Someone asks me for directions, and I think again. I turn into
A side-street try to throw off my shadow, and history is
changed.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Potem znowu skręć”
w temacie Lekcja geografii...

The Tag

round your wrist
bore a number

your name
and D.O.B.

two weeks after
two stone less

the day you
came home it

slipped off
no need to snip

przekład Krzysztofa Stachnika pt. „Identyfikator”
w temacie Imiona w poezji

Through

Irrevocable? Never irrevocable, you said,
picking me up wrong through the din of the coffee machine.

We were in the Ulster Milk Bar I think they blew up back
in the seventies. We must have been barely acquainted.

Noise is what surrounds us, I'd said earlier, gesturing
to the wider world of disinformation, the dizzy

spells that come when someone you know might have been in a bomb
as the toll has not yet been reckoned except by hearsay.

I'd have my ear glued to the radio, waiting for what
passed for the truth to come out, men picking through the rubble.

Some of the victims would appear in wedding photographs
blinded by a light forever gone. Graveside by graveside

I shake hands with men I have not shaken hands with for years,
trying to make out their faces through what they have become.

przekład Krzysztofa Stachnika pt. „Przez”
w temacie Dlaczego zabijamy?

Belfast Confetti

Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation
marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broke type. And the
explosion

Itself - an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of
rapid fire…
I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept
stuttering.
All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.

I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman,
Odessa Street –
Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street.
Dead and again.
A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh, Makrolon face-shields . Walkie –
talkies. Wahat is
My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A
fusillade of question-marks.

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. „Confetti Belfastu”
w temacie Trudne pytania

Catmint Tea

The cat and I are quite alike, these winter nights:
I consult thesauruses; he forages for mice.
He prowls the darkest corners, while I throw the dice
Of rhyme and rummage through the OED's delights.

He's all ears and eyes and whiskery antennae
Bristling with the whispered broadcast of the stars,
And I have cruised the ocean of a thousand bars,
And trawled a thousand entries at the dawn of day.

I plucked another goose-quill from the living wing
And opened up my knife, while Cat unsheathed his claws.
Our wild imaginations started to take wing.

We rolled in serendipity upon the mat.
I forged a chapter of the Universal Laws.
Then he became the man, and I became the cat.

przekład Krzysztofa Stachnika pt. „Herbata z kocimiętki”
w temacie Sierściuchy

Inne wiersze Ciarána Carsona w tematach: Wiersze z podróży/Poezja i telewizja, Dzieciństwo, Śmierć, O rybach i innych mieszkańcach wód, Powroty, Ból, Kalectwo, Pamiątki i ślady przeszłości, Zima, Wspomnienia, Poetyckie studium przedmiotu, Dlaczego zabijamy?Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 11.06.10 o godzinie 08:14

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

David Harsent (ur. 1942) – angielski poeta, prozaik i scenarzysta telewizyjny.
Urodził się w Bovey Tracy (Devonshire), ukończył tylko szkołę średnią: Sir Henry Floyd School. Przez wiele lat pracował w branży księgarskiej i wydawniczej, miał też własną drukarnię, pracował w teatrze muzycznym. Wydał tomy poezji: „A Violent Country” (1969) , “After Dark”(1973), “Truce” (1973), “Dreams of the Dead” (1977), “From an Inland Sea” (1985), “Storybook Hero” (1992), “A Bird’s Idea of Flight” (1998), “Marriage (2002), “Legion” (2005), “Selected Poems” 1969–2005” (2007).
Zaliczany jest do najważniejszych twórców skupionych wokół szkoły poetyckiej Iana Hamiltona. Oprócz poezji pisze też powieści kryminalne i scenariusze telewizyjne pod pseudonimem David Lawrence. Jest członkiem Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
i profesorem wizytującym na Sheffield Hallam University.
Wiersze Davida Harsenta tłumaczył na język polski Jarosław Anders. Ukazały się one
w książce: Piotr Sommer: Antologia nowej poezji brytyjskiej. Czytelnik, Warszawa 1983.

The Duffel Bag

God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up
just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get

off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup
runneth over and you breast a thickening fret

of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game
turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough

you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame
but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff

into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame,
with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff,

the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash. . .
So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free

to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush
in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame

from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree
of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name

in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee. . .
Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee

of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream
of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery—

what brought you to this and who might take the blame,
and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea

”Poetry”, September 2008

ABSTRAKCT

Red

The skim on the surface of your soup, or the cut on your plate
in the Café des Anges, juices swamping the willow-pattern skiff
as she dabs her mouth with her napkin, your blind, blind date,

leaving a smudge, lipstick-and-gore, though there’s still a worm
of gristle in the gap between her teeth.
Mood music, candlelight, wine, low voices in a world of harm,

the creature brought down, hindquarters heavy, hind legs
broken by the dogs, its head held up, eyes wide,
the tangle and drag as a gralloch knife unpegs

the bulk, all slippage and seepage, and the way she thumbs
a morsel into your mouth, or smiles your smile
back at you, lets you know that everything’s just as it seems,

then back at the small hotel, she strips off quicker than you
might have hoped, pink as a new-skinned cat, all too
eager to have you by heart. Her cry tells you nothing new.

Purple

Surely, what first comes to mind is purpill and pall.
No? So is it what she is said to have said that night
when she breathed a secret and put the whole room on stall?

Not that? Then it must have something to do with the way,
in the fairy tale when the twins are lost in the wood,
daylight suddenly deepens and it’s run or stay or pray.

Still wrong? Rain in the hanging gardens then? That bruise
you can’t account for? The color of money, win or lose?
A Balkan liqueur that hits you where—Ah, yes, of course; the bruise.

Black

You know the room, or think you do, half-dark
and windowless it seems, though maybe
the shutters are dropped against the day, loose talk

from women in veils and something like a pulse,
on the air when he opens the door and slips straight in.
The Loden coat, the old slouch hat, the harelip, so who else

could it be, right on time and keen to help? Think back
to those promises, all of them straight from the heart,
never asked for, never kept. The skin trade . . . there’s a knack.

It’s been a lifetime coming but now you understand,
or think you do, why what you wanted wasn’t what you planned.
They bring a tray to your bedside. You eat from his hand.

Blue

It sings they say, and so it does: something like the note
that fractures glass or gets so far below
the range of human hearing that it jolts your heart;

and the glass it breaks is blue, and that’s a blue note for sure
from the guy on the alto sax in the basement dive,
which is where they’re bound to meet up in the classic noir,

the private eye, the girl with a shadowy past, the old-style cop,
and it’s nigh-on certain she’ll have to take a bullet
or we’ll see her in prison blue as they lead her to the drop.

The fragments of glass were part of it too, that’s plain,
though no one noticed, just as they failed to spot
how the crucifix in her bedroom made sense of the subtle stain

on her cocktail dress. And in this, the director’s cut,
the dive is deeper, the saxophone sadder, the cop
bent as a dog’s hind leg, the girl a scheming slut,

and the gumshoe comes in late with the one and only clue
that would finally set things straight, though its true
meaning is hidden from him, and lost on you.

Green

That misericord with the ugly little fucker
at the moment in his dance when slap-and-tickle
has become a serious matter, and no one’s quicker

in getting his hand up the skirt of some “ladye fayre,”
who returns to hearth and home with the rub of the green
on her back for all to see and devil-may-care,

his smell still on her, reek of the barley mow,
and hers on him, which could have been sloe
or sweat and sandalwood, but you’d be the one to know.

”Poetry”, September 2009

Inne wiersze Davida Harsenta w tematach:
Muzea i galerie, Czynności i zajęcia, poza pisaniem wierszy, W świecie baśni, legend
i mitów, Samobójstwo w wierszach..., Poezja codzienności, Smutek, melancholia, nostalgia, Co się poetom śni...?, Nasze miejsca.Krzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 21.06.11 o godzinie 15:58

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

James Joyce (1882-1941) – irlandzki poeta i prozaik, piszący po angielsku, jeden
z najwybitniejszych twórców literackich XX wieku, wielki eksperymentator i nowator
w zakresie języka artystycznego. Urodził się w Dublinie, w rodzinie katolickiej jako jeden z dziesięciorga dzieci, dwóch jego braci zmarło wcześnie na tyfus. Uczył się
w jezuickiej szkole prywatnej Clongowes Wood College, trochę w domu i w innej szkole jezuickiej Belvedere. W tym czasie jego ojciec stracił pracę i popadł w alkoholizm, co znacznie pogorszyło sytuację finansową rodziny Joyce’ów. W 1898 roku podjął studia na uniwersytecie w Dublinie w zakresie filozofii, literatury i języków nowożytnych (angielskiego, francuskiego i włoskiego). Studiował też medycynę w Paryżu, ale szybko ją szybko porzucił. Prowadził dość swobodny i awanturniczy tryb życia, konflikty
z prawem, problemy finansowe, do których dołączył wkrótce też alkoholizm, zwłaszcza po śmierci matki, która zmarła na raka, spowodowały że dobrowolnie opuścił Irlandię
i większość życia spędził za granicą. W 1904 roku poznał Norę Barmacle – młodą pokojówkę z hotelu, z którą spędził wiele lat w konkubinacie i po 27 latach nieformalnego związku ożenił się. Pomimo, iż Nora, kobieta prosta i niewykształcona, nie mogła być partnerką intelektualną dla pisarza, który słynął ze swej erudycji, ich związek należał do udanych i szczęśliwych. W styczniu 1941 roku znalazł się szpitalu
w Zurychu. Po operacji na wrzody zapadł w dwudniową śpiączkę, z której wybudził się na 15 minut przed śmiercią. Przyczyną zgonu było zapalenie otrzewnej, choć wiele źródeł podaje, że był podobno chory na syfilis. Ostatnie, wypowiedziane przed śmiercią, słowa brzmiały: "Czy nikt nie rozumie?"
James Joyce zaczął pisać wiersze, kiedy miał 9 lat. Pierwszy tomik „Chamber Music” (Muzyka kameralna, 1907) wydał w wieku 19 lat. Były to wiersze niezbyt oryginalne, utrzymane w konwencji neoromantycznej, do której niechętnie się przyznawał.
Z czasem zaczął eksperymentować i tworzyć nowe formy zapisu literackiego, którego ukoronowaniem był tzw. strumień świadomości. Eksperymenty te podejmował głównie na gruncie prozy: „Dublińczycy” (1914), „Portret artysty z czasów młodości” (1916), przede wszystkim: „Ulisses” (1922), „Finnegans Wake” (1939) i "Giacomo Joyce", którego rękopis odnaleziono już po śmierci pisarza, a wydano dopiero w latach 60-tych, w poezji: „Pomes Penyeach” (Jabłuszka po pensie, 1927). Jak napisał jeden
z najlepszych na świecie znawców i tłumaczy jego twórczości, Maciej Słomczyński: „James Joyce był zapewne jednym z największych poetów, jacy kiedykolwiek żyli na naszym tak obfitującym w poetów globie, lecz w ogóle nie liczył się z koniecznością tworzenia w takim lub innym gatunku literackim. Zasadą jego pisarstwa było podporządkowanie wszelkich istniejących rodzajów twórczości: prozy, dramatu, liryki, epiki – jednemu celowi nadrzędnemu, jakim był najdoskonalszy zapis tego, co chciał powiedzieć.” (z Posłowia do James Joyce: Utwory poetyckie. Przełożył Maciej Słomczyński. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1971).

Z tomu “Chamber Music”, 1907

II

The twilight turns from amethyst
To deep and deeper blue,
The lamp fills with a pale green glow
The trees of the avenue.

The old piano plays an air,
Sedate and slow and gay;
She bends upon the yellow keys,
Her head inclines this way.

Shy thought and grave wide eyes and hands
That wander as they list -- -
The twilight turns to darker blue
With lights of amethyst.

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego pt. „***[Zmierzch, z ametystu
przemieniony...]” w temacie Wiersz na różne pory dnia

XXII

Of that so sweet imprisonment
My soul, dearest, is fain -- -
Soft arms that woo me to relent
And woo me to detain.
Ah, could they ever hold me there
Gladly were I a prisoner!

Dearest, through interwoven arms
By love made tremulous,
That night allures me where alarms
Nowise may trouble us;
But lseep to dreamier sleep be wed
Where soul with soul lies prisoned.

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego pt. „***[Że jest ma dusza
uwięziona...”] w temacie Trochę o duszy

XXIV

Silently she's combing,
Combing her long hair
Silently and graciously,
With many a pretty air.

The sun is in the willow leaves
And on the dappled grass,
And still she's combing her long hair
Before the looking-glass.

I pray you, cease to comb out,
Comb out your long hair,
For I have heard of witchery
Under a pretty air,

That makes as one thing to the lover
Staying and going hence,
All fair, with many a pretty air
And many a negligence.

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego
pt. „***[Milcząc czesze włosy...]” w temacie Włosy

XXVI

Thou leanest to the shell of night,
Dear lady, a divining ear.
In that soft choiring of delight
What sound hath made thy heart to fear?
Seemed it of rivers rushing forth
From the grey deserts of the north?

That mood of thine
Is his, if thou but scan it well,
Who a mad tale bequeaths to us
At ghosting hour conjurable -- -
And all for some strange name he read
In Purchas or in Holinshed.

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego pt. „***[Wtuliłaś ucho
w muszlę nocy...] w temacie Dar słuchu

XXIX

Dear heart, why will you use me so?
Dear eyes that gently me upbraid,
Still are you beautiful -- - but O,
How is your beauty raimented!

Through the clear mirror of your eyes,
Through the soft sigh of kiss to kiss,
Desolate winds assail with cries
The shadowy garden where love is.

And soon shall love dissolved be
When over us the wild winds blow -- -
But you, dear love, too dear to me,
Alas! why will you use me so?

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego pt. „***[Droga, cóż ze mną
chcesz uczynić?...]” w temacie Schyłek miłości

Z tomu „Pomes Penyeach”, 1927

A Flower Given to My Daughter

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time's wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair -- yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

Trieste, 1913

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego pt. „Kwiat dany mojej córce”
w temacie Dziecko jest chodzącym cudem...

A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight

They mouth love's language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love's breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat's breath,
Harsh of tongue.

This grey that stares
Lies not, stark skin and bone.
Leave greasy lips their kissing. None
Will choose her what you see to mouth upon.
Dire hunger holds his hour.
Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears.
Pluck and devour!

Zurich, 1917

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego pt. „Wspomnienie o aktorach
w lustrze o północy” w temacie Widzę ich w duszy teatrze...

A Prayer

Again!
Come, give, yield all your strenght to me!
From far a low word breathes on the breaking brain
Its cruel calm, submission's misery,
Gentling her awe as to a soul predestinated.
Cease, silent love! My doom!

Blind me with your dark nearness, O have mercy, beloved enemy of my will!
I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread.
Draw me still
My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,
Proud by my downfall, remembering, pitying
Him who is, him who was!

Again!
Together, folded by the night, they lay on earth. I hear
From far her low word breathe on my breaking brain.
Come! I yield. Bend deeper upon me! I am here.
Subduer, do not leave me! Only joy, only anguish,
Take me, save me, soothe me, O spare me!

Paris, 1924

przekład Macieja Słomczyńskiego pt. „Modlitwa” w temacie Modlitwa



James Joyce, 1915

Inny wiersz Jamesa Joyce'a w temacie Kołysanki, nie tylko dla dzieciRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 13.07.10 o godzinie 12:51

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars."

The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.

1917

przekład Władysława Dulęby pt. „Rapsodia wietrznej nocy”
w temacie Latarnie – symbolika i poetyckie konteksty

Ash Wednesday

I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each
other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.


IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

1930

dwa przekłady: Adama Pomorskiego pt. „Środa popielcowa” w temacie Poezja religijna
i Jerzego Niemojowskiego, pod tym samym tytułem, w temacie Wiersz na taki dzień,
jak dzisiaj. Wcześniej, w tym samym temacie inne tłumaczenie, Jacka Nowaczyka
fragmentu utworu (cz. I).Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 09.03.11 o godzinie 21:24

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

James Wright (1927-1980) - poeta amerykański. Urodził się i wychował w latach wielkiego kryzysu gospodarczego, w rodzinie robotniczej. Pomimo, że młodość spędził w otoczeniu włóczęgów, alkoholików i meneli, ukończył studia na uniwersytecie stanowym w Waszyngtonie. Jednym z jego profesorów był wybitny poeta Theodore Roethke. Jego talent poetycki odkrył jednak inny znany poeta Robert Bly, z którym połączyła Wrighta wieloletnia przyjaźń. Dużo podróżował, m. in. do Europy. Zmarł przedwcześnie, w wieku 53 lat, do czego w dużym stopniu przyczyniło się jego wieloletnie uzależnienie od alkoholu. Wydał tomy poezji: "The Green Wall" (1957), "Saint Judas"(1959, "The Branch Will Not Break" (1963), "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (1963), "Shall We Gather at the River (1967), "Collected Poems" (1971), "Two Citizens" (1973), "Moments of the Italian Summer" (1976), "To a Blossoming
Pear Tree" (1977).
Polskie przekłady wierszy Jamesa Wrigta ukazały się w tomie: Grzegorz Musiał: Ameryka, Ameryka! Antologia wierszy poetów amerykańskich po 1940 roku. Wyd. Pomorze, Bydgoszcz 1994.

Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt."Błogosławieństwo"
w temacie Jak wysłowić konia czerń...?

Saint Judas

When I went out to k
ill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Święty Judasz" w tematach:
Między sacrum i profanum... oraz Wiersze na Wielki Tydzień i Wielkanoc

The Jewel

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Klejnot" w temacie
Drogie kamienie w poezji

In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse
in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned

I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. "W odpowiedzi na plotkę, że w Wheeling w Zachodniej
Wirginii skasowano najstarszy burdel" w temacie W kręgu plotek i pomówień

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt."Jesień idzie w Martins Ferry w Ohio"
w temacie Jesień przychodzi za wcześnie...

Inne wiersze Jamesa Wrighta w tematach: A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech,
W świecie baśni, legend i mitów, "Okrutną zagadką jest życie"...Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.10.11 o godzinie 09:02

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) - poeta angielski, publikujący jako A. E. Housman. Studiował filologię klasyczną w Oksfordzie. Pomimo, że uchodził za bardzo zdolnego studenta, nie zdał egzaminu końcowego. Fakt ten wiązany jest z jego silnymi zaburzeniami emocjonalnymi na tle ukrywanej miłości homoseksualnej. Przez 10 lat pracował w urzędzie patentowym, kontynuując studia n własną rękę. Osiągnął w nich takie uznanie, że zaproponowano mu katedrę literatury łacińskiej w University College, a potem w Cambridge. W 1896 roku wydał swój pierwszy tom wierszy "A Shropshire Lad", bardzo dobrze przyjęty przez krytykę literacką i czytelników. Następny i ostatni za życia tom "Last Poems" (1922) wydał dopiero po 26 latach. Obok liryki refleksyjnej uprawiał też z powodzeniem tzw. poezję purnonsensu.

II. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Najczarowniejsze z drzew, czereśnia"
w temacie Cóż jest piękniejszego niż (wysokie) drzewa...

XIII. When I was one-and-twenty

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, "tis true," tis true.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt."Dwudziestojednoletni"
w temacie Ta nasza młodość

LIV. With rue my heart is laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Boleśnie serce pamięta"
w temacie Pamięć

Inne wiersze A. E. Housmana w tematach: Miłość, Schyłek miłości..., Erotyka.Marek F. edytował(a) ten post dnia 13.04.11 o godzinie 18:00