Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Basil Bunting

What the Chairman told Tom

Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It's not work. You dont sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You c o u l d advertise soap.

Art, that's opera; or repertory -
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week -
married, aren't you? -
you've got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it a n d rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I'm an accountant.

They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do y o u do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he's a shcoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find w o r k.

przekład Kuby Piotrowicza w temacie Czym jest wiersz?Krzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 07.06.09 o godzinie 13:57

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

John Ashbery

Some Trees

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.


przekład Agaty Preis-Smith w temacie
Cóż jest piękniejszego niż (wysokie) drzewa... Krzysztof Adamczyk edytował(a) ten post dnia 02.01.09 o godzinie 12:09

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) – urodził się w Anglii, studiował w Okfordzie
i Berlinie. W 1935 r. poślubił Erikę Mann, córkę Thomasa Manna. Dzięki temu Erika w obawie przed represjami antysemickimi mogła opuścić III Rzeszę. Związek ten służył tylko temu celowi, ponieważ oboje małżonkowie byli orientacji homoseksualnej. W 1939 r. Auden wyjechał z Eriką na stałe do Stanów Zjednoczonych, gdzie szybko zyskał sobie pozycję jednego z najwybitniejszych poetów. W utworach swoich, uchodzących za wzór doskonałości formalnej, poruszał szerokie spectrum zagadnień: od problematyki filozoficzno-egzystencjalnej, poprzez moralną, religijną, aż po aktualne zagadnienia społeczno-polityczne.
Wydał m. in. tomy wierszy: “The Sea and the Mirror”(1944), “The Age of Anxiety” (1948), “The Old Man’s Road” (1956), “Homage to Clio” (1960). Polskie wydania: „Poezje” (1988), „44 wiersze” (1994), „Morze i zwierciadło” (2003), także eseje „Ręka farbiarza” (1988).

Who's who

A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day;
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Who's who"
w temacie Autoportret w lustrze wiersza

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

przekład Tadeusza Rybowskiego pt. "Epitafium dla tyrana"
w temacie Totalitaryzm

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Kołysanka"
w temacie Kołysanki, nie tylko dla dzieci

Blues

for Hedli Anderson

Ladies and gentlemen, sitting here,
Eating and drinking and warming a chair,
Feeling and thinking and drawing your breath,
Who's sitting next to you? It may be Death.

As a high-stepping blondie with eyes of blue
In the subway, on beaches, Death looks at you;
And married or single or young or old,
You'll become a sugar daddy and do as you're told.

Death is a G-man. You may think yourself smart,
But he'll send you to the hot-seat or plug you through the heart;
He may be a slow worker, but in the end
He'll get you for the crime of being born, my friend.

Death as a doctor has first-class degrees;
The world is on his panel; he charges no fees;
He listens to your chest, says - "You're breathing. That's bad.
But don't worry; we'll soon see to that, my lad."

Death knocks at your door selling real estate,
The value of which will not depreciate;
It's easy, it's convenient, it's old world. You'll sign,
Whatever your income, on the dotted line.

Death as a teacher is simply grand;
The dumbest pupil can understand.
He has only one subject and that is the Tomb;
But no one ever yawns or asks to leave the room.

So whether you're standing broke in the rain,
Or playing poker or drinking champagne,
Death's looking for you, he's already on the way,
So look out for him tomorrow or perhaps today.

przekład Jacka Dehnela pt. "Blues"
w temacie Śmierć

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. "1 września 1939"
w temacie Wiersze jak kartki z pamiętnika

Autumn Song

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.

Dead in hundreds at the back
Follow wooden in our track,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food;
And the nightingale is dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain's lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. „Pieśń jesienna”
w temacie O przemijaniu...

This Lunar Beauty

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early,
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this,
For time is inches
And the heart's changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

But this was never
A ghost's endeavor
Nor finished this,
Was ghost at ease,
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza
pt. „Księżycowe piękno” w temacie Piękno

Seascape

Look, stranger, at this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

Here at the small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the suck-
ing surf,
and the gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands;
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. „Morski pejzaż”
w temacie Marynistyka

Another Time

For us like any other fugitive,
Like the numberless flowers that cannot number
And all the beasts that need not remember,
It is today in which we live.

So many try to say Not Now,
So many have forgotten how
To say I Am, and would be
Lost, if they could, in history.

Bowing, for instance, with such old-world grace
To a proper flag in a proper place,
Muttering like ancients as they stump upstairs
Of Mine and His or Ours and Theirs.

Just as if time were what they used to will
When it was gifted with possession still,
Just as if they were wrong
In no more wishing to belong.

No wonder then so many die of grief,
So many are so lonely as they die;
No one has yet believed or liked a lie,
Another time has other lives to live.

przekład Jerzego S. Sity pt. „Inny czas”
w temacie Czas, zegary...

Gare du Midi

A nondescript express in from the South,
Crowds round the ticket barrier, A face
To welcome which the mayor has not contrived
Bugles or braid: Something about the face
Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.
Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,
He walks out briskly to infect a city
Whose terrible future may have just arrived.

przekład Jerzego S. Sity pt. „Gare du Midi”
w temacie Poezja kolei żelaznych

Inne wiersze W. H. Audena w tematach:
Poezja liczb, Spacery poetów, Miasto, s. 5, s. 6, Łzy, płacz, rozpacz...,
Poezja i fotografia, Co się poetom śni...? , Śmierć, Poetycka zawartość
strychów, Piwnice: tam były nasze rewolucje...Ten post został edytowany przez Autora dnia 10.07.13 o godzinie 13:04

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

John Keats

Sonnet

After dark vapours have oppress'd our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains,

The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.

The calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves
Budding - fruit ripening in stilness - autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves -

Sweet Sappho's cheek - as smiling infant's breath -
The gradual sand that through an hourglass runs -
A woodland rivulet - a Poet's death.

Sonet

Gdy ciemny opar uciskać przestaje
Równiny przez czas długi i smutny - nadchodzi
Dzień zrodzony z Południa i zmywa jak w wodzie
Z chorych niebios wszelakie plamy i liszaje.

Ten miesiąc niespokojny znów ma prawo Majem
Poczuć się, uwolniony od bólu narodzin;
A powieki drżą lekko w mijającym chłodzie,
Jak liście róży, które z deszczem letnim grają.

Najspokojniejsze myśli przychodzą: o liści
Pękaniu - dojrzewaniu owocu - uśmiechu
Słońc jesiennych nad stogi schodzących przejrzyście -

Piasku klepsydry, który czas wiedzie do mety -
Słodkim licu Safony - dzieciątka oddechu -
O strumieniu wśród lasu - o śmierci Poety

przełożyła Ludmiła MarjańskaMarta Konarska edytował(a) ten post dnia 05.01.09 o godzinie 14:56

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Witam,

mam wielka prośbę:potrzebne mi są dwa,trzy wiersze w jezyku angielskim z motywem "dzwonu" lub "dzwoneczków"(bell,bells).Wiem,że jest taki temat na forum,ale wiersze są tylko w języku polskim...
Będę wdzięczna za przytoczenie ich!

Pozdrawiam noworocznie,
Małgorzata

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Spełniając prośbę Małgosi, najpierw coś z klasyki:

Edgar Allan Poe

The Bells

Hear the sledges with the bells--
Silver bells--
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells,--
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Hear the mellow wedding-bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight
From the molten-golden notes!
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gust of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells--
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells--
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

Hear the loud alarum bells--
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire
Leaping higher, higher, higher
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor,
Now--now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear, it fully knows,
By the twanging
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking of the swelling in the anger of the bells--
Of the bells--
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells,--
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

Hear the tolling of the bells--
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In a silence of the night
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats,
Is a groan:
And the people--ah, the people--
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone--
They are neither man nor woman--
They are neither brute nor human--
They are Ghouls!
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls, rolls,
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells--
Of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells--
Of the bells, bells, bells,
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,--
Of the bells, bells, bells--
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells,--
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

przekład Antoniego Langego w temacie Motyw dzwonu w poezjiRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 05.01.09 o godzinie 18:32

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Nick Cave

The Weeping Song

Go son, go down to the water
And see the women weeping there
Then go up into the mountains
The men, they are all weeping too

Father, why are all the women weeping?
They are all weeping for their men
Then why are all the men there weeping?
They are weeping back at them

This is a weeping song
A song in which to weep
While all the men and women sleep
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long

Father, why are all the children weeping?
They are merely crying son
O, are they merely crying, father?
Yes, true weeping is yet to come

This is a weeping song
A song in which to weep
While all the little children sleep
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long

O father, tell me, are you weeping?
Your face seems we to touch
O them I'm so sorry, father
I never thought I hurt you so much

This is a weeping song
A song in which to weep
While we rock ourselves to sleep
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long
No, I won't be weeping long
No, I won't be weeping long
No, I won't be weeping long

The Weeping Song –
słowa, muzyka i wykonanie Nick Cave (wraz z zespołem The Bad Seeds)

Przekład wiersza w temacie Łzy, płacz, rozpacz.Jolanta Chrostowska-Sufa edytował(a) ten post dnia 05.01.09 o godzinie 20:54

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Wracając do tematu dzwonu, nie wiem, czy chodzi tylko o wiersze anglojęzycznych poetów,
czy również o inne w języku angielskim, na przykład tłumaczenia? Poniżej piękny, klasyczny wiersz Charlesa Baudelaire'a "La Cloche fêlée" w dwóch tłumaczeniach na język angielski: Roya Campbella z lat 50-tych i Geoffrey'a Wagnera o dwadzieścia lat późniejsze.

Charles Baudelaire

La Cloche fêlée

II est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d'hiver,
D'écouter, près du feu qui palpite et qui fume,
Les souvenirs lointains lentement s'élever
Au bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.

Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux
Qui, malgré sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,
Jette fidèlement son cri religieux,
Ainsi qu'un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente!

Moi, mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu'en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l'air froid des nuits,
II arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie

Semble le râle épais d'un blessé qu'on oublie
Au bord d'un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts
Et qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d'immenses efforts.

The Cracked Bell

It's sweet and bitter, of a winter night,
To hear, beside the crackling, smoking log,
Far memories prepare themselves for flight
To carillons that sound amid the fog.

Happy's the bell whose vigorous throat on high,
in spite of time, is sound and still unspent,
To hurl his faithful and religious cry
Like an old soldier watching in his tent.

My soul is cracked, and when amidst its care
It tries with song to fill the frosty air,
Sometimes, its voice seems like the feeble croak

A wounded soldier makes, lost in the smoke,
Beneath a pile of dead, in bloody mire,
Trying, with fearful efforts, to expire.

trans. by Roy Campbell

The Cracked Bell

It is bitter and sweet, during winter nights,
To listen, beside the throbbing, smoking fire,
To distant memories slowly ascending
In the sound of the chimes chanting through the fog.

Blessed the bell with the vigorous gullet
Which, despite old age, watchful and healthy,
Throws out faithfully its pious tones,
Like an old soldier in vigil under his tent!

Ah, my soul is cracked, and when in sorrows
It wishes to people the cold air of the night with its songs,
Often it happens that its feeble voice

Seems like the thick death-rattle of one wounded, forgotten
By the side of a lake of blood, under a great weight of dead,
Who dies, without moving, amongst enormous efforts.

trans. by Geoffrey Wagner

polskie tłumaczenie Stanisława Korab-Brzozowskiego pt. „Pęknięty dzwon”
w temacie Motyw dzwonu w poezjiRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 05.01.09 o godzinie 22:20

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

The Bell

I love thy music, mellow bell,
I love thine iron chime,
To life or death, to heaven or hell,
Which calls the sons of Time.

Thy voice upon the deep
The home-bound sea-boy hails,
It charms his cares to sleep,
It cheers him as he sails.

To house of God and heavenly joys
Thy summons called our sires,
And good men thought thy sacred voice
Disarmed the thunder's fires.

And soon thy music, sad death-bell,
Shall lift its notes once more,
And mix my requiem with the wind
That sweeps my native shore.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 05.01.09 o godzinie 23:07

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Alfred Noyes (1880-1958)

The Bell

The Temple Bell was out of tune,
That once out-melodied sun and moon.

Instead of calling folk to prayer
It spread an evil in the air.

Instead of a song, from north to south,
It put a lie in the wind's mouth.

The very palms beneath it died,
So harsh it jarred, so loud it lied.

Then the gods told the blue-robed bonze:
"Your Bell is only wrought of bronze.

Lower it down, cast it again,
Or you shall shake the heavens in vain."

Then, as the mighty cauldron hissed,
Men brought the wealth that no man missed.

Yea, they brought silver, they brought gold,
And melted them into the seething mould.

The miser brought his greening hoard,
And the king cast in his sword.

Yet, when the Bell in the Temple swung,
It jarred the stars with its harsh tongue.

"Is this your best? " the oracle said,
"Then were you better drunk or dead."

Once again they melted it down,
And the king cast in his crown.

Then they poured wine, and bullock's blood,
Into the hot, grey, seething flood.

They gave it mellowing fruits to eat,
And honey-combs to make it sweet.

Yet, when they hauled it to the sky,
The Bell was one star-shattering lie.

So, for the third time and the last,
They lowered it down to be re-cast.

The white-hot metal seethed anew,
And the crowd shrank as the heat grew;

But a white-robed woman, queenly and tall,
Pressed to the brink before them all,

One breast, like a golden fruit lay bare;
She held her small son feeding there.

She plucked him off, she lifted him high,
Like rose-red fruit on the blue sky.

She pressed her lips to the budded feet,
And murmured softly, " Oh, sweet, my sweet."

She whispered, "Gods, that my land may live,
I give the best that I have to give!"

Then, then, before the throng awoke,
Before one cry from their white lips broke,

She tossed him into the fiery flood,
Her child, her baby, her flesh and blood.

And the crisp hissing waves closed round
And melted him through without a sound.

"Too quick for pain," they heard her say,
And she sobbed, once, and she turned away.

* * *

The Temple Bell, in peace and war,
Keeps the measure of sun and star.

But sometimes, in the night it cries
Faintly, and a voice replies:

Mother, Oh, mother, the Bell rings true!
You were all that I had!--Oh, mother, my mother!
With the land and the Bell it is well. Is it well,
Is it well with the heart that had you and none other?Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 05.01.09 o godzinie 23:25

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

John Donne (1572-1631)

For Whom the Bell tolls

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Najbardziej chyba znany wiersz z motywem dzwonu, wykorzystany przez Ernesta Hemingwaya jako motto powieści "Komu bije dzwon": "Dlatego nigdy nie pytaj,
komu bije dzwon; bije on tobie".Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 05.01.09 o godzinie 23:53

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Małgorzata Kazimierczak:
Witam,

mam wielka prośbę:potrzebne mi są dwa,trzy wiersze w jezyku angielskim z motywem "dzwonu" lub "dzwoneczków"(bell,bells).Wiem,że jest taki temat na forum,ale wiersze są tylko w języku polskim...
Będę wdzięczna za przytoczenie ich!

Pozdrawiam noworocznie,
Małgorzata

Witaj Małgosiu, w temacie Hej kolęda! Kolęda! jest wpisany przeze mnie angielski tekst znanej piosenki Jamesa Pierpointa "Jingle Bells", śpiewanej często w okresie świątecznym jako kolęda, choć właściwie w ścisłym rozumieniu nie jest to kolęda. Pozdrawiam - Marta

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Pięknie dziękuję Ci Ryszardzie za te anglojęzyczne wiersze o dzwonach!:-)Ogromnie mi pomogłeś!!!Zwłaszcza wiersz Edgara Allana Poe!

Marta wspomniała o "Jingle Bells"...Tak,znajoma przesłała mi słowa tej bozonarodzeniowej pieśni,ale mnie chodziło o wiersze,a nie piosenki czy pieśni!

Jeszcze raz dziękuję:-)
Małgorzata
p.s. powolutku czytam sobie tę wspaniałą poezję prezentowaną na forum,może,gdy zdobędę się na więcej odwagi,przytoczę jakąś własną próbę...?

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Anne Sexton

All My Pretty Ones

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart
where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;
a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,
leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber
you from the residence you could not afford:
a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,
twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,
the love and legal verbiage of another will,
boxes of pictures of people I do not know.
I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,
hold me. I stop here, where a small boy
waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...
for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy
or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.
Is this your father’s father, this commodore
in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile
has made it unimportant who you are looking for.
I’ll never know what these faces are all about.
I lock them into their book and throw them out.

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began
the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly
as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran
the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me
and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went
down and recent years where you went flush
on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant
to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.
But before you had that second chance, I cried
on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.
Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;
here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,
here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,
here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,
running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;
here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;
and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.
Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,
my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept
for three years, telling all she does not say
of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,
she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day
with your blood, will I drink down your glass
of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years
goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.
Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.
Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,
bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

All My Pretty Ones – recytuje Anne Sexton

All My Pretty Ones - recytuje Anne Sexton

The Fury Of Sunsets

Something
cold is in the air,
an aura of ice
and phlegm.
All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.
The horizon bleeds
and sucks its thumb.
The little red thumb
goes out of sight.
And I wonder about
this lifetime with myself,
this dream I'm living.
I could eat the sky
like an apple
but I'd rather
ask the first star:
why am I here?
why do I live in this house?
who's responsible?
eh?

The Fury Of Sunsets – recytuje Anne Sexton

The Fury Of Sunsets - recytuje Anne Sexton

Said The Poet To The Analyst

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget who one words is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
somethhing I might have said...
but did not.

Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing. I worth with my best, for instances,
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine,
that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.
But if you should say this is something it is not,
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny
and ridiculous and crowded with all
the believing money.

Said The Poet To The Analyst – recytuje Anne Sexton

Said The Poet To The Analyst - recytuje Anne Sexton

W hołdzie dla Anne Sexton

W hołdzie dla Anne SextonMarta Konarska edytował(a) ten post dnia 14.01.09 o godzinie 21:29

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Paul Muldoon (ur. 1951) – irlandzki poeta, dramaturg, tłumacz i eseista, laureat wielu prestiżowych nagród literackich, m. in. Nagrody Puliztera. Od 1989 r. mieszka w USA, gdzie wykłada literaturę na Uniwersytecie w Princeton. Wydał m. in. tomy wierszy: “Knowing My Place” (1971), “New Weather” (1973), “Spirit of Dawn” (1975), “Mules” (1977), “ (1978), “Why Brownlee Left” (1980), “Out of Siberia” (1982), “Quoof” (1983), “The Wishbone” (1984), “Meeting The British” (1987), “Madoc: A Mystery” (1990),
“The Annals of Chile” (1994), “Hay” (1998), “Moy Sand And Gravel” (2002 - Nagroda Pulitzera w 2003), “Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore” (2005), “Horse Latitudes” (2006), “When the Pie Was Opened” (2008), “Plan B” (2009), “Wayside Shrines” (2009). W Polsce znany dzięki znakomitym przekładom Piotra Sommera.

Anseo

When the master was calling the roll
At the primary school in Collegelands,
You were meant to call back Anseo
And raise your hand
As your name occurred.
Anseo, meaning here, here and now,
All present and correct,
Was the first word of Irish I spoke.
The last name on the ledger
Belonged to Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward
And was followed, as often as not,
By silence, knowing looks,
A nod and a wink, the master's droll
'And where's our little Ward-of-court?'

I remember the first time he came back
The master had sent him out
Along the hedges
To weigh up for himself and cut
A stick with which he would be beaten.
After a while, nothing was spoken;
He would arrive as a matter of course
With an ash-plant, a salley-rod.
Or, finally, the hazel-wand
He had whittled down to a whip-lash,
Its twist of red and yellow lacquers
Sanded and polished,
And altogether so delicately wrought
That he had engraved his initials on it.

I last met Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward
In a pub just over the Irish border.
He was living in the open,
in a secret camp
On the other side of the mountain.
He was fighting for Ireland,
Making things happen.
And he told me, Joe Ward,
Of how he had risen through the ranks
To Quartermaster, Commandant:
How every morning at parade
His volunteers would call back Anseo
And raise their hands
As their names occurred.

Anseo - recytuje Paul Muldoon

przekład Piotra Sommera pt. "Anseo" w temacie Wspomnienia

Why Brownlee Left

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.

Why Brownlee Left – recytuje Paul Muldoon

Dlaczego Brownlee odszedł

Dlaczego Brownlee odszedł, i gdzie,
Jest tajemnicą, nawet dziś.
Bo jeśli ktoś powinien być szczęśliwy
To właśnie on; dwa akry jęczmienia,
Akr ziemniaków, cztery woły,
Krowa mleczna, dom kryty dachówką.
Widziano go ostatnio, jak szedł orać
W rześki marcowy ranek.

W południe było o nim głośno;
Zostawił wszystko – ostatnią
Nowiuteńką furę, a obok, dwójkę
Czarnych koni, jak mąż i żona,
Przestępujących ciężko z kopyta na
Kopyto, i wpatrujących się w przyszłość.

tłum. Piotr Sommer

Inne wiersze Paula Muldoona w tematach: A mnie jest szkoda słomianych strzech, Śmierć, Portret (super) męski, Erotyka, Kobiecy portret, Motyw dłoni rąk, Motyw ojca, Wiersze na Wielki Tydzień i Wielkanoc, Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam , Patologia wokół nas – R. M.Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 24.03.10 o godzinie 23:26

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

David Gascoyne (1916 –2001) – poeta angielski, jeden z głównych przedstawicieli surrealizmu, swoją pierwszą książkę poetycką „Roman Balcony and Other Poems” (1932) wydał, gdy miał zaledwie 16 lat, rok później wydał powieść autobiograficzną “Opening Day”. Za otrzymane honorarium wyjechał do Paryża, gdzie nawiązał osobiste znajomości - z czasem przerodzone w przyjaźnie - z czołowymi surrealistami takimi,
jak: Salvadore Dali, Max Ernst, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Jean Jouve.
W 1933 r. napisał „And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis”, uważany za pierwszy surrealistyczny utwór poetycki w języku angielskim. Zafascynowany surrealizmem, poświęcił temu kierunkowi swoją książkę „A Short Survey of Surrealism” (1935).
W czasie II wojny światowej pracował w Anglii jako aktor, po wojnie ponownie wyjechał do Francji, gdzie mieszkał w latach 1947-1948 i 1953-1964. Interesował się wówczas egzystencjalizmem i filozofią Lwa Szestowa.
Oprócz własnej twórczości, tłumaczył na angielski utwory najwybitniejszych surrealistów: Hansa Arpa, André Bretona, Salvadora Dali, Benjamina Péreta i innych, które można poczytać na stronie French surrealist poetry.

And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis

1

white curtains of infinite fatigue
dominating the starborn heritage of the colonies of St Francis
white curtains of tortured destinies
inheriting the calamities of the plagues
of the desert encourage the waistlines of women to expand
and the eyes of men to enlarge like pocket-cameras
teach children to sin at the age of five
to cut out the eyes of their sisters with nail-scissors
to run into the streets and offer themselves to unfrocked priests
teach insects to invade the deathbeds of rich spinsters
and to engrave the foreheads of their footmen with purple signs
for the year is open the year is complete
the year is full of unforeseen happenings
and the time of earthquakes is at hand

today is the day when the streets are full of hearses
and when women cover their ring fingers with pieces of silk
when the doors fall off their hinges in ruined cathedrals
when hosts of white birds fly across the ocean from america
and make their nests in the trees of public gardens
the pavements of cities are covered with needles
the reservoirs are full of human hair
fumes of sulphur envelop the houses of ill-fame
out of which bloodred lilies appear.

2

across the square where crowds are dying in thousands
a man is walking a tightrope covered with moths

there is an explosion of geraniums in the ballroom of the hotel
there is an extremely unpleasant odour of decaying meat
arising from the depetalled flower growing out of her ear
her arms are like pieces of sandpaper
or wings of leprous birds in taxis
and when she sings her hair stands on end
and lights itself with a million little lamps like glowworms
you must always write the last two letters of her christian name
upside down with a blue pencil

she was standing at the window clothed only in a ribbon
she was burning the eyes of snails in a candle
she was eating the excrement of dogs and horses
she was writing a letter to the president of france

3

the edges of leaves must be examined through microscopes
in order to see the stains made by dying flies
at the other end of the tube is a woman bathing her husband
and a box of newspapers covered with handwriting
when an angel writes the word TOBACCO across the sky
the sea becomes covered with patches of dandruff
the trunks of trees burst open to release streams of milk
little girls stick photographs of genitals to the windows of their homes
prayerbooks in churches open themselves at the death service
and virgins cover their parents' beds with tealeaves
there is an extraordinary epidemic of tuberculosis in yorkshire
where medical dictionaries are banned from the public libraries
and salt turns a pale violet colour every day at seven o'clock
when the hearts of troubadours unfold like soaked mattresses
when the leaven of the gruesome slum-visitors
and the wings of private airplanes look like shoeleather
shoeleather on which pentagrams have been drawn
shoeleather covered with vomitings of hedgehogs
shoeleather used for decorating wedding-cakes
and the gums of queens like glass marbles
queens whose wrists are chained to the walls of houses
and whose fingernails are covered with little drawings of flowers
we rejoice to receive the blessing of criminals
and we illuminate the roofs of convents when they are hung
we look through a telescope on which the lord's prayer has been written
and we see an old woman making a scarecrow
on a mountain near a village in the middle of spain
we see an elephant killing a stag-beetle
by letting hot tears fall onto the small of its back
we see a large cocoa-tin full of shapeless lumps of wax
there is a horrible dentist walking out of a ship's funnel
and leaving behind him footsteps which make noises
on account of his accent he was discharged from the sanatorium
and sent to examine the methods of cannibals
so that wreaths of passion-flowers were floating in the darkness
giving terrible illnesses to the possessors of pistols
so that large quantities of rats disguised as pigeons
were sold to various customers from neighbouring towns
who were adepts at painting gothic letters on screens
and at tying up parcels with pieces of grass
we told them to cut off the buttons on their trousers
but they swore in our faces and took off their shoes
whereupon the whole place was stifled with vast clouds of smoke
and with theatres and eggshells and droppings of eagles
and the drums of the hospitals were broken like glass
and glass were the faces in the last looking-glass.

przekład Tadeusza Pióro pt. "A sen siódmy jest snem Izydy"
w temacie Co się poetom śni...?

Salvador Dali

The face of the precipice is black with lovers;
The sun above them is a bag of nails; the spring's
First rivers hide among their hair.
Goliath plunges his hand into the poisoned well
And bows his head and feels my feet walk through his brain.
The children chasing butterflies turn round and see him there
With his hand in the well and my body growing from his head,
And are afraid. They drop their nets and walk into the wall like smoke.

The smooth plain with its mirrors listens to the cliff
Like a basilisk eating flowers.
And the children, lost in the shadows of the catacombs,
Call to the mirrors for help:
'Strong-bow of salt, cutlass of memory,
Write on my map the name of every river.'

A flock of banners fight their way through the telescoped forest
And fly away like birds towards the sound of roasting meat.
Sand falls into the boiling rivers through the telescopes' mouths
And forms clear drops of acid with petals of whirling flame.
Heraldic animals wade through the asphyxia of planets,
Butterflies burst from their skins and grow long tongues like plants,
The plants play games with a suit of mail like a cloud.

Mirrors write Goliath's name upon my forehead,
While the children are killed in the smoke of the catacombs
And lovers float down from the cliffs like rain.

przekład Tadeusza Pióro w temacie Magia kina

“The Truth is Blind”

The light fell from the window and the day was done
Another day of thinking and distractions
Love wrapped in its wings passed by and coal-black Hate
Paused on the edge of the cliff and dropped a stone
From which the night grew like a savage plant
With daggers for its leaves and scarlet hearts
For flowers - then the bed
Rose clocklike from the ground and spread its sheets
Across the shifting sands

Autumnal breath of mornings far from here
A star veiled in grey mist
A living man:

The snapping of a dry twig was his only announcement. The two men, who had tied their boat to a branch that grew out over the water's edge, and were now moving up through the rank tropical vegetation, turned sharply.

He raised his eyes and saw the river's source
Between their legs - he saw the flaming sun
He saw the buildings in between the leaves
Behind their heads that were as large as globes
He heard their voices indistinct as rain
As faint as feathers falling
And he fell

The boat sailed on
The masts were made of straw
The sails were made of finest silken thread
And out of holes on either side the prow
Gushed endless streams of water and of flame
In which the passengers saw curious things:

The conjurer, we are told, “took out of his bag a silken thread, and so projected it upwards that it stuck fast in a certain cloud of air. Out of the same receptacle he pulled a hare, that ran away up along the thread; a little beagle, which when it was slipped at the hare pursued it in full cry; last of all a small dogboy, whom he commanded to follow both hare and hound up the thread. From another bag that he had he extracted a winsome young woman, at all points well adorned, and instructed her to follow after hound and dogboy.”

She laughed to see them gazing after her
She clapped her hands and vanished in thin air
To reappear upon the other bank
Among the restless traffic of the quays
Her silhouette against the dusty sky
Her shadow falling on the hungry stones
Where sat the pilot dressed in mud-stained rags

He knocked the fragile statue down
And ate her sugar head
And then the witnesses all gathered round
And pointed at the chasm at his feet:

Clouds of blue smoke, sometimes mixed with black, were being emitted from the exhaust pipe. The smoke was of sufficient density to be an annoyance to the driver following the vehicle or to pedestrians.

The whispering of unseen flames
A sharp taste in the mouth.

przekład Tadeusza Pióro pt. "Prawda jest ślepa"
w temacie Prawda i kłamstwoRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 24.03.10 o godzinie 23:27

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963) – poeta amerykański niemieckiego pochodzenia,
był profesorem literatury na kilku uczelniach, m. in. na Uniwersytecie Michigan
i Uniwersytecie Waszyngtońskim w Seatle. Przez wiele lat cierpiał na depresję i był uzależniony od alkoholu. Pozostawił po sobie niewielki, ale liczący się dorobek, tomy poetyckie: „Open House” (1941), „The Lost Son and Other Poems” (1948), „The Long
and Twisty Road” (1950), „Praise to the End!” (1951), “The Waking” (1953). Za ten ostatni otrzymał Nagrodę Pulitzera w 1954 roku. Na język polski jego wiersze były tłumaczone
m. in. przez Tadeusza Rybowskiego, Leszka Elektorowicza, Ludmiłę Marjańską, Stanisława Barańczaka. Najpełniejszy, jak dotąd, ich wybór zawiera tom Theodore Roethke: Dalekie pole. Wybór i przekład Ludmiła Marjańska. PIW, Warszawa 1971.

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

przekład Tadeusza Rybowskiego pt. „Dolor”
w temacie ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”...

Moss-Gathering

To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top,—
That was moss-gathering.
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.

przekład Leszka Elektorowicza pt. "Zbieranie mchu"
w temacie Czynności i zajęcia, poza pisaniem wierszy

Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

przekład Ludmiły Marjańskiej pt. "Naskórkowa
makabra" w temacie Ciało mojego ciała...

Words for the Wind

1.

Love, love, a lily’s my care,
She’s sweeter than a tree.
Loving, I use the air
Most lovingly: I breathe;
Mad in the wind I wear
Myself as I should be,
All’s even with the odd,
My brother the vine is glad.

Are flower and seed the same?
What do the great dead say?
Sweet Phoebe, she’s my theme:
She sways whenever I sway.
“O love me while I am,
You green thing in my way!”
I cried, and the birds came down
And made my song their own.

Motion can keep me still:
She kissed me out of thought
As a lovely substance will;
She wandered; I did not:
I stayed, and light fell
Across her pulsing throat;
I stared, and a garden stone
Slowly became the moon.

The shallow stream runs slack;
The wind creaks slowly by;
Out of a nestling’s beak
Comes a tremulous cry
I cannot answer back;
A shape from deep in the eye--
That woman I saw in a stone--
Keeps pace when I walk alone.

2.

The sun declares the earth;
The stones leap in the stream;
On a wide plain, beyond
The far stretch of a dream,
A field breaks like the sea;
The wind’s white with her name,
And I walk with the wind.

The dove’s my will today.
She sways, half in the sun:
Rose, easy on a stem,
One with the sighing vine,
One to be merry with,
And pleased to meet the moon.
She likes wherever I am.

Passion’s enough to give
Shape to a random joy:
I cry delight: I know
The root, the core of a cry.
Swan-heart, arbutus-calm,
She moves when time is shy:
Love has a thing to do.

A fair thing grows more fair;
The green, the springing green
Makes an intenser day
Under the rising moon;
I smile, no mineral man;
I bear, but not alone,
The burden of this joy.

3.

Under a southern wind,
The birds and fishes move
North, in a single stream;
The sharp stars swing around;
I get a step beyond
The wind, and there I am,
I’m odd and full of love.

Wisdom, where is it found?--
Those who embrace, believe.
Whatever was, still is,
Says a song tied to a tree.
Below, on the ferny ground,
In rivery air, at ease,
I walk with my true love.

What time’s my heart? I care.
I cherish what I have
Had of the temporal:
I am no longer young
But the winds and waters are;
What falls away will fall;
All things bring me to love.

4.

The breath of a long root,
The shy perimeter
Of the unfolding rose,
The green, the altered leaf,
The oyster’s weeping foot,
And the incipient star--
Are part of what she is.
She wakes the ends of life.

Being myself, I sing
The soul’s immediate joy.
Light, light, where’s my repose?
A wind wreathes round a tree.
A thing is done: a thing
Body and spirit know
When I do what she does:
Creaturely creature, she!--

I kiss her moving mouth,
Her swart hilarious skin;
She breaks my breath in half;
She frolicks like a beast;
And I dance round and round,
A fond and foolish man,
And see and suffer myself
In another being, at last.

przekład Ludmiły Marjańskiej pt. "Słowa
na wiatr" w temacie Miłość

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close behind me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lonely worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air;
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Budzę się”
w temacie ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”...

The Bat

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. "Nietoperz"
w temacie Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam

She

think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? --
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.
If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.
She makes space lonely with a lovely song.
She lilts a low soft language, and I hear
Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.

We sing together; we sing mouth to mouth.
The garden is a river flowing south.
She cries out loud the soul's own secret joy;
She dances, and the ground bears her away.
She knows the speech of light, and makes it plain
A lively thing can come to life again.

I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Ona”
w temacie Kobiecy portret

In A Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „W ciemny czas”
w temacie W głąb siebie („Szaleństwo i geniusz”)

Elegy For Jane

My student, thrown by a horse

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her.
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Elegia dla Jane”
w temacie Elegia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vHYygm1wBg

Inne wiersze Theodore'a Roethke w tematach:
W harmonii z przyrodą, Motyw ojca, ”Okrutną zagadką jest życie”...,
Blaski i cienie małżeństwa, Mów do mnie..., W gniewie i złości Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 10.01.12 o godzinie 07:52

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

William Shakespeare

Sonet XLIX

Against that time, if ever that time come,
When I shall see thee frown on my defects,
When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,
Call'd to that audit by advised respects;
Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass
And scarcely greet me with that sun thine eye,
When love, converted from the thing it was,
Shall reasons find of settled gravity,--
Against that time do I ensconce me here
Within the knowledge of mine own desert,
And this my hand against myself uprear,
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part:
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,
Since why to love I can allege no cause.

Sonet XLIX

Przeciw tej chwili, jeżeli nadejdzie,
Gdy ujrzę, że się martwisz na me wady,
Gdy miłość twoja jak rozrzutność przejdzie,
A pokierują nią względy i rady,
Przeciw tej chwili, gdy przyjdzie ta chwila,
Że ledwie dojrzysz mnie okiem słonecznym,
A miłość, nie chcąc już być tym, czym była,
Każe poważnym ci być i statecznym;
Przeciw tej chwili me szańce sposobię,
Wiedząc, że własne zasługi mam winić,
I oto wznoszę rękę przeciw sobie,
By przysiąc, że masz tak prawo uczynić.
Rzucić mnie prawo nie wzbrania ci żadne;
A czemu kochać masz, tego nie zgadnę.

tłum. Maciej Słomczyński

Sonet XLIX

Na ów czas (jeśli kiedyś taki czas nastanie),
Gdy ujrzę, jak twa niechęć wady moje karze,
Gdy rozum wezwie miłość twą na przesłuchanie
I ocen ostatecznych dokonać jej każe;
Na ów czas, gdy mnie miniesz, jakbyś nie znał wcale,
I nie powitasz błyskiem słonecznego oka,
Gdy miłość, jakże inna w tym smutnym finale,
Znajdzie powody, by mnie traktować z wysoka;
Na ów czas, jak obrońca w oblężonym grodzie,
Muszę się dziś gotować, otaczać murami
Samowiedzy - lecz przyznać, ku swej własnej szkodzie,
Że zgodne z prawem będzie, co się stanie z nami:
Gdyż w mocy prawa możesz mnie rzucić, nieczuły;
Mnie w kochaniu nie wesprą żadne artykuły.

tłum. Stanisław Barańczak

Sonet XLIX

Przeciw temu czasowi kiedy mnie wyminiesz
Kiedy poczną cię mierzić wszystkie moje wady
Kiedy sumę rzuciwszy na czyjeś wezwanie
Dodawać będziesz zyski i obliczać straty
Przeciw temu czasowi kiedy mnie wyminiesz
Ledwie okiem rzuciwszy grosik pozdrowienia
Kiedy miłość zmienionym łożyskiem odpłynie
I ważne znajdziesz dla niej usprawiedliwienie
Przeciw temu czasowi umacniam się teraz
W wyniosłych murach wiedzy o mojej wartości
Tę oto rękę prawą podnoszę niech wspiera
Wszystkie moje powody do innej miłości
Chcąc mnie bowiem porzucić prawa przywołujesz
Ja bo orzec nie umiem czemu mnie miłujesz

tłum. Jerzy S. Sito

Sonet XLIX - słowa William Shakespeare (przeł. Jerzy S. Sito),
muzyka Piotr Walewski, śpiewa Halina WyrodekRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 29.12.11 o godzinie 09:32

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) – jeden z najwybitniejszych poetów amerykańskich
XX wieku, laureat National Award Book (1951) oraz Nagrody Pulitzera (1955). Wiersze Stevensa, pisane w poetyce późnego romantyzmu, estetyzmu i imagizmu, uważane są
za arcydzieła poezji minionego stulecia. Debiutował w 1923 roku tomem "Harmonium".
Inne jego książki poetyckie to: "Harmonium" (wyd. II rozszerzone, 1931), "Ideas of Order" (1936), "The Man with The Blue Guitar" (1937), "Parts of a World" (1942), "Transport to Summer" (1947), "The Auroras of Autumn" (1950), "The Rock" (1954).
W języku polskim ukazały się: Wiersze. Wybór, przekład i słowo wstępne Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz. PIW, Warszawa 1969 i Żółte popołudnie. Wybór, przekład i posłowie Jacek Gutorow. Biuro Literackie, Wrocław 2008 (patrz recenzję z tej książki Jakuba Winiarskiego w temacie Recenzje o publikacjach – naszych i innych autorów).

Z tomu "Harmonium", 1923



Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. „Dominacja czerni”
w temacie Poezjomalowanie...

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

przekład Mike'a Cygalskiego pt. "Bałwan" w tematach:
Zima i Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

Six Significant Landscapes

I

An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II

The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III

I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV

When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V

Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI

Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. "Sześć znaczących pejzaży"
w temacie W harmonii z przyrodą

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Anegdota o słoju

Umieściłem słój w Tennessee,
Okrągły był i stał na wzgórzu.
Za jego sprawą bezładne pustkowie
Obległo to wzgórze.

Dzikie pustkowie wspięło się ku niemu
I wnet osiadło w krąg, już oswojone.
Okrągły i wysoki słój, na gołej ziemi.
Pośród powietrza stał otworem.

Wszędzie roztaczał rządy swoje.
Był zwykłym, szarym słojem.
A nie popuszczał ptakom ani krzakom,
Jak nic innego w Tennessee.

tłum. Jacek Gutorow

Inny przekład tego wiersza, Stanisława Barańczaka pod tym
samym tytułem, w temacie Poetyckie studium przedmiotu

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka pt. „Imperator porcji lodów”
w temacie Potrawy i napoje...

Z tomu "Ideas of Order", 1936

The Sun This March

The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become,

And re-illuminates things that used to turn
To gold in broadest blue, and be a part

Of a turning spirit in an earlier self.
That, too, returns from out the winter's air,

Like an hallucination come to daze
The corner of the eye. Our element,

Cold is our element and winter's air
Brings voices as of lions coming down.

Oh! Rabbi, rabbi, fend my soul for me
And true savant of this dark nature be.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. "Słońce tego marca"
w temacie Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

The Brave Man

The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.
Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.
The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.
Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.
That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

przekład Adama Lipszyca pt. „Ten dzielny
człowiek” w temacie Światło

Restatement of Romance

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. "Ponowna deklaracja
romansu" w temacie Miłość

Evening Without Angels

the great interests of man: air and light,
the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness
of looking.

Mario Rossi

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged
Above the trees? And why the poet as
Eternal chef d'orchestre?

Air is air,
Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.
Its sounds are not angelic syllables
But our unfashioned spirits realized
More sharply in more furious selves.

And light
That fosters seraphim and is to them
Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweller---
Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?
Sad men made angels of the sun, and of
The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,
Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun
And men of day and never of pointed night,
Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air
In an accord of repetitions. Yet,
If we repeat, it is because the wind
Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible
The motions of the mind and giving form
To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day
Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,
Desire for rest, in that descending sea
Of dark, which in its very darkening
Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

... Evening, when the measure skips a beat
And then another, one by one, and all
To a seething minor swiftly modulate.
Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,

Except for our own houses, huddled low
Beneath the arches and their spangled air,
Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,
Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,
Where the voice that is great within us rises up,
As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. „Wieczór bez aniołów” w temacie
Oślepiony błyskiem, czyli o tym, co się mowie wymyka

Z tomu "Parts of a World", 1942

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Dwa różne przekłady tego wiersza: Stanisława Barańczaka w temacie
W zamieci słowa... i Jacka Gutorowa w temacie Czym jest wiersz?

Z tomu "Transport to Summer", 1947

The Creations of Sound

If the poetry of X was music,
So that it came to him of its own,
Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,
Or chosen quickly, in a freedom
That was their element, we should not know

That X is an obstruction, a man
Too exactly himself, and that there are words
Better without an author, without a poet,

Or having a separate author, a different poet,
An accretion from ourselves, intelligent
Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

At a distance, a secondary expositor,
A being of sound, whom one does not approach
Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made dirtier.
It is more than an imitation for the ear.

He lacks this venerable complication.
His poems are not of the second part of life.
They do not make the visible a little hard

To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind
Or peculiar horns, themselves eked out
By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

We do not say ourselves like that in poems.
We say ourselves in syllables that rise
From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. „Kreacje dźwięku”
w temacie Dar słuchu

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

przekład Stanisława Barańczaka
pt. „Dom pełen ciszy, świat pełen spokoju”
w temacie Cisza w poezji

Z tomu "The Auroras of Autumn", 1950

Angel Surrounded by Paysans

One of the countrymen:

There is
A welcome at the door to which no one comes?

The angel:

I am the angel of reality,
Seen for the moment standing in the door.

I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore
And live without a tepid aureole,

Or stars that follow me, not to attend,
But, of my being and its knowing, part.

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings
Like watery words awash; like meanings said

By repetitions of half meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. "Anioł otoczony przez chłopów"
w temacie Angelologia i dal..., czyli motyw anioła w poezji

Z tomu "The Rock", 1954

Lebensweisheitspielerei

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls
In the afternoon. The proud and the strong
Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,
The finally human,
Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Their indigence is an indigence
That is an indigence of the light,
A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

Little by little, the poverty
Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.

Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

przekład Jacka Gutorowa pt. "Lebensweisheitspielerei"
w temacie "Okrutną zagadką jest życie"...

Vacancy in the Park

March . . . Someone has walked across the snow,
Someone looking for he knows not what.

It is like a boat that has pulled away
From a shore at night and disappeared.

It is like a guitar left on a table
By a woman, who has forgotten it.

It is like the feeling of a man
Come back to see a certain house.

The four winds blow through the rustic arbor,
Under its mattresses of vines.

przekład Grzegorza Musiała pt. "Puste miejsce w parku"
w temacie Kalendarz poetycki na cały rok

Inne wiersze Wallece'a Stevensa w tematach: Marynistyka, Pierzaści bracia mniejsi, Poetyckie studium przedmiotu, O czytaniu i czytelnikach, Pochodnie, świece, znicze...,
Motyw wiatru w poezjiRyszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 10.01.12 o godzinie 21:25

Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna

Alden Nowlan (1933 – 1983) – poeta kanadyjski, jeden z najwybitniejszych powojennych twórców literatury kanadyjskiej. Debiutował w 1958 roku tomem wierszy „A Darkness in the Earth”. Za życia wydano jego 17 książek poetyckich, m. in.: „Wind in A Rocky Country” (1960), „Bread, Wine and Salt” (1967), „The Mysterious Naked Man” (1969), “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” (1974), “Smoked Glass” (1977), “The Execution” (1982). Pisał również powieści (m. in. autobiograficzną „Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien, 1973), sztuki sceniczne („Frankenstein” 1973, “The Dollar Woman” 1981, „Gardens of the Wind” 1982) i eseje krytyczno-literackie (“Double Exposure” 1978). Przekłady prezentowanych niżej wierszy Aldena Nowlana ukazały się na łamach "Literatury na Świecie" nr 4-5/1998.

Britain Street

Saint John, New Brunswick

This is a street at war.
The smallest children
battle with clubs
till the blood comes,
shout ‘fuck you!’
like a rallying cry ––

while mothers shriek
from doorsteps and windows
as though the very names
of their young were curses:

‘Brian! Marlene!
Damn you! God damn you!’

or waddle into the street
to beat their own with switches:
‘I’ll teach you, Brian!
I’ll teach you, God damn you!’

On this street
even the dogs
would rather fight
than eat.

I have lived here nine months
and in all that time
have never once heard
a gentle word spoken.

I like to tell myself
that is only because
gentle words are whispered
and harsh words shouted.

przekład Bohdana Zadury pt.”Britain Street”
w temacie Na miejskich ulicach

A Mysterious Naked Man

A mysterious naked man has been reported
on Cranston Avenue. The police are performing
the usual ceremonies with coloured lights and sirens.
Almost everyone is outdoors and strangers are conversing excitedly
as they do during disasters when their involvement is peripheral.
”What did he look like?”' the lieutenant is asking.
”I don't know”, says the witness. “He was naked”.
There is talk of dogs-this is no ordinary case
of indecent exposure, the man has been seen
a dozen times since the milkman spotted him and now
the sky is turning purple and voices
carry a long way and the children
have gone a little crazy as they often do at dusk
and cars are arriving
from other sections of the city.
And the mysterious naked man
is kneeling behind a garbage can or lying on his belly
in somebody's garden
or maybe even hiding in the branches of a tree,
where the wind from the harbour
whips at his naked body,
and by now he's probably done
whatever it was he wanted to do
and wishes he could go to sleep
or die
or take to the air like Superman.

przekład Bohdana Zadury pt. „Tajemniczy
nagi człowiek” w temacie Nagość

The Execution

On the night of the execution
a man at the door
mistook me for the coroner.
"Press," I said.

But he didn't understand. He led me
into the wrong room
where the sheriff greeted me:
"You're late, Padre."

"You're wrong," I told him. "I'm Press,"
"Yes, of course, Reverend Press."
We went down a stairway.

"Ah, Mr Ellis," said the Deputy.
"Press!" I shouted. But he shoved me
through a black curtain.
The lights were so bright
I couldn't see the faces
of the men sitting
opposite. But, thank God, I thought
they can see me!

"Look!" I cried. "Look at my face!
Doesn't anybody know me?"

Then a hood covered my head.
"Don't make it harder for us," the hangman whispered.

przekład Bohdana Zadury pt. „Egzekucja”
w temacie Przemoc w majestacie prawa

Inne wiersze Aldena Nowlana w tematach:
Lot nasz podniebny..., Rozstania, Samotność, Na falach eteru, czyli poezja i radio, Zwierzęta w ZOO i nie tylko tam, Pożądanie, fantazje erotyczne...Ryszard Mierzejewski edytował(a) ten post dnia 30.08.11 o godzinie 07:33