Ilya Kutik

Fine-bearded Ilya Kutik & his wife, center, at home with his circle of friends, philologists, translators, poets & philosophy teachers, Moscow December 16, 1985. Dostoevsky-eyed youth in striped sweater had gone absent without leave for the evening from the Army to meet me and ask after Neal Cassady, Kerouac's hero On the Road., 1985

David and Orpheus

On his simple harp he sings praise to Him,
Who created us. His voice trembles from uncertainty
in himself, but not in Him, the Only, the Formidable – no escape.

Over his Apollonian lyre, having left behind the gloom
of Hades, he runs his fingers, not knowing amongst this scenery
which god to sing his song for in the present forest landscape:

of that oak? of that there pine? of that river? which to?
Again – the problems of Paris? He’ll play for any o’ youse
easily, even in the rain. But for which one ought he?

David, now, sits under a tree. From soul rupture
after the Anointing – life is like the branches
his ancestors have hung their harps on ever since captivity.

~

Harp, you are like the cheekbone
of cubism, you are like an icon-
precipice falling down,
and alongside – a saint and his mount.

Lyre, your sides
are incurved so like lips,
that Pan says to Apollo: “I
knew not of such a tulip.”

Dino Compano

The night

Their shadows slithered along the ruined reddish walls: he followed, robotically. He said to the woman one word that fell in the silence of the afternoon: an old man turned to look at him with a gaze absurd shining and empty. And the woman smiled always a smile feeble in the afternoon aridity, stupid and alone in the catastrophic light

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Seven-Sided Poem

When was born, one of the crooked
angels who live in shadow, said:
Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life.

The houses watch the men,
men who run after women.
If the afternoon had been blue,
there might have been less desire.

The trolley goes by full of legs:
white legs, black legs, yellow legs.
My God, why all the legs?
my heart asks. But my eyes
ask nothing at all.

The man behind the moustache
is serious, simple, and strong.
He hardly ever speaks.
He has a few, choice friends,
the man behind the spectacles and the moustache.

My God, why hast Thou forsaken me
if Thou knew'st 1 was not God,
if Thou- knew'st that 1 was weak.

Universe, vast universe,
if 1 had been named Eugene
that would not be what 1 mean
but it would go into verse
faster.
Universe, vast universe,
my heart is vaster.

I oughtn't to tell you,
but this moon
and this brandy
play the devil with one's emotions.

Translated by Elizabeth Bishop

Eugenio Montale

Concerning the Universe, the City of God

Concerning the universe, the city of God, 
we know very little.
It was cooked for a long time
over a low flame.

Now, according to some idiots,
things are speeding up,
an acceleration that seems almost
a prelude to total extinction.

Perhaps thought itself will survive
without the one doing the thinking.
What’s left is sheer absurdity,
the black hole, the Encyclopedia
of zero.

                                                            Translation by George Bradley

Dino Compana

Oh poem poem poem

Oh poem poem poem

Rise, rise, rise

Up from the electric fever of the nightly pavement.

Unstoppable from the equivocal elastic silhouettes

Darts in the burst and in the sudden scream

Over the monotonous and anonymous shooting

Of voices which tireless like flutes

The perverted whore screams at the intersection

Because the big elegant man stole her little dog

A wanton grasshopper jumps

From one sidewalk to another all green

And galls the core of my bread the metal rasps of the streetcar

Silence–a lightening gesture

Has generated a rain of stars

From one side that bows and collapses under the prestigious hit

In an eye-catching cape of velvety blood

Silence again. Comments dry

And deaf a revolver that announces

And closes another destiny.

Fernando Pessoa/Alvaro de Campos

                    Picasso

On The Last Page Of A New Anthology

So many good poets!
So many good poems!
They’re really good and all alike,
With so much concurrency not one stays with you,
Or they endure by chance, posterity’s lottery,
Gaining place by the Empresario’s whim...
So many good poets!
What am I writing poems for?
When I write them they seem to me
What my sensation, with which I write them, seems to me —
The only big thing in the world —
The universe outside swells with my largess.
Afterwards, written, right there, readable...
Well, now... And in this anthology of minor poets?
So many good poets!
What is genius, finally; how does one distinguish
Genius from dexterity, good poets from bad?
I have no idea if you can really distinguish...
It’s better to sleep...
I shut the anthology more weary of it than I am of the world...
Am I vulgar?...
So many good poets!
Holy God!...

(5/1/28)

Fernando Pessoa

from Notebooks

 In me every thought, however much I’d like to preserve it intact, turns sooner or later into reverie. If I wish to set forth reasons or launch a train of argument, what comes out of me are sentences initially expressive of the thought itself, then phrases subsidiary to those initial sentences, and finally shadows and derivatives of those subsidiary phrases. I begin to meditate on the existence of God and soon find myself speaking of faraway parks, feudal processions, rivers that pass almost soundlessly beneath the windows of my contemplation . . . And I find myself speaking about them because I find myself seeing them, feeling them, and there’s a brief moment when my face is grazed by a real breeze rising from the surface of the dreamed river through metaphors, through the stylistic feudalism of my central self-abandon.

I like to think, because I know it won’t be long before I stop thinking. It’s as a point of departure that thinking delights me—a cold, metallic harbor station from which to set sail for the vast South. I sometimes try to focus my mind on a large metaphysical or even social problem, because I know that, ensconced in the hoarse voice of my reason, there are peacock tails ready to spread open for me as soon as I forget I’m thinking, and I know that humanity is a door in a wall that doesn’t exist, so I can open it onto whatever gardens I like.

Fernando Pessoa/ Alvaro de Campos

"So Many Gods"

So many gods!   

They’re like books—you can’t read everything, you never know anything.   

Happy the man who knows but one god, and keeps him a secret.   

Every day I have different beliefs— 

Sometimes in the same day I have different beliefs— 

And I wish I were the child now crossing   

The view from my window of the street below.   

He’s eating a cheap pastry (he’s poor) without efficient or final cause,   

An animal uselessly raised above the other vertebrates,   

And through his teeth he sings a ribald show tune . . .   

Yes, there are many gods,   

But I’d give anything to the one who’d take that child out of my sight.   

                                                                TRANSLATED BY RICHARD ZENITH

Fernando Pessoa/Alvaro de Campos

 

 

Sonnet

When I look at myself I see a stranger

So obsessed am I with feeling
That I sometimes lose my way when I step free
From all the sensations I receive.

The air I breathe, the liquor I imbibe,
Both belong to my way of existing,
And I never quite know how to conclude
The sensations I so unwillingly conceive.

Nor have I ever properly ascertained
If I do actually feel what I feel. Am I
Really the person I seem to be?

Am I really who I believe I am?
Even in my sensations I’m a semi-atheist,
Unsure that I am the one feeling those feelings.

                Translation by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari