Rain
translated by Elizabeth Bishop
Mr. Yousouf forgot his umbrella
Mr. Yousouf lost his umbrella
Madame Yousouf, someone stole her umbrella
There was an ivory handle on her umbrella
What stuck in my eye was the end of an umbrella
Somewhere, haven’t I left my umbrella
Didn’t I leave my umbrella
Last night in your umbrella-stand?
I shall have to buy myself an umbrella
I never really use an umbrella
I have a duster with a hood for the rain
Mr. Yousouf you are lucky to dispense with
par Amadeo Modigliani (1911)
Poem of the Moon
There are on the night sky three mushrooms, which are the moon. As abruptly as sings the cuckoo from a clock, they rearrange themselves each month at midnight. There are in the garden some rare flowers which are little men at rest that wake up every morning. There is in my dark room a luminous shuttle that roves, then two … phosphorescent aerostats, they’re the reflections of a
Dusk
The moon is red on the misted horizon;
In a fog that dances, the meadow
Sleeps in the smoke, frogs bellow
In green reeds through which frissons run;
The lilies close their shutters,
The poplars stretch far away,
Tall and serried, their spectres stray;
Among bushes the fireflies flicker;
The owls are awake, in soundless flight
They row through the air on heavy wings,
The zenith fills, sombrely glowing.
Pale Venus emerges, and it is Night.
 |
| Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbau |
It rains in my heart
As it rains on the town,
What languor so dark
That soaks to my heart?
Oh sweet sound of the rain
On the earth and the roofs!
For the dull heart again,
Oh the song of the rain!
It rains for no reason
In this heart lacking heart.
What? And no treason?
It’s grief without reason.
By far the worst pain,
Without hatred, or love,
Yet no way to explain
Why my heart feels such pain!
Prayer
Parigi – Milano 1919
When I awake
from inflamed profligacy
within a crystalline, astonished space
When my weight becomes light once again
The shipwreck endows me, Lord
the first exclamation of a new day
Sea's shifting landscapes no longer
Lead me, or lacerating
Pallor of dawn on these or those leaves;
Old night I carry on my eyes,
I cannot set against the block.
Forgotten, what
Do I want with images?
Translation by Andrew Wylie
Italy
I am a poet, a unanimous
cry, am
“My Rivers”
I cling to this wounded tree
forsaken in this sinkhole
that feels as dull
as a circus
before or after the show
and I watch
the calm passage
of clouds across the moon
This morning I stretched out
in an urn of water
and like a relic
rested
The Isonzo as it flowed
polished me
like one of its stones
I lifted
my bones
and walked out
translated by Geoffrey Brock
The dead are getting more restless each day.
They used to be easy
we’d put on stiff collars flowers
praised their names on long lists
shrines of the homeland
remarkable shadows
monstrous marble.
The corpses signed away for posterity
returned to formation
and marched to the beat of our old music.
But not anymore
the dead
have changed.
They get all ironic
they ask questions.
It seems to me they’ve started to realise
they’re becoming the majority!
(trans. by Luis Gonzalez Serrano)
I wanted
I wanted to talk about life in all the corners
filled with song I wanted to join a river of words
the dreams and the names what is not said
in the newspapers the agony of the lonely
caught in the folds of the rain
reclaim the bare parables of the lovers and leave them
at the feet of a child’s game
elaborating their sweet daily destruction
I wanted to pronounce the syllables of the people
the songs of their anguish
point out where the heart is lame
to say who alone deserves a shot
in the back to tell of my own country
lay down the exodus of the large
migrations that opened all the paths of the world
of love even dragged over there
by the ditches to talk to you about trains
and my friend who killed himself with another’s knife
of the history of all of the people torn
from the blindness of the myth of reefs
the century that will end with my three sons
of the tongues of the birds and the furious foam
of the great quadrupeds’ stampede
and I wanted to tell you about the Revolution
and about Cuba and the Soviet Union
and about the woman I love because of her eyes
of the smallest storms
and of your lives filled with sunrise
and asking people who saw it who said that
how could it be done I got here
ahead of you
and of all of the things of nature
and of the heart and its testimony
of the last fingerprint before annihilation
of the little animals and of tenderness
I wanted to say yes all that and tell
a lot of the stories I know and were told to me in my time
and all that I learned living in sorrow’s big room
the things that were said by the poets before me
and that it was good to knowAnd I could not give you more—closed door
of poetry—
than my own headless body in the sand of the ring.(mexico-havana-san-salvador-prague 1961-1965)
(trans. by Anne Boyer)
Poem of Love
They who widened the Panama Canal
(and were classified “silver roll” and “gold roll”),
they who repaired the Pacific fleet at California bases,
they who rotted in the jails of Guatemala,
Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua *
for being thieves, smugglers, swindlers, for being hungry,
they always suspicious of everything
("permit me to haul you in as a suspect
for hanging out on corners suspiciously, and furthermore
with the pretentious air of being Salvadorian"),
they who packed the bars and brothels of all the ports
and capitals of the region
(“The Blue Cave,” “Hot Pants,” “Happyland”),
the planters of corn deep in foreign jungles,
the kings of cheap porn,
they who no one knows where they come from,
the best artisans of the world,
they who were stitched by bullets crossing the border,
they who died of malaria
or by the sting of scorpions or yellow fever
in the hell of banana plantations,
the drunkards who cried for the national anthem
under a cyclone of the Pacific or northern snows,
the moochers, the beggars, the dope pushers,
guanaco sons of bitches,
they who hardly made it back,
they who had a little more luck,
the eternally undocumented,
the jack-of-all trades, the hustlers, the gluts,
the first the flash a knife,
the sad, the saddest of all,
my people, my brothers.
*Somoza’s era in Nicaragua.
Translated from the Spanish by Zoë Anglesey and Daniel Flores Ascencio.
After four hours of torture, the Apache and the other two
cops threw a bucket of water at the prisoner to wake him up
The Companions in Hades
fools, who ate the cattle of Helios Hyperion;
but he deprived them of the day of their return.
— Odyssey
with brother Alexander (on right). painting by Leonid Pasternak
My desk is not so wide that I might lean
There is a sacred, secret line in loving
San Biagio, at Montepulciano
Columns, arches, vaults: how he knew
The ways you promise what you lack;
And that your bodies, like your souls,
Always slip from our grasping hands.
Space is such a lure . . . Swift to disappoint,
As they raise and topple clouds, the sky's
Architects still offer more than ours,
Who only build a scaffolding of dreams.
He dreamed, all the same; but on that day,
He gave a better use to beauty's shapes:
He understood that form means to die.
And this, his final work, is a coin
With both sides bare. He made in stone,
Of this great room, the arrow and the bow.
(Translated by Hoyt Rogers)
In autumn
Catlike in the salamander’s
slimy yellow
between the hedge and the tarmac: I didn’t even
see the face of the boy who
almost ran over me at the bend with his bike.
The rain was hosing down sideways
so much that it darkened the mood of the cows
near the high school:
in groups, dazed,
they forsook the grass,
and lowed miserably at the sky.
translation by Marco Sanzongi
Carnival at Prato Levantina
This is the Undone Sunday,
without a cry or flight from the strange
gashes in the sky.
But the hares
ran invisible over the snowy
lawns, and discreet designs remain
from the silent orgy.
Children hidden in old men
with light humpbacks and heavy heads
return home taciturn
after dinner, greeting
with resigned gestures.
I follow from a distance
as they sink gently into the snow.
translation by Lynne Lawner
The beggar woman of naples
When I lived in Naples there was always a beggar woman at the gate of my palace, to whom I would toss some coins before climbing into my carriage. One day, surprised at never being thanked, I looked at the beggar woman. Now, as I looked at her, I saw that what I had taken for a beggar woman was a wooden case painted green which contained some red earth and a few half-rotten bananas …
***
Happy bananas!
Jose
translated by
The Concarneau Regattas
