From The Magnetic Fields (with Andre Breton)
Epitaph for Francis Picabia
Why
did you want us to bury you with your four dogs
a newspaper
and your hat
You asked us to write on your grave
Have a nice trip
They’re going to take you for a fool up there too
Translations by John Lyons
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Robert Bly)
Phillipe Soupault and Erna Niemeyer-Richter, Berlin, 1934
SPORT ARTICLES
Courageous like a stamp
he went his way
tapping softly in his hands
to count his steps
his heart red as a boar
beat beat
like a pink green butterfly
Now and then
he planted a little satin flag
When he had walked a lot
he sat down to rest
and fell asleep
But since that day there have been many clouds in the sky
many birds in the trees
and there's been a lot of salt in the sea
There also have been lots of other things
Philippe Soupault, translated by Johannes Beilharz
from A Kumquat for John Keats
Now were you twenty five or six years old
when that fevered brow of yours at last grew cold?
I've got no books at hand to check the dates.
My grudging but glad spirit celebrates
that all I've got to hand's the kumquats, John,
the fruit I'd love to have your verdict on,
but dead men don't eat kumquats, or drink wine,
they shiver in the arms of Proserpine,
not warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne,
nor watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn
as I did, waking, when I saw her twist,
with one deft movement of a sunburnt wrist,
the moon that feebly lit our last night's walk
past alligator swampland, off its stalk.
I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw,
as if I'd never seen the moon before,
the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light
make each citrus on the tree its satellite.
I am neither useful nor beautiful,
Have no pleasing colours or scents;
My roots eat into cement,
And my thorn-edged leaves -
Sharp as swords - protect me.
I'm mute. I speak only my plant language,
Hard for you, man, to understand:
An out-of-use language,
Exotic, since I come from far away,
From a cruel country
Full of wind, poisons and volcanoes.
I've waited many years before sending up
This towering desperate flower of mine,
Ugly, wooden, stiff, but stretching towards the sky.
It's our way of shouting:
I'll die tomorrow. Now do you understand?
Translated by Ruth Feldman
When evening ebbs in these fountains
my home is a run colour.
I am gone, I remember the frogs,
the moon, the sad whirr of crickets.
Vespers ring and waste on the fields:
I am dead to the bellsong.
Don't worry, stranger: my sweet flight aches
over the empty land. I am a ghost of love
who comes back to his home that was gone.
In some city, Trieste or Udine,
along some limetreed street,
in spring, while the leaves
are shifting colour,
I'll fall down dead
under a throbbing sun,
blond, tall,
and shut my eyes
and leave the shining sky alone.
Under a hot-green limetree
I'll fall down in death's
dark, ungathering
the limes and the sun.
And beautiful boys
will run in the light
I've lately lost
hareing from school
all tousled
translations by John Gallas
I ought to tell you some time how my view
Of poetry has changed, and how it came about
That today I think of myself as merely one
Of those craftsmen or merchants of Imperial Japan
Who composed poems on how the cherry-tree blossoms,
On chrysanthemums and the full moon.
If I could describe that courtyard of Venetian courtesans,
One of them teasing a peacock with a twig,
And could peel the silken drape and the sash studded with pearls
From the full weight of a breast and from the reddish
Stripe on a belly where the dress had been fastened —
At least as the captain of the galleons saw it
Whose fleet laden with gold sailed into port that morning;
And if at the same time I could enshrine their poor bones
— Now laid in the graveyard whose gate the fat sea licks —
In words more durable than the last of their hair-combs
Which in dust under the slab, alone, waits for the light,
Then I would have no doubts. What can be gathered
From stubborn matter? Nothing: at most, beauty.
And therefore we should be content with cherry blossom,
With chrysanthemums and the fullness of the moon
1957
