Fernando Pessoa/Alvaro de Campos

 I Got Off the Train

I got off the train
And said goodbye to the man I'd met.
We'd been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears...
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another's lives,
And we all feel sorry when it's time to get off.

All that is human moves me, because I'm a man.
All that is human moves me, not because I have an affinity
With human ideas or human doctrine
But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself.

The maid who hated to go,
Crying with nostalgia
For the house where she'd been mistreated...

All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world's sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, in my heart.

And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

Alvaro De Campos
aka Fernando Pessoa
Translated by Richard Zenith

Arthur Rimbaud

 Au Cabaret Vert

         cinq heures du soir

Depuis huit jours, j’avais déchiré mes bottines
Aux cailloux des chemins. J’entrais à Charleroi.
– Au Cabaret-Vert : je demandai des tartines
De beurre et du jambon qui fût à moitié froid.

Bienheureux, j’allongeai les jambes sous la table
Verte : je contemplai les sujets très naïfs
De la tapisserie. – Et ce fut adorable,
Quand la fille aux tétons énormes, aux yeux vifs,

– Celle-là, ce n’est pas un baiser qui l’épeure ! –
Rieuse, m’apporta des tartines de beurre,
Du jambon tiède, dans un plat colorié,

Du jambon rose et blanc parfumé d’une gousse
D’ail, – et m’emplit la chope immense, avec sa mousse
Que dorait un rayon de soleil arriéré.

 [Robert Lowell translation]

For eight days I had been knocking my boots
on the road stones. I was entering Charleroi.
At the Green Cabaret, I called for ham,
half cold, and a large helping of tartines.

Happy, I kicked my shoes off, cooled my feet
under the table, green like the room, and laughed
at the naive Belgian pictures on the wall.
But it was terrific when the house-girl

with her earth-mother tits and come-on eyes—
no Snow Queen having cat-fits at a kiss—
brought me tarts and ham on a colored plate 

She stuck a clove of garlic in the ham,
red frothed by white, and slopped beer in my stein,
foam gilded by a ray of the late sun.

[Ezra Pound translation]

Wearing out my shoes, 8th day
On the bad roads, I got into Charleroi.
Bread, butter, at the Green Cabaret
And the ham half cold.

Got my legs stretched out
And was looking at the simple tapestries,
Very nice when the gal with the big bubs
And lively eyes,

Not one to be scared of a kiss and more,
Brought the butter and bread with a grin
And the luke-warm ham on a colored plate…

Pink ham, white fat and a sprig
Of garlic, and a great chope of foamy beer

Gilt by the sun in that atmosphere.

Eugenio Montale

 “The Blackcap Wasn’t Killed”

The blackcap wasn’t killed
by a hunter, so far as I know.
Perhaps she died mid-morning. And I never
got the news. Regarding me, I suppose
she had lost all recollection. If some
ghostly presence flutters around here now,
I can’t capture it to ask: “Who are you?”
It may be that ghosts have no more substance
than a faint breath of wind. Perhaps I, too,
am just one of these puffs and don’t know it,
a breeze so light the cardboard stage-set
that surrounds me manages to stand upright.
To destroy it will take different gusts entirely.
Where will they take refuge then, these stray
bits of gossamer? There exists no science,
philosophy, theology that concerns itself with them.

The Allegory

The meaning of the plot is unclear
even to those whom it concerns.
We’re just supporting actors, prompters in the pit,
but the story line is in the hands of others.
Clearly we’re dealing with an allegory
lasting an infinitude of centuries, assuming
that time exists, or rather that it is not part
of some great machination, divine or otherwise.
There are those who posit thingamajigs causing
the whole of everything to collapse into itself.
But you don’t believe this. The rapture of lunatics
is somebody else’s business.

Anne-Marie Albiach

 

The Hermitage Road (detail)

Parallel life of corporeal horizons already lived—the ties loosen along a trajectory, leaving to silence a dynamic of power or of destruction.

 

The contour of an outline constrains the masked face and the limbs, encloses wrists and wristlets, neck and neck band. Lewdness of earliest hours; light on lifting eyelids, distinct in color. Under the lace cap, silver-tinted hair ‘‘emerges in a flowering of unsuspected seasons.’’

Facing these accomplices in their preferred setting, soft skirts white and trimly belted, she verifies with both hands the precise point of the mask, where feminine and masculine become exacerbated. In the penumbra of the double, they look on with calm, a fragility in their frills of evanescent blue. An uncertain dream issues from her to them, a whiteness meanwhile irradiating our impulses.

How pierce this luminosity, which cancels the most ardent spectator. Two ardors, one white, the other scarlet, separated by the curtain of a distance fashioned as by time’s occlusions.

All that in an immediate memory.

Max Jacob

par Pablo Picasso                                

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 (Jose Angel Araguz)

Gilgamesh (c. 2150-1400 BCE)

from Gilgamesh's rejection of the goddess Ishtar 

in Tablet 6:

"Which of your husbands did you love forever?

Which could satisfy your endless desires?

Let me remind you of how they suffered,
how each one came to a bitter end.
Remember what happened to that beautiful boy
Tammuz: you loved him when you were both young,
then you changed, you sent him to the underworld
and doomed him to be wailed for, year after year.
You loved the bright-speckled roller bird,
then you changed, you attacked him and broke his wings,
and he sits in the woods crying Ow-ee! Ow-ee!
You loved the lion, matchless in strength,
then you changed, you dug seven pits for him,
and when he fell, you left him to die.

                                            --------tr. Stephen Miller 

Don Quixote

 

Julio Cortazar

 

 ‘Letter to a Young Lady in Paris’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn (First published in English in Blow-Up and Other Stories, Pantheon 1967; also in Bestiary, Vintage Classics, 2020. 

“Andrea, I didn’t want to come live in your apartment on Suipacha. Not so much because of the bunnies, but rather that it offends me to intrude on a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air, networks that in your environment conserve the music in the lavender, the heavy fluff of the powder puff in the talcum, the play between the violin and the viola in Ravel’s quartet.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Imaginary Biography

                                        Translated by Robert Bly

First Childhood, no limits, no renunciations,
no goals. Such unthinking joy.
Then abruptly terror, schoolrooms, boundaries,
. . captivity,
and a plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance. The one crushed will be the crusher
. . now,
and he avenges his defeats, wrestles, wins, 
and overpowers others, slowly, act by act. 

And then all alone in space, in lightness, in cold.
But deep in the shape he has made to stand erect
he takes a breath, as if reaching for the First, 
. . Primitive....

Then God explodes from his hiding place.

Andre du Bouchet

 

Everything becomes words
earth
pebbles

in my mouth and under my feet

man given back
redeemed
in stones
in coins
of gold

currency of words and steps

what I say makes you laugh

nameless
gold that barters me
alive.

 

Andre du Bouchet

SANG

…sang

tel qu’
est
pour le dire
de surcroît
accouru sourdre
un mot

le mot est là

pas moi.

© 1987, André du Bouchet

André Du Bouchet

                                           portrait by Giacometti (1965)

 Painting

 

     all things look as if

they are waiting, as soon as we see them.                                      is it by their

   proven resemblance

that we will know they are, at the same time that we are,

here.

 

  itself, it is

reality                         —                        other, and resembling nothing, that we

desire.                                         already, in the doorway, it flowers.               in

the halo flush with bloom, which cuts through all

appearance.                                                                                  almost unmoved.

 

the tile.                                                                                                        the vines

  of the façade.                                        in

the branchings, the breakage of the sky.               this is how the given world’s

fatigue, its freshness, cracks and flowers.

 

    it happens

that, once we’ve reached the thing we have desired,

it may slip away into an infinite otherness.                                                        no

illusion if the window returning the color of its light to the

blue we do not see is forever merged with

that blue.                           who, then, will say the name of recognized things?

already, through our waiting, they have flowered.

                                                                                                            (tr. Hoyt Rogers)

 

André Du Bouchet

Dawn without sun

white straightaway.
From the cliff : an immense trampling of clouds suspended above the flow of the Seine. This white chain cracks open above the island like a needle’s eye.
Magical fields, like a beach of cuttlefish and kelp newly abandoned by the sea. Colors still preserved — sharp fishbones, lace of thistles bright as window-panes — awakening of yellow and purple dots before they’ve stirred.
At dawn : everything that’s worn becomes both new and worn. Worn objects — brand-new — not yet tired out by day — like the stones of the path that glow.

Here is the unending spring we’re steeped in as we sleep — that we can glimpse when we’re awakened toward the end of night : we catch sight of night’s mists.

The body of mist spreads underfoot like the trampling of clouds. The sun rises in our chest even before it appears on the room’s horizon; between the black casements, the black knoll standing out against the light, dawn plows us.
The head shoots up in its field, its tethers suddenly cut— it wouldn’t take much for us to crow like roosters.

 

Pablo Neruda

Sonnet XVII (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

TRANSLATED BY MARK EISNER

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,   

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:   

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,   

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries   

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,   

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose   

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,   

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,   

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,   

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Holderlin

 Round us the town is at rest; the street, in pale lamplight, grows quiet And, their torches ablaze, coaches rush through and away.

People go home to rest, replete with the day and its pleas- ures, There to weigh up in their heads, pensive, the gain and the loss,
Finding the balance good; stripped bare now of grapes and of flowers, As of their hand-made goods, quiet the market stalls lie.
But faint music of strings comes drifting from gardens; it could be Someone in love who plays there, could be a man all alone
Thinking of distant friends, the days of his youth; and the fountains, Ever welling and new, plash amid fragrance from beds.
Church-bells ring; every stroke hangs still in the quivering half-light And the watchman calls out, mindful, no less, of the hour.
Now a breeze rises too and ruffles the crest of the coppice, Look, and in secret our globe’s shadowy image, the moon,
Slowly is rising too; and Night, the fantastical, comes now Full of stars and, I think, little concerned about us,
Night, the astonishing, there, the stranger to all that is human, Over the mountain-tops mourn- ful and gleaming draws on.

                                                                translation by Michael Hamburger 

Philippe Soupault

 tomato blossoms

Don't know where to go
Set
plumb
bedded
In advance
Board the wagons
Bring on the brooms
What is there! The colors of the small fish
Or the lousy automobiles
Or the practical safety pins
Or the tall cylinder hats
Or Mr. X.
Or the newspaper kiosks
You just have to know how to use them.

Philippe Soupault

From The Magnetic Fields (with Andre Breton)

PERPETUAL FASHIONS

Crime of teenagers English salt

River of chapped hands

Palace of celebrations and dawns

Red red the song

Sweet sugar become the color green

Sensations gone pale

Courage virgin blotting paper

A fly strikes fear in old men

They discover a brain there are red ants

March

March

Hallelujah

Philippe Soupault

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

Rilke

 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)

Philippe Soupault

                                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