Max Jacob

Rain 

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                 

                                                    translation by Elizabeth Bishop

Max Jacob

Rain

                            translated by Elizabeth Bishop

IS2018

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 

Max Jacob

Ravignan Street“One never bathes twice in the same stream,” the philosopher Heraclitus used to say. However, the same people always turn up again! They go by, at the same time, gay or sad. You, passers-by in Ravignan Street, I have given you the names of Historical Defuncts! Here’s Agamemnon! Here’s Madame Hanska! Ulysses is a milkman! Patrocles is at the foot of the street while a Pharaoh is near me. Castor and Pollux are the ladies on the sixth floor. But you, old rag-picker, you who, in the enchanted morning, come to get the garbage, the garbage which is still fresh when I put out my nice big lamp, you whom I do not know, poor and mysterious rag-picker, you, rag-picker, I have named you a noble and celebrated name. I have named you Dostoyevsky.

                                                                               translated by Elizabeth Bishop

Max Jacob

 

                                    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

Max Jacob

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

Max Jacob

The Concarneau Regattas

Drowning people don’t always sink to the bottom. It is even enough for someone struggling in the water to remember that he knew how to swim and then he sees his trousers flap around like the legs of a jumping jack. That’s what happened to me at the Concarneau regattas. I was perfectly calm before sinking, or well those elegant people in their skiffs passing by will notice my efforts or well…in short, a certain optimism. The shore so close! With life-sized Israelite individuals of the most gracious sort. What surprised me in getting out of the water was that I was hardly damp, and that people looked at me not as a poodle, but as a man.

            translated by Sophia Lecker

Max Jacob

 Perigal-Nohor

Someone’s patched up the azure of my sky
My nuptials had two lions standing by
And then Saint Catherine lifted her blade
To prune my honey-colored shrubs in braids—
Two castles on which little towers dwell—
The little castle tower’s scrofules swell.
It’s all that was left in this capitol
With bits of garden scattered here and there
And we could see your coifs of lace as well
Madame Adamunzipper
The color of kipper
Madame Mirabeau, Madame Mirabelle
Nebuchadnezzar’s mother, truth to tell.
Now sailboats returned to this cathedral
One with gold and the other with coal tar
The third one catching fire carried Abelard
While the sea seemed somewhat vegetal
I write in letters that are capital:
I’ll never be but a novice in art
The novices’ necklaces we wear crowns
The one who’s crowned amounts to he who crowns. 

                    translated by Alexander Prikow                           

Sandro Penna

n his poetry Penna clearly says who he is and how he feels. That is a rare enough quality these days. He moves away from the trappings of identity toward an honest expression of love. In Penna’s work the beautiful is not conscious of itself and is therefore erotic: “Is not the beauty of those who are unaware of their beauty / more beautiful than those who are aware?” He is critical of those who hide their desires behind a thin façade of modesty:

Here they are, these lords of life.

They are very modest, indeed.

Even with their senses fully aroused,

they manage to offend no one.

Penna never hid his sexuality in interviews. He once told a reporter (who probably had to pay dearly for the interview), “I am not a homosexual. I am a pederasta.…Homosexuality is a privilege.” Penna’s homosexuality is complicated in one sense by a moral dilemma:

The problem of sex

consumes my entire life.

I wonder at each moment

whether I am doing the right thing

or the wrong.

But there is another sense in which Penna accepts the impossibility of a moral resolution to his “problem” and instead turns this negative to a positive value:

There are always boys in my poems.

But I do not know how to speak of anything else.

Everything else is just a tedious noise.

I am unable to sing of Good Deeds.

Since his poems chiefly concern homosexual love, they face being relegated to a gay-only ghetto of readers or to another ghetto that even homosexuals avoid: pederastia. This is a problematic issue in the United States where scandal surrounding sexual orientation is still prevalent. But more importantly, there are no glamorous pronouncements or concern with gender politics in Penna’s poetry. You also won’t find a vision of historical process or a mass of physical details. What you will find is an attachment to everyday reality. Penna’s poetry is candid, uncluttered, minimalist, and of profound lyrical intensity and as Pasolini, a great supporter of Penna’s work, wrote in the 1970 preface to Penna’s collected poems, he is, “perhaps t

Sandro Penna

I have found my little angel

amid a shady audience.
Smoking a small cigar
and with shining eyes..

Severo Sarduy

from Firefly

So no one will know i’m afraid 

Wait, who is that guy with the big head? Firefly? My god, I thought he’d be more developed, not so skinny. I had imagined him sort of like a tiny Greek athlete with clear glass eyes and gold nipples. I find him like this, all of a shocking sudden, squatting on his clay chamber pot, the pale gray one with two handles, atop a dark green cistern in the shade of a royal poinciana collapsing from the weight of the cockatoos. The first thing I see is his oversized head. And his eyes are so Chinese, he might as well not have any. A bald Chinaman. When he spreads his little arms, his chest is really scrawny: a spidery map of bones. Instead of getting off the pot, he holds tight to both handles and lets himself slide down the cistern, and the basin shatters into more bits of ceramic than you’d find in a Julian Schnabel self- portrait. The cheeks of Firefly’s bottom are two purple splotches when he dashes across the various blues of the floor tiles, screaming at the top of his lungs.The three aunts are in such a tizzy from his descent you would think they’d seen a polka-dotted bear cub riding a chariot down a steep brambly slope.The aunts: all in shining silk. There must be some baptism to attend, or a small parish celebration. They gleam so in the noonday sun that you have to squint to look at them. That isn’t all: crocodile-leather high heels with red platforms and over their shoulders see-through handbags like round canteens for a thirsty outing. The make-up is simple: a bit of powdered eggshell does it, plus a purple touch of Mercurochrome on the lips. Yes, it must be a catechism klatch, or maybe the arrival from the mother country of some buff parish priest whose photograph they’ve seen, the longed-for replacement of the insipid confessor of bilious believers his predecessor turned into after half a century of evangelizing against the tide

Severo Sarduy

 

“Recounting”

Today, I’m not like yesterday, time passes.
My verse has turned transparent.
In the afternoons, come to me
sudden longings to go home.

Consuming passion, passion that burns
left me; now its my mind
that delights, indifferent night,
in those bodies that day turns away.

I do not deplore love, now left for someone else;
only desire, which redeems, inverts
and alters all it touches.

Writings, passions, and poison
were missing in my life and my death.
And the touch of some hands, and a mouth.

                                                TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY DAVID FRANCIS 

Severo Sarduy

 

“Rothko”

To Andrés Sánchez Robayna

Not the colors, nor the pure form.
Memory of ink. Sediment
that decants light from its pigment,
beyond the canvas and its framework.

Not the lines, not the shadow or texture,
nor the brief illusion of movement;
nothing more than silence: the feeling
of being in its presence. The Painting

between parallel fringes whose mist
crosses the intact canvas, though tinged
with cinnabar, with wine that fades;

purple, vermillion, orange…
The red of spilled blood
sealed his exploration. And also his life.

 

                            TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY DAVID FRANCIS 

Reinaldo Arenas

               Egon Schiele. Young boy (1918

Viejo Niño

I am that child with the round dirty face
who on every corner is bothering you with
his “can you spare one quarter?”1
I am that child with the dirty face
—no doubt unlucky—
that from far away contemplates coaches
where the other children emit laughter
and jump up and down considerably
I am that unlikable child
—definitely unlucky—

with the round dirty face who under giant
streetlights or under the grand dames
also illuminated or before the little
girls that seem to levitate
project the insult of my dirty face.
I am that sullen child, even more gray,
that wrapped up in lamentable
combinations puts a dark note on the snow
or on the carefully trimmed lawn
that nobody but me would walk on,
because I don’t pay fines.

I am that angry and lonely child of
always, that throws you the insult of
that angry child of always
and warns you: if hypocritically you pat
me on the head I would take that
opportunity to steal your wallet.
I am that child of always,
before the panorama of eminent terror,
of eminent leprosy, of eminent fleas, of
offenses or of the eminent crime.
I am that repulsive child that improvises
a bed out of an old cardboard box and
waits, certain, that you will accompany
me.

New York (October 1983)
 

Reinaldo Arenas

from Before Night Falls (Antes que Anochezca)

 “In those days I had a different idea about sexual relations; I loved someone and I wanted that person to love me; I did not believe that one had to search, unceasingly, to find in other bodies what one body had already provided.” – 64

“The gay world is not monogamous. Almost by nature, by instinct, the tendency is to spread out to multiple relationships, quite often to promiscuity. It was normal for me not to understand this at the time; I had just lost my lover and felt completely disillusioned.” – 64=65

“We would all bring our notebooks and write poems or chapters of our books, and would have sex with armies of young men. The erotic and literary went hand in hand.” – 101

“The ideal in any sexual relationship is finding one’s opposite, and therefore the homosexual world is now something sinister and desolate; we almost never get what we most desire.” – 108

“The sea was like a feast and forced us to be happy, even when we did not particularly want to be. Perhaps subconsciously we loved the sea as a way to escape from the land where we were repressed; perhaps in floating on the waves we escaped our cursed insularity.” – 114