Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (13 page)

Th

e schoolboy maimed the tree, did such harm in the end

Th

at the fruit-grower, disheartened,

Complained to the school-master of the scapegrace,

Who brought others until the orchard was over-run

By boys doing what the fi rst had done

Except that they were worse. Th

e pedant—man in its most worthless

phase—

Was adding to all the harm begun,

Dunces who had been mistaught,

Saying his object was to discipline but one,

Th

e marauder who was originally caught—

All profi ting by the demonstration.

Th

en he droned Virgil and Cicero on and on,

Each of course with reference.

Meanwhile boys swarmed through the orchard till the miscreants

Did the garden more harm than anybody could mend.

How I hate far-fetched magniloquence—

Discursive intrusiveness world without end.

If there are creatures who err

More than boys at play, it is pedants as inane.

I declare, with either near, one or the other,

God knows which infl icts the more pain.

Marianne Moore, 1954

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Vic tor Hugo
(1802–85)

So Boaz Slept

Boaz lay down in weariness and pain;

He’d spent long hours laboring on his land

And smoothed his blanket with a dusty hand

To sleep among his heaps of garnered grain.

More fi elds of wheat stood ready to be mowed;

Th

ough wealthy, he was not an unjust man.

Down his mill-race unclouded waters ran,

And in his forge no hellish irons glowed.

His beard shone silver like a brook in spring.

His sheaves were thick, but bundled without greed,

And when, at harvest, gleaners came in need,

He said, “Leave some ears for their gathering.”

On righteous paths his feet were known to dwell,

And goodness cloaked him like a robe of white;

His grain poured forth for all whose hungry plight

Touched him, like water from a public well.

Honest with workers, loyal to his kin,

He honored thrift no less than charity;

Th

e women watched old Boaz wistfully

And saw more in him than in younger men.

An old man sees his source with clearer sight;

Soon passing from this world of troubled days,

He holds eternity within his gaze.

A young man’s eyes fl ash fi re; an old man’s, light.

So Boaz slept beneath the moon’s faint glow.

Among the great stones massed outside his mill,

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His reapers lay together, dark and still,

In that mild evening age on age ago.

Judges still ruled the tribes of Abram’s blood.

Th

e Hebrews, wandering in their land of birth,

Saw footprints left by giants in the earth

Soft and damp from the still-remembered fl ood.

Like Jacob, or like Judith, Boaz too

Lay fast asleep upon his humble bed;

Th

e gates of heaven, far above his head,

Half opened, and a dream came passing through.

And from his loins a great oak, fl ourishing,

Stirred Boaz in his dream, and, gazing down,

He saw a race ascending it; a king

Sang at the roots; a god died in its crown.

Th

en Boaz murmured with a heartfelt sigh:

How can it pass that I should bear this tree

When eighty years and more have fl ed from me?

I have no son, nor wife to get one by.

Th

e woman, Lord, with whom I shared this bed

Has gone forever, sharing one with Th

ee;

Yet still we two remain together, she

Half-living in my thoughts, and I half-dead.

Shall I conceive a nation sprung from me,

A tree arising from this ancient dust?

Only when I was younger could I trust

Th

at day could wring from night such victory.

For now I tremble like a winter bough;

Alone and widowed, I am dry and old,

And, as night falls, I bend against the cold

As to the trough the plow-ox dips his brow.

V ic t or H ug o
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Th

us Boaz mourned. Th

e cedar does not feel

Th

e rose that clings to it; his dream was sweet

Yet painful to him; and it was so real

He did not sense the woman at his feet.

So Boaz slept, while Ruth, the Moabite,

Laid herself at his feet with naked breast,

Hoping he would not wholly waken, lest

He fi nd her there, unknown in the pale light.

But Boaz did not know that she was there,

Nor did Ruth know what God required of her.

Th

e breath of night caused asphodels to stir,

And all Galgala teemed with perfumed air.

Darkness deepened—nuptial, august, sublime.

Perhaps an angel watched them, hovering

Above them with a barely beating wing;

Blue shadows brushed their eyes from time to time.

Th

e breath of Boaz soft ened like the tones

Sung by stream water when it fl ows across

A gentle bed of pebbles thick with moss

While lilies bloom among the hilltop stones.

So Boaz slept, and Ruth awakened fi rst,

To drowsy sheep-bells tinkling in the night;

Th

e false dawn was aglow with kindly light

In that still hour when lions slake their thirst.

Th

e whole world dreamed, from Ur to Jerimadeth;

Stars studded the blue velvet of the air;

Th

e crescent moon hung low; Ruth said her prayer,

Begging the heavens in her soft est breath—

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Barely moving, with veiled, half-lidded eyes—

To say what god, what summer harvester,

Had come that night to make his peace with her,

Leaving his golden scythe there in the skies.

R. S. Gwynn, 2009

V ic t or H ug o
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Lecon te de Lisle
(1818–94)

Leilah Asleep

No wing-stir, no murmur of springs: all sounds are stayed.

Dust of the sun fl oats above the blossoming grass,

and the bengalee wren, with furtive beak, taps the rich juice

of mangoes in full bloom and ripe with golden blood.

In the king’s orchard, where the mulberries blush red,

beneath a sky that burns limpid and colorless,

Leilah, all rosy in the heat and languorous,

closes her deep-lashed eyes in the dark-branching shade.

Her forehead, circleted in rubies, rests upon

one lovely arm. Her naked foot, with amber tone,

tints the pearled lattice of her slim babouche. Apart

she sleeps; and smiles in dream upon her lover’s presence,

like an empurpled fruit, perfumèd and intense,

that makes the mouth’s deep thirst a freshness in the heart.

Frederick Morgan, 1953

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Ch a r les Baudel a ir e
(1821–67)

“Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville . . .”

I remember it well enough, on the edge of town,

Th

at little house, and its quiet, and out in back

Th

e fertile goddesses, naked Venus and so on,

Up to their plaster breasts in wild sumac;

And the sun at evening, fl ooding the whole place,

Ignited the window with bursting Catherine wheels,

And seemed like a great eye in a prying face,

Watching our mute, interminable meals

And diff using its votive radiance on all shapes,

On the frowsy tablecloth, the worsted drapes.

Th

e Swan

I

Andromache, I think of you. Th

e little stream,

A yellowing mirror that onetime beheld

Th

e huge solemnity of your widow’s grief,

(Th

is deceiving Simois that your tears have swelled)

Suddenly fl ooded the memory’s dark soil

As I was crossing the
Place du Carrousel
.

Th

e old Paris is gone (the face of a town

Is more changeable than the heart of mortal man).

I see what seem the ghosts of these royal barracks,

Th

e rough-hewn capitals, the columns waiting to crack,

Weeds, and the big rocks greened with standing water,

And at the window, Th

eir Majesty’s bric-a-brac.

One time a menagerie was on display there,

And there I saw one morning at the hour

C h a r l e s Bau de l a i r e
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Of cold and clarity when Labor rises

And brooms make little cyclones of soot in the air

A swan that had escaped out of his cage,

And there, web-footed on the dry sidewalk,

Dragged his white plumes over the cobblestones,

Lift ing his beak at the gutter as if to talk,

And bathing his wings in the sift ing city dust,

His heart full of some cool, remembered lake,

Said, “Water, when will you rain? Where is your thunder?”

I can see him now, straining his twitching neck

Skyward again and again, like the man in Ovid,

Toward an ironic heaven as blank as slate,

And trapped in a ruinous myth, he lift s his head

As if God were the object of his hate.

II

Paris changes, but nothing of my melancholy

Gives way. Foundations, scaff oldings, tackle and blocks,

And the old suburbs drift off into allegory,

While my frailest memories take on the weight of rocks.

And so at the Louvre one image weighs me down:

I think of my great swan, the imbecile strain

Of his head, noble and foolish as all the exiled,

Eaten by ceaseless needs—and once again

Of you, Andromache, from a great husband’s arms

Fallen to the whip and mounted lust of Pyrrhus,

And slumped in a heap beside an empty tomb,

(Poor widow of Hector, and bride of Helenus)

And think of the consumptive negress, stamping

In mud, emaciate, and trying to see

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Th

e vanished coconuts of hidden Africa

Behind the thickening granite of the mist;

Of whoever has lost what cannot be found again,

Ever, ever; of those who lap up the tears

And nurse at the teats of that motherly she-wolf, Sorrow;

Of orphans drying like fl owers in empty jars.

So in that forest where my mind is exiled

One memory sounds like brass in the ancient war:

I think of sailors washed up on uncharted islands,

Of prisoners, the conquered, and more, so many more.

Anthony Hecht, 1961

C h a r l e s Bau de l a i r e
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Stéph a ne M a ll a r m é
(1842–98)

Th

e Aft ernoon of a Faun. Eclogue

Th

e Faun:

Th

ese nymphs, I would make them endure.

Th

eir delicate fl esh-tint so clear,

it hovers yet upon the air

heavy with foliage of sleep.

Was it a dream I loved? My doubt,

hoarded of old night, culminates

in many a subtle branch, that stayed

the very forest’s self and proves

alas! that I alone proposed

the ideal failing of the rose

as triumph of my own.

Th

ink now . . .

and if the women whom you gloze

picture a wish of your fabled senses!

Faun, the illusion takes escape

from blue cold eyes, like a spring in tears,

of the purer one: and would you say

of her, the other, made of sighs,

that she contrasts, like the day breeze

warmly astir now in your fl eece!

No! through the moveless, half-alive

languor that suff ocates in heat

freshness of morning, if it strive,

no water sounds save what is poured

upon the grove sparged with accords

by this my fl ute; and the sole wind

prompt from twin pipes to be exhaled

before dispersal of the sound

in arid shower without rain

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is—on the unwrinkled, unstirred

horizon—calm and clear to the eye,

the artifi cial breath of in-

spiration, which regains the sky.

Sicilian shores of a calm marsh,