Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (37 page)

it will rise my inviolate savior

but through the blue tattered fogs

of unconfessed rivers

I may pass with a drunken smile

never knowing him

no tear lighting up on my lashes

to break my dream

joy like a blue dove

dropping into the dark

sadness resuming

its vindictive song

but may the wind on my grave

dance like a peasant in spring.

“It’s done. I’ve left the home fi elds.”

It’s done. I’ve left the home fi elds.

Th

ere’ll be no going back.

Th

e green wings all over the poplars

will never ring again.

Without me the hunched house sinks lower.

My old dog died long ago.

I know God means I’m to die

among the bent streets of Moscow.

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I like the city, in its old script,

though it’s grown fat with age.

Th

e gold somnolence of Asia

dozes on the cupolas.

But at night when the moon shines, shines,

shines, the devil knows how,

I take a side street, head down,

into the same tavern.

A lair full of din and roaring,

but all night till daylight

I read out poems to whores

and drink with cut-throats.

My heart beats faster and faster,

I pick the wrong moments

to say, “I’m like you, I’m lost,

I can never go back.”

Without me the hunched house sinks lower.

My old dog died long ago.

I know God means I’m to die

among the bent streets of Moscow.

W. S. Merwin and Olga Carlisle, 1968

Se rg e i E s se n i n
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Olg a Seda kova
(b. 1949)

Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man

When, why, who

with what housepainter’s brush

covered these features over,

which were once meaningless as the sky,

without purpose, end, or name—

pounding storms, squadrons of aircraft , a child’s jackstraws—

the sky stirring the trees

without wind, yet stronger than wind:

so that they get up and walk

away from their roots,

away from their earth,

away from their kith and kin:

o, there, where we do not know ourselves
at all
!

into the meaningless never-darkening sky.

With what lime-plaster, what clay

what meaning,

profi t, fear and success

have they been sealed tight, dead—

slots, oriel windows,

loopholes in never-whitewashed stone,

through which, remember, you looked and could never get your fi ll?

Ach, du liebe Augustin
,

dear Augustine, it’s all over,

all over, all ended.

Ended in the usual way.

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Ru s s i a n

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Th

e Angel of Rheims

For François Fédier

Are you ready?

Th

is angel smiles—

I ask, although I know

Th

at you are doubtless ready:

For I am not speaking to just anyone,

But to you,

One whose heart will not survive the betrayal

Of your earthly king,

Who was crowned here before all the people,

Or of your other Lord,

Th

e King of Heaven, our Lamb,

Who dies in the hope

Th

at you will hear me again;

Again and again,

As every evening

My name is rung out by the bells

Here, in the country of excellent wheat

And bright grapes,

And tassel and cluster

Trembling respond—

But all the same,

Set in this pink crumbling stone,

I raise my hand,

Broken off in the World War.

All the same, let me remind you:

Are you ready?

For plague, famine, earthquake, fi re,

Foreign invasions, wrath visited upon us?

All this is doubtless important.

But it is not what I mean.

Ol g a Se da kova
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It is not what I was sent for.

I say:

Are you

Ready

For unbelievable joy?

Music

For Alexandre Vustich

By the gates of air, as they say now,

before the celestial steppes,

where half-incorporeal salt marshes prepare to fl oat away,

alone, as usual, straying across the splendor

of the oecumene,

distorting various languages,

expecting who knows what: not happiness, not suff ering,

not the sudden transparency of nontransparent existence,

listening intently, like a watchdog, I distinguish sounds—

sounds not sounds:

a prelude to music which no one calls “mine.”

For it is more than no one’s:

music that has no tune or tone,

no stock or root, nor bar line,

nor the fi ve lines invented by d’Arezzo,

only shift ings of the unattainable, of height.

Music, sky of Mars, star of archaic battle,

where we are at once and irrevocably defeated

by the approach of armed detachments of distance,

by the beating of breakers,

by the fi rst touch of a wavelet.

I pleaded for you on the hill of Zion, forgetting

friend and foe, everyone, everything—

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for the sake of unsounding sound,

of unrung ringing,

of your almightiness,

your all-suff ering.

Th

is is a city in central Europe

its gates of air:

perhaps Budapest, I think,

but that magnifi cent display

of embankments and towers I will not see, don’t even wish to,

I’m not sorry at all. In transit.

Music is in transit.

Th

e bubbling of lava in a volcano’s crater,

the chirping of a cricket on a village hearth,

the heart of the ocean, pounding in the ocean’s breast,

as long as it beats, music, we are alive,

as long as no least patch

of land belongs to you,

no glory, no assurance, no success,

as long as you lie, like Lazarus, at another’s gate,

the heart can still look into the heart, like echo into echo,

into the immortal,

into the downpour that, like love, will never cease.

Emily Grosholz and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2009

Ol g a Se da kova
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Dim itr i V. Psurtse v
(b. 1960)

Th

ird Rome Man

I like the wintertime feeling of “Big” and warm,

Done up in mittens and boots, long johns and pants,

In a short coat of fur even though it’s not really real,

Shaggy earfl aps tied tight to keep out the cold and the wind—

Th

e wind’s fi erce—how handy my eyes are Polovtsian slits

And the terrible cold can’t get under my high Tartar cheekbones;

My moustache does get frosted and my blood’s like chilled vodka:

But here I am, happy-go-lucky, at home in the last, the Th

ird Rome,

A barbarian scion, a forefather maybe someday,

My breathing engraved on its quick, immortal air.

F. D. Reeve, 2009

Two Monasteries

In the cloister where day tourists scurry

Back and forth like phantoms,

And the President in a photograph

In the vestibule is like a choir director

Among full-bearded archbishops,

Th

ere’s no peace and quiet.

In the old monastery there’s no

Place to worship, only a brick

Ruin like the skeletal frame of a stove

With a houseless chimney. Th

e solitary

Green-eyed, white-chested, chestnut-faced

Lady cat Masha lives here without grieving,

And like a Holy Roller having scraped on rusty iron

Over the porch of the wing, now rubs herself

Against a standing seam on the roof.

In this monastery now owned by the city

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Where the studios of artists who come and go

Are also part of Masha’s world,

Where varnishing day has nearly come round

For the city jubilee, and there’s

An exhibit of the best works to benefi t

Th

e regional children’s hospital—

Here there’s peace and quiet,

And like cupolas the clouds fl oat overhead

Eternally

golden.

F. D. Reeve, 2011

Di m i t r i V. P s u rt se v
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S pa n i s h

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Lope de Veg a
(1562–1635)

“Dawns hung with fl owers”

Dawns hung with fl owers

In the cold winter,

Be mindful of my child

Who sleeps upon the ice.

Joyful mornings

In cold December,

Th

ough the sky sow you

With fl owers and roses,

Yet are you severe

And God is tender;

Be mindful of my child

Upon the ice who sleeps.

“In Santiago the Green”

In Santiago the Green

Jealousy seized me,

Night sits in the day,

I think to avenge myself.

Poplars of the thicket,

Where is my love?

If with another

Th

en should I die.

Clear Manzanares,

O little river,

For lack of water

Run full with fi re.

L ope de V e g a
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Harvest Song

From Th

e Grand Duke of Muscovy

White I was

When I came to the harvest

Now I am brown where the sun touched me.

White once on a time I was

Before I came to the harvesting

But the sun would not allow

Whiteness to the fi re I wield.

My youth at break of day

Was a lustrous lily;

Now I am brown where the sun touched me.

W. S. Merwin, 1957

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S pa n i s h

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Rubén Da r ío

Urna Votiva

I’d carve this for the ashes of years:

a garland of immortelle to adorn

the Grecian fret on a votive urn;

a chalice to hold heaven’s tears;

now a lark surprised on the wing;

and an olive branch where she’ll

sing; and, wrapped in a Muse’s veil,

Diana’s statue near a forest spring.

My work, if I could work the stone,

releasing the marble’s cold fi re,

I’d crown with a rose and a lyre.

My dream, as day turns back night?

To see in the face of a weeping girl

one tear full of love and of light . . .

Lorna Knowles Blake, 2011

Ru bé n Da r ío
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A n tonio M ach a do
(1875–1939)

Waters

I

Sun in the ram. My window

stands open to cold air.

Evening wakens the river—

hark! the rumour of the water there.

II

Gregarious sound begins to wane

within the ancient hamlet, storks

crowning its ample turrets. In the plain

the water speaks from solitude and rocks.

III

As before, my thought

is water’s captive;

but of water in the live

rock that is my heart.

IV

Can you tell the water’s sound?

Whether of summit or of valley,

plaza, garden, orchard ground?

From “Galerías”

Blue mountains, river, the erect

and coppery wands

of poplars in their delicacy,

and on the hill, the almonds white—

oh, snow in fl ower, butterfl y in tree!

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A bean-scent on its breath,

the wind goes by

runs in the plain whose solitude is gay.

Guadalquivír

Oh, Guadalquivír!