Read Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology Online
Authors: Paula Deitz
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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Ru s s i a n
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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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Ru s s i a n
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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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Ru s s i a n
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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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S pa n i s h
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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!