East German Poets : Durs Grünbein by Judy Gaghan

September 2, 2010 in German | by Sebastian Hayes | Leave a comment

Many poets live in  exile, severed from the cultural roots of their writing and needing to find new sources for their writing. In the case of poets from the former German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany these roots became peculiarly distorted and invalidated by the catastrophes of the 20th century: WW1 followed by the great Depression; the subversion of all cultural life by the Nazi regime; WW11 and the firebombing that reduced many cities to stone-age conditions and which could not be mourned due to the felt complicity of the population at large; the Russian occupation followed by the totalitarian communist regime; finally the propulsion into late 20th century consumer capitalism. In West Germany over a long period of the mid 20th century there was a reckoning and continuing struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past and degrees of complicity in it which shaped radically West German society and its culture. But not in East Germany where Nazism was interpreted simply as a violent consequence of capitalism.

The collapse of the GDR regime and communism generally led to a widespread view that those forty-five years or so of history had been a history of failure and invalidity. The result was, for many people and poets especially, an immense hole in the fabric of their culture and cultural memory. Furthermore the devastation of the immediate post-war was met by a great silence in German literature, as the writer W.G. Sebald has explored in his essay: ‘ Between History and Natural History: on the literary description of total destruction’. This silence was partly due to the impossibility of comprehending what had happened and partly to the sense that they, the people, were complicit in their own downfall. Thus it was to take a long time before people could speak of such horrors as the firebombing of, for example, Dresden. What kind of terrain was this for the poet?

The poems of Günter Eich, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein, poets all born in East Germany and overlapping chronologically,  illustrate the very different ways poets may survive the assaults on the histories and purposes of their homelands and consequent sense of alienation and homelessness, barely alleviated by the subsequent freedoms of the West. Each developed a particular strategy to create a home for and in poetry. Günter Eich experienced the Third Reich, the army and being a prisoner of war; but he died before the liberation of the GDR. Heinz Czechowski was born in Dresden and aged ten experienced its destruction; he travelled in the West before and after the liberation ands died there. Durs Grünbein was also born in Dresden in 1962 and has subsequently travelled and lived in the West.

Durs Grünbein  1962 was born in Dresden and studied natural sciences thinking to become a vet; although he changed his mind, his studies sparked an enduring fascination with creatures generally. He’s the most recent and most celebrated of the three poets– highly lauded,  a real star in the German poetry scene for his youth, brilliance, knowledge and scope; but above all perhaps for his participation in the modern zeitgeist: streetwise, ironic, and witty style and take on the world; part of that zeitgeist is the sense of ‘ get-over-it, move-on’ and his poetic style exemplifies that attitude. Already celebrated, his liberation from DDR led to continual travel and poetic material. His ironic tone appears  at first to reveal little of the emotional  homelessness of the other two. The rubble and ruin of the Germany the other two experienced nevertheless became a theme, a  starting point for seeing rubble and ruin across the world in the distant past and everywhere in the present. His response to the triumphal shine of the West was largely sceptical as the first two poems show. Nevertheless he spent 10 years composing a collection  of 49 traditionally formed 10-line poems dedicated to the once incredibly beautiful city of Dresden and of that city’s destruction. However the first two poems here – though ironic, witty cool etc. nevertheless reveal a similar disorientation, distance and a sense of death and the ephemeral as those of Czechowski:

Arcadia for Everyone

It’s not just the city centre, deserted Sunday morning,
the letters marked unknown at this address.
In the sea-shell sound on the phone the quiet Who’s there?
not the thousands of cars abandoned at the roadside
nor the stolen poetry on hoardings no one reads,
scrawlings on busts of schoolbook worthies in the parks —
it’s all of this and more you gladly shut your eyes to
feeding just one suspicion: swollen up to a metropolis
so this is how place looks where they buried the god like a dog.
Arcadia, graveyard of the heavenly, like any city
where death enters and leaves, life’s on privatised grounds.
So much for the idyllic, the happy lands, the rustic
Hideaways. Whatever shepherds sang to, travellers ever dreamed of.
This is the showcase: City and gorod, metropolis or ville.
It’s here you pass, your own spirit, beneath stoical trees
sleepless glass person, reflected in too-much-of-everything.
Glances set the beat, reflections urbane, no eclogues
In which Daphne flirts, Milon and Lakon watch out for each other.
Your vertebrae vibrate with the arches of the bridge,
you sense your skeleton, your face gets lost,
dazzled by the metallic glare of puddles; and yet
there’s nowhere else so homely. It was first here that,
in an accustomed exile, where nights you’d crawl
into your mouse-hole, were crumbs of happiness.
Where else, but in heavy traffic aimless,
Was one ever so alive, was one ever so removed
From lazy posthumous peace.

ARKADIEN :

Nicht nur das Zentrum, menschenleer am Sonntagvormittag,
Die briefe, gestempelt mit dem Vermerk Empfänger unbekannt.
Das Meeresrauschen am Telephon, in die Stille das‚ Bitte?’
Die tausenden Autos, von den Besitzern verlassen am Strassenrand,
Auch die Reklametafeln mit den Dichterplagiaten, die keiner liest,
In den Parks, grell beschmiert, die Monumente der Schulbuchidole,
Diesa alles und mances, wovor man die Augen gern schliesst,
Nährt den einen Verdacht. So also sieht, aufgeschwollen zur metropole,
Der ort aus, an dem man den Gott einst begrub wie einen Hund.
Arkadien, Friedhof der Himmlischen,ihm gleicht jede Stadt,
Wo der Tod ein-und ausgeht, das Leben auf privatisiertem Grund.
Von wegen Idylle, Landschaft  der Seligen, bukolisches Reservat.
Was immer Hirten besangen, wovon die Reisenden träumten –
Dies ist der Schauplatz.  City und gorod, metropolis oder ville.
Hier geht man, sein eigener Geist, unter stoischen Bäumen,
Ein gläserner Mensch, schlaflos, sich spiegelnd im Vielzuviel.
Den Takt geben Blicke, urbane Reflexe, nicht die Eklogen,
In denen Daphnis flirtete, Milon un Lakon einander beschützten.
Man spürt sein Skelett, Vertebrat im Vibrato der Brückenbogen,
Verliert das Gesicht, geblender vom metallischen Glanz der Pfützen,
Und ist doch nirgends so heimisch. Erst hier, im gewohnten Exil,
Wo man nachts in sein Mauseloch kroch, gab es Krümel bom Glück.
Wann sonst, wenn nicht im dichten Verkehr, untewegs ohne Ziel,
War man je so vital, so dem faulen, posthumen Frieden entrückt?

Durs Grünbein

East German Poets : Heinz Czechowski by Judy Gaghan

August 31, 2010 in German | by Sebastian Hayes | Leave a comment

Many poets live in  exile, severed from the cultural roots of their writing and needing to find new sources for their writing. In the case of poets from the former German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany these roots became peculiarly distorted and invalidated by the catastrophes of the 20th century: WW1 followed by the great Depression; the subversion of all cultural life by the Nazi regime; WW11 and the firebombing that reduced many cities to stone-age conditions and which could not be mourned due to the felt complicity of the population at large; the Russian occupation followed by the totalitarian communist regime; finally the propulsion into late 20th century consumer capitalism. In West Germany over a long period of the mid 20th century there was a reckoning and continuing struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past and degrees of complicity in it which shaped radically West German society and its culture. But not in East Germany where Nazism was interpreted simply as a violent consequence of capitalism.

The collapse of the GDR regime and communism generally led to a widespread view that those forty-five years or so of history had been a history of failure and invalidity. The result was, for many people and poets especially, an immense hole in the fabric of their culture and cultural memory. Furthermore the devastation of the immediate post-war was met by a great silence in German literature, as the writer W.G. Sebald has explored in his essay: ‘ Between History and Natural History: on the literary description of total destruction’. This silence was partly due to the impossibility of comprehending what had happened and partly to the sense that they, the people, were complicit in their own downfall. Thus it was to take a long time before people could speak of such horrors as the firebombing of, for example, Dresden. What kind of terrain was this for the poet?

The poems of Günter Eich, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein, poets all born in East Germany and overlapping chronologically,  illustrate the very different ways poets may survive the assaults on the histories and purposes of their homelands and consequent sense of alienation and homelessness, barely alleviated by the subsequent freedoms of the West. Each developed a particular strategy to create a home for and in poetry. Günter Eich experienced the Third Reich, the army and being a prisoner of war; but he died before the liberation of the GDR. Heinz Czechowski was born in Dresden and aged ten experienced its destruction; he travelled in the West before and after the liberation ands died there. Durs Grünbein was also born in Dresden in 1962 and has subsequently travelled and lived in the West.

The following poems are chosen to illustrate these different strategies.

Heinz Czechowski  1935 -2009

Born in Dresden he survived, aged 10, the firebombing and destruction of the city. He published poetry in the GDR was recognised and prized in both East and West Germany and was able to travel on literary visits before the regime collapsed. However of all three poets he expresses most directly the spiritual and psychological homelessness that emerged from the apocalyptic changes of his lifetime, although he could not experience directly the ‘complicity’ that Gunter Eich will have experienced. His poetry has been described as a ‘journey home to strangeness.’ His poetic strategy was rooted in nostalgia, a mourning for another world – the recall of early childhood and childhood places infused with that melancholy which itself is often envisaged as a wasteland. His personality was depressive anyway and last year he died in an institution sick and cut off. He more than the other two expresses a profound sense of disorientation and pessimism and there’s little of the harsh irony informing the triumphal passage to freedom which featured so much post-war writing–his elegiac tone feels a more honest response to history.

I AM WHERE I AM

I am where I am,
and there’s nothing
to indicate that I
could ever be anywhere else
at any rate, in foreseeable time.
Even yesterday I saw
The little villages between Kamenz and Dresden.
Marked by the East, not spared
I went back, there
Where nowadays I am at home.
I saw the beloved in front of her house,
The distant past
Was close again
In the lowlands around Leipzig
I am, at any rate, where I am
Unredeemed and without prospect.

In me
There lives, again lives what died
Yet still ever, and ever again
Reaches me.

ICH BIN, WO ICH BIN, UND NICHTS

Deutet darauf hin, dass ich
Je woanders sein könnte, in
Absehbarer Zeit jedenfalls. Gestern noch
Sah ich die kleinen
Dörfer  zwischen Kamenz und Dresden.
Östlich geprägt und nicht verschont
Fuhr ich zurück, dort hin,
Wo ich jetzt zu Haus bin. Die Liebste
Sah ich vor ihrem Haus,
Die ferne Vergangenheit
War wieder nah
Im Flachland bei Leipzig: Ich jedenfalls
Bin, wo ich bin, unerlöst
Und ohne Aussicht. In mir
Lebt und lebt,was gestorben ist,und mich doch
Immer and immer wieder

In the poem published in 1988 he refers to the great post-war silence ‘what should have been said, was not said’ ; and beyond history he looks around and sees that power and force only change their names as he returns again and again to remembered familiar scenes:

FORTY YEARS AGO

Films underexposed: the pictures move on at a gentle pace,
Always the same landscape: the city
Surrounded by hills where barracks
Emerge and re-emerge.
What’s left is what I see today:
Tinder, in it the treads of tyres
On which we road towards the Elbe
Fish-tackle in our pockets.

The new age couldn’t arise
With all that concrete by the woods.
Behind the blacked-out window
Of the unfamiliar house
I played, forty years ago, with tin soldiers
Marching in step with the generations,
That moved back into the  barracks,
I’ve lost my innocence, what’s remained is force,
Only its names have changed.

I see the faces, overexposed in the floodlights
Of the conference. What, forty years ago
Should have been said
Has not been said, so
I’m returning to my childhood
Unenlightened by history
That draws back into itself
The monstrous
Whose beginning took place
Well before I was a child.

Vor Vierzig Jahren

Unterbelichtete Filme: im Zuckeltrab
Bewegen sich Bilder, immer
Die gleiche Landschaft: die Stadt,
Umgeben von Hügeln, auf denen
Kaserned stehn und
Neue entstehen. Was
Davon übrigblieb, sehe ich heute:
Zunder, darin
Die Profile der Reifen,
Auf denen wir elbwärts fuhren,
AngelschnureIn unseren Taschen

Die neue ZeitKonnte nicht aufkommen
Gegen all den Beton neben den Wäldern.
Hinter den erblindeten Fenstern
Des ausgewohnten Hauses
Spielt ich vor vierzig Jahren
Mit Zinnsoldaten. Im Marschtritt
Der Generationen,
Die einrückten in die Kasernen,
Habe ich meine Unschuld verloren, geblieben
Ist die Gewalt
Nur ihre Namen haben gewechselt.

Ich sehe die Gesichter,
Überbelichtet vom Scheinwerferlicht
Der Kongresse: Was vor Vierzig Jahren
Hatte gesagt werden müssen,
Ist nicht gesagt worden, so
Kehre ich wieder
In meine Kindheit zurück, unbelehrt
Von der Geschichte
Die in sich zurücknimmt
Das Ungeheure, das
Seinen Anfang nahm,
Schon lange bevor ich ein Kind war.

East German Poets : Gunter Eich by Judy Gaghan

August 15, 2010 in German | by Sebastian Hayes | 1 comment

Many poets live in  exile, severed from the cultural roots of their writing and needing to find new sources for their writing. In the case of poets from the former German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany these roots became peculiarly distorted and invalidated by the catastrophes of the 20th century: WW1 followed by the great Depression; the subversion of all cultural life by the Nazi regime; WW11 and the firebombing that reduced many cities to stone-age conditions and which could not be mourned due to the felt complicity of the population at large; the Russian occupation followed by the totalitarian communist regime; finally the propulsion into late 20th century consumer capitalism. In West Germany over a long period of the mid 20th century there was a reckoning and continuing struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past and degrees of complicity in it which shaped radically West German society and its culture. But not in East Germany where Nazism was interpreted simply as a violent consequence of capitalism.

The collapse of the GDR regime and communism generally led to a widespread view that those forty-five years or so of history had been a history of failure and invalidity. The result was, for many people and poets especially, an immense hole in the fabric of their culture and cultural memory. Furthermore the devastation of the immediate post-war was met by a great silence in German literature, as the writer W.G. Sebald has explored in his essay: ‘ Between History and Natural History: on the literary description of total destruction’. This silence was partly due to the impossibility of comprehending what had happened and partly to the sense that they, the people, were complicit in their own downfall. Thus it was to take a long time before people could speak of such horrors as the firebombing of, for example, Dresden. What kind of terrain was this for the poet?

The poems of Günter Eich, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein, poets all born in East Germany and overlapping chronologically,  illustrate the very different ways poets may survive the assaults on the histories and purposes of their homelands and consequent sense of alienation and homelessness, barely alleviated by the subsequent freedoms of the West. Each developed a particular strategy to create a home for and in poetry. Günter Eich experienced the Third Reich, the army and being a prisoner of war; but he died before the liberation of the GDR. Heinz Czechowski was born in Dresden and aged ten experienced its destruction; he travelled in the West before and after the liberation ands died there. Durs Grünbein was also born in Dresden in 1962 and has subsequently travelled and lived in the West.

The following poems are chosen to illustrate these different strategies.

Günter Eich 1907 – 1972

Was born in Lebus on the Oder on the far eastern frontiers of Germany. He studied economics and Chinese but became a full-time writer. He wrote many radio plays, which in Germany have a more important literary status than in England; but during the Nazi and wartime period he wrote virtually no poetry. He started writing poetry again as a prisoner of war. His writing was fully acknowledged and prized. He belonged to a pre-war literary movement that coined the phrase ‘inner emigration’ –inward being the only place one could go in a terror regime – but actually as a region to escape from any inhospitable milieu. One component of this was the essential timelessness of poetry and its a-political nature. Günter Eich immersed himself in the natural world which he found full of message and meaning. This was hardly popular at a time when, in the immediate post-war period with the revelations of the holocaust, the general sentiment was ‘how can one write about trees after Auschwitz’. More than half a century later perhaps, our recognition of a nature devastated and the consequences of that devastation in view, we now appreciate that trees might be the most healing things a poet could write about.

A poem written while he was still prisoner-of-war, all around rubble and desolation, calls up long-gone epochs of naive nature poetry; it’s called ‘Sun In October Mist’

SUN IN OCTOBER MIST

Sun in October mist
And the hedgerows flaring red
I look on with a desire
Whose source lies far off

When, beauty at the point of tears
Autumn was my happiness,
Those feelings, those colours
Reach me now as new.

The moment and permanence vanish
Under the startled eyelid
There where the reflection of the forest
Encloses me in its light.

SONNE IM OKTOBERNEBEL

Sonne im Oktobernebel
Und die Hecke rot entflammt
Seh ich an mit dem Begehren,
das aus alten Jahren stammt,

als die schönheit tränennahe
und der Herbst mir Wollust war,
solches Fühlen, solche Farben
reicht er mir erneuert dar.

Augenblick und Dauer schwinden
Unter dem erschrocknen Lid,
da der Widerschein der Wälderin sein Licht mich einbezieht.

By 1955 Eich had already published a collection ‚ Messages of the Rain’ in which his absorption in the natural world is established; in spite of the general anti-nature, anti-lyrical intellectual climate of that time he could write the following:

END OF SUMMER

Who would wish to live without the comfort of the trees?

How right they should take part in dying.
The peaches have been picked, the plums are darkening
While beneath the arches of the bridge time roars.

It is to the bird migrations I entrust my despair
Calmly they measure out a share in eternity.
Their passage seen through foliage is a dark force
The movement of wings tinges the fruit.

What’s needed is patience.
Soon the bird’s script will be deciphered.
Under the tongue is a coin to be tasted.

ENDE EINES SOMMERS

Wer möchte leben ohne den Trost der Bäume!

Wie gut, dass sie am Sterben teilhaben!
Die pfirsiche sind geerntet, di Pflaumen färben sich,
während unter dem Bruckenbogen die Zeit rauscht.

Dem Vogelzug vertraue ich meine Verzweiflung an.
Er misst seinen Teil von Ewigkeit gelassen ab.
Seine Strecken
Werden sichtbar im Blattwek als dunkler Zwang,
die Bewegung der Flügel färbt die Früchte.

Es heisst Geduld haben.
Bals wird die Vogelschrift entsiegelt,
unter der Zunge ist der Pfennig zu schmecken.

From the same collection is his poem ‘Pigeons’  in which he already appears to foresee the Gaia hypothesis that the earth and its mysteries can survive without us and the entire realm of nature is not under our control, many years before these ideas were current:

PIGEONS

The flight of pigeons across the fields, —
a beat of the wing, swifter than the beauty
that cannot keep up,but remains
in my heart as disquiet.

As if the laughter of pigeons could be caught
in front of the dovecotes, green-painted dwarf dwellings,
and I begin to wonder
if flight matters to them,
what rank they give to the earthward glance,
what place to the pecking of grain,to the spotting of hawks.

I tell myself I should fear pigeons:
you are not the master when you scatter grain,
when you fasten a message to plumage,
when you breed new strains, new colours,
new crests, new tufts about the foot.
Put no trust in your power,
So you’ll not be amazedto learn how little you count,

that beyond your kind are hidden kingdoms,
soundless languages that will not be discovered,
dominions powerless and unassailable,
decisions made in the flight of pigeons.

TAUBEN

Taubenflug über die Äcker hin, —
Ein Flügelschlag, der schneller ist als die Schönheit.
Sie holt ihn nicht ein, sondern bleibt mir
Als Unbehagen zurück im Herzen.

Als wäre auch taubengelächter vernhembar
Vor den Schlägen, den grün gestrichenen Zwerghäusern,
ob der Flug ihnen wichtig ist,welchen Rang die Blicke zum Erdboden haben
und wie sie das Aufpicken des korns einordnenund das Erkennen des Habichts.

Ich rate mir selbst, mich vor den Tauben zu fürchten.
Du bist nicht ihr Herr, sage ich, wenn du Futter streust,
wenn du Nachrichten an ihre Federn heftest,
wenn du Zierformen züchtest, neue Farben,
neue Schöpfe, Gefieder am Fuss.
Vertrau deiner Macht nicht,
so wirst du auch nichtverwundert sein,
wenn du erfährst, dass du unwichtig bist,

dass neben deinesgleichen heimliche Königsreiche bestehen,
Sprachen ohne Laut, die nicht erforscht werden,
Herrschaften ohne Macht und unangreifbar,
dass die Entscheidungen geschehen im Taubenflug.

Thus for Günter Eich nature could be a refuge for the ‘inner emigration’.

Poetry from a Tragic Land, by Sonam Kachru

August 4, 2010 in Uncategorized | by Sebastian Hayes | Leave a comment

July 14, 2010  Chicago, Illinois

Dear Reader,

(…) As I write, it is now more than a month since Tufail Ahmad Matoo died. And so many have died since. God only knows how many are yet to die and who can count how many have died or suffered in the ruinous valley [Kashmir], the quiet horror of refugee camps. It was impossible not to attempt to commit to memory the names of the young dead these last few weeks when translating Bashir Athar’s line from his poem ‘Where do I go’ (included among those given in  translation here):

I had forgotten the graves, so many, so quick to grow,
I had forgotten, there will never be enough graves.

What can poems make of a time such as ours?
I do not know.

Athar continues,    Speak to me of the grave…it will not give me sleep.

Neither the poems I have translated here nor the larger audio-visual project of which they are a part are intended as aesthetic opportunity in calamity. But the poems, I feel, are not entirely unrelated to our time. They are not unrelated in something like the way a frame is ‘not unrelated’ to a picture, though it is not what the picture is about. Or, perhaps, they are ‘not unrelated’ in the way environments are not unrelated to houses and those who build them to live in. Some poems are rooms in houses built for certain climates; others  help to create a climate in which it is possible for us to go on building.  “We have been, these many generations, on fire”, Moti Lal Saqi writes. So many fires, and this, our unholy normality, is only one among many kinds of burning.

It is not in bad taste, I think, to celebrate poetry at a time when one is, to borrow a phrase from W. B. Yeats, painfully conscious of “polite, meaningless words.” For I think with Abdul Rahman Rahi that it is in the work of poetry that we are sensitized and offered a chance to go beyond our contentment or despair with degenerate speech and thought, what Rahi called our “empty shuttles threading wind.” I think what Amin Kamil says is true: “In a ruined city, a trembling heart is treasure,” and that often the heart is shown in a word that trembles, a word that is true.

Even as we bring out our dead, we can and must show others what yet lives with us, what else is endangered.

The range of these pieces is important to me. For these eight pieces are offered here as an invitation to a  project entitled ‘Make Humans Again: Voices of Kashmir’. This project will contain more contemporary poems by more authors and, I sincerely hope, a ‘parallel text’ in the form of art works by the prodigiously talented Malik Sajad. This project is an attempt to introduce something of an echo chamber in which to begin fathoming Kashmir’s many, very different voices, an ecology of sense—a fragile ecology, to adopt a biologist’s word—still largely unknown to too many. For a little too long Kashmir has been restricted to what can fill without disrupting  the honeymooner’s itinerary.

I have called the project ‘Make Humans Again,’ and spoken of what is made. I do not follow here the Greek roots of the word ‘poetry’ in speaking of something to be ‘made’, nor only intend the Sanskrit conceit of the genius of poets making the world once again.  Rather I follow Dina Nath Nadim who said “I’ve got to make humans of Hindus and Muslims again.”

I do not know what it is to be human. It is fitting to recall what Nadim was later to sing to the tune of a folk melody (Yaa Shaah-i-Hamdaan): “Are even we human? Who says we are?”, a piece where the only movement in a bleak landscape is the onset of winter, the persistence of Law, of hunger and those who still outrun it all. The piece ends– “Do you give a damn?I don’t give a damn.”
I’d like to think of Nadim letting the matter of being human resound as an indefinite imperative, resisting the smug comforts of knowing or the despair of unknowing. So many times, and in so many ways, being human has been a question. (Kamil writes, “These must then be wraiths,/ These were Man, you say, we’ve yet to raise.”) We are not alone in being creatures that environ ourselves partly through our own efforts, but we are perhaps unique in taking for our materials such things as words. One thing made, unmade and made again in the curious intimacy of sound and sense that is poetry is our nature: as we are and as we yet might be. This is potentially the work and the redress of poetry.

You will find very different poems in this short selection, each of which makes very different demands of a translator. With some, such as Amin Kamil’s ghazal or Dina Natha Nadim’s sonnet, I have attempted to follow formal requirements in English. But I am no formalist, as little as am I wedded to free verse. In each case, I have tried to work within the constraints of the requirements of the poetry and my lack of talent. This can lead to experiments: thus Moti Lal Saqi’s ‘Request’ is offered here in extremely minimal free verse and Abdul Rahman Rahi’s magisterial lines and closely bound images are offered here in one of the versions I prepared for it, a version in which instead of rhyme, on the one hand, or an entirely free line on the other, I have opted for the strong oral properties of the four stress hemistich of Old English and its strongly alliterated line. In some pieces you will find lines breaking in and out of form, such as in Amin Malik’s ‘Bare Thoughts’; in this case, it is because I found that this managed to say something on behalf of the argument of the original piece which makes its music in a regulated form; in others, such as in Dina Natha Nadim’s ‘A Coat for the Rain’, the effect of teetering on form in English is due to the inventive evocation of form in the original, even as it swerves away from any particular music. The last is the most experimental, though it may not seem it. I include it here to invite reconsideration of what is old though still with us through the prism of new masters. In all pieces I have attempted to preserve something of the voice of the masters I translate. Thus Nadim in the sonnet alliterates with as much assonance in English (“I’ll see by glimmer light and glean fairies, by the glow of cooking stoves”) as he enjoyed in Kashmiri; and the music of Habba Khatun’s open, lyrical line is transposed in English through very carefully echoed vowels and consonants instead of strict rhyme.

It is, I think, important if we can offer ourselves on occasion some taste of what it is we mean when we go on, as we do, about being Kashmiri.

It is left for me to dedicate these translations (or adaptations) to my father, the better man and, it must be said, the better poet, and not the least of his generation to endure. I am indebted to my friend Abir Bazaz for making this (and so much else) possible, and to the editor for helping us find a home for them.

For all my comfort with English, I am not a poet. I have merely begun writing a book I should have liked to be able to pick up and read in a local bookstore in provincial Chicago when I think of Kashmir.

Thank you for your time,

Sonam Kachru

_________________________________

WATER (GHAZAL) — Amin Kazil

YOU ARE fraught with words—you’d better go sit in water:
For words swell with meaning, gleam more in water.

Look for the heart in a chest to roast on dry embers,
Look for blood in the liver to swallow with water.

Kashmir will stretch, a desert tomorrow—
The day after, Ladakh and Leh will float on water.

Anxious the wave that seeks refuge in hollows,
The god of waters is born with fire in water.

High-noon and the sun sinks soaked in self’s sweat,
In the end the moon will ignite, on fire in water.

For the time being ecstatic they’ll set towns on fire,
There are times some for laughs mix in poison with water.

The cow is lost and looks for eleven—who here shall tell her?
Five drowned on dry land, six are on fire in water.

This peddler, this Kamil, cries out with fire—
Still the fate-frosted sleep, deep in water.

WHERE DO I GO? —  Bashir Athal

You thought to see me content
To see you go; eager
To run my fingers
Through your earth, the things
You did not carry,
Eager to undo what once was
The time you buried
Behind you, build
The house of my dreams
On ruins, what memory
Can call its own  —
So it was;
And even so
I’ve made an end of myself.
All you left
I marked my own.
You thought
I had swallowed you
Whole —
Where did I go?
You cannot say.
I’d forgotten the graves
So many,
So quick to grow
I’d forgotten,
There will never be enough graves.
There will be fire, you’ll see,
And fire enough, pyre
To pyre, anywhere —
Where do I go?
Speak to me of the grave
In my time to come—

It will not give me sleep.

A REQUEST —  Moti Lal Saqi

You
With the flute,
Inclined
To lie
By the Gunpowder
Hills,
Strike up
A mood,
Attune us
To rain
To the wet earth
Colors,
Win us
A smile
From blue
Skies.
We are
These many generations
On fire.

You
Who
Play
The flute,
The relief I crave
Is not
At home
In all that is the case,
My body, kindling
To fire
More intimate
Fires

You
With the flute,
I pray—
This palette
Dulls to dusk’s
Ends,
Do not
Play
Time’s fool,
Do not
Strike up
A mood,
Attune us
To the burning
Colors,
To new
Fire.

LOVE SONG — Abdul Radi Rahi

I have threaded flowers for your wrists, my love,
Taste, why don’t you, my pomegranate flowers

We are sky above and earth, my love, my secret hostage beneath
You are the guest, and I, a feast—
Taste, why don’t you, my pomegranate flowers

Layla found the wick in the dark. Bless the girl,
She’s come apart. I could singe myself this close
Your too-quick beating flames

Taste, why don’t you, my pomegranate flowers

Summer walks on by and my wildflowers will fade. Love come quick,
Love steal in a hurry—
Listen, what more would have me sell?

I will fuse sound and pain enough
(Become what I sing…)

Now don’t you get mad, love, and don’t you take it so bad
Habba Khatun will yet stay
A wilderness longing.

Taste, why don’t you, my pomegranate flowers

BARE THOUGHTS —Amin Kamil

A DESERT my love can offer the shade of your hair
The memory of you insists, knocking at the door
(If the heart is a door). It is hard to wantmore
Of time; to wish to be alone
We were none of us given to be

What more can a heart do (if the heart lives right
Next-door a too inquisitive mind) but doubt
And fasten close the pain? The softened, open mouth
Hate can never know—
In tears is a consecration of love.

These cups are too shallow for thought—
Do you think they’ll found
For us forms more truly shaped, less hallowed
Before I sell and no longer sound
Love’s wants, myself grow to shadow
Some other?
These must be wraiths
These where Man, you say,
We’ve yet to raise.
The wreath of words is not your own.
Bare thought is given to grey
Unto decrease.

The dog is collared in gold—
O how your bark quickens my heart.
In the ruined city
A trembling heart is treasure.

A COAT FOR RAIN — Dina Nath Nadim

I WALKED into that room.
I took the raincoat off, set it hanging

On a nail; I spun around
Cold, to consider at length and well

Myself, it seemed, hanging there
On a nail—

These are the same
Shoulders, these are my arms

Disjected, I have known this
Incoherence of buttons

Clinging—Unreasonable, unyielding thread!—
This way and that to all too familiar holes

—Thus, duly inspected, I
Took to the door, I checked myself

Out, out from this rack
Of cloth, this institution, this store.

Then there were two
Strangers, yes they were both

Strangers, the two of them something
Odd, and surpassing eager—

“Is there anything his he left behind
Anything to survive, something used

Something old, something he wore
To cover his head, something scribbled

Or green, something fresh, a poem
He did not live to publish? He had on a coat

At the end,
For rain.”

“Yes he did,
There is a room above
Where it hung
on a nail.
We none of us could
Bring ourselves
To look
Till the day we tried it on
Ourselves,
Till it fit
And we let it lie after, left it well enough
Alone
It’s been a few days since
We let
The rag-picker have it
For who
Knows how much.
What’s it to you?”

“It is wanted, naturally,
By the museum of letters—
Won’t you say who has it
Or if there is a mark
To certify it?”

“And how will you get your hands on it?
Will you fish for it
On the mountain
Of rags? Listen,
Friend,
There is something,
Stitched into the lining,
A label its very own:
SHEIKH ALLAH,
TAILOR-MASTER”

SONNET — Dina Nath Nadim

Such are days I can believe the moon to be
Unleavened bread, but for scars I see unseam
A neck so collared in every dissolute color; I’ll believe,
Instead, the moon is cut from threadbare Pampur tweed.
The moon is bread, if through a spent halo in decline
She yet shines, something too finely used or unseemly old,
Something a man may slip in with money owed
The peasant girls—this moon is counterfeit coin.
The moon is unleavened bread and the mountains
Hunger. The Clouds again put out kitchen fires.
But in woods I’ll see by glimmer light and glean faeries
By the glow of their cooking stoves and on distant peaks I’m sure
There’s a little rice that’s trying to grow. I’ll let my hunger know,
I’ll heave my eyes to the heavens.

SHADOWS — Abdul Rahman Rahi

The point is to taste    an indefinite moment
Past the ebb and the trials    0f stars, past subsiding
Time you insist eternal.
A city road is heeled    right through thickest trees
As doubts worm    through my waning faith’s
Finest mantle.

I did open my eyes—
And I exposed my dreams    to an evil eye.
Desolate now, the green
Swell of breasts,    scorched wilderness of fire.
Look about you,    this carnival crackles
Tally your thought    and the lone crow in the void.
I wished to make stars,    once upon a time
Now it’ll be sweat again    to give myself a name.
For the sake of belief,     belligerent scrub to grow
Above snow, for consciousness,    seething snake.
These gods are not    but the shadows I cast
All monsters mirror    the self’s most obscure
Movements.This gibbering crowds    our corridors
I’ll comb trees    to clothe the saints.
What hand will steer us     now, what shore?
The spindrift boat turns    alone in the dark.
You who dance,        disrobe—-circumscribe him.
Madman, I eat    fire.

NOTES

I remain indebted to the labors of those who have translated these works before me. I should like to state here that I am especially indebted to Muneebur Rahman’s fine translation of Kamil’s ghazal which appeared as ‘In Water’ in Language for a New Century—Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W. Norton and Company, New York). I am indebted especially to his choice of ‘fraught’ in line one, and ‘fate-frosted’ in line sixteen, unable to do any better. As most of the poems do not contain any allusions, I think it worthwhile to mention at least one instance of it. In ‘Water’, the line ‘the cow is lost and looks for eleven’ is best read as an echo of Lal Ded’s line ‘ada kyaazi raavihey kaahan gav’ (Why should the eleven have lost the cow?). Eleven, on one philosophical account, is the number of capacities constituting the lived-body, some of them sensory, some cognitive, and some motor. The cow thus figured is one’s self.  Sonam Kachru


REMCO CAMPERT BY DONALD GARDNER

July 12, 2010 in Dutch | by Sebastian Hayes | Leave a comment

(Donald Gardner will present Remco Campert’s poetry at the Poetry Café on Wednesday, November 24. He will share the evening with Sarah Lawson who will present the work of Jacques Prévert)

Remco Campert, born 1929, belongs to the group of Dutch poets labelled after their decade, the ‘Fifties’ poets (De vijftigers), who broke the mould of Dutch poetry in those years. Paris was their chief literary and artistic reference point. They had come to maturity in the bitter years of the occupation and the buttoned-up sobriety expected of the Dutch in the post-war period was for them the last straw. Determinedly modern and worldly, theirs was an existential rather than a political revolt. Of this avant-garde Campert was always the most accessible. He wrote novellas and newspaper columns as well as poetry, establishing himself as a much-loved and widely-read writer.

Though he started in the fifties, Campert also caught the playful mood of the 60s very well and he has continued to draw on this spirit, although his most recent work is often lyrical or elegiac. The irony that is thought to be his hallmark is often a mask for a surprising emotional engagement. Now aged eighty, Campert is still writing in all three of his genres as well as giving superb readings of his work.

Another Dutch poet, Louis Lehmann, wrote about Campert, ‘What is so marvellous is that someone who appears to do nothing but mumble a few dead ordinary words, without getting worked up about anything, can say so much.’ It is just this quality – the seeming off-the-cuff naturalness of Campert’s poetry that was a challenge for me as his translator. To capture language that is colloquial and very close to conversation and render it as poetry in another language – that was the challenge.

Donald Gardner’s book of translations of the poems of Remco Campert, ‘I Dreamed in the Cities at Night’, was published by Arc publications in 2007 as no. 20 in their bilingual series, Visible Poets, edited by Jean Boase Beier. (www.arcpublications.co.uk) Donald Gardner is a poet and translator who has lived in Amsterdam for many years. Recent publications of his poetry include ‘The Glittering Sea’ (Hearing Eye, London, 2006) and ‘Sleight of Tongue’ (Boekie Woekie, Amsterdam, 2010). His website is: www.donaldgardner.net

The following three poems are taken from the collection ‘I Dreamed in the Cities at Night’, published by Arc in 2007 as no. 20 in their bilingual series, Visible Poets, edited by Jean Boase Beier.

FADED DAYS

It was late in the evening
rain caught in lamplight
beat down on the cobbles
of the Old Mechlin Road
you were wearing an off-white dress
I’d have guessed you were fifteen
you were walking down the street
as I was crossing
cars passed by
braked rode on
you asked me the way to the Muse Café
the bar where that singer was on
singer you said of your song
voice that had found you
you were on your way there
‘Just follow the tram lines’
I let you go

Antwerp girl
you’re still on my mind
what have I done
with my life

HOTEL

For Cees Nooteboom

Late in the Autumn
weather turned
storm pounced on the palm trees
rushed down the hotel corridors
final visitors packed their bags —
the English couple on their last legs
the beautiful girl and her mother
who smoked long cigarettes
and waited for something that never came
the tennis star past his prime —
I lingered on
a nuisance to the staff

in this hotel I was dreadfully unhappy
as usual that just happened
but I stayed put
the book I’d not yet started
like a huge egg in my arms
self-imposed trial of strength
nobody had asked for

I thought of you on your island
or en route between two continents
gone before you’d even landed
seeking safety in movement
so unlike me, yet just the same

at that thought
stuck in that foreign eyrie
suddenly I found wings
I got better, I was cured

STREET THEATRE

In the balmy afternoon wind
I was sitting on a bench
on the Boulevard du Général Leclerc
next to an old gent
who’d fought in Indochina
rosette in his buttonhole
white cravat round his wizened neck
at his feet a little mutt
watching everything
when suddenly Sophie Marceau
actress I recognized from the papers
stepped out of a limousine
followed by her photographer
and holding her sun-hat in place
gave us an eyeful
of her cream-white armpit

the mutt yapped
and the old gent and I
stood up in unison
sang a ditty
did a couple of dance steps
and waggled our bottoms

she didn’t see us

On Translating Eugene Onegin by Stanley Mitchell

June 28, 2010 in Russian, Translating techniques | by Sebastian Hayes | Leave a comment

When I was translating Onegin my shrink asked me, as they always do, what I ‘felt’ about it, how I responded to this or that character. I pondered and replied that I felt nothing, that I had only one concern – to get the translation as ‘right’ as possible in terms of style, vocabulary, rhyme and metre. In other words, my task was purely technical. ‘Feeling’ was confined to the intensity of the task. I was retired, but had never worked so hard at anything before. The translation took between seven and eight years. Every stanza was a struggle. With each successful final couplet I’d jump up, crying ‘erquickend!, for some reason choosing the German word. I certainly felt ‘quickened’. The process of translating each stanza resembled a Sisyphean labour except that I was always able in the end to topple the boulder over to the other side. The final couplet did that for me, resolving the complex rhymes of the preceding twelve lines and summing up or puncturing the preceding argument. So we were engaged in a parallel labour. The stanza left an indelible stamp on me. For a long time I could only write poetry using Pushkin’s fourteen lines. These seemed to capture the novel as a whole, capacious enough to include all the moods listed by Pushkin in his Dedication to Pletnyov:

Half-comic and half-melancholic,
Ideal and down-to-earth bucolic,
The careless fruit of leisure times,
Of sleepless nights, light inspirations,
Of immature and withered years,
The intellect’s cold observations,
The heart’s impressions marked in tears.

I think this is why so many English and American poets have tried to repopularize narrative verse by imitating the Onegin stanza.

But these are the exigencies of translation rather than the meaning of the story, although I know the two can’t be separated. As my good shrink remarked, I must have been reacting to the novel unconsciously. I wrote two unfinished accounts of the translation once I had completed it, and there my feelings began to emerge. I am glad therefore to have been invited to write yet another in which I can scrutinize more clearly what I felt. Translation and reading are two distinct activities. I had read Onegin a number of times and thought about it. But translation brings you unusually close to the original and enables you to see the text differently. Hitherto, I had read Pushkin intellectually, influenced by the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, who saw in the Russian poet the embodiment of the ‘beautiful’. It didn’t need a Marxist to say this, but the ‘beautiful’ wasn’t a category used by Marxist critics. ‘Realism’ was their criterion. Lukacs singled out beauty as an autonomous sphere within a realist aesthetic, locating it in three periods – classical Greece, the Renaissance and the French Revolution, each of which, he argued, benefited from a pause between successive class societies. Pushkin he regarded as a late representative of the French revolutionary epoch in spite of Russia’s persisting feudalism. In the art of the beautiful, Lukacs found the Russian poet superior even to Goethe, master pupil of the Greeks in this age. There is no other kind of beauty for Lukacs but the classical. He ignores or discounts Romantic beauty and Romanticism in general. But here is not the place to pursue his theory further.

I had always been attracted to the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘classical’. I was by nature predisposed to proportion, harmony and balance. The idea that these aesthetic qualities could be married to a materialist philosophy excited me as a young Marxist interested in the arts. From then on Pushkin became my principal object of research.

Translation changed my ideas. I should mention that I suffer from bipolar disorder, which involves the very opposite of harmony, balance and proportion. It is understandable therefore that I should seek them in art. There were several occasions during the translation when I was depressed or manic. When I was depressed I was unable to continue. During one manic phase I came near to destroying the already finished translation and substituting an inferior one. I took the manuscript from one hospital to another, not necessarily working on it, but keeping it as a talisman. I believe that my disablity left no mark on the final version. Pushkin’s precision and clarity steadied me. And both my Penguin editor and my devoted helpmeet Barbara Rosenbaum tested the translation at every step. Angela Livingstone, a former colleague brought more precision to the text. She and I had planned a book on Pushkin of which only a few pages remain extant. We discussed Lukacs’s essay together. Robert Chandler, who encouraged me to submit the first chapter to Penguin, so making the translation possible, suggested some perceptive changes at the final stage. Above all, my thanks go to Barbara, who patiently withstood the blast of my mania and kept the original version safe.

In my retrospective accounts I dwelt not unexpectedly on the suicidal moments in Onegin or what I took to be such. Towards the end of Chapter Two Pushkin writes of his generation:

Meanwhile, enjoy, friends, till it’s ended,
This light existence, every dram!
Its nullity I’ve comprehended
And little bound to it I am.

The concluding stanza of the poem expresses a similar feeling without the bitterness:

Blest who betimes has left life’s revel,
Whose wine-filled glass he has not drained

To these may be added the concluding lines to Chapter Six which, if not articulating a suicidal inclination, conjure a ferocious alienation:

Let not a poet’s soul be frozen,
Made rough and hard, reduced to bone
And finally be turned to stone
In that benumbing world he goes in,
In that intoxicating slough
Where, friends, we bathe together now.

The first quotation reminded me of Keats’s wish ‘to cease upon the midnight with no pain’. In the aftermath of the French Revolution Keats laments the beauty that can no longer ‘keep her lustrous eyes’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’). The lure of death is common to Romantic poets. Pushkin is held back from the abyss by what he calls his ‘sad mission’, that is his poetic gift, and his desire for posterity.

I feel now that the last stanza of Onegin is not so much an invitation to suicide as an Epicurean appeal to withdraw from the storms of life into congenial company. In the penultimate stanza he thanks his novel for giving him this shelter:
With you I’ve known
The things that every poet covets:
Oblivion, when the tempest buffets,
Sweet talk of friends.

Nor can it be by accident that Pushkin refers in the final stanza to the Persian poet Sadi, who in his poem Bustan celebrated a garden retreat similar to that of Epicurus. Pushkin’s last stanza is a gentle and accepting valediction.

It was natural that I should have been attracted by the dark sides of the novel. But it was a discovery I needed to make, for I was also discovering myself. My depressions impinged several times while I was translating and, costly though they were, led me to a more sombre view of the novel than hitherto. Yet it was not a subjective view. I believe the novel is objectively very pessimistic, and that I had previously approached it with a one-sided theory derived from Lukacs.

He sees Tatiana as the embodiment of beauty. Her fine ‘moral balance’, he says, is rooted in the people. But in the ‘benumbing world’ of St. Petersburg high society she is isolated from the people. Her beloved nurse has died. She is cut off from her adored countryside. She hates her new social milieu, although she adapts to it very well. Her marriage is arranged and her love for Onegin wasted. She is a broken woman who maintains an outward poise, who behaves ‘comme il faut’. Is this the embodiment of beauty? I now began to see Tatiana very differently. Her stoicism evoked compassion, and like Herzen I felt anger for the society that imprisoned and thwarted not only her but Onegin and Lensky too. Like her, they were broken people. Onegin withdraws from a shallow life, and experiences a helpless love too late. Lensky is prevented from realizing his impossible ideals, and sacrifices himself in a futile duel. No wonder Pushkin ends his novel before any further degradation takes place in his hero’s life (though it is witnessed in the fragments of his Journey). Likewise he refrains from following Tatiana any further into her marriage.

Translation brought me closer to the characters. I could never identify with Lensky, whom Pushkin himself nearly destroys in his prediction of the young poet’s philistine future. Nor could I identify with Onegin, but I now saw him as a tragic figure. I saw his frequent yawns not just as symptoms of boredom, but as entrances into a void, perhaps the ‘nullity’ that Pushkin found in his ‘light-headed’ generation. There is nothing metaphysical about Pushkin, yet when Onegin hears ‘the timeless mutter of the soul’ we are carried into a dimension beyond everyday life. The novel is laconic, therefore one has to read slowly to become aware of its depths which are often capped by irony. But the irony differs from the cutting tones of Lermontov or Heine. It does not undermine, but binds oppositions – illusion and reality, past and present, town and country, digressions and narrative, poetry and prose and the contrasting and self-contradictory characters. No single aspect of the novel acquires predominance, yet none is fragmentary. (The fragment was the goal of Romantic Irony.) Not even the most straightforward description (Onegin’s estate, the theatre, the duel etc.) escapes a touch of the ironic. Pushkin’s irony unites the novel, but it is a unity quite different from the ‘epic objectivity’ or ‘totality’ that Lukacs talks about. It is a unity of dissonance. Only nature here is entirely free of irony, providing the chronological canvas of the novel and the source for many of the similes, especially the monitory lines in Chapter Two:

Alas! Each generation must
By Providence’s dispensation
Rise, ripen, fall in quick succession,
Upon life’s furrows

Tatiana of course is most closely involved with nature, enabling her to grow. Neither Lensky nor Onegin grows. I could not only sympathize now, but positively fall in love with her, with her shyness, passion, imagination and waywardness. For Kuchelbecker she was a portrait of Pushkin himself, Pushkin combines dark and light. Pisarev, offended by what he saw as the brilliant triviality of the surface, could not see the depths. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky remarked that Onegin could only gain by the removal of the digressions, where the depths of the novel are mostly to be found. I was drawn more and more to the digressions. I had written an essay on them long ago. While translating Onegin I wrote another, which means that I had been thinking consciously about the novel despite my earlier disclaimer. But it was only after I’d finished the translation that I could discover my feelings about the characters. I saw the digressions and the narrative as a counterpoint of bass and treble or a chiaroscuro of depth and surface, longing and light, past and present. The surface depicted what is and what must be, the world to which the characters have to adapt or fall by the wayside. The digressions, like Pushkin’s urge to freedom, expressed unfulfillable desire or mourned an irretrievable past. Although Pushkin as author is at home everywhere in the novel, it seemed to me that the digressions were his true abode. I have in mind the lyrical digressions, not the commentary on the state of the roads or the debate between the ode and the elegy. All the characters leave home. Lensky of course dies, Olga joins her hussar in his regiment, Tatiana marries into an alien milieu, Eugene travels, returning to a hostile St. Petersburg, Pushkin sheds his digressions, bidding farewell to youth and poetry for a literature of prose.

I saw now a different beauty in Onegin, not just the familiar serenity, light-heartedness and harmony, but the disparity of dark and light, which reminded me of similar contrasts in the music of Mozart and the paintings of Leonardo. The surface sparkle rests ‘upon a base of suffering’ as Nietzsche said of the art of the Apollonian Greeks or, as Pushkin himself noted, upon ‘The heart’s impressions marked in tears.’

Before translating Onegin I had regarded my life as a failure because of the bipolar disorder which nearly ruined me. I had managed, as I have indicated, to write a few things about Pushkin, including a critical study, which was first accepted and then turned down by the publisher. This study which I longed to rewrite was superseded by the translation which I completed at the age of 75, earning me high praise. Having gone through Pushkin’s school, I am now much more eager to write poetry than to write about it. I’d rather have written this present piece as a poem. I’ve composed the odd poem since my adolescence, but I never regarded myself seriously as a poet. Pushkin was my only teacher. My translation goes back to a collective project at Essex University in the nineteen-sixties, when Angela Livingstone and I collaborated with our Head of Department, Donald Davie, an established poet, to translate Onegin. The project foundered and the poet died. Many years later I tried my hand at the first stanza and still more years passed until the translation was born. Only here do I recognize myself as a poet. Verse that I had written before or composed after the translation cannot compare with it. Reading it through recently with a small group, I marvelled at some of my lines. But that is not the main point. Since completing the translation, I know that I shall never have to feel a failure again. Repeating Pushkin’s self-congratulation on finishing a piece of work, I said of mine : ‘Well done, you son-of-a-bitch!’        Stanley Mitchell

Note: This moving account of the joys and tribulations of a translator is taken verbatim (with permission) from the author’s website www.stosvet.net/12/mitchell/ .           Sebastian Hayes

Pushkin in Translation

June 15, 2010 in Russian | by Sebastian Hayes | Leave a comment

Subsequent to the recent presentation of Pushkin at the Poetry Café on 23 June (see Events and Meetings) the three translators, Robert Chandler, Stanley Mitchell and Antony Wood,  have offered  the following excerpts  from the work of Russia’s most renowned poet :

‘Poem Addressed to Pushkin’s Decembrist
Friend, Ivan Pushchin’

First friend, friend beyond price,
One morning I blessed fate
When sleigh bells, your sleigh bells
Sang out and filled my lonely home
Lost in its drifts of snow.

May my voice now, please God,
Gladden your soul
In that same way
And lighten your exile
With light from our Lycée’s clear day.

Translated by Robert Chandler

‘From Pindemonte’*

I don’t much care for those resounding rights
That take so many heads to dizzy heights.
I won’t complain. I’ll just admit, the fact is,
The gods debarred me from contending taxes
Or parleying with emperors at loggerheads;
To me it makes no difference whether blockheads
Are hoodwinked by the freedom of the press
Or sharpnosed censorship snuffs out excess.
All this, I have to say, is words, words, words.
To rights of this kind I have grown averse,
Freedom of this kind is to me quite feeble:
Subject to the sovereign or the people –
What does it matter? Let it be.
To owe
Account to no one, serve oneself alone,
And please oneself, and breathe without delivering
One’s conscience, thoughts or neck to power or livery;
To gaze at Nature’s beauty at one’s will,
Feast eyes on works of art, take in one’s fill:
These things are happiness, rights …

1836

*Pushkin’s title pretending that the poem was a translation in order to hoodwink the censors.

Translated by Antony Wood

From Eugene Onegin

[Young Tatiana, romantically in love with Onegin, visits his house in his absence and discovers the real man in his library:]

22

Although, as we’re aware, Onegin
Had long abandoned reading, still
There were some books he’d not forsaken
That earned a place in his goodwill:
The bard of Juan and the Giaour
And two, three novels of the hour,
In which the epoch was displayed
And modern man put on parade
And fairly faithfully depicted:
With his depraved, immoral soul,
Dried up and egotistical,
To dreaming endlessly addicted,
With his embittered, seething mind
To futile enterprise consigned.

23

There were preserved on many pages
The trenchant mark of fingernails,
With them the watchful girl engages
As if she were deciphering spells.
Tatiana saw with trepidation
What thought it was or observation
Had struck Onegin, what they meant,
To which he’d given mute consent.
And in the margins she encountered
His pencil marks by certain lines.
Throughout, his soul was by such signs,
Without his knowing it, expounded,
Whether by cross, by succinct word,
Or question mark, as they occurred.

translated by Stanley Mitchell.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger by Anne Boileau

June 3, 2010 in German | by Sebastian Hayes | 1 comment

[Note: This piece about the German poet Hans Enzensberger has been sent in by Anne Boileau who presented him at the Poetry Café on May 26th -- see  Events and Meetings. S.H.]

Hans Magnus Enzensberger was born in 1929 in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria and grew up in Nurnberg. This was an exciting time for a boy – destruction, bombings, death, bulletins, and after the war, shortages, very little government, near anarchy. He realized at a young age that his country had not only been defeated but was in deep disgrace, a pariah throughout the world. He vowed to learn languages and leave Germany behind. While still at school he made friends with American servicemen based at the Nurnberg airbase and earned pocket money interpreting and translating for them, and trading on the black market. He observed the collective amnesia about Germany’s recent past, the fact that cities were in ruins but no one commented on it: “There was no self reflection for a long time in the media in postwar Germany.”

He studied foreign languages, linguistics and Philosophy at various universities, including the Sorbonne and after gaining a doctorate worked as a radio producer. He travelled widely in Scandinavia, the US, Mexico and South America; from 1968-69 he lived in Cuba and for several years on a small island in Norway.

He is an accomplished linguist. He has edited an influential periodical called Kursbuch, and is eminent as a critic, translator and contributor to all the media. He has re-invented the art of essay writing; his writings cover in an often rather quirky style all sorts of topics, politics, the environment, philosophy. He also writes under a pseudonym. (Ref: Michael Hamburger, one of his translators.)

But it is his poetry which I chiefly want to talk to you about.

He says the poet is an omnivore, not a specialist. He thinks a poem should be accessible and easy to understand on one level, while at the same time have layers of other meaning which can be peeled away like onion skins. He does not claim to be prescient, but is an observer and critic. Rather than saying straight out that something is bad, he paints an image or a scene, often with humour, to say what he means in a more original and memorable way.

He hates tyranny and dictators. “If Hitler had survived I would not have been tolerated – I’d have been done away with. I’ve been lucky, I have said what I like, not been sent into exile or put in prison. Poetry is risky. If you take on the risk it’s wrong to complain.”

He loves Europe – there is nowhere better in the world – but is appalled at the growing level of bureaucracy- Brussels is a sort of Politburo, it meets behind closed doors.

George Steiner writes: “HME is a poet of formidable intelligence and range, like Brecht before him he combines an intense political imagination with lyric gusto. The reader discovers in him both a satirist and a friend.”

An example of his work :

blindlings

siegreich sein
wird die sache der sehenden
die einäugigen
haben sich in die hand genommen
die macht ergriffen
und den blinden zum könig gemacht

an der abgeriegelten grenze stehen
blindekuhspielende polizisten
zuweilen erhaschen sie einen augenarzt
nach dem gefahndet wird
wegen staatsgefährdender umtriebe

sämtliche leitende herren tragen
ein schwarzes pflästerchen
über dem rechten aug
auf den fundämtern schimmeln
abgeliefert von blindenhunden
herrenlose lupen und brillen

strebsame junge astronomen
lassen sich glasaugen einsetzen
weitblickende eltern
unterrichten ihre kinder beizeiten
in der fortschrittlichen kunst des schielens

der feind schwärzt borwasser ein
für die bindehaut seiner agenten
anständige bürger aber trauen
mit rücksicht auf die verhältnisse
ihren augen nicht
streuen sich pfeffer und salz ins gesicht
betasten weinend die sehenswürdigkeitenund erlernen die blindenschrift

der könig soll kürzlich erklärt haben
er blicke voll zuversicht in die zukunft

from   Landesprache   Suhrkamp 1962

blindly

victory will go
to the sighted ones
those with one eye
have joined hands
seized power
and made the blind man king

at the heavily armed  border policemen are playing blind-man’s-buff
while on the hunt for an eye doctor
who is wanted
for activities dangerous to the state

all the prominent gentlemen wear
a small black patch
over their right eye
in lost property offices
abandoned lenses and spectacles
brought in by guide dogs gather dust

assiduous young astronomers
are getting glass eyes fitted
while far-seeing parents
instruct their children
in the progressive art of squinting

the enemy is smuggling in eyewash
for the conjunctiva of his agents
but decent citizens
considering the circumstances
do not trust their eyes
throw pepper and salt into their own faces
weep while running their hands
over works of art
and are studying Braille

they say the king has just declared
that he looks to the future  with
confidence.

Translation: Anne Boileau

René Char by Graham Mummery

May 29, 2010 in French | by Sebastian Hayes | Leave a comment

[The following piece on the French poet René Char is based on the translator's Notes for his presentation at the Poetry Café Wednesday 26th May -- see Events and Meetings.   S.H.]

René Char’s name can generate mixed reactions. He has a high reputation amongst the international avant-garde, and counted amongst his friends Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso and Martin Heidegger. Yet, he also has a reputation of being difficult. In some ways, Char is to blame for this. His poems often throw up strange phrases, and surreal images aimed at provoking imaginative leaps. He once said it was not possible for us to live without the unknown. He invites us to leap into the unknown to change our way of looking at things. Yet, he also believed in the healing power of beauty, and even in prose poems, displays a lyrical side that can have great simplicity as in this late poem of his, with a haiku-like delicacy.

TO A TREE-BROTHER WHOSE DAYS ARE NUMBERED

Small harp of the larches,
On a spur of moss and fertile rocks
— Edge of the forest where the clouds break —
Counterpoint of the void in which I believe.

René Char was in 1907 in the village l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Province. The young René was an angry passionate young man. He lost his father early and sought solace from nature in the woods around his home. Tall and powerful — he later played rugby — he would punch tree trunks to let off steam…  A local blacksmith took him on board. In the 1920s, Char attended a Lycée in Marseille to study business, but spent more time reading literature.

He read Paul Éluard’s poems and on meeting, they became friends. It was Éluard who introduced Char to the Surrealists. Though later to break amicably with them, Char is still often referred to as a Surrealist poet. It’s around this time he married his first wife, Georgette who was Jewish.

This was in the late nineteen twenties / early thirties when Fascism was on the rise. The Surrealists campaigned against them. Char briefly joined the Communist Party, but left them, being too much of an individualist. He also broke with the surrealists at about this time. His poems of the time reflect this, there is a sense passionate engagement with politics and life. Here is a typical poem from his from his first major collection Le Marteau sans Maitre / The Hammer without a Master:

WATERSHED

Let’s yield to blessings of happy oblivion
Unperturbed
Let’s flee with the dust from those things we clung to
Let’s abandon those watery facades we call our fate
With the dignity of leaves
At the moment they shed all precedent
For whatever window appears through our tears
What are you waiting for
You partisan hearts?

The words “partisan hearts” has a prophetic ring to it. When the Second World War broke out, Char was called up. When the Germans invaded, he escaped back to Province, only to find himself outlawed as a Communist on the grounds of being married to a Jew.

He joined the Resistance. Being familiar with the Provencal countryside, made him well equipped for waging guerrilla warfare. He became the regional commander there, known as Capitaine Alexandre. He had many adventures, often sheltered by peasant farmers, escaping death many times. His memories of this are recorded in a collection of prose pieces from his notebook at this time, published after the war under the title Leaves of Hypnos, edited by Albert Camus with whom he remained friends until the latter‘s death in 1960. Hypnos is the name of the Ancient Greek of sleep, which was also Char’s codename in this time.

When war ended, Char refused all decorations and refused to co-operate in witch-hunts for collaborators, saying: “We must triumph over our rage and disgust in order to make both our actions and our morality nobler.” He was haunted by memories from this time for many years — deaths of friends  and by the fact that he had had to kill others. There’s a change in his poetry brought about by this time.

His new collection Fureur et Mystère / Furor and Mystery was published in 1948. The poems still have anger and passion. They are also denser, more hermetic, drawing on many sources. The war taught Char the importance of codes and imagery, as both a way of hiding things and as a short hand to a larger reality.. There are more descriptions of things, more imagery, and in this collection has an underling a sense of terror underneath the beauty. This next poem entitled The Swift demonstrates this.

THE SWIFT

Swift spreading wings too wide as he wheels in the air, circling round the house, crying out for joy. Just like the heart.

He dries up thunder. He sows seeds in calm skies. Touching ground tears him apart.

The swallow is his response. The familiar that he detests. What is the use of lacing round towers?

His silence’s reach into the most somber depths. No one can inhabit a smaller space.

Through the lengths of summer’s brightness, he will weave amidst shadows, through midnight’s shutters.

There are no eyes to hold him. His whole being is his voice. A rifle is going to shoot him down. Just like the heart.

The next poem is an invocation of the River Sorgue, which flows through l’Isle-sur-le-Sorgue, Char’s home-town out towards Avignon. It is an incantation to the river and has been set to music by Pierre Boulez. It was later used by Char in the 1950’s for a radio play he wrote about environmental protest which he became increasingly involved in as he grew older.

It’s in rhyming couplets, which is unusual for him, as he rarely uses rhyme. It also has many associative layers for the river. Many of these are self-explanatory. Two require clarification.

You will hear about “the sun leaving its plough to fall in with the liar.” I only found year explanation for this from notes in a French selection of his work. It is a reference to a Provinceal folk-tale. The sun was an honest worker who put his plough in the sky each night. A liar came by and they became friends. The sun stopped working.

The second is in the dedication: “Chanson pour Yvonne /. Song for Yvonne”. Yvonne was Char’s close friend, confidant and muse, Yvonne Zervos. Yvonne was the wife of a patron of the arts, who he knew. Char was also a painter, and Yvonne and her husband helped organize exhibitions of Char’s paintings. The poem suggests that he saw something elemental in her nature, and it flowed through her.

The very last line literally translated is “Keep us violent and friendly with the bees on the horizon”. This has caused some comment by academics, and not least problems for the translator! What are the bees? This I believe is simply what ever lies in the future. But bees can be a mixed blessing: they make honey and they sting! The word “violent” is also a problem. It’s a word that Char found evocative of the elemental violence in nature, which he felt was mirrored in human passion. It’s remarkably similar to Ted Hughes’ elementals in English poetry:

SONG OF THE SORGUE

River rushing by so fast, at full pelt, on your own,
Give my country’s children the full face of your passion.

River where the lightning ends, where my home begins,
Who rolls into oblivion the rubble of my reasonings.

River, in you the earth is shaken,  the sun made uneasy.
Let the poor facing night’s darkness feed from your harvest.

River, whom we so often abuse and then abandon.

River, teacher to novices of life’s calloused condition,
There is no wind that ever fails to bow down to your wave-crests.

River of the empty soul, of rags and suspicion,
Of ancient griefs let loose, of elms and compassion.

River of the foolhardy, of the feverish, of the knacker,
Of the sun leaving its plough to fall in with the liar.

River of our betters, river of the clear morning haze,
Of the lamp that dispels fears left in its shade.

River who respects the dream, river who rusts iron,
Where shadows the stars keep from the sea are hidden.

River of transmitted powers, of ferryman’s cries,
Of strong winds that nip the grapes announce new wines.

River whose heart is never broken in this mad world of prisons,
Keep our spirits violent and friends with bees on our horizons.

Char also wrote many love poems. After the war his marriage to Georgette broke down and they divorced. He wasn’t to marry again until just before his death in 1988. In the meantime he had many women friends.

This poem is a prose-poem, and in it Char also speaks of poetry as if it were a mistress that he is making love to. The Penitentiary in the title is a play on the words “penitentiary” for prison as well as implying penitence.

THE LIGHT OF THE PENITENTIARY

I wanted only the briefest night with you, so your silent stepmother would grow old in the background unable to marshal her powers.

My dream was to be beside you, a harmonious fugitive that few ever noticed, as we chanced along this sad but angelic route. Nothing would dare slow us down.

The daylight suddenly closes in. Losing all the dead I loved so much, I am casting off that dog rose, the last living thing left, a distracted summer.

I’m emptied out, yet full. Finnish me, you melancholy beauty, your eyelids fluttering in drunken rapture. Every wound from you awakens the phoenixes whose eyes appear in my window. Something sings and sighs its satisfaction at being complete out there inside the wall’s gold.

This wind that is driving my yoke along.

Gradually in the poet-war years Char’s psychological injuries healed. He looked forward to better times. His next collection Les Matinaux / The Dawn Breakers reflects this. The next poem, is really a group of aphorisms, describing his vision of an ideal country. The title is “MAKE IT SO!” which he prefigures with the note that This land is a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre. This reflects something Char says in another poem, that humanity flees from suffocation.

MAKE IT SO!

This land is a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre.

In my land, the tender evidence of spring and meagrely clothed birds are preferred to far off goal.
Truth awaits the dawn by the candle.
The windowpane is ignored. To the watcher what does it matter.
In my land we don’t question someone who has been touched deeply.

There is no malign shadow over capsized boats.
A half-hearted greeting is unheard of in my land.
We only borrow what we can return with interest.
There are leaves, many leaves on the trees in my land.
The branches free not to bear fruit.
Nobody trusts the good faith of a conqueror.
In my land, we say thank you.

During the years from the 1950’s onwards until his death in 1988, Char lived between Paris and Provençe. They were not as exciting as the war years in terms of external life. He dedicated it to his vocations of writing and painting

All his life Char loved art. The next two poems are taken from a sequence he wrote about the cave-paintings at Lascaux which he visited after the Second World War. The first is titled after the stags of the frieze there. In it Char looks across the whole of human history in wonder at the beauty of the paintings at Lascaux. Maybe also we are being shown Char’s belief in the power of beauty to save us, and how long it has done so.

BLACK STAGS

The waters spoke into the ear of the sky.
You stags have leapt across millennia
From darkness in the rocks to the air’s caresses.
The hunter driving you, the spirit watching you,
How I love their passion, viewed from my wide shore!
And what if, in a moment of hope, I had their eyes ?

The second poem “Young Horse With Hazy Maine” relates these paintings to other works of art. The “White Lady of Africa” is a cave-painting found in Africa. The Madaleine by the Mirror is a painting by Georges de la Tour, a reproduction of which Char carried round with him in his Resistance days, and which gave him much consolation.

YOUNG HORSE WITH HAZY MANE

Spring, horse, how beautiful you are,
Riddling your mane across the sky
Splashing the reeds with foam!
All love is there in your breast:
From the “White Lady of Africa”
To the “Madeleine by the Mirror”,
Warrior idol, grace deep in thought.

In this later period Char wrote many of his greatest poems. Many become much simpler less dense. He is a visionary poet who also still kept his sense of involvement, for example being as mentioned previously he protested against both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

To finish of I’ll leave with a poem from this period. Like the Song of the Sorgue earlier, this poem has also been set to music by Pierre Boulez. In it a lizard lies on a stone in the Province taking in the sun. There danger, and a sense of nature going about its business. Perhaps we get a sense of Char himself, in his own element, taking in the mystery and violence of creation. It seems right to leave him here.

LAMENT OF THE AMOROUS LIZARD

Don’t pick the sunflower seeds
Lest it annoy the cypresses.
Goldfinch take flight, speed
Back to your woolly nest.

The wind will let go of you
You are not a stone in the sky
Country bird, the rainbow
Comes together in the daisy.

The hunter has his gun, so hide.
The sunflower is his accomplice.
Only grasses are on your side,
Field-grasses that bow and crease.

The snake does not know you,
And the grasshopper is sullen;
The mole sees nothing true;
The butterfly has hate for none.

It’s midday, goldfinch.
The groundsel becomes shiny.
Stay here, out of danger’s reach:
The hunter is back with his family.

The echo from this land rings true.
I watch, prophesy well.
From my ledge I see all, view
Even the twittering owl.

Who better than an amorous lizard
Can tell the secrets of this land?
O gentle, kindly king of the skies
Why not nest on my rock’s side!

Graham Mummery


YIDDISH FOLKSONGS ‘RE-IMAGINED’ INTO ENGLISH POETRY

May 15, 2010 in Translating techniques, Yiddish | by Sebastian Hayes | Leave a comment

Yiddish was the principal daily language of European Jews for nearly one thousand years.  Yiddish is a fusion language based on German, written in Hebrew script, with additional vocabulary drawn from Slavic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other sources. It reflects the dispersal (‘diaspora’) of a whole people through many lands; from the sixteenth and especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a rich literature developed, fuelled by Hasidic emotionalism, comprising song, fiction, poetry, disputation and polemical writing and as such had an impact on politics, national and social movements.  The language was nearly extinguished by the Shoah, remaining today as the ordinary language of only a remnant of the Jewish people – Hasidim and elderly survivors.  The past four decades, however, have seen a revival of Yiddish as a cultural phenomenon: language courses are now given at major universities; Yiddish phrases, humor, music are common parlance among Jews and even non-Jews; perhaps also as a reassertion of Diaspora Jewry against the hegemonic rule of Hebrew in the State of Israel.

Folksongs in Yiddish existed as far back as the fourteenth century. But the genre especially flourished from the eighteenth century onward, originally because of the rise of ecstatic Hasidic prayer, and expanded generally in  the Pale of Settlement – the old Lithuanian and Polish empires – where Jews were banished until the end of the nineteenth century. Conditions there were appalling: persecution, pogroms, military conscription, and poverty.  The thousands of Yiddish folksongs reflected the plight of the people, as well as their hopes, prayer and daily lives.  “Yiddish folksongs are in a vernacular closest to the popular speech of the folk,” wrote Ruth Rubin, pioneer archivist of Yiddish folksong. “…Into folksong were poured feelings, thoughts, desires, aspirations, which often seemingly had no other place to go.” [1]

The categories in chapter headings to Rubin’s seminal work, “Voices of a People. The Story of Yiddish Folksong,” [2] are illustrative: “At the Cradle…The Children’s World…Love and Courtship…Marriage…Customs and Beliefs…Merriment…Dancing Songs…Historical and Topical…Chasidic Melody and Songs…Of Literary Origin…Poverty, Toil, and Struggle…Out of the Shadows (Underworld songs)…To America…To Zion…Soviet Yiddish Folksong…The Struggle to Survive.”  As Isaac Bashevis Singer explained in his Nobel Lecture (delivered in Yiddish), “In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.”

Some folksongs began as poems, some became poems adapted from the songs. (In Yiddish lid means both song and poem.) The folksongs were, in any event, fluid, often altered and adapted in passages from one person, time, or country to another. Adaptation and transformation of Yiddish songs to new purposes is an honored tradition. As the composer Stefan Wolpe once said,
“When using folklore material for creative purposes the composer strives to reveal and to remould in a novel fashion what nobody but himself is able to detect in it….He thus preserves and transforms the original at the very same time.”

As a Jew rediscovering his own cultural history, and as a poet, I noticed that most English translations of the folksongs’ lyrics are mainly dutiful, literal, stilted, capturing none of the rich idiom and feeling of the original; certainly none of the felicitous rhyming or cadence as conveyed in both the language and the melody. As I scanned through nearly one thousand texts from Rubin’s archives and others, from collections on the Internet and CDs, many ‘spoke’ to me, begging for recomposition or ‘re-imagination’, as I term it: aI penetrated the lyrics to distill their essence; I recreated, advanced, and sometimes subverted the original in order to create a vibrant poem in English.

This poem, published in the April 2010 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (used with permission), is an example – I give the recomposition first, then the original (a perennial klezmer favourite):

MY COUSIN THE GREENHORN

I had a pretty cousin, just over on the boat, a real greenhorn.  Her hair cascaded in curls, her cheeks flushed with freedom, she was the kind who skipped when she walked, trilled when she talked. “Listen greenhorn,” I warned, “this may be the goldene medine, but it’s no land of milk and honey. The streets are pocked, the men are goats, you’ve no mama no tate to watch out for you.” Yet her feet begged to dance, her eyes to flirt, and no bent-backed tailor or pasty-faced scholar for her, God forbid!  But you can’t eat gaiety. Soon she was tied to a machine, working for some lecher himself once green. Meantime, I had my own troubles, so when I saw her again her feet were wrapped in rag-slippers, her hair cut blunt, her cheeks, once like pomegranates, now sunken and sallow, her belly swollen. “Nu, greenhorn, how goes it?” She stared past me as if not knowing that anyone spoke. Finally: “To hell with your goldene medine.”

Notes: greenhorn — ‘a newcomer (as to a country) unacquainted with local manners and customs; esp: a recently arrived immigrant.’ – Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.

goldene medine –  land of gold.

Di Grine Kuzine (music by Abe Schwartz (1881-1963), lyrics by Hyman (Khayim) Prizant, a perennial favorite for Klezmorim. (hear a sedate version of the song at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ndY1Hc3xa8c

and a raucous one at  http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vNpasfW0dmY&feature=related.)

Tsu mir iz gekumen a kuzine                        A girl cousin arrived, a greenhorn.
Sheyn vi gold iz zi geven, di grine              Beautiful as gold she was,
Bekelakh vi royte pomerantsn                    Cheeks red as oranges,
Fiselakh vos betn zich tsum tantsn.          Tiny feet, just made for dancing.

Herelakh vi zaydn-veb gelokte                    Her hair was as a silk web,
Tseyndelekh vi perelakh getokte                Her teeth as pearls on a string,
Eygelakh vi himl-bloy in friling                   Her eyes, blue as skies in spring,
Lipelekh vi karshelekh a tsviling.                Her lips, just like twin cherries.

Nisht gegangen is zi, nor geshprungen,     She did not walk, she leapt.
Nisht geredt hot zi nor gezungen                 She did not talk, she sang.
Lebedik un freilech yede mine                     Her every feature joyful and gay –
Ot aza geven is main kuzine!                          Such a one was my cousin!

Un azoy ariber tseyner yorn                        But, as the years passed by
Fun mayn kuzine iz a tel gevorn                  My cousin went downhill
“Peides” hot zi vokhenlang geklibn             From working hard week after week.
Biz fun ir iz gornisht nit geblibn.                  Nothing remained but a wreck.

Haynt az ikh bagegen mayn kuzine            Today, as I meet her on the street,
Un ikh freg ir: S’makhtsu epes, Grine?      And I ask: How’s everything, Greenhorn?
Ziftst zi op, un kh’leyen in ir mine:              She just sighs and I read in her eye:
Brenen zol Colombus’ es medine!               To hell with Columbus’s paradise!

Norbert Hirschhorn

May 2010

www.bertzpoet.com

[1] Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive. Edited by Chana Mlotek and Mark Slobin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007; pp. 16, xii).

[2] Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois University Press, 2000.

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