Poetry in Translation

Sonnet by the Comte de Saint-Germain translated Sebastian Hayes

Sebastian Hayes — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:31:31 +0000

Curious enquirer into All That Is
Whose guiding principle and end I sought,
The hidden gold I spied within th’ abyss,
Made it my leaven, to fulfilment brought.

Then I explained how in a mother’s womb
The soul makes house, and how the pip and crumb
Of vine and corn, sealed in their earthy tomb
By miracle the bread and wine become.

The void; God spoke; the void became a thing;
I doubted this — for what maintained it so?
Nought but the void was ground and scaffolding.

At last, with scales that blame and merit show,
I weighed the eternal and it called to me;
I died adoring it, no more I know.

Translation Sebastian Hayes

SONNET

Curieux scrutateur de la Nature entière,
J’ai connu du grand tout le principe et la fin.
J’ai vu l’or en puissance au fond de sa rivière
J’ai saisi sa matière et surpris son levain.

J’expliquai par quel art l’âme aux flancs d’une mère
Fait sa maison, l’emporte, et comment un pépin Mis contre un grain de blé, sous l’humide poussière;
L’un plante et l’autre cep, sont le pain et le vin.

Rien n’était, Dieu voulant, rien devint quelque chose,
J’en doutais, je cherchai sur quoi l’univers pose.
Rien gardait l’équilibre et servait de soutien.

Enfin avec le poids de l’éloge et du blâme
Je pesai l’éternel; il appella mon âme:
Je mourrai, j’adorai, je ne savais plus rien.

—Comte de St.-Germain

Modern Poets of East Germany by Judy Gagahan

Sebastian Hayes — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:32:28 +0000

Poets from the former East Germany have shared a difficult fate: because of the peculiar history of 20^th-21^st century Germany much of their potential terrain for poetry was overrun by the events that surrounded them. Like many poets suffering terror regimes and/or exile their roots became invalidated and or irrelevant. Like many from totalitarian regimes they had to develop a technique of ‘inner emigration’. My interest lies in the diverse ways certain poets managed, in this historical trashing, to find a terrain for poetry. I have translated the work of a number of poets whose lifetimes overlapped the Nazi, war-time, communist, post-Wall periods. Some, like Peter Huchel and Gunter Eich, lived out the whole period from the Hitler nightmare through the apocalyptic end of the war, when thousands died being driven westwards by the Russian forces from the now Polish regions in the East; they experienced the firebombing of cities; and then the reduction of many areas of Germany to stone- age conditions and heaps of rubble inhabited by homeless, hungry, often stateless refugees from the camps; and the occupying forces trying to restore some semblance of order. Others arrived post-Hitler and knew only the GDR. Those remaining in the East were first subject to the totalitarian regime eventually finding themselves in a free capitalist world for which they were scarcely prepared. All this created an enormous amnesiac gulf between their time and that of the earlier rich treasury of German literary culture prior and up to the Weimar Republic.
In the aftermath of the war there was, in literature, a great silence. Germans as both perpetrators and victims were silenced by a kind of narrative wreckage that made it impossible to reconstruct any cultural terrain for a long time. In the East the communist narrative of Nazism and the holocaust was quite different to that that emerged gradually in the west of Germany, being seen through the lens of critiques of capitalism. The horror of all these events was and is only partially to be explained. Subsequently under the communist regime there was constraint on what could be written and published and this often led to coded forms, explicable only to others living in that society. Only the relatively young, with the vitality to engage subsequently with an unfamiliar capitalist world could make themselves at home, poetically, when they found themselves in affluence and freedom. But the near half-century under communism was now revealed as a period of economic, political and cultural failure – whatever large parts of the population may have believed or wanted to believe about it. It had become invalid.
Nevertheless the past remained - though only partly articulated. For example the young poet Durs Grunbein, though he had the brilliance and energy to fully exploit in his work post-Wall many perspectives and many cultural opportunities, nevertheless devoted one poetry collection to his birth city Dresden, whose appalling destruction in the closing months of the war he’d been too young to witness, and which his poems nevertheless address.
The great literary silence around these apocalyptic events must have been, aside from the difficulty of explaining them due also to the dual role Germans had to embrace as at once perpetrators of these horrors and victims of them. Why is this of interest to poets of today? Firstly of course many poets in the world at large will find their cultural terrain trashed by political events –though mostly they will be exclusively victims of such events.. Yet even those living in comparative freedom and affluence may find a world around them disenchanted and commoditised and inimical to the creation of poetic art, and that so similarly offers slight refuge for the poet –though he’s perfectly free to do and say what he likes. Some such poets may too find themselves in ‘inner emigration’.
In the work of poets like Gunter Eich, Reiner Kunze, Heinz Czechovski and Peter Huchel and others we can find strategies for creating terrains for poetry in the face of cultural narrative wreckage. Here it is the work of Peter Huchel I want to offer now as a fine poetic survival. Peter Huchel’s life was a struggle against every outside pressure – whether political or through literary trends and canons. His translator, Michael Hamburger wrote of him: ‘at the cost of producing no more than 4 books in half a century…at the cost of silence, exile…and what to some looked like compromise’, and, I would add, wrote some of the most profound and beautiful poetry in the whole history of German lyric. He was extremely reticent and fairly indifferent about how his work was received, though it must be said he won eventually some highly prestigious prizes. He avoided outward commitment in order to stay true to his inner ones. And he suffered for it.
Born in 1903 near Berlin to a middle-class family he was 30 when Hitler came to power. He went to university in Berlin, Freiburg and Vienna and then travelled to France., working as a labourer and then moving on to the Balkans. From 1934 until 1940 he worked writing radio plays ( as did some other poets) – but we know little of any public statements he might have made about the Nazi regime. In 1940 he was conscripted into the war and in 1945 imprisoned briefly by the Russians. Much of his early life had been spent on his grandfather’s farm in rural Brandenburg, and it’s that flat, misty land of lakes and forests, rain and snow that forms the constant background and companion to much of his poetry. – in spite of his travels in the sunny south and east of Europe.
His early poems are much in the tradition of the romantic German nature lyric; they recall for me both Wordsworth and John Clare in their absorption into the natural world and into the innocence and freedom of childhood. His poem ‘Elderberry’ illustrates this (in spite of the grim realities around him).’ Underneath the elderberry hollow/we’d sleep the whole spring…holy to us it sang’. But these landscapes and his lyrical use of them pervade all his work whatever the themes. It’s clear too that, equally, early on and prior to Hitler he’s haunted by the deprivation and alienation of the poor and the migrants working on the land around him. For example he writes of the ‘fire at the heart’ of the Polish reaper as he harvests what he will not enjoy: ‘none of the scythed corn belongs to him’. Huchel, like many GDR poets was a socialist in spirit and soul; nevertheless it’s that lyrical connection between the natural world, their habitats and the soul of the inhabitants that is at the heart of this early work.
His first collection Knabenteich (Boy’s Pond) was withdrawn before publication when the Nazi’s came to power and only re-appeared much later in 1948 under a different title –Gedichte (Poems). He was married but divorced in 1946 and re-married in 1953. Peter Huchel would have been in his 40s during the apocalyptic time of the bombing, migrations and chaos of 1945. Those scenes appear in poems, not in their literal forms, but as landscapes marked by and speaking of them. He continued in the GDR writing radio plays but also, importantly, edited a radical and influential journal ‘Sinn und Form’ in which he published such writers as Sartre, Neruda, Brecht and many contemporary Germans. In 1961 it was censored and Huchel dismissed and publicly disgraced. From 1962 and until 1971, when he was allowed to leave, he lived in isolation under Stasi surveillance and forbidden to work or to publish. Nevertheless his collection ‘Chausseen, Chaussen (Highways, Highways) was published in West Germany. When he left the GDR he settled in Staufen near Freiburg. The next five years was a period of success –travel, prizes, readings –but he was soon to fall ill and died in 1980. Subsequently all his work –poetry and prose- has been published in special editions by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt.
He always supported vigorously other writers – Brecht and particularly Reiner Kunze –and they saw immediately the power of his work – even though, or perhaps especially, because he avoided so many popular trends for example that mundane, up-to-date, colloquial style and the irony of much post-war writing –still marked by the statements that there could be no poetry, to write a poem about a tree, would be an offense after Auschwitz. The writer Hans Nossak wrote of him: ‘how highly political is Huchel’s anti-political attitude – only we of two world wars can understand’. He was right! That preservation of one’s unique outlook, ideas and imagery, that poetic terrain that belongs to inwardness in general, is the only weapon against the controlling frameworks of any political or cultural milieu – whether totalitarian or simply vulnerable to the entertainment and promotional frameworks of the capitalist world. I suspect it was precisely his inwardness and ambivalence towards the world outside that aroused more hostility on the part of the GDR regime than any straightforward opposition would have done.
It is his intense lyricism that contrasts him with most poets of his milieu and generation. He also had an extraordinary capacity for rhyme and metre –more available to German given its regular morphology than to English. It’s his lyricism rooted in place, in the inhabiting of a place, the intimacy he feels with nature – its weathers, plants and forests, its fields and lakes, that have witnessed the horrors of human life at its worst, it is this that answers the question: what terrain was left for the poet after the violence of the 20^th century.? It is the natural world and our inhabiting of it and our response to it that remains for the poet a primordial terrain. Much of Huchel’s poetry is winter poetry, the melancholy of winter,, calling to mind the great Schubert song-cycle Die Winterreise (The winter Journey) that makes Huchel’s poetry so distinctive. Here are three of Huchel’s poems I’ve particularly loved and so translated

SNOW

Der Schnee treibt
das grosse Schleppnetz des Himmels,
Es wird die Toten nicht fangen.

Der Schnee wechselt
Sein Lager.
Er stäubt von Ast zu Ast.

Die blauen Schatten
der Füchse lauern
im Hinterhalt. Sie wittern

die weisse
Kehle der Einsamkeit.
SNOW

Snow is driving
the great dragnet of heaven,
it will not catch the dead.

The snow
shifts camp.
It sprinkles itself
from branch to branch.

The blue shadows
of foxes lurk
In ambush. They sense

the white
throat of loneliness.

WINTERPSALM

Da ich ging bei der träger Kälte des Himmels
Und ging hinab die Strasse zum Fluss,
Sah ich die Mulde im Schnee.
Wo nachts der Wind
Mit flacher Schulter gelegen.
Seine gebrechliche Stimme,
In den erstarrten Ästen oben
Stiess sich am Trugbild weisser Luft:
“Alles Verscharrte blickt mich an.
Soll ich es heben aus dem Staub
Und zeigen dem Richter? Ich schweige.
Ich will nicht Zeuge sein’’
Sein Flüstern erlosch
Von keiner Flamme genährt

Wohin du stürzt, o Seele,
Nicht weiss es die Nacht. Denn da ist nichts
Als vieler Wesen stumme Angst.
Der Zeuge tritt hervor. Es ist das Licht.

Ich stand auf der Brücke,
Allein vor der trägen Kälte des Himmels.
Atmet noch schwach,
Durch die Kehle des Schilfrohrs,
Der vereiste Fluss?

WINTER PSALM

There I walked by the lifeless cold of heaven
down the street to the river,
I saw the troughs in the snow
Where of nights the wind
Had leaned a flattened shoulder.
Its frail voice,
above in the frozen branches,
Came against a mirage of white air:
“All that’s been buried gazes at me,
must I raise it from the dust
and expose it to justice? I’m silent.
I will not be a witness’.
Its whispering dies out.
Unfed by any flame.

Wherever you fall, oh soul,
the night knows it not. For there’s nothing
but the dumb fear of many beings.
The witness steps forward.
It is the light.

I stood on the bridge
alone before the lifeless cold of heaven.
Is it the icy river
Still breathing weakly
through the throat
of the reeds?

DIE WASSERAMSEL

Könnte ich stürzen
Heller hinab
Ins fliessende Dunkel

Um mir ein wort zu fischen

Wie diese Wasseramsel
Durch Erlenzweige,
die ihre Nahrung

vom steinigen Grund des Flusses holt

Goldwäsche,. Fischer,
stellt eure Geräte fort,
der scheue Vogel

will seine Arbeit lautlos verrichten

THE WATER OUSEL

If I could swoop
brightly downwards
into the flowing dark

to fish for myself a word,

like this water ousel
through the alder branches
whose sustenance

the stony riverbed keeps.

Gold washers, fishermen,
put away your gear
the shy bird

wants to work in silence.

Judy Gahagan March 2012

My nightingale by Rose Ausländer translated by Vincent Homolka

Sebastian Hayes — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:04:55 +0000

My Nightingale

My mother was once a doe
The golden brown eyes
the grace
remained from her time as a doe

Here she was
half angel half human -
the middle a mother
When I asked her what she would have liked to be
she said: a nightingale

Now she is a nightingale
Night after night I hear her
in the garden of my sleepless dream

She sings the ancestors’ Zion
she sings old Austria
she sings the mountains and beech woods
of the Bukovina
Night after night
my nightingale sings me
lullabies
in the garden of my sleepless dream

Rose Ausländer translation by Vincent Homolka

Meine Nachtigall

Meine Mutter war einmal ein Reh
Die goldbraunen Augen
dieAnmut
blieben ihr aus der Rehzeit

Hier war sie
halb Engel halb Mensch –
die Mitte war Mutter
Als ich sie fragte was sie gern geworden wäre
sagte sie: eine Nactigall

Jetzt ist sie eine Nachtigall
Nacht um Nacht höre ich sie
im Garten meines schlaflosen Traumes

Sie singt das Zion der Ahnen
sie singt das alte Österreich
sie singt die Berge und Buchenwälder
der Bukowina
Wiegenlieder
singt mir Nacht um Nacht
meine Nactigall
im Garten meines schlaflosen Traumes

Rose Ausländer

Midday Dream by Rose Ausländer translated by Vincent Homolka

Sebastian Hayes — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:40:45 +0000

Midday dream

The northeasterly breeze
sings the ballad of the
green resurrection
Pebbles in the asphalt
resume their sparkling
in the April sun.

On the benches
we dream away
our midday break
For brief minutes we doze
in the dream castle
on a journey to the primeval world
or in our mother’s arms

Opening our eyelids
we look into the pavement’s
glittering eyes
Tiny in the distance
the Statue ofLiberty
waves to us you’re free free
The tower clock strikes one
its finger threatens
hurry up
the dream is over.

Translation by Vincent Homolka

Mittagstraum

Die Nordostbrise
singt die Ballade von der
grünen Auferstehung
Steinchen im Asphalt
erneuern ihr Leuchten
in der Aprilsonne

Wir träumen
auf den Bänken unsre
Mittagspause zu Ende
Minutenkurz schlummern wir
im Traumschloß
auf der Urweltreise
oder im Mutterarm

Wenn wir die Lider öffnen
blicken wir in die Glitzeraugen
des Pflasters
Die Statue ofLiberty
meilenklein
winkt uns zu ihr seid frei frei
Eins ruft die Turmuhr
ihr Finger droht
sputet euch
der Traum ist aus

Rose Ausländer

Desire and Truce by Abdourahman A. Waberi translated by Patrick Williamson

Sebastian Hayes — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:43:19 +0000

Desire

I am the rustling of the world
the swaying between here and elsewhere
the dumb foliage of the cactus
the coarse wood that covers the gecko
the bed for the world-book
whose pages are as many waves of the quest
endlessly begun again

Abdourahman A. Waberi tr. Williamson

Truce

I scatter my voice to the four corners of the town
the water shapes time there
I mingle my body with the fragrances that emerge from night
I drown my confusion there
I look into your eyes for our past quarrels
clans undone weaving the web of discord
I ask the succulents to give back

my sweet memory
indecisive you listen to the rustling of my cracks
you put off until tomorrow
the approach of night

Abdourahman A. Waberi tr. Williamson

Désirs

je suis le bruissement du monde
le balancement entre ici et ailleurs
la frondaison muette du cactus
le bois rugueux qui recouvre le gecko
le lit du livre-monde
où les pages sont autant de vagues de la quête
toujours recommence

Abdourahman A. Waberi

Treve

je sème ma voix aux quatres coins de la ville
l’eau y dessine le temps
je mêle mon corps aux effluves remontant de la nuit
j’y noie mon desarroi
je cherche dans tes yeux nos querelles d’antan
les clans défaits tissent la toile de leur discorde
je demande aux plantes grasses de me rendre

ma tendre mémoire
indécise tu écoutes les bruissements de ma brisure
tu remets à demain
l’approche de la nuit

Abdourahman A. Waberi

Abdourahman A. Waberi is a writer, novelist and poet. He has won numerous awards notably the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique noire in 1996 for his short story collection Cahier nomade. In 2000 he published a poetry collection, Les Nomades, mes frères, vont boire à la Grande Ourse with Editions Pierron, France. An English teacher at Lisieux in Normandy, Mr Waberi is also an editorial advisor for Le Serpent à plumes in Paris, and a literary chronicler and writer for Monde Diplomatique. English translations of his work appeared in The Gallery of the Insane, Xcités, the Flamingo Book of New French Writing,London, 1999, which was shortlisted for the first Caine Prize for African Fiction, 2000.

Patrick Williamson was born in Madrid in 1960 and is currently living near Paris, France. Most recent poetry collections: Prussia Cove and Strands, both from Palores Publications. He has translated Yves Bonnefoy among others, and edited selected poems of Tunisian poet Tahar Bekri (Inconnues Saisons/Unknown Seasons, L’Harmattan) and Quebecois poet Gilles Cyr (The Graph of Roads, Guernica Editions). He is the editor of Quarante et un poètes de Grande-Bretagne (Ecrits des Forges/Le Temps de Cérises, 2003).

Snow by Peter Huchel translated by Judy Gagahan

Sebastian Hayes — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:35:44 +0000

Snow is driving
the great dragnet of heaven,
it will not catch the dead.

The snow
shifts camp.
It sprinkles itself
from branch to branch.

The blue shadows
of foxes lurk
in ambush. They scent

the white
throat of loneliness.

Translated by Judy Gahagan

Schnee

Der Schnee treibt
das grosse Schleppnetz des Himmels,
Es wird die Toten nicht fangen.

Der Schnee wechselt
Sein Lager.
Er stäubt von Ast zu Ast.

Die blauen Schatten
der Füchse lauern
im Hinterhalt. Sie wittern

die weisse
Kehle der Einsamkeit.

Peter Huchel

New Translation of Gilgamesh

Sebastian Hayes — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:03:03 +0000

GILGAMESH
Announcing the inaugural publication of Contra Mundum Press, a new translation by Stuart Kendall of the ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, Gilgamesh. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure, mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic literature.

Known for his translations of Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard, and others, Kendall’s first translation of an ancient text is informed by his work in the history of consciousness at the intersections of poetics, philosophy, theology, and visual culture.

While scholarly translations often dilute the expressive force of the original and popular versions distort its pagan ethics, Kendall’s Gilgamesh honors both, creating what Jerome Rothenberg has called nothing less than “the exemplary version for our time.”

Stuart Kendall, Gilgamesh (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012) ISBN: 9780983697206. 18 USD, 14 GBP, 12 €. Bookstores can order through Ingram. The general public can acquire copies through local retailers or Amazon and similar sites worldwide. For a review, desk copy, or interview request write to: info@contramundum.net

For a free sample of the text, please visit our website to download the pdf: http://contramundum.net

ENCOMIUMS

“As Gilgamesh enters the domain of the classical—as it has for several decades now—each new generation looks for a way to bring it from its ur-world into the living present. Toward this end Stuart Kendall’s is the exemplary version for our time, a reading that allows the mind to see what had been too long lost to us and what we so much need to make us fully human. This is the place to go for further sustenance.”—Jerome Rothenberg

“This new translation of the Gilgamesh tale ventures outside the straitjackets that have often constrained the text, understanding its complicated transmission-history in the Sumerian and East Semitic languages of the ancient Near East and the way it evades modern ideas of ‘epic’ and ‘fiction’ often foisted upon it. In sharp, imagistic prose, Kendall shows how Gilgamesh’s story is not just an instructive yarn but a concerted act of ontological investigation. A needed provisioning of a much-discussed but little understood work.”—Nicholas Birns, Eugene Lang College

Two Poems by Adnan Al-Sayegh translated by Stephen Watts and Marga Burgui-Artajo

Sebastian Hayes — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:49:43 +0000

[1]
I am wandering under the street-lamps
addresses drenched in my pocket
one tavern chases me off to another tavern
one woman’s desire drives me to another woman
I bite such breasts
I bite such books
I bite such streets
this mouth must devour something
these lips must be closed over a glass
or a mouth
or a stone
Neither God nor the fields caused me such hungers
but the slogans’ propaganda did
& the sickles ahead of me taking all the spikes of grain
I step from my own noise to the pavement’s clamour
I’m bored enough to throw my life at any passing woman
& then make off unfettered I’m bored with memories and friends and melancholy
bored & desperate
like a ship full of holes on the shore
able neither to sail or sink

Aden (Yemen) 1993

(2)

My books are under my head
And my hands on the handle of the suitcase
The plains we dreamt of gave us nothing but mud
And the books we wrote, poverty & lashes
My feet are eroded from hanging about on paper pavements
My songs smashed up with tavern glasses
My tears hung as lanterns from narrow prison windows
I disentangle threads of ink in my head’s wool
And strew them in the streets
Line by line
Until my papers are done with
And finally I can go to sleep

Damascus 1996

Note :
Adnan Al-Sayegh, the Iraqi poet, will be reading some of his poems at the Poetry Cafe, Betterton Street, Covent Garden on February 29th 2012 – see Events page.

The End of Professional Translation ? by Sebastian Hayes

Sebastian Hayes — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:38:36 +0000

Those of you involved in the ‘business’ of translation, whether for gain or pleasure (or a mixture of both) will probably be interested, more likely alarmed, to hear about “Duolingo”, the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, an American computer scientist. The business strategy behind Duolingo is adroit : Duolingo offers free online tutoring but doubles as a non-free translation service. Nothing specially innovative about that, you might think : there exist several good free educational sites on the web (I recommend Khan Academy) while there is a growing need for translators, especially in technical areas, because of globalisation. But Duolingo joins the two strands together to form a closed loop : learners pay for their tuition by translating material which can be sold on, so Duolingo has it both ways !

So far, where translation is concerned, computers and artificial intelligence have proved to be no match for humans : chess programmes can beat grandmasters but automated translations are usually awful. This is not surprising : you don’t need life experience to solve Sudokus but language, even that used in technical manuals, crucially depends on context — a computer finds it hard to decide whether a ‘plant’ is the vegetable or industrial variety. But what about learner human translators? Are they going to provide unexpected competition for the professionals? The idea is not so daft as it may sound : there will apparently be a system of cross-checks and revisions before a Duolingo translation is given the OK. It is not inconceivable that a large and varied number of enthusiastic translators, if properly supervised, could come up with something quite interesting.

Von Ahn seems to have his sights more on factual stuff than the sort of material showcased on this website — one of his aims is to get the whole of Wikipedia translated into Spanish without paying a penny — but learners might well have something to offer even in the field of literature proper. The Elizabethan and Jacobean era was a golden age for fine translations (Chapman’s Homer, Plutarch, The King James Bible, &c.) although, by modern standards, the translators were rank amateurs. Beginners have an enthusiasm for a new language and its poetry that people who translate for a living have, in most cases, long since lost : Ezra Pound, arguably the greatest 20^th century English translator of poetry, remained gloriously ignorant of most of the languages (Provencal, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese) he trafficked in.

Maybe, given the nature of von Ahn’s business formula, one ought to get one of his students to translate into English the French expression, “Aux frais de la princesse” , or, better still — but this would be for advanced students only — into Sixties Cockney. We’ll see if any Duolingo student manages to come up with “Down to Larkin” which is what you said to a London publican when he asked you to settle up for your last ten pints. S.H.

Note : I heard about Duolingo via the excellent article “Learn a language, translate the web” by Jim Giles (New Scientist, 14 Jan pp. 18-19)

Etre by Paul Eluard translated by Graham Mummery

Sebastian Hayes — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:03:46 +0000

ÊTRE

Le front comme un drapeau perdu
Je te traine quand je suis seul
Dans des rues froides
Dans les chambres noires
En criant misère

Je ne veux pas les lâcher
Tes mains claires et compliquées
Nées dans le miroir clos des miennes

Tout le reste est parfait
Tour le reste est encore plus inutile
Que la vie

Une nappe d’eau près des seins
Où se noyer
Comme une pierre

Paul Éluard

BEING

Brow as a lost flag
I pull you with me when I am alone
In the cold streets
In the dark rooms
Crying poverty

I’ll not let go of them
Your light intricate hands
Born in the closed mirror of mine

All the rest is perfect
All the rest is even more futile
Than life

A sheet of water near your breasts
Where I’ll let myself drown
Like a stone

(translation Graham Mummery)