Recalling Poets

R e c a l l i n g 

Tomas Tranströmer

The Couple

They switch off the light and its white shade
glimmers for a moment before dissolving
like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up.
The hotel walls rise into the black sky.
The movements of love have settled, and they sleep
but their most secret thoughts meet as when
two colors meet and flow into each other
on the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting.
It is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer
tonight. With quenched windows. The houses have approached.
They stand close up in a throng, waiting,
a crowd whose faces have no expressions.

Translated by Robin Fulton
New and Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer,  Bloodaxe Books

Outskirts

Men in overalls the same color as earth rise from a ditch.
It’s a transitional place, in stalemate, neither country nor city.
Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap,
but the clocks are against it.
Concrete piping scattered around laps at the light with cold tongues.
Auto-body shops occupy old barns.
Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface.
And these sites keep on getting bigger
like the land bought with Judas’ silver: ‘a potter’s field for
burying strangers.’

After a Death

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

Translated by Robert Bly
The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations,  published by Harper Collins

 Simone Yoyotte

PALE BLUE LINE IN A FORCED EPISODE, I CUT A HOLE
IN THE FLAG OF THE REPUBLIC

My beautiful bird in the eternal the downspouts call you but don’t think about coming back.  The feathers of a pleasant surname won’t fail to admit fear fear of the wind in the glaciers.  My beautiful bird the thunder of all my desires the satisfaction of the sun already set and of all my confused thorns in the undifferentiated anguish of a sojourn I did not wish to impose on you my bird my late bird blood my despair in short sleeves of shaded satin color of my recklessness your feathers your feathered wings on the back foot my bird counter-riddle let us dissipate the brightness of your light blue lines my white voracious gudgeon you are my beautiful bird my beautiful bird zephyr in the night and when all the lamps blow out in the leather of my little agony.  I have flown into the embankments and into the poplars I have sold worry to the easygoing investor I have wandered through the temples of desolation by night by day at the setting of all the great sorrows and everywhere beautiful bird I saw you in the stones and you could not know that the mind does not cross the river for on the bridge that you tossed me it was in vain that I stoned all the ripples.  The call of the rhombohedron at the edge of April resembles the music of your own shadow my useless bird who only knows how to people in the revolt   with all the great trees of the avenues and all the boulevards when the trumpet of the banquet halls resonate under the windows of the woman you do not yet love.

 

HALF-SEASON

I.

Embarrassed cold
in that splendid time when I was naked
I think about saying

far from there
from feet to head
THE SONOROUS SHADOW

Cries
like the seagull
I’m afraid of those eyes

atonal desire
for the first roots

II.
To J – M
Living comet on the peak
such a one
who likewise plunges
does not possess the source of pleasure
I was
like the rocks
an extra immanent
truncated
evil-minded
but the murmuring makes me change
place and ink
to my own measure
like
a liquid
weight that obsesses me
finds its way in a dream
and turns

 

Translated from French by Myrna Bell Rochester

 

Julia de Burgos

I Am Embodied in Now (Soy en cuerpo de ahora)

How this load of centuries wants to knock me down
that on my back drinks the current of time!
Time never changing that stagnates in the centuries
and that nurtures its body with past reflections.

I am afraid of the height of your ambitions—it tells me–;
the yesterday that nurtures me bends in the interior
of your simple life that admits no past
and that lives in the alive, open to the moment;
now the always nakedness of your mind angers me,
repels my load and expands in the new;
it confuses me now in the svelteness of your idea
that flagellates my face and straightens your body…
look to one side and another: hunchbacks, mediocrities;
they are mine, the ones who water my always full vacuum;
be one of them; untwist your vanguard; limp;
it’s so easy to flip from the live to the dead.

You have wanted to knock me down, load in the body of centuries
of prejudices, of hatreds, of passions, of jealousies.

You have wanted to knock me down with your heavy load
But I found myself, and your effort was in vain.

Go, line your centuries with the vulgar ignorant;
my ambitions are not yours, my flights are not yours.

I am embodied in now; about yesterday I know nothing.
In the alive, my life knows the I Am of the new.

To Julia de Burgos (A Julia de Burgos)

Already the people murmur that I am your enemy
because they say that in verse I give the world your me.

They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.
Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice
because you are the dressing and the essence is me;
and the most profound abyss is spread between us.

You are the cold doll of social lies,
and me, the virile starburst of the human truth.

You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me;
in all my poems I undress my heart.

You are like your world, selfish; not me
who gambles everything betting on what I am.

You are only the ponderous lady very lady;
not me; I am life, strength, woman.

You belong to your husband, your master; not me;
I belong to nobody, or all, because to all, to all
I give myself in my clean feeling and in my thought.

You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me;
the wind curls my hair, the sun paints me.

You are a housewife, resigned, submissive,
tied to the prejudices of men; not me;
unbridled, I am a runaway Rocinante
snorting horizons of God’s justice.

You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you;
your husband, your parents, your family,
the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall,
the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne,
heaven and hell, and the social, “what will they say.”

Not in me, in me only my heart governs,
only my thought; who governs in me is me.
You, flower of aristocracy; and me, flower of the people.
You in you have everything and you owe it to everyone,
while me, my nothing I owe to nobody.

You nailed to the static ancestral dividend,
and me, a one in the numerical social divider,
we are the duel to death who fatally approaches.

When the multitudes run rioting
leaving behind ashes of burned injustices,
and with the torch of the seven virtues,
the multitudes run after the seven sins,
against you and against everything unjust and inhuman,
I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand.

Moments (Momento)

Me, fatalist,
watching life coming and going
from my contemporaries.

Me, inside myself,
always waiting for something
that my mind can’t define.

Me, multiple,
as in a contradiction,
tied to a sentiment without edges
that binds and unbinds me
alternatively,
to the world.

Me, universal,
drinking life
in each shooting star,
in each sterile scream,
in each sentiment without edges.

And all for what?
—To go on being the same.

Where is
the Special Sound of the Light?
(En dónde está el sonido especial de la luz?) 

Where is the special
sound of the light,
and the sky of the spirit,
where is it photographing itself?

The sea split my name
in two and in daylights,
and an uneraseable shadow
was erased from the twilight.

What happened to the wave?
A tragic anticipation
of lights followed it
and found its blue
skirt of foam
in its river.

Translated by Jack Agüeros from Song of The Simple Truth

 

Delmore Schwartz

 

Summer Knowledge

 

The Sin of Hamlet

In the Green Morning, Now, Once More

Ingrid Jonker

This journey

This journey which obliterates your image
torn blood-angel thrown to the dogs
this landscape is deserted as my forehead
wound of the roses

I have wanted to see you walk without chains
I longed to see your face open and free
your broken face and dry as the mud
wound of the earth

in the nights of absence without eyes
I have cried to see you carry a real star
I have cried to see the blue sky and to hear
one word from life

bitter angel untrue with a flame in your mouth
I have placed two swallows under your armpits
and drawn a secret cross on your face
or the man

of whom you had reminded me once.

 Ek herhaal jou (I repeat you)

I repeat you
Without beginning or end,
I repeat your body.
The day has a thin shadow
and the night yellow crosses
the landscape without regard
and the people a row candles
while I repeat you
with my breasts
that reforms the hollows of your hands

 The child is not dead

The child is not dead
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of
mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass

 

 Paul Reverdy

The Same Number

The hardly open eyes 
                The hand on the other shore 
The sky 
           And everything that happens there 
The leaning door 
              A head sticks out 
From the frame 
And through the shutters 
You can see out 
The sun fills everything 
But the trees are still green 
                          The falling hour 
                          It gets warmer 
And the houses are smaller 
The passersby go less quickly 
And always look up 
                 The lamp shines on us now 
Looking far away 
We could see the light 
                          Coming 
We were happy 
                          That evening

At the other house where somebody waits for us

 

Still Life-Portrait

Cigarette papers datebook and tobacco pouch 
Life 
Ought to be like painting 
Still 
And literature 
A hairless head 
Eyes straight 
Comma 
A flat nose a plane 
On the forehead 
My portrait 
My heart beats 
It’s an alarm clock 
In the mirror I’m full length 
My head smokes

 

The Dry Tongue

There is a nail 
         Holding up the slope 
The bright tatter of twisting wind blows and anyone 
     who understands 
           The whole road is naked 
the pavement the sidewalks the distance the railings are 
     white 
                     Not a drop of rain 
                     Not a leaf of a tree 
                     Not the shadow of a garment 
                                             I wait 
                                                the station is a long way off 
The river still flows as you go up along the embankments 
       the earth is dried out 
                everything is naked and white

With only the movement of a clock out of order 
                        the noise of the train passed 
                                   I wait

 

Spectacle for the Eyes

The heads that got out of line have fallen 
Everybody yells out the windows 
Others are also in the street 
In the middle of noise and laughter 
There are animals you have never seen 
Familiar passersby 
Golden faces 
Voices on the paths 
Broad accents 
Then about noon the sun the trumpets 
Men so happy they start to laugh 
Houses opening their eyes 
The doorsills smile with welcome 
When the parade floats in dust 
A child with eyes burning with astonishment 
Against the wife with a blue apron 
The blond child and the angel 
Timid before all these people come together 
Like nobody they ever knew 
Whom they’d like to go away with 
Marvelous deathless foreigners who go by 
The evening lights its lamps again 
The show sets up its flares 
The blazing dancer comes out of her suitcase 
The swollen tights come to life 
The one-wheeled bicycle runs on the frame 
The spotlight rolls in the track 
They jump through the scenery 
While the equivocal deep shadow of the circus 
Revolves with the racket 
And the child dreamer of magnificent dreams 
Weeps for his own ugliness

 

Memory

Just a minute 
                  And I am back 
Of everything that’s gone I have kept nothing 
A point 
         The wide sky 
                        And at the last moment 
The lantern goes by 
                   The step you hear 
    Somebody stops and everything else goes on 
You let the world go 
                      And what is inside 
Dancing lights 
            Outstretched shadows 
There is still space 
                     Looking ahead 
A cage where a live animal leaps 
Breast and arms make the same motion 
A woman was laughing 
                     With her head thrown back 
And the man who came mistook us 
Who didn’t know each other all three of us 
And yet we formed 
                        A world full of hope

 

Sacrificed Man

Nothing but blue spots in the corner of a sheet 
Memories of smiles filed away 
A head and thorns on a crown of arms 
Heaving shoulders 
At last the mill moves 
And the mountain of brass wire 
Slides around the world 
Somewhere doors open 
On ordered numbers 
Gathered by name 
By height 
Rollcall 
Over the whole mob 
Rain splinters of glass 
Or dew 
The dampness of the shores penetrates to the middle 
    of the driest soil 
And beneath their shivering dance the houses 
Rotted by sun and chill wear away 
Then leaves are born from young girl’s fingertips 
Eyes open under moss 
Now and then feet crush eyelids 
Then curtains are drawn still lower 
The head turns and hides in the hollow of the arms 
Memories stir 
Night goes

 

Live Flesh

Rise up carcass and walk 
Nothing new under the yellow sun 
The very last of the last gold pieces 
The light which detaches itself 
under the films of time 
The lock of the bursting heart 
A silk thread 
A lead wire 
A trickle of blood 
After waves of silence 
These signs of love’s black pelt 
Heaven slippery as your eye 
The neck wrenched with pride 
My life in the wings 
Where I can watch the harvests of death undulate 
All these avid hands kneading balls of smoke 
Heavier than the pillars of the universe 
Empty heads 
Naked hearts 
Perfumed hands 
Monkey tentacles aiming at the clouds 
In the wrinkles of those grimaces 
A straight line bends 
A nerve twists 
The sated sea 
Love 
Death’s bitter smile

“Seven Poems”, from Pierre Reverdy: Selected Poems
New Directions, 1966

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

 Roberto Balaño

Twilight in Barcelona

What can be said about the drowning Barcelona twilights.
Remember
The Rusiñol painting Erik Satie en el seu estudi?
The magnetic Barcelona twilights are like that, like Satie’s
eyes and
Long hair, like Satie’s hands and like Rusiñol’s affection.
Twilights inhabited by supreme silhouettes, magnificence.
Of the sun and the sea over these hanging or subterranean
abodes
Built for love. City of Sara Gibert and Lola Paniagua,
City of Slipstreams and completely gratuitous secrets.
City of genuflections and cords.

The Outsider Ape

Remember the Triumph of Alexander the Great, but Gustave
Moreau?
The beauty and terror, the crystal moment when
all breathing stops. But you wouldn’t stand still under
that dome
in dim shadows, under that dome lit by ferocious
rays of harmony. And it didn’t take your great away.
You walked like a tireless ape among the gods.
For you knew–or maybe not–that the Triumph was
unfurling
its weapons inside Plato’s cavern: images,
shadows without substance, sovereignty of emptiness.
You wanted to reach the tree and the bird, the leftovers
from a humble backyard fiesta, the desert land
watered with blood, the scene of the crime where
statues of photographers and police are grazing, and the
hostility of life
outdoors. Ah, the hostility of life outdoors!

From The Romantic Dogs, Poems 1980-1998, New Directions

 Alice Rahon

from On the Bare Ground

Glances changed their source
A bell
made of stormy-blue bronze
chased off to the zenith of the wind
by the white wing
of the lost skyline

Sublime sulphur
foam of solitude
on my forehead
the reason of the wind

HourGlass Lying Down

No sleeping wind will bear my head
no handprint on my check no arm will hold me
at the open window your arm is alone
you could not exist
between this sun and this window at the spring’s assault
here you are laced up and fastened
with no end of thread and knots
of your own mute web

the woman empty like the house just sold
trapped in a net without swaddling sounds
her mouth does not drink does not quench any language
long mouth in vain denied by the veins
each road lost before being born

the dove
whose dress is worn out by captivity
in a wicker cage at the window
your foliage is not born
that blackbird of nightfall
at dawn I cannot listen to your voice
which closes doors and eyes
after drinking my heart.

-Translated by Vanina Deler & Nancy Deffebach

Despair

to Pablo Picasso

29 May 1936

The fireworks have gone off. gray is the absolute color of the present tense. I saw that nightingales imitate dead leaves well before autumn. Despair is a school for deaf-mutes taking their Sunday walk.

It would be better. I don’t know what would be better. The thread breaks constantly; perhaps it’s the same frustrating task as when a blind man tries to recall the memory of colors at his white window.

Beautiful woman with silver waists always fly above cities — Patience — the signs on those roads where every mistake is irreparable end in a horsehead-shaped club.

We must cry out all our secrets before it’s too late. It’s previously too late if we’ve forgotten to leave the chair where despair will sit to join our conversation. Despair will never be reduced to begging even if they burn his arms. Then he’ll affect the silhouette of a poppy against a stormy sky. His pipe-like laughter will only become insulting.

For a while I’ve lived on a geography map on the wall. I think I’m at the wind’s crossroads. I chat with him. The bouquet of larkspur takes flight at dusk and goes to spend the night on the ponds. The doll jumps rope with its shadow. I shall not tame that shadow that followed me during childhood.

I think that at the bottom of their graves the dead listen for long time to see if their hearts will start beating again. For the noise, for the company of noise, let’s greet the company tied by strings.

Translated by Myra Bell Rochester

Fernando Pessoa

 

“How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation, which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don’t know what. (My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I’m sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He’s a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He’s me without my rationalism and emotions. His prose is the same as mine, except for certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same – whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes such as “me myself” instead of “I myself”, etc.., and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive…. ”  (from Pessoa’s  “Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro”, translation by Richard Zenith, 13.01.1935)

Alberto Caeiro

“I see him before me as I saw him that first time and as I will perhaps always see him: first of all those blue eyes of a child who has no fear, then the already somewhat prominent cheekbones, his pale complexion, and his strange Greek air, which was a calmness from within, not something in his outward expression or features. …The expression of his mouth, which was the last thing one noticed, as if speaking were less than existing for this man, consisted of the kind of smile we ascribe in poetry to beautiful inanimate things, merely because they please us — flowers, sprawling fields, sunlit waters.  A smile for existing, not for talking to us.” (from Alvaro de Campos’s Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro)

from The Keeper of Sheep – I

I’ve never kept sheep,
But it’s as if I did.
My soul is like a shepherd.
It knows the wind and sun,
And walks hand in hand with the Seasons
Looking at what passes.
All the peace of Nature without people
Sits down at my side.
But I get sad like a sunset
In our imagination
When the cold drifts over the plain
And we feel the night come in
Like a butterfly through the window.

Yet my sadness is a comfort
For it is natural and right
And is what should fill the soul
Whenever it thinks it exists
And doesn’t notice the hands picking flowers.

Like a sound of sheep-bells
Beyond the bend in the road
My thoughts are content.
My only regret is that I know they’re content,
Since if I did not know it
They would be content and happy
Instead of sadly content.

Thinking is a discomfort, like walking in the rain
When the wind kicks up and it seems to rain harder.

I have no ambitions and no desires.
To be a poet is not my ambition,
It’s my way of being alone.

And if sometimes, in my imagination,
I desire to be a small lamb
(Or to be the whole flock
So as to be scattered across the hillside
As many happy things at the same time),
It’s only because I feel what I write when the sun sets
Or when a cloud passes its hand over the light
And a silence sweeps through the grass.

When I sit down to write verses
Or I walk along roads and pathways
Jotting verses on a piece of paper in my mind,
I feel a staff in my hand
And see my own profile
On top of a low hill
Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,
Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,
And smiling vaguely, like one who doesn’t grasp what was said
But pretends he did.

I salute all who may read me,
Tipping my wide-brimmed hat
As soon as the coach tops the hill
And they see me at my door.
I salute them and wish them sunshine,

Or  rain, if rain is needed,
And a favorite chair where they sit
At home, reading my poems
Next to an open window.
And as they read my poems, I hope
They think I’m something natural —
That old tree, for instance,
In whose shade when they were children
They sat down with a thud, tired of playing,
And wiped the sweat from their hot foreheads
With the sleeve of their striped smocks.

from The Keeper of Sheep – XXIV 

What we see of things are the things.
Why would we see one thing when another thing is there?
Why would seeing and hearing be to delude ourselves
When seeing and hearing are seeing and hearing?

What matters is to know how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when seeing
And not think when seeing
Nor see when thinking.

But this (if only we didn’t have a dressed-up heart!) —
This requires deep study,
Lessons in unlearning,
And a retreat into the freedom of that convent
Where the stars  — say poets  — are the eternal nuns
And the flowers the contrite believers of just one day,
But where after all the stars are just stars
And the flowers just flowers,
Which is why we call them stars and flowers.

Ricardo Reis

“After meeting Caeiro and hearing him recite The Keeper of Sheep, Ricardo Reis began to realize that he was organically a poet.  Some physiologists say that it’s possible to change sex.  I don’t know if it’s true, because I don’t know if anything is “true,” but I know that Ricardo Reis stopped being a woman and became a man, or stopped being a man and became a woman —as you like — when he met Caeiro.”  (from Campos’s Notes to the memory of my Master Caeiro)

– from Odes 13-XI-1935

Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who is thinking or feeling.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.
There are more I’s than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggling in who I am, but I
Ignore them.  They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.

-from Odes 8-VII-1930

What we feel, not what is felt,
Is what we have.  The clear winter straitens.
Like fate let’s accept it.
May winter wrap earth and not our minds,
As from love to love, or book to book,
We enjoy our brief fire.

Álvaro de Campos

“I don’t believe in anything but the existence of my sensations; I have no other certainty, not even of the outer universe conveyed to me by those sensations.  I don’t see the outer universe, I don’t hear the outer universe, I don’t touch the outer universe.  I see my visual impressions; I hear my auditory impressions;  I touch my tactile impressions.  It’s not with the eyes but with the soul that I see; it’s not with the ears by with the soul that I hear; it’s not with the skin but with the soul that I touch.  And if someone should ask me what the soul  is, I’ll  answer it’s me. ”   (from Álvaro de Campos’s Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro)

Lisbon Revisited (1923)

No, I don’t want anything.
I already said I don’t want anything.

Don’t come to me with conclusions!
Death is the only conclusion.

Don’t offer me aesthetics!
Don’t talk to me of morals!
|Take metaphysics away from here!
Don’t try to sell me complete systems, don’t bore me with the breakthroughs
Of science (of science, my God, of science!) —
Of science, of the arts, of modern civilization!

What harm did I ever do to the gods?

If you’ve got the truth, you can keep it!

I’m a technician, but my technique is limited to the technical sphere,
Apart from which I’m crazy, and with every right to be so.
With every right to be so, do you hear?

Leave me alone, for God’s sake!

You want me to be married, futile, conventional and taxable?
You want me to be the opposite of this, the opposite of anything?
If I were someone else, I’d go along with you all.
But since I’m what I am, lay off!

Go to hell without me,
Or let me go there by myself!
Why do we have to go together?

Don’t grab me by the arm!
I don’t like my arm being grabbed.  I want to be alone.
I already told you that I can only be along!
I’m sick of you asking me to be sociable!

O blue sky — the same one I knew as a child —
Perfect and empty eternal truth!
O gentle, silent, ancestral Tagus,
Tiny truth in which the sky is mirrored!
O sorrow revisited, Lisbon of bygone days today!
You give me nothing, you take nothing from me, you’re nothing I feel
is me.

Leave me in peace!  I won’t stay long, for I never stay long…
And as long as Silence and the Abyss hold off, I want to be alone!

Fernando Pessoa (himself)

“What I am essentially — behind the involuntary mask of poets, logical reasoner and so forth — is a dramatist.  My spontaneous tendency to depersonalization, which I mentioned in my last letter to explain the existence of my heteronyms, naturally  leads to this definition.  And so I do not evolve, I simply JOURNEY. (…) I continuously change personality, I keep enlarging (and here there is a kind of evolution) my capacity to create new characters, new forms of pretending that I understand the world or, more accurately, that the world can be understood. “ (from a letter of Pessoa dated 20 January 1935)

 4-VIII-1930

I contemplate the silent pond
Whose water is stirred by a breeze.
Am I thinking about everything,
Or has everything forgotten me?

The pond tells me nothing.
I can’t feel the breeze stir it up.
I don’t know if I’m happy
Or even if I want happiness.

O smiling ripples that flutter
Across the water that’s sleeping,
Why did I make my only life
A life made only of dreams?

Some Music

Some music, any music at all,
As long as it casts from my soul
This uncertainty that craves
Some kind of impossible calm!

Some music—guitar, violin,
Accordion or hurdy-gurdy…
A quick improvised melody…
A dream in which I see nothing…

Something that life has no part in!
Fado, bolero, the frenzy
Of the dance that just ended…
Anything not to feel the heart!

Translated by Richard Zenith 

Papusza (Bronislawa Wajs)

Gypsy Song Composed out of the Head of Papusza

The time of the wandering Gypsies
Has long passed.
But I see them,
They are bright,
Strong and clear like water.
You can hear it
Wandering when it wishes to speak.
But poor thing, it has no speech
Apart from silver splashing and sighing.
Only the horse, grazing the grass,
Listens and understands that sighing.
But the water does not look behind.
It flees, runs away further,
Where the eyes will not see her,
The water that wanders.

Earrings of Leaves

The poor forest girls
Beautiful as bilberries
Wanted to wear
Golden earrings.

Old Gypsy women and young girls
Went wood-gathering in the forest.
They lit a huge fire by the river
And sang a beautiful song about
Gypsy earrings: O my beautiful earring,
You give me beauty,
You break everyone’s
heart!

The wind [had] already blown out the flames,
The river heard the song
And carried it far into the world.
They didn’t know how or whence
An oak leaf with oak apples
Fell into the girl’s lap . . .

We’ll make them wonderful
Gypsy earrings!
How beautiful you are,
Earrings of leaves!
The oak apples that you bear
Like precious stones!

Translated by Jerzy Ficowski

Lorine Neidecker

What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
Time is white
mosquitoes bite
I’ve spent my life on nothing.

The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing,
sitting around with Something’s wife.
Buzz and burn
is all I learn
I’ve spend my life on nothing.

I’m pillowed and padded, pale and puffing
lifting household stuffing–
carpets, dishes
benches, fishes
I’ve spent my life in nothing.

*

February almost March bites the cold.
Take down a book, wind pours in. Frozen–
the Garden of Eden–its oil, if freed, could warm
the world for 20 years and nevermind the storm.

Winter’s after me–she’s out
with sheets so white it hurts the eyes. Nightgown,
pillow slip blow thru my bare catalpa trees,
no objects here.

In February almost March a snow-blanket
is good manure, a tight-bound wet
to move toward May: give me lupines and a care
for her growing air.

*

Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
to sit at desk
and condense

No layoff
from this
condensery

*

We are what the seas
have made us

longingly immense

the very veery
on the fence

*

Consider at the outset:
to be thin for thought
or thick cream blossomy

Many things are better
flavored with bacon

Sweet Life, My love:
didn’t you ever try
this delicacy–the marrow
in the bone?

And don’t be afraid
to pour wine over cabbage

Selected Poems by Jenny Penberthy, Electronic Poetry Center courtesy of University of California Press