Off-Hand Poem

Off-Hand Poem

by Wang An-shih 

Translated by David Hinton

It’s a blessing, the ten thousand things
spoken. Don’t forget even a single line,

for I’m sending in these words a place
far from this loud world of confusion.

Wang An-shih (1021–1086 C.E.) was a remarkable figure — not only one of the great Sung Dynasty poets, but also the most influential and controversial statesman of his time. In his retirement, practicing Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism and wandering the mountains around his home, Wang An-shih wrote the poems that made his reputation. Short and plainspoken, these late poems contain profound multitudes — the passing of time, the rivers and mountains, silence and Buddhist emptiness. They won him wide acclaim in China and beyond across the centuries. And in David Hinton’s breathtaking translations, Wang feels like a major contemporary poet with deep ecological insight and a questioning spirit.

While not in the exalted ranks of such Chinese poets as Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Wang’s poetry possesses the power to transport the reader to another time and place, far from our own “loud world.” How beautifully the poet echoes the strength of a relationship and its place in this world of confusion.

Look for Me

Look for Me

By Vladislav Khodasevich
Translated by Peter Daniels

Look for me in spring's transparent air.
I flit like vanishing wings, no heavier than
a sound, a breath, a sunray on the floor;
I'm lighter than that ray – it's there: I'm gone.

But we are friends for ever, undivided!
Listen: I'm here. Your hands can feel the way
to reach me with their living touch, extended 
trembling into the restless flame of day.

Happen to close your eyelids, while you linger…
Make me one final effort, and you might
find at the nerve-ends of each quivering finger
brushes of secret fire as I ignite.


When the poet Vladislav Khodasevich fled the Soviet Union in 1922, he left behind a country that was, with every passing day, growing more ominous. And yet in finding a way out—and outliving many of his contemporaries—Khodasevich was nearly erased from the tumultuous literary history of Russia’s long twentieth century. The publication of his Selected Poems is an essential and long-overdue tribute to this extraordinarily gifted poet.

Born in 1886, Khodasevich came of age among the famed avant-gardists of Russian poetry, but unlike the major modernists of the age—the Symbolists and the Futurists among them—he sought inspiration neither in esoteric doctrines, nor in grand pronouncements. Instead, he was determined to find meaning in the world, and each of his poems reflects this tireless, often heroic, sometimes deeply bitter engagement with his surroundings.

An innovative classicist in an era taken in by relentless experimentation, Khodasevich was hailed by many of his peers in the Soviet Union and Berlin, including Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote that Khodasevich would “remain the pride of Russian poetry as long as its last memory lives.” Brilliantly translated by Peter Daniels, and with a richly informed introduction by Michael Wachtel, “Selected Poems” is a stunning confirmation of that assessment.

Look at Me is an intensely personal poem relating to the suicide of Khodasevich's friend, Muni (Samuil Viktorovich Kissin) in March, 1916. Muni had saved Khodasevich from suicide in 1911, and the latter "reproached himself terribly for being unable to save his friend in return". 

Look for Me filters the longing for connection with his dead friend obliquely, by making Muni himself the speaker. The monologue evokes a glimmering, edge-of-vision sense of his continuing but elusive presence – as "vanishing wings", "a sound, a breath, a sunray … ". While spring, of course, is the season of rebirth, the images of fire suggest that Muni's recovery for Khodaevich will be as painful as touching fire. The hands stretched into "the restless flame of day" in the second stanza are "trembling". Ultimately, if the dead man's presence is to be felt, it will be as tassels of fire at the poet's "quivering" finger-tips. Muni seems to plead for a return to life, but simultaneously demand a sacrifice from Khodasevich. There's an echo, perhaps, of Dante in Canto 27 of the Purgatorio, encouraged by Virgil to walk through fire as the necessary, cleansing prelude to attaining Paradise and reunion with Beatrice. However, the metaphysics are not Dante's. The longed-for meeting in “Look for Me” will be attained through an effort of imagination.

Khodasevich was a realist and a sceptic, even if some of his poems, like this one, reveal trace elements of the poetic movement that preceded him, Symbolism. “Look for Me” was written at a time of political turmoil, and perhaps its incipiently violent "flame" images and haunting sense of evanescence, connect it to a revolution which, for many writers of Khodasevich's generation, brought hope and dismay in rapid succession. But it also reminds us that love and grief are forces not to be extinguished by political events, and that the hardest battles in a warzone are not always the bloodiest.

From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year –Old

From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year –Old

By Hanan Mikha’il Ashrawi (Palestinian Poet)

Tomorrow, the bandages

will come off. I wonder

will I see half an orange,

half an apple, half my

mother's face

with my one remaining eye?

I did not see the bullet

but felt its pain

exploding in my head.

His image did not

vanish, the soldier

with a big gun, unsteady

hands, and look in

his eyes

I could not understand

I can see him so clearly

with my eyes closed,

it could be that inside our heads

we each have one spare set

of eyes

to make up for the ones we lose

Next month, on my birthday,

I'll have a brand new glass eye,

maybe things will look round

and fat in the middle—

I've gazed through all my marbles,

they made the world look strange.

I hear a nine-month old

has also lost an eye,

I wonder if my soldier

shot her too—a soldier

looking for little girls who

look him in the eye—

I’m old enough , almost four,

I've seen enough of life,

but she's just a baby

who didn't know any better.

Hanan Mikha’il Ashrawi is a prominent Palestinian academic, poet,  politician, and human rights activist. She became known worldwide for her efforts in Palestinian-Israeli negotiation toward peace.

Someone forwarded me an image of a Syrian girl shot in the eye and that is what triggered me to post this poem which I had read in an anthology of poems from the middle east titled ‘the flag of childhood’.

This is a touching, tender poem replete with moments of  artless innocence that shows the empathetic and mature  mindset of a  four-year-old child shot in the eye.  

ADULT

ADULT 

By LINDA GREGG 

I've come back to the country where I was happy 
changed. Passion puts no terrible strain on me now. 
I wonder what will take the place of desire. 
I could be the ghost of my own life returning 
to the places I lived best. Walking here and there, 
nodding when I see something I cared for deeply. 
Now I'm in my house listening to the owls calling 
and wondering if slowly I will take on flesh again.

Linda Gregg is one of the best American poets. As Joseph Brodsky, the Russian Nobel Laureate, described of her- “The blinding intensity of Ms. Gregg's lines stains the reader's psyche the way lightning or heartbreak do.” 

The theme of this poem is the return of an adult to the terrain where she lived a carefree and happy life. The reminders of them are all around. The only thing is that you are not the same person. You find yourself a devitalized apparition waiting for a rebirth.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

BY CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE

Translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop


In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Brazil, according to no less an observer than Elizabeth Bishop, is a place where poets hold a place of honor. The Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (October 31, 1902 – August 17, 1987) is universally recognized as the finest and most accessible modern Portuguese-language poet and, along with Pablo Neruda, a poet of the common man, writing of home, family, friends, and love.

This poem is like a joke and we are inclined, first, to smile, yet a moment of thought suffices to restore a serious meaning to such an encounter. It is enough to live truly intensely our meeting with a thing or a life-changing incident to preserve it forever in our memory.

How powerfully has repetition worked in this simple poem! Try to read varying the stress on the words and you will sense its poetic sway.

The Summer Day

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She is a nature poet and a mystic poet rolled into one.  Her perceptive and brilliantly crafted poems about the natural landscape and the fundamental questions of life and death have won high praise from critics and readers . 

Summer Day is a lovely poem that starts with philosophical enquiries, “Who made the world?/Who made the swan, and the black bear?”. If we approach the poem literally, perhaps the poet started a summer day strolling through grass fields . She is startled by a grasshopper that leaps from the ground into her hands. That becomes a moment of supreme attentiveness that leads to a new awareness of the miracle of existence of flora and fauna around her. Like the God who is said to count every strand of our hair, Oliver turns her eyes on one specific creature and its singularity and asks, “Who made grasshopper?”. It is interesting that Oliver never answers her questions. Instead, she continues to observe the tiny visitor even more closely. It is when she stops, stoops, and examines the grasshopper that she notices its “enormous and complicated eyes”; the jaws that move “back and forth instead of up and down” in contrast to human mandibles; the rubbing of its pale forearms and that unforgettable sight: a grasshopper washing its face.

From here, the poem takes an effortless turn. The act of intensely watching this seemingly insignificant creature become allied in the poet’s mind with an attitude of prayer. She  says, “ I don’t know exactly what a prayer is”. Here she is not talking about prayer encrusted in rote words, or prayer as a communal outpouring of spirit. In Oliver’s world, the worship space is an open field. One kneels to “pay attention”. To be attentive and idle is to pray and be blessed.

The poem offers a new way of being in the world. “Tell me, what else should I have done?/Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?”/Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?." These lines hit us hard. It demonstrates our defenselessness against the flow of time. The poet feels that a way to exalt our ephemerality is to impart an exhilarating and electrifying glaze to our life.

Mattina (Morning)

‘Mattina’ (‘Morning’) 

By  Giuseppe Ungaretti

Translated by  Allen Mandelbaum

M’illumino
d’immenso

Immensity

illumines me 

 

Ranked by T.S. Eliot as “one of the very few authentic poets” of the last century and by Allen Tate as akin to Paul Valery in his sensitivity, Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote verse that was marked by simple vocabulary, unusual lyric tension and illuminating images.

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a pioneer of the Modernist movement in Italian poetry and is widely regarded as one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century. His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music. As a  soldier, he saw action in WW I, endured a dear friend's suicide in Paris, and participated in the postwar birth of modernist French and Italian poetry and art. He eventually settled in Rome, decamping only for an academic appointment in Brazil, during which first his brother and then his nine-year-old son died. With so much tragedy in a life lived largely in a crucible of twentieth-century calamity, that he wrote frequently about death is unsurprising, nor is it wonderful that he became engaged in a profoundly tenuous search for God. His spare poetry is the difficult but deeply engaging and affecting record of his quest.

The genius of this poem is in the way it laminates the unique and the general; the way it recognises that while being illuminated with immensity may feel like a miracle to a soldier who has lived through a night – or night after night – in the trenches, it is to most people at most times just the start of another day. 

The features that render ‘Mattina’ so amenable to mass production make it a nightmare to translate. On the one hand, extreme paucity of paraphrasable content; on the other, extreme subtlety of nuance. ‘Mattina’ literally means (as translated by Andrew Frisardi)  “I turn luminous in an immensity of spaces.”’ But Ungaretti’s poem mentions no spaces and says nothing about turning. That shows how difficult and challenging it is to translate this terse verse as certain words are implicit and not explicit in the poem.

The real point of Ungaretti’s insight is the effect of vast reality of a physical universe (seen in the morning, sea or sky) on the human soul. Far from dismaying the poet, as the vastness of space had dismayed Pascal, it leaves him exhilarant, with a sense of expansion, of inner radiance. The poet is not illuminated from without by sky or sea; he illuminated himself by the contact: the fire of his own soul burns high and clear in its excitement.

This is a flash-of –lightning kind of poem supremely articulating a memorably imbibed experience: this sudden realization that, vast and brilliant as the universe may be, it is less so than the soul embracing it.