AN IDLE 9/9 AT HOME

 

AN IDLE 9/9 AT HOME

By T’ao Ch’ien

Translated by David Hinton

 Spending an idle 9/9 at home, I think fondly of how the day’s name sounds like it’s saying ever and ever. Autumn chrysanthemums fill the dooryard. But without wine, their blossoms promising ever-lasting life are useless, so I trust my feelings to words.

 

Life too short for so many lasting desires,

people adore immortality. When the months

 

return to this day of promise, everyone

fondly hears ever and ever in its name.

 

Warm winds have ended. Now, dew ice-cold,

stars blaze in clear skies. And though

 

the swallows have gone, taking their shadows,

calling geese keep arriving. Wine dispels

 

worries by the hundred, and chrysanthemums

keep us from the ruins of age. But if you

 

live in a bramble hut, helplessly watching

these turning seasons crumble – what then?

 

My empty winejar shamed by a dusty cup, this

cold splendor of blossoms opens for itself

 

alone. I tighten my robe and sing to myself,

idle, overwhelmed by each memory. So many

 

joys to fill a short stay. I’ll take my time

here. It is whole. How could it be any less?

 

T’ao Ch’ien (365–427 A.D.), also known as T'ao Yuan-ming, stands at the head of the great Chinese poetic tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting. T’ao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism which all major Chinese poets inherited and made their own. And in the quiet resonance of his poetry, a poetry that still speaks today’s language, they recognized a depth and clarity of wisdom that seemed beyond them.

T’ao Ch’ien dwelled in the Great Transformation (ta-hua), earth’s process of change in which whatever occurs comes “of itself” (tzu-jan: literally “self-so,” hence “natural” or “spontaneous”). But T’ao was much more than a romantic enthralled with the pastoral. He settled on his secluded farm because earth’s Great Transformation was perfectly immediate there, because there he could live life as it comes of itself, as it ends of itself. When he spoke of leaving government service and returning to the life of a recluse-farmer, he spoke of “returning to tzu-jan.” He took comfort in death as an even more complete return, a return to his “native home.” Although he grieved over loss and dying because he knew the actual to be all there is, he also knew that whatever is alive, himself included, ceases to be as naturally as it comes to be.

T’ao’s return to tzu-jan was also a return to self. His poems are suffused with wonder at the elemental fact of consciousness, and at the same time, his poetry of dwelling initiated that intimate sense of belonging to the earth which shapes the Chinese poetic sensibility.

I hope the above poem written on the day 9/9 of Chinese Calendar exemplifies all the essential aspects of his poetry. How many of us feel the whole in the surrounds we live?

 Ref: Selected Poems of T’ao Ch’ien. Translated by David Hinton. Copper Canyon Press

 

The War Works Hard

 

The War Works Hard

By Dunya Mikhail (Iraqi Poet)

Translated by Elizabeth Winslow

 How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning,
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
swings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers,
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins . . .
Some are lifeless and glistening,
others are pale and still throbbing . . .
It produces the most questions
in the minds of children,
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky,
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters,
urges families to emigrate,
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(poor devil, he remains
with one hand in the searing fire) . . .
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed,
teaches lovers to write letters,
accustoms young women to waiting,
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures,
builds new houses
for the orphans,
invigorates the coffin makers,
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader’s face.
The war works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.

 

Dunya Mikhail was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and moved to the United States thirty years later in 1995. After graduating from the University of Baghdad, she worked as a journalist and translator for the Baghdad Observer. Facing censorship and interrogation, she left Iraq, first to Jordan and then to America, settling in Detroit.

"When I think of war, for me, it's by default a ... lose-lose case," the poet tells in an interview with Renee Montagne. "I believe there's no winner in the war because, you know, the killed one dies physically and the killer dies morally. So they are both dead." Speaking almost entirely by means of list and documentation, this poem shows the transmutation of recorded events when they are drawn into poetry’s more complex awareness. Alternating between journalistic reportage, parable, fable, and lyrical lament, Mikhail records the process of losing a country.

At the surface, the description here may seem detaching, chilling and unnerving. Mikhail’s overt stance is quietly, subliminally, shocking: we are asked to bring sympathy to this personified War, whose side is rightly unchampioned even by those who wage it, since a victory of any kind would be its end. The strategies of coldness in this poem are threefold: documentary’s rhetoric of objectivity; irony; and synecdoche (a literary technique where the mind’s comprehension of a whole from its parts) . We feel, in such a list, that what is named could potentially continue without end. Mikhail’s list extends beyond itself, to every part of human life and culture. Interestingly, she doesn’t spare even herself (as it gives themes for poets to write poems) and ironically devil too (‘stands with one hand in the searing fire’) .

She has the knack for finding the unexpected angle that can illuminate a situation afresh. The poem’s effect reader begins to be felt at another level as well. Over its recitation, we begin to feel war’s unselective and scathing appetite, the ways in which no one nearby, complicit or innocent, remains untouched. And then at some further, even more deeply subliminal level, we recognize prosperity too: a person able to imagine the happy industry of prosthetic and coffin makers is a person not entirely bludgeoned by fate though it may sound  sadly ironical.

What propels the poem, however, is the repetition of the phrase “It wakes up…” which becomes “It produces…” and then “It inspires…”, etc. Also, the cataloging of actions verbs (the same sort of words you might encounter in a resume) speeds the poem up considerably, until you are finally slowed down by the final thought-provoking lines.

 

She cried that night, but not for him to hear

   

She cried that night, but not for him to hear

 By  Stanisław Barańczak

Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

 

    She cried that night, but not for him to hear.

    In fact her crying wasn’t why he woke.

    It was some other sound; that much was clear.

 

    And this half-waking shame. No trace of tears

    all day, and still at night she works to choke

    the sobs; she cries, but not for him to hear.

 

    And all those other nights: she lay so near

    but he had only caught the breeze’s joke,

    the branch that tapped the roof. That much was clear.

 

    The outside dark revolved in its own sphere:

    no wind, no window pane, no creaking oak

    had said: “She’s crying, not for you to hear.”

 

    Untouchable are those tangibly dear,

    so close, they’re closed, too far to reach and stroke

    a quaking shoulder-blade. This much is clear.

 

    And he did not reach out — for shame, for fear

    of spoiling the tears’ tenderness that spoke:

    “Go back to sleep. What woke you isn’t here.

    It was the wind outside, indifferent, clear.”

I have always known Stanisław Barańczak as a great translator of Polish poetry into English. He along with Clare Cavanagh translated the poetry of the great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska which finally led  her to win the Nobel Prize. I had forgotten the fact that Stanisław Barańczak himself was a hugely admired Polish poet. Yesterday I was reading Adam Zagajewski's essay collection titled “Slight Exaggeration” and came to know that Wislawa Szymborska once read the above poem of Stanislaw Barańczak  in a literary function. That is how I located the above poem.

Baranczak was a prominent representative of the Polish "New Wave" and is generally regarded as one of the greatest translators of English poetry into Polish and Polish poetry into English. He received the PEN Translation Prize with Clare Cavanagh in 1996. Stanisław Barańczak died at the age of 68 after prolonged battle with Parkinson's disease in Massachusetts on December 26, 2014.

The above intimate and poignant poem was written during his bedridden days. How subtly and beautifully he conveys the muffled sobbing of his wife dispelling it as “breeze’s joke “and the tapping of a branch on roof. Everything is minified in this one but enough to convey an ocean of anguish and helplessness. 

 

 

 

LOST LOVE

 

LOST LOVE

By Louise Gluck (2020 NOBEL LAUREATE FOR LITERATURE)

 

My sister spent a whole life in the earth.

She was born, she died.

In between,

not one alert look, not one sentence.

She did what babies do,

she cried. But she didn’t want to be fed.

Still, my mother held her, trying to change

first fate, then history.

Something did change: when my sister died,

my mother’s heart became

very cold, very rigid,

like a tiny pendant of iron.

Then it seemed to me my sister’s body

was a magnet. I could feel it draw

my mother’s heart into the earth,

so it would grow

 

Louise Gluck, the American poet Laureate of 2003-2004, has won the 2020 Nobel Prize for literature, as announced today evening, for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

Her beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.

 

“Lost Love” represents the speaker as a victim of a family tragedy. She is the one lacking love and attention from parents too involved in their grief over another daughter’s early death:

“ Something did change: when my sister died,

my mother’s heart became

very cold, very rigid,

like a tiny pendant of iron. “

 

The poem describes how the speaker’s childhood was in effect stolen by the sister, who took her mother’s affection with her into the grave.

 

 

Why Can’t I Be Your Body?

 

 Why Can’t I Be Your Body?

 By Elias Nandino

 Translated by Don Cellini

Why can’t I be your body
on top of my naked body
to hug myself
and feel the fire traveling
up my thighs through you?

Why can’t I be your eyes
so they can cry with mine
in the shade of my chest
and crack the silence
with beads of water?

Why can’t I be your hands
to play with mine
and run them across my body
like toys pushed by the wind
to invent a new caress?

Why can’t I be your mouth
to kiss myself in the fire
you have sparked on my lips
and feel that I am the one
pouring himself into the other?
Why can’t I live your life
to feel what I feel
deep within your chest
and watch you approaching me
like an image in the mirror?

I want to be both glass and wine,
the roots and the branches,
the riverbank and the current,
the bell and its sound,
the fuel and its flame.

Keep sleeping without seeing me,
awake here beside you.
I fly into the flight of your dream
to be so close to you
I breathe through your body.

Elias Nandino (1900-1993) was a Mexican poet who made his living as a surgeon and physician. He published twenty volumes of poetry in his lifetime, work often focused on solitude, eroticism, and love. In recognition of his dedication to teaching and assisting young writers, the National Young Poets Prize in Mexico is named in his honor.

Because his love poems are not addressed to any particular individual, they have sometimes been labeled narcissistic and this poem has echoes of it though its source is the memory of an encounter with his lover. When Nandino writes that he wants to see his beloved “like an image in a mirror,” One might conclude that this label is correct. The theme of love is often addressed in contrasting pairs of presence and absence in many of his poems. For example, in another poem titled “My First Love,” he writes,  “And in the blue that hides the evidence/I discover your unforgettable face,/ and suffer the presence of your absence.”

Source : Elías Nandino: Selected Poems, in Spanish and English
by Elías Nandino,Don Cellin (Translator)