Return to My Childhood Home

  

 Return to My Childhood Home

  By Julia Hartwig

  Translated by John & Bogdana Carpenter

    Amid a dark silence of pines—the shouts of

    young birches calling each other.

    Everything is as it was. Nothing is as it was.

    Speak to me, Lord of the child. Speak,

    innocent terror!

    To understand nothing. Each time in a different

    way, from the first cry to the last breath.

    Yet happy moments come to me from the past,

    like bridesmaids carrying oil lamps.

Julia Hartwig is considered in her native country as the “Grand Dame of Polish poetry” and ranks high among its leading modern poets. Thanks to the concise, elegant translations of John and Bogdana Carpenter, we have now access to the range of her impressive work. While her tonal control and philosophic resonance mark her as quintessentially central European, Hartwig’s poems are distinctive in their playful, eclectic spirit, which may in part result from the invigorating effect of her time spent translating poets as diverse as Apollinaire and Plath and teaching at the University of Iowa.

The poem seems to have sprouted upon a visit to her native home. There is a sense of a vanished life, disappearing in an instant that was fixed in fear, leaving a poetic mark on her as evidenced in this one. Somehow, all the visceral aspects of being, from early to late life, are subsumed into a sort of universal dream of being. In other words, life lived takes on the aura of existence deeper than waking.

Although Julia Hartwig, like her fellow Polish poets, suffered and survived the constraints that postwar communism imposed on personal freedom, the experience has not irrevocably darkened her poems, which continue to affirm natural beauty and childlike wonder. In “Return to My Childhood Home,” what is too painful to be understood is firmly held in counterpoise with remembered contentment: “Yet happy moments come to me from the past, like bridesmaids carrying oil lamps.”

“Return to My Childhood Home” begins with wonder and loss, moving to consolation and light. This  is a great poem in the true sense of that word.

Courtesy :  Rita Signorelli-Pappas ‘s review of in “Praise of the Unfinished” in World Literature Today

 

 

Is That All

 

Is That All

 

by Julia Hartwig

 

Translated by John & Bogdana Carpenter

 

What is a poem worth if it doesn't perform a miracle?

A mother is resurrected and once again strokes our heads.

We forget our own death, and our legs never hurt.

No one talks too much. Moralizing ends, as well as boasting

Everyone lives according to his measure

Dressing and cleaning don't devour time.

Children are caricatures of their parents, and parents, always young, leave one day for a walk before sunset.

So is that all you expect from a miracle?

 

Even when we are beset by daily upheavals, sorrows, drudgeries, unending chores and heaviness of heart, there is this wish within us to let a miracle unfold before us. That is the theme of this lovely poem by the great Polish poet Julia Hartwig.

 

The miracle of poetry unfolding through resurrection and subtle transformations of human kind, which in the end of the poem seems questionable as the poet poses in the end line: So is that all you expect from a miracle? The paradox is nailing into the reader's complacency.

A Note

 

A Note

by Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

The author of this poem is the Nobel Prize winner -Wislawa Szymborska. She is that rarest of phenomena- a serious poet who commanded amazing popularity in her native land as the most representative Polish poet of last century. She is one of the most accessible of all poets I have read and therefore one of my favorite poets.

It’s hard to follow a poetic explanation on Life . Every line in this poem draws a sigh out of the reader. If you take out each line by itself, they might seem quite unpoetic. Or is it that the magic of the poem is in the opening line? It is only when dovetailed with this opening line that the rest of the poem’s lines acquire their magical qualities.

The above poem is a good note on life. There is a reward for being fully open to all of life’s pain and its promise.

Life is the only way…”

It wakes the reader up! We’re all ears now; what is this ‘Life’ thing? Oh let’s see what it’s all about. This is going to be deeply philosophical and wrenching. Intense. But then Szymborska follows it up with all these simple and yet wonderful, wonderful lines that defy any sort of intellectual analysis. It defies them. It denies them the opportunity to probe the poem for this or that with their rude speculative tools. Follows it up with lines that are almost Koan-esque in nature, accessible only to the intuition and leaves the reader with the sense that he/she now shares this secret knowledge of Life with the poet ‘ a knowing, and at the same time a Not Knowing that gives us joy, the joy

“to keep on not knowing
something important.”

How nice! The frustrations of not-knowing are an opportunity, one for which to be grateful. We can’t have answers to our biggest questions – but in that piquancy somehow lies our big chance.

Life is the only chance ‘to mislay your keys in the grass’-that must be an intensely romantic moment!..hehe . ‘To tell pain from everything it’s not’- I lifted up my eyes for a momentary flashback after reading that line. ‘a conversation held with the lamp switched off’, I would love this. ‘To squeeze inside events’- some of you who have experienced turbulent times may already be doing that. But the gift of being fully present, ‘to squeeze inside events’, also brings responsibility: to bear witness (like after a holocaust).

There is a stamp of unmistakable originality, playfulness, delightful inventiveness, prodigality of imagination in most of her poems. I love her laconic style and precision. Her poetry is devoid of any affectation and is fresh and full of charm and wit.

Reference: Monologue of a Dog: Wislawa Szymborska (Author), Stanislaw Baranczak (Translator), Clare Cavanagh (Translator), Billy Collins (Foreword). Publisher: Harcourt.

 

OUTWITTING DEATH

 

OUTWITTING DEATH

 

By Alexander Shurbanov

 

Translated from Bulgarian by Ludmilla G .Popova-Weightman

 

The hour of reckoning has come.

The poplar sheds three golden leaves,

the birch—seven,

The quince—only one,

And not right away,

it doesn’t want

to part with it.

But autumn waits,

even squints in the sun

knowing that everything belongs to it,

no need to be impatient,

because time is its ally

 

I visited Budapest in 2018 and was in a taxi to go to a museum. The driver was a Bulgarian speaking in broken English. When I said I know and have reviewed the poetry of the Bulgarian poet Shurbanov, he had a shock and suddenly applied the brake and drove the car to a side. He then called his wife who spoke fluent English and told her that there is an Indian in his car who knows about Shurbanov, their great poet. She then spoke to me and thanked me for loving and reviewing the poetry of Shurbanov.

 

The Bulgarian Poet Alexander Shurbanov is such a rarity. A versatile poet, a literary critic and chairman of the English department in Sofia University, he has that intuitive ability to fathom the surface of things and record his personal reflection on them in such a way that the reader wonders why such things eclipse his vision. His approach is often unhurried, his lens is pantheistic, and his observations never slip into any religious dogma though many of his poems have strong moral and philosophical moorings.

 

His capacity to create poems of great beauty from the simplest of everyday observations is evident in this one. How eloquently has the poet conveyed the desire to hold on to life against time, the ineluctable devourer of everything!

The Roses of Saadi

 

The Roses of Saadi
 
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Translated by Louis Simpson

I wanted to bring you roses this morning.
There were so many I wanted to bring,
The knots at my waist could not hold so many.
The knots burst. All the roses took wing,
The air was filled with roses flying,
Carried by the wind, into the sea.
The waves are red, as though they are burning.
My dress still has the scent of the morning,
Remembering roses. Smell them on me.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (20 June 1786 – 23 July 1859) was a French poet and novelist. She published Élégies et Romances, her first poetic work, in 1819. Her melancholy, elegiacal poems are admired for their grace and profound emotion. She is the only female writer included in the famous ‘Les Poètes maudits’ anthology (“The Accursed Poets”, a series of articles on poets) published by the great French poet Paul Verlaine in 1884. A volume of her poetry was among the books in Friedrich Nietzsche's library.

Desbordes-Valmore captures intensity of hope and pleasure in this beautiful poem. Imagine a girl trying to carry the whole garden to her lover! I can visualize the strained knots bursting into red flames and permeating the air and turning the sea a canvass of crimson. This is how a love poem should unfold.

A belated Valentine's poem.

Back Home Again

 

T’ao Ch’ien (365–427 A.D.), equally well-known by his given name, T’ao Yüan-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.

The outlines of T’ao Ch’ien’s life – his struggle to free himself from the constraints of official life and his eventual commitment to the life of a recluse-farmer, despite poverty and hardship – became one of the central, organizing myths in the Chinese tradition. By 405, the T’ao family was apparently destitute. That spring, desperate for a means of supporting his family, T’ao took a job on the staff of Liu Yü, although the circumstances are unclear. Then in the fall, he took a position as magistrate in P’eng-tse, thirty miles northeast of his home. He resigned from this post after only eighty days citing his inner urge to return to village. This time he left public life for good, even though he had no means of support other than farm work, which had proven painfully unreliable. Although he received several requests to serve in the government, T’ao farmed in the Ch’ai-sang/Hsün-yang area until his death twenty-two years later.

He is regarded as the foremost representative of what we now know as Fields and Gardens poetry. T’ao Ch’ien found inspiration in the beauty and serenity of the natural world close at hand.

Here is the lovely poem he wrote after his final return to home sweet home.

Back Home Again

By T’ao Ch’ien

Translated by David Hinton

 
Back home –
with fields and gardens all weeds back home,
how can I stay here, my heart a slave to the body?
Why live this dismal life, this lonely grief?
You can’t argue with what’s been done, I know,
but the future’s there to be made. Not too far
gone down this road of delusion, I can see
where I’m right today, yesterday I was wrong.

Far from home, the boat rocking on gentle
swells, my robe snaps in billowing winds.
Asking travelers how the road ahead is,
I wonder how morning light can be so dim,
but seeing our house, suddenly
happy, I break into a run.
Servants greet me gleefully,
and my kids there at the gate.
Our three paths are grown over,
but pines and chrysanthemums
survived. And taking everyone
inside, I find wine waiting.
Pouring a cup from the winejar, I smile, happy
to see these courtyard trees. At the window
my presumptions drift away south. How easily
content I am in this cramped little place.
Here, garden strolls bring joy day after day:
our gate always closed, propped on my old-folk’s
walking-stick, I go a little ways, then rest,
and turning my head, look far away. Clouds
leaving mountain peaks drift without a thought,
and tired of flight, birds think of return.
At sunset, light fading slowly away, I linger
fondly over a lone pine, nowhere I’d rather be.

Back home again —
O let me keep to myself, my wandering ended.
Let the world and I give each other up.
If I left again, what would I go looking for?
It’s loving family voices that make me happy,
koto and books that keep worried grief away.
And farmers here tell me spring has arrived. Soon,
there’ll be work out in the western fields.
Sometimes in a covered cart,
sometimes rowing a lone boat –
I’ll search out sheltered streams and quiet pools,
follow mountain paths up through the hills.
Trees revel in the joy of their lavish blossoms,
and murmuring springs flow again. In these
ten thousand things, each following its season
away perfectly, I touch that repose in which
life ends, done and gone.
This form I am in the world can’t last much longer.
Why not let things carry my heart away with them?
What good is it, agonizing over the way things are going?
Getting rich isn’t what I want. And who
expects to end in some celestial village?
My dream is to walk out all alone into a lovely
morning – maybe stop to pull weeds in the garden,
maybe climb East Ridge and chant, settling into
my breath, or sit writing poems beside a clear
stream. I’ll ride change back to my final home,
rejoicing in heaven’s way. How can it ever fail me? 

Note : Koto is an ancient stringed instrument which Chinese poets used as an accompaniment to chant of their poems.

GIft

 

 Gift

 by Czesław Miłosz

Translated by Czesław Miłosz 

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

Czeslaw Milosz, who died in Krakow at the age of 93 in 2004, gave us a deep poetry of remembrance. He had a grave, open-eyed lucidity about the 20th century. I first felt from his work the nobility and grandeur of poetry, yet one also learned from him to distrust rhetoric, to question false words and sentiments.

He reminds us how difficult it is to remain just one person. He believed in our common humanity and beauty of the world around him despite the horrors he witnessed. I love his poetry most of all for its radiant moments of wonder and being, and also because of its tenderness and acceptance of life without malice just as in this one.