cherry wave moves fast
consumes gas spark oxy
gen ignites momentary true
tears
apart
asphalt
gives it all away for pennies on the dollar
corpse
of oak
wave of pattern-making
gone now so maybe
aerated biomass
bound to steel
screws i once loved
as a lecture
well cared for
white curator
of white curators
my hands in my filial head
translation
concrete
as total aesthetic loss
as movement
the use of poetic dialogue
philosophical filmmakers
the allegorical use of storytelling
right knee lower left shin and calf
A sentence is a word in a photograph.
a cracked tower
yes
it was athletica sì quella
sua rete
ma
non aveva
in sé potenza
alcuna —
se cupamente pietro desert hacked
into the torn soil — the peaks are
still film cameras
penetrasse
gunpowder
bent along
its banks
what is it
it was an athletic
time
presto
trovò di una sua rete
ma non
aveva
mutilation alarmed ranchers
don’t think of the bank
film
cameras
penetrasse
gunpowder order
awaiting presumptions
resistenza alcuna
stessa sé —
arms akimbo
in princeton
in 2000
the famous
squirrelly record producer
in boring denim and black work
shirt chameleon-like
his wicked opacity
doesn’t applaud
when the band
finishes its final
song — there are
still film cameras
pentax nikon canon
is that guy picciotto
in the branches
of a pine tree?
Gracieux fils de Pan! Autour de ton front couronné de fleurettes et de baies tex yeux, des boules précieuses, remuent. Tachées de lies brunes, tes joues se creusent. Tes crocs luisent. Ta poitrine ressemble à une cithare, des tintements circulent dans tes bras blonds. Ton cœur bat dans ce ventre où dort le double sexe. Promène-toi, la nuit, en mouvant doucement cette cuisse, cette seconde cuisse et cette jambe de gauche.
Graceful son of Pan! Around your forehead crowned with small flowers and berries, your eyes precious spheres, are moving. Spotted with brownish wine lees, your cheeks grow hollow. Your fangs gleam. Your chest is like a lyre, jingling sounds circulate between your blond arms. Your heart beats in that belly where the double sex sleeps. Walk at night, gently moving that thigh, that second thigh and that left leg.
Graceful son of Pan! Under your brow crowned with flowers and berries, your eyes, precious balls, move. Spotted with dark streaks, your cheeks look hollow. Your fangs glisten. Your chest is like a lyre and tinklings move up and down your white arms. Your heart beats in that abdomen where your double sex sleeps. Walk at night and move gently this thigh, then this other thigh and this left leg.
Beats in the belly! Whereas your bat dans tes pan! Autour heart beats in the abdomen where your fangs glisten. Your eyes, remuent. Tachées de gauche. Ancient trains walk at night, gently moving sound. Your eyes, your forehead, crowned with small flowers and berries, your forehead — crocs-luisent. Tachées de les tes yeux, des boules précieux fils de pan! Under your fangs gleam brilliant blond arms. Your double, à une cithare, des tes yeux, des boules précieux, fils de pan! Autour forehead crocs luisent. Tachées de pan! Autour hearts beat in your thigh.
Un beau matin, chez un peuple fort doux, un homme et une femme superbes criaient sur la place publique. «Mes amis, je veux qu’elle soit reine!» «Je veux être reine!» Elle riait et tremblait. Il parlait aux amis de révélation, d’épreuve terminée. Ils se pâmaient lun contre l’autre.
En effet ils furent rois toute toute une matinée où les tentures carminées se relevèrent sur les maisons, et toute l´après-midi, où ils sávancérent du côté des jardins de palmes.
One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people, a magnificent man and woman were shouting in the public square. “My friends, I want her to be queen!” “I want to be queen!” She was laughing and trembling. He spoke to their friends of revelation, of trials completed. They swooned against each other.
In fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward the groves of palm trees.
Source: Rimbaud, Arthur, and John Ashbery. Illuminations. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012, pp. 52-53.
Forgive her.
Sometimes she forgets
she is painfully the same
as stagnant water,
hollow ditches,
foolishly imagines
she has the right to exist.
Forgive
a portrait’s listless rage,
whose longing for movement
melts in her paper eyes.
Forgive
this woman whose casket is washed over
by a flowing red moon,
her body’s thousand-year sleep
perturbed by night’s stormy scent.
Forgive
this woman who’s crumbling inside,
but whose eyelids tingle still with dreams of light,
her useless hair quivering hopelessly,
infiltrated by love’s breath.
People of the land of plain joys,
you who have opened your windows to the rain,
forgive her,
forgive because your lives’ fertile roots
burrow into her exiled soil and pound
with envy’s rod her naive heart,
until it swells.
Source: Farrokhzad, Forugh, Sholeh Wolpé, and Alicia Ostriker. Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad. , 2007, pp. 39-40. Print.*
*With minor edits by me, with insincere apologies to the imagined reader.
“It was hot,
the flies were persistent and teasing,
and it was pleasant to reflect
that it would soon be evening.”
No one attacks it with a long lance,
No one plies a strong cross-bow.
Suckling its grandsons, rearing its cubs,
It trains them into savagery.
Its reared head becomes a wall
Its waving tail becomes a banner.
Even Huang from the Eastern Sea,¹
Dreaded to see it after dark,
A righteous tiger, met on the road,²
Was quite enough to upset Niu Ai.
What good is it for that short sword
To hang on the wall, growling like thunder?
When from the foot of Tai mountain
Comes the sound of a woman weeping,
Government regulations forbid
Any official to dare to listen.³
Notes from The Collected Poems of Li He:
A satire on oppressive government, of which the tiger was the symbol. Caught between the Central Government and the warlords, the people are harassed as though by tigers.
More about Li He from The New York Review of Books:
Li He is the bad-boy poet of the late Tang dynasty. He began writing at the age of seven and died at twenty-six from alcoholism or, according to a later commentator, “sexual dissipation,” or both. An obscure and unsuccessful relative of the imperial family, he would set out at dawn on horseback, pause, write a poem, and toss the paper away. A servant boy followed him to collect these scraps in a tapestry bag.
Long considered far too extravagant and weird for Chinese taste, Li He was virtually excluded from the poetic canon until the mid-twentieth century. Today, as the translator and scholar Anne M. Birrell, writes, “Of all the Tang poets, even of all Chinese poets, he best speaks for our disconcerting times.” Modern critics have compared him to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keats, and Trakl.
Source: Li He, Ballad of the Savage Tiger. “The Collected Poems of Li He.” Translated by J.D. Frodsham, New York Review Books, 2016.
Translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern
You have a strange pet—
one eye is a cat’s, the other a sheep’s.
Yet, it won’t socialize with felines,
will attack any flock of sheep.
On moonlit nights,
it wanders on roofs.
When you’re alone,
it will lie in your lap,
preoccupied,
slowly studying you until—
on its face—a challenge.
6/1988
Source: Liu, Xia, Di Ming, Jennifer Kronovet, Herta Müller, and Yiwu Liao. Empty Chairs: Selected Poems. 2015.
Begin reading about Liu Xia here and then Google her name and pay attention to learn more.
I encourage readers to purchase the book here, and listen to a conversation between poet Rachel Zucker and translator Jennifer Kronovet on a recent episode of the Commonplace Podcast. You can financially support (as I do) Commonplace Podcast—a brilliant, important project exploring the work of influential working artists—on Patreon.
these might be bad translations
but at this moment they are
the only translations available in english
Nous avons traversé la nuit sans délivrance
translated as
We have passed through the night without deliverance
sure it’s accurate but
the translator must also be
a most loving octopus