Friday, August 14, 2009
Invincible recluse (Solitario invencible), by Vicente Huidobro
Frédéric Chopin - Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2with Dinu Lipatti, live recording
Skidding
Like a basket of bitterness
Filled with silence and light
Frozen asleep
You leave and return to yourself
You laugh at your own dream
Yet you sigh shivering poems
And convince yourself of some hope
Absence, the hunger of keeping silent
Of no longer emitting so many hypotheses
Of closing the talkative wounds
You surrender to a special anxiety
Like from snow and fire
You want to turn your eyes to life
To swallow the entire universe
Those fields of stars
They fly away from your hand after the catastrophe
When the perfume of carnations
Spins around your axis
transl. from Spanish by Sherman Souther
in Many Mountains Moving, vol. v, no.1
thank you vv for the music
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Resblando
Como canasta de amarguras
Con mucho silencio y mucha luz
Dormido de hielos
Te vas y vuelves a ti mismo
Te ries de tu proprio sueno
Pero suspiras poemas temblorosos
Y te convences de alguna esperanza
LA austencia el hambre de callar
De no emitir mas tantas hipotesis
De cerrar las heridas habladoras
Te da una ansia especial
Como de nievo y fuego
Quieres volver los ojos a la vida
Tragarte el universo entero
Esos campos de estrellas
Se te van de la mano despues de la catastrofe
Cunado el perfume de los claveles
Gira en torno de su eje
pondering...
thank you for the post...
Absence, the hunger of keeping silent
Of no longer emitting so many hypotheses
Of closing the talkative wounds
You surrender to a special anxiety
Like from snow and fire
You want to turn your eyes to life
Risk
And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.
Anaïs Nin
oh, it is so much better in spanish, i was reading in english and some lines just didn't work for me, but then i turn to spanish and i see how wonderful they actually are. but the ending is fabulous, in both versions: When the perfume of carnations
Spins around your axis.
this is something only poetry can do, no image, no music (sorry :-)
i can't get over
sigh shivering poems
suspiras poemas temblorosos
though i'm reading it more like
sigh shimmering poems
thank you for that, vv - it makes it sound like it's inevitable...
r., i actually agree with you, about what poetry can do. but it is also true about music, and about pictures, no?
I am able to see (hear) the same poetic attributes in music, cinema and prose.
But suddenly at some station all climbed out, and it was already dark, although in the west there still hung a very long, very pink cloud, and farther along the track, with a soul-piercing light, the star of a lamp trembled through the slow smoke of the engine, and crickets chirped in the dark, and from somewhere there came the odor of jasmine and hay, my love.
Vladimir Nabokov
yes, it is true - in each case, there are things which are un-translatable, therefore it is not translation that one has to seek, but baudelairian correspondences - or at least this is how i feel.
and thank you Prospero, for this most wonderful quote.
beautiful writing, thank you prospero
Post a Comment