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

8 comments:

  1. ManuelaAugust 14, 2009

    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

    ReplyDelete
  2. vvAugust 15, 2009

    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

    ReplyDelete
  3. r.August 15, 2009

    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 :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. manuelaAugust 15, 2009

    i can't get over

    sigh shivering poems
    suspiras poemas temblorosos

    though i'm reading it more like

    sigh shimmering poems

    ReplyDelete
  5. manuelaAugust 15, 2009

    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?

    ReplyDelete
  6. ProsperoAugust 17, 2009

    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

    ReplyDelete
  7. RoxanaAugust 17, 2009

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  8. mAugust 17, 2009

    beautiful writing, thank you prospero

    ReplyDelete

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