Simic, Charles; Mark Strand (eds);
Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers
Ecco Press (HarperCollins), 1976 / 1989, 256 pages
ISBN 0880011912, 9780880011914
topics: | poetry | europe | latin-america
tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott 1. They take them out in the morning to the stone courtyard and put them against the wall five men two of them very young the others middle-aged nothing more can be said about them 2. when the platoon level their guns everything suddenly appears in the garish light of obviousness the yellow wall the cold blue the black wire on the wall instead of a horizon that is the moment when the five senses rebel they would gladly escape like rats from a sinking ship before the bullet reaches its destination the eye will percive the flight of the projectile the ear record the steely rustle the nostrils will be filled with biting smoke a petal of blood will brush the palate the touch will shrink and then slacken now they lie on the ground covered up to their eyes with shadow the platoon walks away their buttonstraps and steel helmets are more alive then those lying beside the wall 3. I did not learn this today I knew it before yesterday so why have I been writing unimportant poems on flowers what did the five talk of the night before the execution of prophetic dreams of an escapade in a brothel of automobile parts of a sea voyage of how when he had spades he ought not to have opened of how vodka is best after wine you get a headache of girls of fruits of life thus one can use in poetry names of Greek shepherds one can attempt to catch the colour of morning sky write of love and also once again in dead earnest offer to the betrayed world a rose
tr. Mark Strand p. 169 Clara strolled in the garden with the children. The sky was green over the grass, the water was golden under the bridges, other elements were blue and rose and orange, a policeman smiled, bicycles passed, a girl stepped onto the lawn to catch a bird, the whole world -- Germany, China -- all was quiet around Clara. The children looked at the sky: it was not forbidden. Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger. What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects. Clara feared missing the eleven o'clock trolley: She waited for letters slow to arrive, She couldn't always wear a new dress. But she strolled in the garden, in the morning! They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!
She sat on a willow-trunk watching part of the battle of Crecy, the shouts, the gasps, the groans, the tramping and the tumbling. During the fourteenth charge of the French cavalry she mated with the brown-eyed male fly from Vadincourt. She rubbed her legs together as she sat on the disemboweled horse meditating on the immortality of flies. With relief she alighted on the blue tongue of the Duke of Clervaux. When silence settled and only the whisper of decay softly circled the bodies and only a few arms and legs still twitched jerkily under the trees, she began to lay her eggs on the single eye of Johann of Uhr, The Royal Armourer. And thus it was that she was eaten by a swift fleeing from the fires of Estrees. from http://www.utc.edu/Academic/English/pm/polpoet.htm: On the one hand we can read the fly as a simple metaphor for a human being, and certainly the idea that she meditates "on the immortality of flies" invites this sort of reading. But we are missing the point if we downplay the radical deconstruction of history here-- it is the peripheral, the small, the seemingly frivolous, that gives us a key into our own actions. What is more important, the charge of the French cavalry or the mating of the fly? We would like to insist that man's history is more important. But from the point of view of the cosmos, from that larger frame, where man is, like Salamun, a speck, does it make much difference? The fly's perspective is only an arbitrary frame as good as any other, and in turned framed as any other frame is framed. From the swift's point of view at the end, the fly is peripheral. The poem suggests that the historical and ideological frames are just ways of privileging one perspective over another, usually opposite perspective. That is why the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz said: "The language that nourishes the poem is, after all, nothing but history, name of this or that, reference and meaning....Without history -- without men, who are the origin, the substance and the end of history -- the poem could not be born or incarnated, and without the poem there could be no history either, because there would be no origin or beginning." How does the poet rewrite the perversions of history, then?
(Czech; tr. George Theiner) To amuse His Royal Majesty he will change water into wine. Frogs into footmen. Beetles into bailiffs. And make a Minister out of a rat. He bows, and daisies grow from his finger-tips. And a talking bird sits on his shoulder. There. Think up something else, demands His Royal Majesty. Think up a black star. So he thinks up a black star. Think up dry water. So he thinks up dry water. Think up a river bound with straw-bands. So he does. There. Then along comes a student and asks: Think up sine alpha greater than one. And Zito grows pale and sad. Terribly sorry. Sine is Between plus one and minus one. Nothing you can do about that. And he leaves the great royal empire, quietly weaves his way Through the throng of courtiers, to his home in a nutshell.
Miroslav Holub is a scientist by vocation and considers his poetry a pastime. Holub told Stephen Stepanchev in a New Leader interview that, for him, science and poetry enjoy an "uneasy relationship." "In scientific circles," he said, "I try to hide the fact that I write verse. Scientists tend to be suspicious of poets; they feel that poets are, somehow, irresponsible." And he admitted that his profession was similarly held suspect by his literary friends. Holub is an immunologist, and the rigorous logic of the scientist shows in many of the poems, which are almost mathematical in their analogies. But it is a mathematics with blood in it." - Paul Breslin, Poetry (7/1997) But Holub sees no real conflict between science and poetry. As a scientist, he says, he believes in "an objective reality" and hates superstition. Holub often employs scientific metaphors in his poems, a technique that, although he considers it "a risk," allows him to "find poetic equivalents for the new reality of the micro-world." Holub told Stepanchev that one of the reasons he uses metaphors at all is "to avoid the aridities of rationalism." "The other reason," he adds, "is that I like the play or dance of metaphors, just as I like the play of ideas in a poem. My poems, by the way, always begin with an idea, an obsessive idea of some sort. . . . I try to achieve effects of suspense with my long lines and tremendous emphases with my short ones." http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Holub.htm: Miroslav Holub had taken an active part in the reformist movement in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s (he published essays in the main Czech liberal cultural and literary periodicals Literární noviny [The Literary Gazette,] Plamen [The Flame], Orientace,[Orientation]). As a result, he was sacked from the Microbiological Institute in 1970; from 1971 - like many other Czech writers at the time - he suffered a publication ban, was not allowed to travel abroad or to appear in public. His work was banned and his books were removed from the libraries. A new collection of poems Strucné úvahy (Brief contemplations), was destroyed, although it was already typeset. A book of selections from the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Poe cili Údolí neklidu (Poe or The Valley of Restlessness), compiled by Holub, could only be published anonymously in 1972. Henceforth Holub made a degrading public self-criticism and thereafter could be employed at least in a junior position at the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine (in 1995 he returned to the Microbiological Institute). His literary work could not be published officially in Czechoslovakia again until 1982. Although Holub was ostracised in his native country, his literary as well as scientific work became very well known abroad. In his native Czechoslovakia, he was not very well received even after the fall of communism. Some of his fellow Czechs could not accept Holub's self-criticism, there were even unfounded allegations of his alleged cooperation with the communist secret police (since he could travel to the West in the 1980s while other Czech authors were languishing as non-persons in the dissident ghetto). Some people could not forget that Holub never came out openly against communism in the 1970s and 1980s and became a dissident himself, thus allegedly betraying his liberal credentials from the 1950s and 1960s. Others could not accept his rational, terse poetic style, which foregoes linguistic embellishments and relies instead on the intricate interplay. It so happened that this style is extremely well suited to the English language - English translations have made Miroslav Holub a world famous author. Translations: Translations of Holub are non-uniform. Some translators like Ewald Osers "seem fairly true to Holub, but Osers shows a great reluctance to trim any of the poems." http://www.complete-review.com/authors/holubm.htm On the other hand those which Holub himself co-translated (he is fairly fluent in English) - are markedly more paired down. Holub speaks English, French, and German. Links: biography: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/miroslav-holub http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Holub.htm critique : http://www.complete-review.com/authors/holubm.htm
[tr. Beth Archer] The Pleasures of the Door 25 Water 25 The Pebble (tr. Cid Corman) 27 The Horse 34
[b. Belgium; tr. Richard Ellmann] I Am Writing to you from a far-off country 41 Icebergs 45 from In the land of magic 45 Birth 46 from The Emanglons 48 The Emanglom 51
The Egg 55 The Barn Owl 55 Black Meat 56 Housewives 56 Father and Daughter 57 Signs 58 Asia 58
tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott Wooden Die 61 Study of the Object 61 Arion 66 Episode in a Library 67 The Seventh Angel 68 Rosy Ear 70 Five Men 71 Naked Town 74 A Halt 75
(tr. Paul Blackburn) The Lines of the Hand 79 Theme for a Tapestry 79 The Behavior of Mirrors on Easter Island 80 Instructions on how to Wind a Watch 81 Instructions on or rather Examples of How to be Afraid 81 Marvelous Pursuits 83 Progress And Retrogression 84
(tr. Edwin Honig) [b. Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa] Tobacco Shop 87 If they want me to be a mystic, fine. So I'm a mystic 93 Salutation to Walt Whitman 93 I am tired (tr. Jonathan Griffin) 101
(tr. Eliot Weinberger) Hurry 105 Old Poem 106 Natural Being 107 Letter To Two Strangers 109 Marvels Of The Will 111 Obsidian Butterfly 112 Vrindaban (tr. Lysander Kemp) 114
Out Of Three Or Four In A Room 121 Tourist 122 My Mother Once Told Me 123 A Pity. We Were such a Good Invention 124 Rain on a Battlefield 124 We Did It [in front of the mirror] (tr. Harold Schimel) 125 If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem 126
Childhood 129 Kaunas 1941 130 North Russian Town 132 On the Jewish Dealer A.S. 133 Cathedral 1941 124 Latvian Songs 135 The Spoor In The Sand 136
[b. Lithuania, US citizen 1970] Dedication (tr. Czeslaw Milosz) 139 Mittelbergheim (tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Richard Lourie) 140 A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto (tr. Czeslaw Milosz) 141 A Song on the End of the World (tr. A.M.) 142 To Robinson Jeffers (tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Richard Lourie) 144 The Master (tr. Czeslaw Milosz) 146 Elegy For N.N. (tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Lawrence Davis) 148
[Nicanor Parra Sandoval] tr. W.S. Merwin Piano Solo (tr. William Carlos Williams) 153 Journey Through Hell 154 Litany Of The Little Bourgeois 156 The Pilgrim 158 The Tablets 159 The Tunnel 160 The Viper 162 Madrigal 165 I Take Back Everything I've Said (tr. Miller Williams) 166
(tr. Mark Strand) Souvenir of the Ancient World 169 The Elephant 170 Quadrille 173 The Dead In Frock Coats 174 Wandering 174 Don't Kill Yourself 175 The Dirty Hand 176 Your Shoulders Hold Up The World 178
tr. Michael Hamburger [b. Romania Jew] Corona 181 Aspen Tree ... 182 Shibboleth 182 Psalm 184 Chanson Of A Lady In The Shade 186 Fugue Of Death (tr. Christopher Middleton) 187 Your Hand Full Of Hours 189 --Miroslav Holub [Czechoslovakia 1923-1998] tr. Ian Milner and George Theiner [immunologist] The Fly 193 Cinderella 194 Man Cursing The Sea 196 Zito The Magician 197 Suffering 198
tr. Paul Merchant The Poet's Place 203 black, carved writing desk Putting Out The Lamp 204 Final Hour 205 Dusk 206 Alone With His Work 207 Miniature (tr. Edmund Keeley)207 Beauty (tr. Minas Sarras) 208 Insignificant Needs 209 --Vasko Popa [Serbian 1922-1991] tr. Charles Simic [b. Romania] The Stargazer's Legacy 213 Proud Error 214 Echo Turned To Stone 215 Forgetful Number 216 Prudent Triangle 217 The Tale About A Tale 218 The Yawn Of Yawns 219 The Little Box 220 The Tenants Of The Little Box 221 The Craftsmen Of The Little Box 222 The Victims Of The Little Box 223 The Enemies Of The Little Box 224 The Judges Of The Little Box 225 The Prisoners Of The Little Box 226 Last News About The Little Box 227 --Italo Calvino Cities & Desire 5 231 Hidden Cities 1 232 Cities & Signs 1 233 Cities & Signs 2 234 Trading Cities 1 235 Cities & Signs 5 236 Cities & The Dead 3 237 Continuous Cities 4 238 Cities & The Sky 5 240