Washburn, Katherine; John S. Major; Clifton Fadiman;
World poetry: an anthology of verse from antiquity to our time
Quality Paperback Book Club 1998, 1338 pages
ISBN 0965419835
topics: | poetry | anthology | world
The temple bell stops but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers tr. Robert Bly Skylark sings all day and day not long enough. tr. Lucien Stryk and Takeushi Ikemoto
My father travels on the late evening train Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light. Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes. His shirt and pants are soggy, and his black raincoat Is stained with mud, his bag stuffed with books Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed with age Fade homeward through the humid monsoon night. Now I can see him getting off the train Like a word dropped from a long sentence. He hurries across the length of the grey platform, Crosses the railway line and enters the lane, His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries on. Home again, I see him drinking weak tea, Eating a stale chapati, reading a book. He goes into the toilet to contemplate Man's estrangement from a man-made world. Coming out, he trembles at the sink, The cold water running over his brown hands. A few droplets cling to the greying hair on his wrists. His sullen children have often refused to share Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to sleep Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.
[tr. from Hindi, Vinay Dharwadker]
I've taken the last drag
and stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray,
and now I'm a respectable man
with all the trappings of civility.
When I'm on vacation
I don't hate anyone.
I don't have any protest march to join.
I've drunk all the liquor
in the bottle marked
FOR DEFENCE SERVICES ONLY
and thrown it away in the bathroom.
That's the sum total of my life.
(Like everyg good citizen
I draw the curtains across my windows
the moment I hear the ari-raid siren.
These days it isn't the light outside
but the light inside that's dangerous.)
I haven't done a thing to deserve
a statue whose unveiling
would make the wise men of this city
waste a whole busy day.
I've been sitting in a corner of my dinner plate
and leading a very ordinary life.
What I inherited were citizenship
in the neighbourhood of a jail
and gentlemanliness
in front of a slaughter-house.
I've tied them both to my own convenience
and taken them two steps forward.
The municipal government has taught me
to stay on the left side of the road.
(To succeed in life you don't need
to read Dale Carnegie's book
but to understand traffic signs.)
Other than petty lies
I don't know the weight of a gun.
On the face of the traffic policeman
doing his drill in the square
I've always seen the map of democracy.
And now I don't have a single worry,
I don't have to do a thing.
I've reached the stage in life
when files begin to close.
I'm sitting in my own chair on the verandah
without any qualms.
The sun's setting on the toe of my shoe.
A bugle's blosing in the distance.
This is the time when the soldiers come back,
and the possessed city
is now slowly turning its madness
into the windowpanes and lights.
-also in Dharwadker and Ramanujan's The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry p.139-40
[tr. Coleman Barks, Lalla: Naked Songs, Maypop Books, 1992 p. 583] The soul, like the moon, is new, and always new again. And I have seen the ocean continuously creating. Since I scoured my mind and my body, I too, Lalla, am new, each moment new. My teacher told me one thing. Live in the soul. When that was so, I began to go naked, and dance.
On the way to God the difficulties
feel like being ground by millstone,
like night coming at noon, like
lightning through the clouds.
But don't worry! What must come, comes.
Face everything with love,
as your mind dissolves in God.
[Coleman Barks has translated 111 of Lalla's songs. More accurately, he
has, in his term, "re-worked" the poems from earlier translations, so he
calls himself the "second translator" (p.12). The introduction recounts
the Lalla traditions:]
Naked song / Lalla; translations by Coleman Barks. Athens, GA: Maypop, c1992. (79 p.)
LC#: PK7035.L3 N35 1992; ISBN: 0961891645
Includes bibliographical references (p. 14).