O'Brien Press are about to publish An Paróiste Míorúilteach/The Miraculous Parish, a dual-language selection of Máire Mhac an tSaoi's poems edited by Louis de Paor, with translations by myself, Celia de Fréine, Louis de Paor, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, James Gleasure, Aidan Higgins, Valentine Iremonger, Biddy Jenkinson, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eiléan Ní Chuileannáin and Douglas Sealy. It comes with an illuminating introduction by Louis de Paor. Here's a taster, first the original, then my own translation.
Cian á thógaint díom
Do mheabhair is mó anois a bhraithim uaim –
Ní cuí dhom feasta cumann rúin an tsúsa –
Cleamhnas na hintinne, ná téann i ndísc,
A d’fhág an t-éasc im lár, an créacht ná dúnann.
An mó de bhlianaibh scartha dhúinn go beacht
Roimh lasadh im cheann don láchtaint seo taibhríodh dom?
Téann díom, ach staonfad fós den gcomhaireamh seasc,
Altaím an uain is ní cheistím an faoiseamh.
Milse ár gcomhluadair d’fhill orm trém néall,
Cling do chuileachtan leanann tréis na físe,
Do leath ár sonas tharainn mar an t-aer.
Bheith beo in éineacht, fiú gan cnaipe ’scaoileadh.
Do cheannfhionn dílis seirgthe i gcré
An t-éitheach; is an fíor? An aisling ghlé.
Sorrow lifts from me
More than anything, it’s your mind I feel the loss of now.
The love between the sheets has had its day
But the bond of mind, which never fades
Is what tears me, is the wound that never heals.
How many years exactly since we parted
Before this brightening kindled like a waking dream?
I can’t remember, and will not count them, but
Give thanks for the moment and not question its peace.
The sweetness of our company came back to me in the
dream,
The chime of your pleasure still sounds in the room,
Our joy spread round us like the air.
Even if no button is undone, just to be alive together.
This is the lie: your fair head withered in clay.
And the truth? The clear vision in the brightening day.
Monday, September 26, 2011
An Paróiste Míorúilteach
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
The freshness of what happens
Reading Pearse Hutchinson:Review of collection of essays on PH edited by Philip Coleman and Maria Johnston, published by Irish Academic Press.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Education by Stone: João Cabral de Melo Neto
Two poems, taken from the recent The FSG Book of Latin American Poetry
O Fim Do Mundo
No fim de um mundo melancólico
os homens lêem jornais.
Homens indiferentes a comer laranjas
que ardem como o sol.
Me deram uma maçã para lembrar
a morte. Sei que cidades telegrafam
pedindo querosene. O véu que olhei voar
caiu no deserto.
O poema final ninguém escreverá
desse mundo particular de doze horas.
Em vez de juízo final a mim me preocupa
o sonho final.
The End of the World
At the end of a melancholy world
men read the newspapers.
Men indifferent to eating oranges
that flame like the sun.
They gave me an apple to remind me
of death. I know that cities telegraph
asking for kerosene. The veil I saw flying
fell in the desert.
No one will write the final poem
about this particular twelve o’clock world.
Instead of the last judgememt, what worries me
is the final dream.
Translated by James Wright
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Elbow Room
A letter brings me to my teenage father,
unpicks his bones and calls him back
from his week of boarder’s rations, his years
of darkness and silence, to where he sits
in the depths of winter in his cousins’ kitchen
and wolfs his Sunday lunch.
What does he say? He lifts a fork and vanishes
until now, how many winters
later, and his father, too, lifted and returned
to drive his hackney down the narrow roads
flat capped and with his elbow out the window
so close I can reach my hand across –
as if that casual elbow opened a portal,
poked through time to graze the city air
or as if I might somehow reach in to raise
these always resisting bones, always
unfinishable journeys. How much can you stretch
from lunch to dinner, from headstone to hearth
and back again? But the engine is running
in the unkillable car, my grandfather changes up
as he leaves the bend
and accelerates from the letter.
Around the corner, my father drains his cup,
pushes back his chair. After lunch
comes nothing, unmemory, unwritten.
I can follow them to nowhere, to where
the engine rusts and the broken years
lie in fields, and when the traffic stalls
I can open the window
and rest my arm on the door, let my elbow
graze the zone, let the altered day come in.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Valerio Magrelli
Age of the duck-hare: the poetry of Valerio Magrelli
published in Agenda Vol 45 No.4 / Vol 46 No. 1, May 2011
Valerio Magrelli is one of the brightest stars of Italian poetry, widely acclaimed since the appearance of his first collection Ora Serrata Tesserae when he was twenty three. The title of that collection gives a hint of the kind of poet he is — it’s the irregular, serrated demarcation between the retina and the circumferential tissue inside the eye. So specialist is the title that when he went to the optician some months after the book came out, the optician remarked ‘I didn’t realise we were colleagues, I see you’ve written a book . . .’
The scientific term directs us to a poetry preoccupied with visual perception of the world, and the forensic attention applied simultaneously to the gaze. The blank page is ‘like the cornea of an eye’ where the poet ‘embroider(s)/an iris and in the iris etch(es)/the deep gorge of the retina’:
A gaze then
sprouts from the page
and a chasm gapes
in this yellow notebook.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Falling
Back from the blogging dead. Has The Cat Flap been filled with cement? someone asked. Pretty much, for the last few months, but it will now be re-activated. To begin with, a piece published in the Dublin Review for Winter 2010-11. The piece led to a documentary on RTE Radio, produced by Bernadette Comerford, available for download here
Poems, prose and who knows what else to follow...
When I started falling, I didn’t think much of it. I took it as something the body naturally did, a way of testing itself, maybe, or a kind of trick. I’d get up in the morning and go down to the bathroom on the first landing, splash water on my face, and immediately lose consciousness. A few seconds later I’d find myself on the red lino of the bathroom, haul myself up, and go back to the sink. And then it would happen again, and again I’d pick myself up from the floor and return to the sink. (I might not have been so quick to return if I’d known that water was one of the triggers of the falling, or rather the alchemy that took place between water and light as I washed my face.) To me, falling was just part of the morning ritual. Occasionally I reported it to my mother, but the notion must have seemed too silly to register, just the kind of thing a boy could be relied on to make up. So I went on falling, giving myself a few bruises every morning, lurching backwards into the day.
More Read more!
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Continual Visit
 |
| From Drop Box |
Somehow a wilderness grows. The grasses
are full of small animals, the nights so absolute
you could haul yourself through blackness to the stars
and stream down like a stray god on the meadow.
The lake shifts and startles, a vixen cries from her lair.
The cottage veers and shakes and makes
like a mad thing for the trees. If there is a dog
he is barking now, shocked head pummelling air.
If there are foxes they are running, if the dead
have spilled from their fields they are here now
running headlong into the night. They are lost
and their gods with them, running down the narrow
lanes, leaping into hedgerows and ditches, mingling
with ash branches, rushes, the sleeping machines
in their sheds.
Sequence continues in The Manchester Review
Click here for the rest of the issue
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