Goat song

Aleksander Wat and Czesław Miłosz

Aleksander Wat
(1900 – 1967)

To a Roman, My Friend

Everything that lies in rubble
reaches tenderly at me:
the ruins of my Warsaw
the ruins of your Rome.

In April ’forty-six
I saw two old goats
searching for some special herbs
in the former Albrecht’s Café
(now overgrown with nettles,
thistles, burdock, spear grass).
Their barefoot shepherdess
in graveyard stillness
stood gaping, a child, under a pathetic column that once adorned
     the fourth floor
                                of the Credit Society building,
where then it was just a fancy ornament
changed today into an orphaned pendicle
on a fragment of charred wall.

On the Aventino I met two goats, roamers of ruins,
and a barefoot shepherdess
staring at faded frescoes.

Thus after man’s glory,
after his acts and disasters
goats arrive. Smelly,
comic and worthy goats
to search among remnants of glory
for medicinal herbs and forage
for earthly nourishment.

Translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan

from Aleksander Wat, Selected Poems, translated and edited by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan, Penguin, 1991.

'More than the usual chaos'

More than the usual chaos
the raisin box, the onions,
the potatoes, the small cup,
the brick, the drum

each one a solemn offering
searched out and handed over
with such ceremony
I can hardly bear to clear my desk

More than the usual chaos
may such
unlooked for riches
accompany me always

PIR 87

Dear Sir(r)

It has come to my attention that you purport to publish a poem of mine in PIR. In the manner of subject people everywhere, I wish to grudgingly thank you, and to use the occasion as an excuse to ask for more....
But first I wish to explicitly acknowledge that I now believe that it is possible to be an editor and a human being at the same time. This suspicion had been growing on me for some time, as The Cat Flap could not have been written by a complete bastard. . . I feel I've now traced the sources of my previously unpositive attitude to you: you didn't previously publish my many offerings; you obviously had a serious Montale phase (but who am I to judge: I had a serious Neruda phase; after a while, however, like Catholicism and Communism, it went away, leaving, like them, a certain positive residue; and your, eh, sirrname, operating no doubt at a subliminal and psychological level, caused me to see you as rather aloof, cold, distant, etc.

A brief sample from the Cat Flap's mailbag. The Flap, it has to be said, has never pretended to be a human being, and the labours of editorship have long drained him of whatever vestigial humanity might have slipped between the scales. And all of this preamble is by way of saying there is a new Poetry Ireland Review abroad in the world. PIR 87 features poems by John Greening, CL Dallat, Cathal O'Searcaigh, Maurice Scully, Enda Coyle-Greene and many others. The Crucial Collection series, begun in PIR 86, continues with Medbh McGuckian on Tess Gallagher's Instructions to the Double, Biddy Jenkinson on Dánta Grádha, Gabriel Rosenstock on Santoka Taneda and Mark Granier on Pearse Hutchinson's Watching the Morning Grow. Patrick Crotty contributes an essay on place in Thomas Kinsella, Chris Murray writes about the dramas of Austin Clarke. And in the Reviews section, among others, Terence Brown looks at Seamus Heaney's District and Circle, Gerald Dawe looks at George Mackay Brown's Collected, Aingeal Clare reviews John Kinsella and Jane Yeh, and Michael Cronin celebrates Biddy Jenkinson's latest collection, Oíche Bhealtaine. Dennis O'Driscoll contributes his popular Poetry Pickings – here's a couple to be going on with:

'If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems - not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate. New poems, poets, and manuscripts are added to the inventory every year.'
- Joseph Bednarik, Poets & Writers, May/June 2006

'The fear of straight speaking, the constant, painstaking efforts to metaphorize everything, the ceaseless need to prove you're a poet in every line: these are the anxieties that beset every budding bard. But they are curable, if caught in time.'
- Wislawa Szymborska, quoted in Poetry Foundation online, 19 April 2006



'I didn't have time to write poetry before, but now I have had the time to become a poet.'
- Saddam Hussein, quoted in The Sunday Times, 14 May 2006

'People think they love poetry, but actually they hate it. The average punter feels that poetry is too self-conscious. I'm just grateful that I've been allowed to stay at home and do it. Oh my God. The idea of an office.'
- Hugo Williams, The Observer, 26 March 2006

'What's surprising about many poems from Britain is just how unsurprising they are - how domesticated, how well-behaved - and how closely they adhere to a single register, the poet getting quietly worked up about something in the plainest conversational tone.'

-Andrew Johnston, Best New Zealand Poems 2005, 2006

Fans of this feature might like to know that Bloodaxe has collected a selection of Dennis' pickings as The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations , which has just come out.

Getting it right

Another commonplace book entry, offered as encouragement.

Proofs

Death will not correct
a single line of verse
she is no proof-reader
she is no sympathetic
lady editor

a bad metaphor is immortal

a shoddy poet who has died
is a shoddy dead poet

a bore bores after death
a fool keeps up his foolish chatter
from beyond the grave

Tadeusz Rózewicz
translated from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski

The best intentions

Olav H. Hauge

A Poem Every Day

I want to write a poem every day,
every day.
That should be easy enough.
Browning kept at it, though
he rhymed and
counted beats
with bushy eyebrows.
So, a poem every day.
Something strikes you,
something happens,
something catches your notice.
– I get up. It’s light now.
I’ve the best intentions.
And see the bullfinch rising from the cherry tree,
where he’s stealing my buds.


translated from the Norwegian by Robin Fulton

from Olav H. Hauge, Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses, Translated by Robin Fulton, Anvil, 2003.

Four of the best

Bloodaxe has recently started publishing a new series of slim anthologies, each of which features generous selections from four poets. Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions 2, published in June, brings together four major European poets: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Miroslav Holub, Marin Sorescu and Tomas Tranströrmer. Each selection is prefaced by introductory materials – essays, interviews, profiles and commentaries by the poets. Below, as a sampler, is one poem from each of the selections.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Optimistic Little Poem

Now and then it happens
that somebody shouts for help
and somebody else jumps in at once
and absolutely gratis.

Here in the thick of the grossest capitalism
round the corner comes the shining fire brigade
and extinguishes, or suddenly
there’s silver in the beggar’s hat.

Mornings the streets are full
of people hurrying here and there without
daggers in their hands, quite equably
after milk or radishes.

As though in a time of deepest peace.

A splendid sight.

[1999] translated by David Constantine




Miroslav Holub

At last

At last we were masters of our heads,
masters of the city,
masters of our shadows
and our equinox.

Someone fired a shot to celebrate,
but only the kind with a cork
tied to a string.

And then we opened the cages
and ferrets ran out.
Out of the skull ran brown and white
spotted rats.
Out of the heart flew
blood-soaked cuckoos.

Out of the lungs
a condor rose, croaking with rage
because of the way his plumes had been squashed
in the bronchi.

Even a panther showed up,
on the loose from an obsolete circus,
starved, ready to eat
even the Emperor Claudius.

You could hear squeaks in the streets –
the groans and shouts
of expiring fiends.

And at last we were masters
of our new moon.

But we couldn’t step out
of our doorways;
someone might cast
a spell on us.

We might even
be hostage
to ourselves.

[1998] translated by Mirolsav Holub and David Young.

Marin Sorescu


The martyrs

Just the usual lion-fodder, no one
whose name will ever make the calendar,
anonymously rattling into death.

Fed to bestial mud, your bodies are
frail as flowers. The life that you enjoy
will have to be the next one.

To carry off a crucifixion, talent
is required. It takes skill, as well, to plunge a trident
deep in someone’s throat. The goggling
crowd awaits the miracle to follow,

which won’t, of course, take place.
There’s just am ugly pool of blood
where the ripped-to-pieces die. That’s it.
Matinees on Tuesday. Bring a friend.


translated by John Hartley Williams and Hilde Ottschofski (2001)

Tomas Tranströrmer

April and Silence

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.

The only thing that shines
is yellow flowers.

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.

[1996]

Translated by Robin Fulton.

In one of the pieces republished here, Tomas Tranströrmer’s acceptance speech of his Neustadt prize, the poet talk about the importance of poetry translation:

Let me sketch two ways of looking at a poem. You can perceive a poem as an expression of the life of the language itself, something organically grown out of the very language in which it is written – in my case, Swedish. A poem written by the Swedish language through me. Impossible to carry over into another language.
Another, and contrary, view is this: the poem as it is presented is a manifestation of another, invisible poem, written in a language behind the common languages. Thus, even the original version is a translation. A transfer into English or Malayalam is merely the invisible poem’s new attempt to come into being. The important thing is what happens between the text and the reader. Does a really committed reader ask if the written version he reads is the original or a translation?

Probably not, is the answer to that question. The reader consumes the text and doesn’t worry about its origins. But the consumption will be greatly aided by the quality of the text – that is, the quality of the translation. How well the translators gathered in this volume have pulled the invisible poems into the light is something you can judge for yourselves as you make your way through this interesting book.


Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions 2, edited by Neil Astley, 96 pp. £7.95 in UK.

Thomas Street Is Happening (just not today)

14 June 2006

To St Catherine's Park to do a reading for the Thomas Street Is Happening Festival. The brief is to read poems that in some way relate to this area, a project that appeals because I have written quite a few pieces set in this part of the city or in some way inspired by it. For years I lived opposite Christchurch Cathedral and now live down the road in the Tenters. I was, though, a bit wary about reading in St Catherine's Park. Park is probably a bit of an exaggeration; it is in fact the graveyard at the rear of St Catherine's Church in Thomas St, with the entrance in Thomas Court – not by any means a major thoroughfare. I used to drop in with the mutt to give him a bit of greenery until I realised it seemed to be used exclusively by dealers and users. I find it hard to visualise it being packed with poetry lovers on a Wednesday lunchtime. And indeed there is no-one in the park except for one of the organisers and two sound technicians who have brought an impressive bank of equipment in their Dublin City Council truck, which sits in the middle of the park, taking up about a third of it. The podium and mike are set up and waiting. It's five minutes after the advertised time and there's still no-one. A woman comes in and sits at the other end of the park. This is briefly interpreted as the act of an audience member and there is the real possibility of delivering the reading to a single distant auditor, though the sound equipment will safely carry my voice all around the Liberties. The woman, however, proves not to have come in search of poetry and faced with the prospect of enduring some, promptly flees the park.

The users who were evicted when the sound men came to set are out there somewhere, waiting for us to leave. There is some talk of reading to the organiser, or reading, as it were, speculatively, in the hope that people in the area, magnetised by my amplified poems, will pour into the park. Em, don't think so. Eventually the effort is abandoned and the cheerful soundmen – 'it's all the same to us, we get paid anyway' – load up the truck, and we all drift off. Through Pimlico and The Coombe and back home. I close this dismal chapter in the freelance life with a couple of the poems I'd intended to read, a kind of compensatory virtual reading, both featuring Peter Lewis, proctor of Christchurch Cathedral in the mid sixteenth century, some of whose words I've taken from the account ledger he left us.

After a Day in the History of the City


What vagabond bones
and you, too, Ivar the Boneless,
come together now
stench of what plagues
thriving again
and everywhere one turns
places of execution

Who should not prefer
to cross the river
and walk in procession
down the aisle of his own cathedral
with Samuel
Metropolitan of Oxmantown
wanting nothing from him but his title

or say, with Peter Lewis, cathedral proctor
Today came with his men Tady the hellier
to renew the slates
after the heavy snows of Christmas and the frost

(Selected Poems, Gallery Press, 2005)

Cathedral

I dyd byllyd and pyllyd with oke timber
I fyllyd hit the foundacion with roche lyme
The masons paid, the carters paid
the smith, the cooper, the casters of sand

What I really wanted was to stand
for once empty handed
by the vanishing spires and the bells
beautifully dumb, pealing quiet

as we waited, the world rinsed out of us
Stone by stone the city returned
these streets mapped by desire
the light that seemed to flare

from our own skin to press
the district towards us.
As if in a small rain of touch
we stood, and watched it grow

I leaned towards you, provoking
a dark bricked brewery palazzo
you kissed me and caused
black tramlines to loop and veer

When you stopped, they disappeared
So greedy the desire
the whole place seemed to fall
and my spirit, that had been light, was air

(Selected Poems, Gallery Press, 2005)