Hölderlin: Hälfte des Lebens

Another Hölderlin version  . . .There are many versions of this poem in English, but my favourite translation is Kathleen Jamie's Scots version.



Hälfte des Lebens

Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.


Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein,
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.

Midlife

Yellow with pears
Heavy with wild roses
The land hangs in the lake
Magnificent swans
Drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
In the holy sober water

Where will I find
Flowers this winter
And where will I find
The sunshine and shade
of the earth? Speechless and cold
The walls stand, and the weathercocks
Rattle in the wind

In lovely blue

'In lieblicher Bläue…’

(After Hölderlin)

In lovely blue
the steeple flowers
the swallows cry around it
and pouring
                heartstopping blue

The metal roof
glints in the sun
and the weathercock
struts and crows in his
high silence

As in a still life
everything holds its shape
every edge
sharpens in the light

A man comes down the steps
under the clock
wearing the hour
like a sculpted coat
and the windows of the bell tower
are like gates on miracles
so close still
to the forest, and pure

The mind swings on difference
and is made serious
so simple all of this, so sacred
we would have to be saints
to describe it
or know such kindliness
to draw near


Is God unknown
or clear as the sky?
He must be clear
and this our measure
to live with our clutter
still lightly, like poets
on the earth
           doch dichterisch
           wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde


The dark night
templed with stars
after all
           if I can say it like this the
no purer than man
made in His image


Is there a measure on earth?
There’s none.
               For never the creator restrains
The genius of the maker
can’t prevent the thunder
Flowers astonish
in the sun
but the eye lights
on other creatures
more astonishing, more beautiful


Does it please God
if our hearts and bodies bleed
does it please Him
if we disappear?
This much I know
the soul must stay pure
or the eagle will perch on the Almighty
mouthing songs of praise
and the voices
of every bird in creation

            Du schönes Bächlein
                     du rollest so klar   
                           wie das Auge der Gottheit
                           durch die Milchstraße

The little stream
pours clearly
clear as the eye of a god
piercing the Milky Way


These tears yet
I see joy flower
in every shape created
and with good reason
I see it now in the solitariness
of two doves in the churchyard
But the laugher of men saddens me
I should like to be a comet
quick as a bird, all fiery flowers
and pure in heart, pure as a child
Who could look for more?


A serious spirit
drifts in the garden
this joyous virtue deserves her praise
There, by the columns
A beautiful girl should cover
her head in myrtle  
to show her nature
and her love

If someone looks in the mirror
           and sees his image there
Look in the mirror
the painted man
who stares back is you
A man’s image has eyes
but the moon has light
              and Oedipus has an eye too many
The sufferings of man
are beyond description
so much in this world
is unspeakable
And what do I feel now
when I think of you?


Like a continent washed away, like Asia
like Oedipus, like Hercules
To be alive under the sun is to suffer,
the sun that takes men by the hand and tempts them
          Sohn Laios, armer Fremdling in Griechenland!
          Leben ist Tod, und Tod ist auch ein Leben
Son of Laios, poor stranger in Greece
Life is death, and death too is a kind of life. . .

Jack Gilbert

Painting by Jack Richard Smith  


I was sorry to hear of Jack Gilbert's death recently. Gilbert was one of those poets who are famous for not being famous. For most of his life he operated below the radar of critical attention, but this was by choice. After winning  the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his first book he lived a modest and peripatetic life, travelling around Europe and spending periods in England, Denmark and Greece. But there was more to his relative invisibility than that. He was an old-fashioned kind of poet, a muse poet who wrote obsessively about the women in his life -- the poems he wrote for his dead lover Michiko are among his most powerful. And he didn’t produce at the regular intervals reputation demands. He took twenty years to produce his second book, Monolithos (1982) and only published a further two books, The Great Fires (1994) and Refusing Heaven (2005) which brought him some late recognition, winning him the National Book Critics Circle Award.Bloodaxe published Transgression: Selected Poems in 2006. Here are two poems which can be found in that book, the first forseeing the disappearance, in him, of his birthplace, the second probably his best-known poem.

They Will Put My Body into the Ground

They will put my body into the ground.
Chemistry will have its way for a time,
and then large beetles will come.
After that, the small beetles. Then
the disassembling. After that, the Puccini
will dwindle the way light goes
from the sea. Even Pittsburgh will
vanish, leaving a greed tough as winter.

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.


Listen to Jack Gilbert read his poem here

The sadness of God

The sadness of God

('Tristesse de Dieu', Jules Supervielle)

Just as when it all began

I see you come and go 

on the trembling earth,

with one great difference:

my work is no longer mine:

I gave it all to you.

But if you're my people

misfortune is your own

and beyond my help.

All I could provide

to prove my warmth

was your tears, your strength.

The ache in your soul

is what’s left of me.

It was all I could do.

I can’t help the mother

whose son will die

but I can offer you light,

candles of hope.

If it were any different

do you think the narrow cot

would feel the weight

of the sickly child?

It’s as if my work

was someone else’s.

All that I made

slips farther away.

The stream that flows

down the mountain

has no thought of returning.

I have as much to say to you

as the potter to his pot:

one is deaf, the other 

speechless before his work. 

I can see you careening

towards terrible precipices

but I can’t point them out

let alone help you avoid them.

Like orphans in the the snow

you must save yourselves.

Songs of the earth (1): Yannis Ritsos

 

The Meaning of Simplicity

I hide behind simple things so you’ll find me;

if you don’t find me, you’ll find the things,

you’ll touch what my hand has touched

our hand-prints will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen

like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way because of what I’m saying to you),

it lights up the empty house and the house’s kneeling silence–

always the silence remains kneeling.

Every word is a doorway

to a meeting, one often cancelled,

and that’s when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting.

(Translated by Edmund Keeley, published in The Greek Poets: From Homer to the Present, Norton, 2010)

Yannis Ritsos’ output as a poet was enormous. He published more than a hundred collections of poetry, and often wrote with great speed, sometimes producing three collections in a single year. Such protean fluency can interfere with the reception of a poet in his own culture, and it can also inhibit or distort the reception in translation. How do you choose? How much of the work can endure? Can we trust the judgement as well as the achievement of the translators? These are, of course, impossible questions to answer for those not immersed in his work and its Greek contexts. We can only respond to what we see and get a small sense of the greater project, a whiff of what made him such a vital and uncomfortable presence.

A Rebel Act: Michael Hartnett’s Farewell to English

Pat Walsh
Mercier Press
€14.99 (PB)
ISBN: 9781856359672

In 1974 Michael Hartnett made the decision to take his leave of English and from then to write in Irish only. Or did he? Well, he wouldn’t necessarily stop writing in English – if a poem presented itself in that language it would have to be accommodated. But he wouldn’t publish any more English poems. Ciaran Carson’s reaction, reviewing the volume which announced the decision, A Farewell to English, was to suggest, in a review quoted in Pat Walsh’s book, that the volume might have been more usefully titled A Farewell to Published Poems Written in the English Language. A number of things are at play here: on the one hand a decision – complicated, emotional, theatrical – to effectively abandon not just a language, but his achievement and potential development as a poet in that language, and to attempt to recreate himself as a poet in Irish, a language he would have to study hard to master. To have announced an intention to become a bilingual poet would have fulfilled the need to pay due homage to the Gaelic tradition and the side of his own sensibility that was enmeshed in the Irish language, but the unequal relationship between the two languages and cultures don’t easily accommodate such to-ing and fro-ing. Walsh quotes Eoghan Ó Tuairisc’s analysis of the predicament:
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'Legacies'

Carol Rumens writes about a poem of mine, 'Legacies', in The Guardian