Long did I journey into exile
banished by Augustus
to lose my life hour by hour.
The ship was already thinning out, day by day,
until it only just touched the waves.
The only thing of any weight was my heart.
It sank like the anchor
at this Black Sea coast.
Scudding clouds sought to wipe out my name,
the gibberish spoken to silence my home tongue.
But my Epistulae insisted on being written –
these shards of sorrow that shimmered.
I am the tyrant Ardiaius
who was flayed
and impaled on a gorse bush.
But my end was so precisely etched
by a wily champion
that it gained features of a beginning..
And my gaze is so fixed
on what man can do to his fellow-man
that the world will never escape me.
The thoughts swarming inside the helmet
find their way into the heads of the living.
Réveil
Partout s’entremêlent, brouillés,
Des rayons troubles et mouillés
A l’ombre mal évanouie.
L’aurore se réveille en larmes;
On entend s’égoutter les charmes
Au bord des routes éblouies.
Au-dessus des orges violettes
Et rosées, un chant d’alouette
Éclate rapide et vivace;
Et, venant des lointains perdus,
Un son de cloche répandu
Moire, en larges ondes, l’espace.
Awakening
The blurring sun’s rays everywhere
Opaque and moist, twine in the air
With shadows only faintly there.
The dawn awakens full of tears;
The dripping of its charms one hears
From dazzled roadsides in one’s ears.
Above the barley mauve and rose
The skylark’s song just grows and grows
and then vivaciously explodes.
And, coming from some distant place,
A chiming bell spreads out its trace,
Makes waves that shimmer out of space.
Deep in the darkness of the cave
I painted a bison on the wall
while the woman held up the torch.
The red and the brown
forced out the arched back –
and my hand took fright.
The beast gave a snort
and lowered its head towards me.
It’s a gale-ridden day.
We’ve rowed till the whitewashed walls turned black
but found a way back
to you, to me.
I raise myself slightly so sweaty skin
rustlingly slides off skin
and nestle my heart close to yours:
an earthenware plate tipping over another.
The window is open: May is blue.
In the beam above us death advances
the thousandth part of an inch, with a snap.
But the rosefinch on the naked branch
sings and sings away.
The down on its breast fluffs in the wind.
So much greater its song is
than its quavering body!
Ikaros' fall
Ingen såg när han föll.
Ingen vet vad han kände.
Ingen vet om hans jubel att våga
var undergången värd.
Detta att tillhöra livet,
detta att mista livet,
det skall ingen veta.
Det var bara hans.
Och det som hände sedan
var väl ingenting värt.
Inte mer än dagssländans väg över vattnen.
Vingar som vingar - och alla
skall falla.
Aldrig var kvällen så vacker som nu
i solnedgången:
havet skimrande, solens smycke lysande,
skeppet som far förbi.
Alltid far skeppet förbi
mot morgondagen.
Ingen såg vad som hände.
Ingen har tid i livet.
Fiskaren har så bråttom. Han vet,
att i solnedgången biter fisken bäst.
Och med ryggen mot havet står
herden försänkt i bön.
Han har ingenting märkt.
Och bonden som plöjer ser ingenting
utom fåran han följer.
Alla hade så bråttom.
Kvällen var klar och vacker,
och det var ingen som märkte
Ikaros' fall.
Icarus’ fall
Nobody saw him fall.
Nobody knows what he felt.
Nobody knows if his exultation at daring
was worth his perishing.
All this about belonging to life,
about losing life
nobody is to know.
This was his alone.
And what happened later
was probably of no account.
No more than the mayfly’s
path across the waters.
Wings as wings – and all
shall fall.
The evening was never as beautiful as now
at sunset:
the sea glittering, the sun’s jewel gleaming,
the ship that is passing.
The ship always passing
towards the morrow.
Nobody saw what happened.
Nobody has any time in life.
The fisherman is in such a hurry. He knows
that the fish bite best at sunset.
And with his back to the sea the
shepherd stands deep in prayer.
He has noticed nothing.
And the farmer ploughing sees nothing
except the furrow he is following.
Everybody was in such a hurry,
The evening was clear and beautiful,
and there was nobody who noticed
Icarus’ fall.
La source
La source, dont bleuit si mollement l’haleine,
Entre la bourdaine et les coudres,
Et jamais lasse, avec un bruit chantant, de sourdre,
Où parfois pleut du ciel la lumière sereine,
J’aime y conduire lentement, aux soirs d’été,
Parmi les bois aux vertes roches,
Pour les mieux abreuver, mes grands bœufs déjoutés,
Et dont la corne torse aux rameaux bas s’accroche.
J’aime à voir se pencher leurs deux mufles ardents
Au niveau de la source bleue,
Où leur souffle se mêle et frissonne, pendant
Que d’un caillou mouillé s’envole un hoche-queue.
The spring
The spring – which gentle breathing causes to turn blue –
Flows among buckthorn and the hazel trees
And never tires of welling up with loud reprise,
Where from the sky serene light weeps like dew.
It’s where I love to lead on summer evenings, first
Through woods with rocks of mossy green,
My sparred–with mighty oxen, keen to slake their thirst,
Their crooked horns now tangled in low reeds half-seen.
I love to watch their gleaming muzzles slowly sink
And touch the spring’s light blue at play,
With which their breath will mix and quiver as they drink,
While from a small moist stone a wagtail flies away.
The rabbit motionless at its hole in the grass
like an etching by maestro Albrecht.
As if the meek had been posted
to guard the path to the lower world.
Scare it off! The land without matter
belongs here around my tailor’s cottage.
Nature is an open book
where the writing conceals the real writing –
in the opinion of the great mystic. Ergo:
cut out what is randomly written with scissors,
especially the white soundless butterflies
which entice the lavender to flower.
The sky that seems to be about to burst
is held together for one hour still by the
thoughtless stitches of the swallows. Rip them out!
Perhaps though the strength of the landscape comes
from the sea breathed in the tops of the ash-trees.
Cut out the sea too! And the trees.
Cut out even the thought of sea and tree.
Finally the evening is silent and white
and everything that is
is.
In the midst of life this Sunday:
weightless snow, a silent sermon.
The naked tree gleams with bullfinches.
The only sound existing in the world
is the rustling of pecked-out seeds
plummeting down through the branches.
Today’s text is red smudges
brighter that the blood of Christ
and seed-husks falling slowly, slowly.
Death slows down its steps.
No murmuring yet among the clouds.
Five or six Sixth Form students
who feigned a music society
to loan records from the educational association
was an irresistible temptation.
When you put on my Concerto for Orchestra
I entered the untidy room
and watched you all get up,
frightened at Bartók’s visit.
You stared at my 49 kilos,
my down-folded soft-leather boots,
but evaded my eyes
as if dazzled by welding flames.
I sat silent for what was about an hour
and raised a warming hand
if anyone tried to ask a question.
Then I abruptly got up and left.
Only in that way
could I remain among you.
Forgetting is voracious.
The one who turns his back on the past
will be hollowed out from behind without noticing it.
Without seeing how what has been and is to be
exist here now and claim us.
You who rest with your head against my arm
while conversing intimately in the dark
still live in a distant city
with some other man. So much longer
we must go on searching for each other!
In the meantime I continue working
on my book about the anatomy of forgetting.
Note how the mirror has been emptied of memories.
When on a June day I was struck
by a pancreas going to pieces
the hospital walls became grey paper
the nurses scurrying ashes
and the air crematorium smoke.
But it framed a miracle:
In my hour of greatest need I saw –
what seemed to be a rowing boat
that was slowly lowered into the room.
It smelt strongly of pitch.
And wanted to take me on board
to be rowed past sleeping waters
to the place where the pike are waiting.
Gongula
Oh Gongula, I have the snippets of my yearnings
a whole eternity and thousand hour-long journeys
from sunken cheeks that emanate the scent of grass,
your high-pitched laughter, fragile as is new-blown glass,
the artless grace of your two lotus eyes so massive
and fluttering smooth gait, your poignantly impassive
existence on a day drenched by the sun once more,
which your unfolding, you and you alone then saw,
and from the transience of all your words so chilling
which on the seven lyre strings through the song went drilling,
now re-discovered in the hope-destroying sand
of a quite empty, sun-scorched and unlikely land
and excavated with chilled instruments, unfolding
with nails that hoped for you. And I now stand here holding
the crumbling fragments of your skin and memory
in hands that are too large by far and loss is free
to gnaw at edges of the lightly, palely written
papyrus. The sole remnant of your song unbitten,
is, bar your name, a fist of stuttering great woe
in partial interrupted statements: ‘Grave.’ ‘Oh no.’
‘The most.’ ‘Because unhappy.’ ‘Said I.’ ‘A quite blinding
insistent wish to die, a pathway to be finding
to dew-encrusted banks down by the Acheron.’
Before the song began your life perhaps was gone.
Oh Gongula, the flakes of broken sighs once uttered
about the voices of blue butterflies that fluttered
in Lesbos’ young spring skies, when every wind was blond
still as the song, and then your peplos, caught by song,
just danced, as did the wind, round you, round every gesture
your Alma Tadema-like staring in this vesture
as, ’gainst a column, you leant like a statue there
of tantalising bronze that twirls a lock of hair,
as if for history you simply stood there waiting
and sombre, ancient Grecian thoughts were contemplating,
I now hold in my clumsy hands in the large hall
of Berlin’s institute and would need to know all
the language of dry forms to read you through their phrasing.
And of your being, which folk painfully were praising
which bore your name ere you were mourned there’s but your name,
that’s catalogued and skilfully transcribed, the same
reposes in card-index boxes and editions.
You’re fleshed out with the aid of metrical positions.
Your filing card says restoration’s overdue.
Oh Gongula, your name echoes the loss of you.
The greatest ever poet came to your assistance.
In Sappho’s song your life has gained a new existence
So after Sappho’s death you were by no means dead.
It can well be a seaman’s lips your name have said
or murmured, sailing all the way from Mytilene
to Corinth or Priene, somewhere in Cyrene
at some small feast perhaps they sang about your fame
or on Aegina once some fisher hummed your name.
But time can even so erase immortal verses,
for what takes place, takes place: and each event coerces.
A man called Caesar set the city all alight
and old papyri gave the fire yet greater might
with everything consumed by flames, as too the yearning
of Sappho and myself for cheeks no more returning
and naked feet that walked on marble, cool as snow.
And many centuries past your one long ago
you died a second time for good – the fragments lying
in my two hands can only emphasise your dying
because they form a constant memory that you
have been forgotten. But I know I’ve known you too,
oh Gongula. I hear the echo of your shadow
and see that you beget the spring just like a swallow.
So I tear up this verse that time will now reclaim
and hope that what perhaps survives contains your name.