Yang Chu (c. 350 B.C.) wept at the cross-roads because whichever road he chose would lead to a new cross-roads and multiply the chances of having lost his way.
(poets and exponential sadness)
Yang Chu (c. 350 B.C.) wept at the cross-roads because whichever road he chose would lead to a new cross-roads and multiply the chances of having lost his way.
(poets and exponential sadness)
(the) two types of poet:
those who forget and those who keep re-membering.
for instance, Tu Fu’s crows:
in his later poems:
(“my old friends”)
in his last poems:
an endnote:
(“Li Po died as the legend says he died: out drunk in a boat, he fell into a river and drowned trying to embrace the moon.”)
a translator’s endnote from The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, trans. David Hinton
(to love from the distance of memory, from the distance of images)
(“Here lost—I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat”)
from “The Letter of Lord Chandos”, Hofmannsthal, trans. Hottinger, and the Sterns
(“[am] loath to scare away the celestial shudders that still linger about the shrubbery in this neighbourhood!”
(same, bro, same))
(“developed it to a high[(], absurdly high skill[)]”)
Rilke seemed in some sense to be an anachronism in the Paris of the twenties. There is an intriguing incident recounted by Stefan Zweig in his memoirs, of Rilke attending a function and entering into a monologue whose depth and sensitivity, perhaps too onerous for the occasion, served only to alienate the other guests, who one by one walked awkwardly away, leaving the poet virtually addressing himself, an alienated solitary figure. Zweig also recounts an earlier sighting of Rilke, when he chanced upon the poet riding the top of an omnibus, as if in a trance, curiously out of place amongst the other passengers. The sight of Rilke awkwardly embedded in this modern vehicle, silently passing in anonymity and unaware of his friend’s presence, had clearly touched Zweig.
— Will Stone, from his translator’s introduction to Rilke in Paris
[…]
Of course, I tried the usual ploy:
I told myself that they were all dead;
that their sufferings long ago came to an end,
but I knew all along I could never avoid
the truth I’d discovered when I first
engaged with texts: the self-evident fact
of there being no reader nor subject-matter
only images and feelings in a sort of eternity.
— Gerald Murnane, “Green Shadows”, from “The Still-Breathing Author”
Source: sydneyreviewofbooks.com
to be lost then found again
my whole life has been that way
it was good to sit beside the sea
to let the waves wash over me
my whole life has been that way
to be lost then found again
to let the waves wash over me
it was good to sit beside the sea
to let the waves wash over me
it was good to sit beside the sea
to be lost then found again
my whole life has been that way
it was good to sit beside the sea
to let the waves wash over me
my whole life has been that way
to be lost then found again
— Sándor Weöres, “Dice Game”, trans. William Jay Smith
There are blows in life, so powerful … I don’t know!
Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them,
the undertow of everything suffered
welled up in the soul … I don’t know!
They are few; but they are … They open dark trenches
in the fiercest face and in the strongest back.
Perhaps they are the colts of barbaric Attilas;
or the black heralds sent to us by Death.
They are the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,
of some adored faith blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloodstained blows are the crackling of
bread burning up at the oven door.
And man … Poor … poor! He turns his eyes, as
when a slap on the shoulder summons us;
turns his crazed eyes, and everything lived
wells up, like a pool of guilt, in his look.
There are blows in life, so powerful … I don’t know!
— César Vallejo, “The Black Heralds”, trans. Clayton Eshleman
See here the tulip, and see there the roses,
Where in the park Love sports beneath the trees,
Sing in the long rose-red, unruffled eves
Under the bronze and marble’s massive poses.
Gaily at night have sung the flower-beds
On which the slanting moonbeams pirouette,
And gusts of wind blow heavy, desolate,
Troubling the white dream of the lonely birds.
See here the tulip, and see there the roses
And lilies dusk-empurpled, crystalline,
Gleam sadly in the sun that now declines;
And now the pain of things and creatures closes.
My shattered love is bruised and raw; but see,
The quivering nerves grow still, the hurt reposes.
And the lily now, the tulip and the roses
Watch my soul bathe in memories, and weep.
— Émile Nelligan, “Autumn Evenings”, trans. P. F. Widdows.
Today I wore a
warm red blood
today men love me
a woman smiled at me
a girl gave me a seashell
a boy gave me a hammerToday I kneel on the sidewalk
and nail the naked white feet of the passers-by
to the pavement tiles
they are all in tears
but no one is frightened
all remain in the places to which I had come in time
they are all in tears
but they gaze at the celestial advertisements
and at a beggar who sells hot cross buns
in the skyTwo men whisper
what is he doing is he nailing our hearts?
yes he is nailing our hearts
well then he is a poet
— Miltos Sa©htouris, “The Gifts”, trans. Kimon Friar.
The cry of the stag
Is so loud in the empty
Mountains that an echo
Answers him as though
It were a doe.
— Ōtomo no Yakamochi, from Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Japanese.
“No one reads Nichita Stănescu” is a five-word poem; it is a lament, my lament, but I need not cry it in his homeland of Romania. There, he is revered by everyone, and his poems are not merely read but prayed.
[The Romanian poet] Nichita Danilov recalls Stănescu being feted with an introduction suited for a demigod: “Remember, my friends. Take a good look at this man. He is a genius. Rejoice that you were able to meet him! That you lived at the same time as he did!”(SC, 307)
He was born on March 31, 1933, in Ploieşti. During WWII, the city’s groundbreaking oil refinery was taken over by the Nazis and eventually crippled by US bombers—“people dying in flames, the smell of burning everywhere, screaming, the indecent redness of split flesh” are some of the horrors that riddled through Stănescu’s childhood. His account of failing the first grade, because “he’d found it unusually difficult to imagine that the uttered utterance and the spoken speech exist and that they can be written”, serves as a good primer for his approach to poetry (“the ritual of writing on air”), and it describes a bewilderment toward language that every writer would benefit from experiencing and cultivating.
In 1952, Stănescu moved to Bucharest, where he studied Romanian, linguistics, philosophy, and literature. After university, he worked as an editor for various Romanian literary periodicals. His writings earned him the Herder Prize in 1975, and he was nominated for the 1979 Nobel Prize in Literature, which ended in the hands of Greek poet Odysseas Elytis—that same year, Max Frisch, Léopold Senghor, and Borges were also in contention.
Stănescu preferred togetherness over solitude; he married three times, smoked, drank heavily, resided mainly in the houses of friends, and could be found extemporizing poems in bars with his audience eagerly scrambling to make transcriptions.
‘Gutenberg flattened words out,’ delcared Stănescu in a Belgrade interview, ‘but words exist in space … Words are spatialized. They are not dead, like a book. They are alive, between me and you, me and you, me and you. They live; they are spoken, spatialized, and received.’(SC, 308)
During his fiftieth year of life, the long-suffered illness of his liver worsened, prompting a trip to the hospital. The doctor, while attempting to revive him, asked Stănescu if he could breathe. “I breathe”, he said, and those were his last words, written in air, written in pneuma: “am respira”.
He left behind a prodigious body of work that includes not only his diverse poetry, but also essays, and Romanian translations of the Serbian-language poets Adam Puslojic and Vasko Popa.
Collections of Stănescu’s poetry in English translation:
Stănescu “tears with [things’] tears”, because “[e]verything on earth / at one time or another needs to cry”, so he cries for those unable, for “the still unborn about the dead”, for the everyday, for Language. As such, he belongs in the same league as Rilke, Vallejo, Celan: poets for whom “[poetry] is [often] the weeping itself”; poets who do not simply play with words but, rather, who accumulate a poetic charge until it arcs out and brilliantly sears fresh paths through language—paths that become new homes for Being.
With English translations of Stănescu’s poems back in circulation, now is the time for you to embrace his words with your ribs: by breathing them in through your eyes, ears, skin.
‘A poet is greater,’ [Stănescu] wrote, ‘when those that read him don’t discover the poet but themselves.’(OA, 10)
(Photos: please see their captions—unfortunately, I could not find credits for all of them, and there are a lot more photographs on the extremely popular Facebook page dedicated to Nichita Stănescu. Also, this article could not have been possible without the essays and translations by Popescu, Irwin, Avasilichioaei, and Cotter; where appropriate, I noted, either in superscript or in tooltips, their initials and their book’s page number.)
(via writersnoonereads)
When we saw each other, the air
between us quickly tossed aside
the image of those trees, indifferent and bare,
it had before allowed to come inside.
Oh, we rushed, calling our names,
together,—thus did we quicken
that time was pressed between our chests
and the hour fell into minutes, stricken.
I wished to hold you in my arms
as I hold the body of childhood, in the past,
with its unrepeated dyings.
And I wished to embrace you with my ribs.
— Nichita Stănescu, “The Embrace”, trans. Thomas C. Carlson
(Images: “Embracing Couple” (via egonschiele) and The Embrace by Egon Schiele)
Tell me, if I caught you one day
and kissed the sole of your foot,
wouldn’t you limp a little then,
afraid to crush my kiss?…
— Nichita Stănescu, “A Poem” from Bas-Relief with Heroes, trans. Thomas Carlson
Source: romanianvoice.com
I am an editor at Writers No One Reads and also the Technical Manager of Asymptote Journal.
This tumblr is mainly a commonplace book.
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