Re: poetry thread

[Guest]

Contra Jaime Gil de Biedma
(de Jaime Gil de Biedma)

De qué sirve, quisiera yo saber, cambiar de piso,
dejar atrás un sótano más negro
que mi reputación -y ya es decir-,
poner visillos blancos
y tomar criada,
renunciar a la vida de bohemio,
si vienes luego tú, pelmazo,
embarazoso huésped, memo vestido con mis trajes,
zángano de colmena, inútil, cacaseno,
con tus manos lavadas,
a comer en mi plato y a ensuciar la casa?

Te acompañan las barras de los bares
últimos de la noche, los chulos, las floristas,
las calles muertas de la madrugada
y los ascensores de luz amarilla
cuando llegas, borracho,
y te paras a verte en el espejo
la cara destruida,
con ojos todavía violentos
que no quieres cerrar. Y si te increpo,
te ríes, me recuerdas el pasado
y dices que envejezco.

Podría recordarte que ya no tienes gracia.
Que tu estilo casual y que tu desenfado
resultan truculentos
cuando se tienen más de treinta años,
y que tu encantadora
sonrisa de muchacho soñoliento
-seguro de gustar- es un resto penoso,
un intento patético.
Mientras que tú me miras con tus ojos
de verdadero huérfano, y me lloras
y me prometes ya no hacerlo.

Si no fueses tan puta!
Y si yo no supiese, hace ya tiempo,
que tú eres fuerte cuando yo soy débil
y que eres débil cuando me enfurezco...
De tus regresos guardo una impresión confusa
de pánico, de pena y descontento,
y la desesperanza
y la impaciencia y el resentimiento
de volver a sufrir, otra vez más,
la humillación imperdonable
de la excesiva intimidad.

A duras penas te llevaré a la cama,
como quien va al infierno
para dormir contigo.
Muriendo a cada paso de impotencia,
tropezando con muebles
a tientas, cruzaremos el piso
torpemente abrazados, vacilando
de alcohol y de sollozos reprimidos.
Oh innoble servidumbre de amar seres humanos,
y la más innoble
que es amarse a sí mismo!




This is the only translation I've found:

Against Jaime Gil de Biedma
by Jaime Gil de Biedma

why should i, i'd like to know, change flat,
leave behind a basement blacker
than my reputation -and that's saying something-
put up white net curtains
and get a maid,
give up this bohemian life
if later you come, twat
embarassing guest, dickhead dressed in my suit
beehive drone, useless, shithead
with your washed hands
to eat from my plate and dirty my house

the bars of the bars acompany you
the last of the night, the pimps, the flirts
the dead streets of the early morming
and lifts with yellow light
when you arrive, drunk,
and you stop to look at yourself in the mirror
your face destroyed
with still violent eyes
thet you dont want to shut. And if i tell you off,
you laugh, you remind me of the past
and you say i'm getting old.

I could remind you you're not funny any more.
That your casual style and your cool
seem bad tempered
when you're more than thirty
and that your charming
young man's dreamy smile
-really lovely- is the sad left-over,
a crap try.
While you look at me with your eyes
of true orphan, and you cry to me
and you promise not to do it any more.

If you weren't such a slag!
And if I knew, ages ago,
that you are strong while i am weak
and that you are weak when i get mad...
I have a blurry impression of when you come back
of panic, of sadness and unhappiness,
and the desperation
and the impatience and the resentment
of suffering again, one more time,
the unforgivable humilliation
of excessive privacy

i can hardly take you to bed,
like someone who is going to hell
to sleep with you.
Dying with each impotent step,
banging into the furniture
fumbling, we cross the flat
hugging each other ungainly, hesitating
from alcohol and from repressed tears
Oh ignoble servitude loving human beings
and the most ignoble of all
that is loving oneself!

[Guest]

Y después

Los laberintos
que crea el tiempo,
se desvanecen.

(Sólo queda
el desierto.)

El corazón
fuente del deseo,
se desvanece.

(Sólo queda
el desierto.)

La ilusión de la aurora
y los besos,
se desvanecen.

Sólo queda
el desierto.
Un ondulado
desierto.


And afterwards

The labyrinths
that time creates
vanish.

(Only the desert
remains.)

The heart,
fountain of desire,
vanishes.

(Only the desert
remains.)

The illusion of dawn
and kisses
vanish.

Only the desert
remains.
Rippling
desert.

by Federico García Lorca

[Guest]

La Casa Del Sol

Oye un canto mi corazón
me pongo a llorar
me lleno de dolor

Nos vamos entre flores
Tenemos que dejar esta tierra
Estamos prestados unos a otros

Iremos a la casa del sol

No es verdad que se vive aquí,
Aquí en la tierra
Un sueño es.

El oro se rompe
El jade se quiebra
La pluma de Quetzal se desgarra
Como una pintura, nos borraremos

Iremos a la casa del sol


translation:

I hear a song in my heart
and I start to cry
I fill up with pain

We are walking amongst a field of flowers
And we have to leave this Earth.
We are only borrowing each other.

We will go to the house of the Sun.

It is not true that we live here,
here on Earth.
It is only a dream.

Gold will be destroyed.
Jade will break.
The feather of Quetzal will tears.
Like a painting, we will be erased.
We will go to the house of the sun.


hmmm I've found this version on youtube but it seems like a combination of several ballads... telling from the ones I've read in Spanish ("Ballads of the Lords of New Spain")

If I trust the internet, the author would be Nezahualcoyotl, a philosopher, warrior, architect, poet and ruler (tlatoani) of the city-state of Texcoco in pre-Columbian Mexico.

[Woo]

I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When sorrow walked with me.

-Robert Browning Hamilton

[eddie]

John Keats – autumnal idealist or trenchant social commentator?

Traditionally regarded as a bucolic idyll, Keats's ode 'To Autumn' has a hitherto unsuspected political edge, say scholars

Alison Flood

guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 March 2012 12.16 GMT


Was a burning sense of social injustice, rather than soothing walks by the river Itchen, the shaping influence behind Keats's ode To Autumn? Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The bucolic calm of John Keats's "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" hides a searing criticism of contemporary landowners, according to a group of Aberystwyth academics.

The 23-year-old Keats spent time in Winchester in the summer of 1819, planning to finish his poem "Lamia" but instead composing "To Autumn". The ode, with its idyllic images of ripening fruit, drowsing workers and a maturing sun, was published the following year, and was originally thought to have been inspired by the poet's regular walks through the meadows by the river Itchen.

However, after analysing maps and records from the time, Professor Richard Marggraf Turley of Aberystwyth University and fellow researchers Jayne Archer and Howard Thomas believe it was the view from St Giles's Hill that informed the poem – giving it a previously unsuspected political edge.

"We found a walking guide which Keats would have used, and at the front there is an engraving of the view from St Giles's Hill," said Marggraf Turley. "People have looked at it for years, but it suddenly occurred to us that what looked like shading was actually a ploughed furrow."

They looked through archives to discover the leasehold for the field at the time, and discovered the city-facing slopes had just been appropriated for corn by the banker Nicholas Waller, who had been buying as much of Winchester's grain-producing land as possible during a period of record bread prices.

Keats, they knew, had written in a letter to his sister Fanny about climbing St Giles's Hill; the scenes of harvesting, labour, fruit and flowers that he records in the poem would all have been visible from the elevated vantage point. "The scenes don't make sense if he was by the water meadows – if he was on the hill then suddenly it is no longer a series of unconnected images," said Marggraf Turley.

The poem was written at a time of national debate around fair wages for labour as bread prices spiralled; Keats's mentor, Leigh Hunt, had railed against the practice of financial and leasehold consolidation. With this background in mind, the suggestion that Keats was looking at actual fields, rather than writing about an imagined idyll of autumnal perfection, also sheds new light on the labourer in the poem, "sitting careless on a granary floor", or "on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep".

"Suddenly the scenes of idleness in the poem seem to look more interesting," said Marggraf Turley. "It's not a charming scene of a sleeping labourer, but a worn-out labourer who can't afford to buy the corn he is harvesting."

Keats, Marggraf Turley said, is seen as a "transcendental genius, interested in the big themes – love and death and art. But we're saying no. He looked at things with an accurate poet's eye, and was able to record acute human struggle … We're suggesting that To Autumn is not a bucolic idyll, but a far angrier poem. It's been seen as a poem of solace and comfort, but a far more interesting Keats appears when you realise he was a young man who was plugged in, who was looking straight on at what he viewed as exploitation."

And the corn fields today? Buried, said Margraff Turley, under a multi-storey car park.

[eddie]

My hero: John Keats by Andrew Motion

'It's hard – no, it's impossible – to think of another writer who suffered and achieved so much in such a short time at such an early age'

Andrew Motion

guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 April 2012 22.47 BST


'The man we discover is fierce in his dislikes, generous in his friendships, passionate in his loves.' Photograph: Mary Evans/Rue des Archives/PVDE

The story of John Keats has an irresistible pathos: the humble origins; the early death of his father; his mother's disappearance, reappearance, illness and (again) early death; the noble labours as a trainee doctor; the even more noble aspirations as a poet; the peerlessly precocious flowering (he was 23 when he wrote most of the great poetry); the appalling illness; the courage with which he endured it; the tragic journey to Rome; the miserable end. It's hard – no, it's impossible – to think of another writer who suffered and achieved so much in such a short time at such an early age.

These things alone are enough to make Keats seem heroic. But while they instantly catch our attention and keep our sympathy, they can also detain us in a way that blinds us to the actual texture of his personality – his everyday self; the self that lived beneath and within the tragic narrative of his circumstances.

This is where his real heroism resides. We can see it, of course, in the poems – in their profound concern for the deepest questions in life (what is suffering for? How can art help us enjoy and endure? How much does love weigh compared to death? ). We can find it even more clearly in his letters, which by their nature allow us to hear Keats's speaking voice – because their comparative informality encourages him to produce a different kind of immediacy.

The man we discover is fierce in his dislikes, generous in his friendships, passionate in his loves, funny, generous, big-hearted, clever, compassionate, brilliant in his apprehensions about the business of writing, seriously good fun and marvellously well able to combine what we would call highbrow seriousness with japes, larks and capers. If that's not a heroic combination I don't know what is.

[blue moon]

Keats' "Ode on Indolence"
(from: http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/odeonindolence.html)

Ode on Indolence

This ode was written in spring 1819, between mid-March and early June. On 19 March Keats wrote of his 'sort of temper indolent' in a letter to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana. And on 9 June, he told one Miss Jeffrey that 'the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence'. The ode was first published in 1848.

In the letter to George and Georgiana, Keats described his indolence: 'This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.' The ode itself is the least well-known of the six great odes of 1819. Most critics consider it the least accomplished of the group.

The epigraph is from Matthew 6:28.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'They toil not, neither do they spin.'

One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp'd serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced:
They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.

How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?
How came ye muffled in so hush a masque?
Was it a silent deep-disguised plot
To steal away, and leave without a task
My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb'd my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower.
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but - nothingness?

A third time pass'd they by, and, passing, turn'd
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burn'd
And ached for wings, because I knew the three:
The first was a fair maid, and Love her name;
The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
And ever watchful with fatigued eye;
The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
Is heap'd upon her, maiden most unmeek, -
I knew to be my demon Poesy.

They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
O folly! What is Love? and where is it?
And for that poor Ambition - it springs
From a man's little heart's short fever-fit;
For Poesy! - no, - she has not a joy, -
At least for me, - so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;
O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

A third time came they by: - alas! wherefore?
My sleep had been embroider'd with dim dreams;
My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o'er
With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:
The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
The open casement press'd a new-leaved vine,
Let in the budding warmth and throstle's lay;
O shadows! 'twas a time to bid farewell!
Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.

So, ye three ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!
Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreary urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye phantoms, from my idle spright,
Into the clouds, and never more return!

[Guest]

[Constance]

Ed and Moony, thanks for the Keats. Much enjoyed!

But I don't know about the swooning gleaner being an old, beleagurer laborer...

[blue moon]

The poem was written at a time of national debate around fair wages for labour as bread prices spiralled; Keats's mentor, Leigh Hunt, had railed against the practice of financial and leasehold consolidation. With this background in mind, the suggestion that Keats was looking at actual fields, rather than writing about an imagined idyll of autumnal perfection, also sheds new light on the labourer in the poem, "sitting careless on a granary floor", or "on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep".

"Suddenly the scenes of idleness in the poem seem to look more interesting," said Marggraf Turley. "It's not a charming scene of a sleeping labourer, but a worn-out labourer who can't afford to buy the corn he is harvesting."

...is this the part you mean, Constance?

[eddie]

But I don't know about the swooning gleaner being an old, beleagurer laborer...

How true this is I don't know, but somewhere down the decades someone once told me that the reason Picasso had a "Blue" period was that he was broke- and blue was the cheapest paint you could buy.

Of course, you could argue that what matters is what he DID with the colour blue...

[blue moon]

low tide

I wish we’d stopped somewhere civilised.

We live on a ridge.
West runs a coastline whose ribbon
of sharp shell-grit sand gives way
to black mud and mangroves.
East, rubber vines dot a wasteland of saltpans,
white-streaked and cracked from the sun.

Just south is a town
where some people huddle
in caravan parks, and some camp
in water tanks or cars under trees
on the side of the road.
It looks like it changed hands
in a card game, this mottled collage
of canvas and timber and corrugated tin,
perched as it is on one side of a river.
It looks like it wants to fall in.

Under the sun in seventy-three: large pub,
small school and a rust shuttered store
selling food, pumping petrol,
and handing out mail.
Capriciously open a few hours a day
to shift-workers from the prawn factory,
deckies for the goldrush at sea.

I wish we’d stopped somewhere civilised.

[blue moon]

High tide'

She bounced over the dusty
corrugated track
in the rusty old truck
till she came to a stop
in a sand drift.

Goat-heads spiked
her bare feet
as she swung
the door open
and hit the ground running
towards the shore.

High tide High tide

like a mantra
ran through her mind
as she raced to the shore.

[blue moon]

I applaud
‘You are raving Artaud, you are mad’

Hear the madmen chant
il momo ― but
as the brows of some begin to knit,
the smiles of others lights their eyes.

I applaud you Artaud,
unfurler of passion, hurling extremes,
your excremental nightmares unleashing
piqued dreams.

In your eyes
stars swirled by Vincent,
in your ears
Vaslav's whispered ‘dance us in’

another madman chanting,
a holy fool commanding,
the fevered vision’s cataclysm for you

and like Nijinky burning
you danced the turning century
scorched by the fever you
fell foul of at four.

What crawled beneath our surface
and made us so afraid of you,
whose fever made us shiver?

Now another century turns,
no Vincent or Nijinsky or Artaud ―
so none to dance us in,
and none to laud.

[Constance]

The poem was written at a time of national debate around fair wages for labour as bread prices spiralled; Keats's mentor, Leigh Hunt, had railed against the practice of financial and leasehold consolidation. With this background in mind, the suggestion that Keats was looking at actual fields, rather than writing about an imagined idyll of autumnal perfection, also sheds new light on the labourer in the poem, "sitting careless on a granary floor", or "on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep".

"Suddenly the scenes of idleness in the poem seem to look more interesting," said Marggraf Turley. "It's not a charming scene of a sleeping labourer, but a worn-out labourer who can't afford to buy the corn he is harvesting."

...is this the part you mean, Constance?

Moony, I just thought that a Marxist interpretation of "To Autumn" seems a little far-fetched.