pō’ĭ-trē

Constantine Cavafy

Listen

When suddenly at the midnight hour
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts -
do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now,
your works that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions.
As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself
it was only a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who are worthy of such a city;
approach the window with firm step,
and listen with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.

[translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven]

“Fortune and Antony part here; even here / do we shake hands”

- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, IV.12

We all know, or think we know, when the Fates turned against Antony. The coast off Actium, Cleopatra’s ships retreating into the fog, taking his hopes with them. It’s an incredibly dramatic moment: a betrayal at once political, military and personal; a battle whose outcome will set the course of Roman history for decades to come, prompting no less a poet than Virgil to place it at the very center of Aeneas’ shield.

It is characteristic of Cavafy that he turns away from this grand scene, and chooses to focus instead on a quieter, more meditative moment, replacing public abandonment with private self-knowledge, the cry of arms with the piping of an “invisible troupe”. This is the true defeat of Antony, the moment when he faces the truth about the future, walking up to it the way one walks up to a window and looks out. Everything that has gone before has led to this, everything that is yet to come will follow, it is here, in the quiet of the Alexandrian night, that the break is made.

Paradoxically, that break is also the acme of Antony’s glory, the point at which, by accepting the inevitable, by not stooping to vain hopes but acting “as if courageous” (such a beautiful phrase!), that Antony truly becomes heroic, takes on all the Sisyphean dignity  that a mortal can claim. It is by breaking free of History that we become individuals. That is why Antony, with no god to support him, is more real a champion to us than a thousand Octavians.

Not that Antony is the first hero to be forsaken by the Gods. On the contrary, in recognizing that the beloved city is lost to him, and that he must play his part out to the bitter end, he becomes the poetic successor of Hector and Turnus. Cavafy understands better than anyone the stuff that myth is made of, the creed of tragedy and its heroes, and deploys that knowledge here to devastating effect.

This is an incredible poem - a testament to the simplicity of perfection that is the mark of true genius. It’s not just his talent for melancholy, his ability to bring history to life, to make us inhabit the myth, his knack for honing in on the one critical moment, or even the exquisite craftsmanship with which, for example, Antony’s doubts and weaknesses are laid out for us by a kind of verbal reflection, that make Cavafy a great poet. It’s the way his poems, this one included, move off the page in two directions at once: the first horizontal, making us think of the before and after of the story the poem is taken from; the second vertical, leading us into the land of metaphor, where Antony’s Alexandria can be lover, ambition or life itself.

Joseph Brodsky writes:

“Cavafy did a very simple thing. There are two elements which usually constitute a metaphor: the object of description and the object to which the first is imagistically, or simply grammatically allied. The implication which the second part usually contains provides the writer with the possibility of virtually endless development. This is the way the poem works. What Cavafy did, almost from the beginning of his career as a poet, was to jump straight to the second part: for the rest of that career he developed and elaborated upon its implicit notions without bother to return to the first part, assumed as self-evident.”

This is the real magic of Cavafy, the reason his poems can seem so rich in wisdom. “Heard melodies”, Keats reminds us, “are sweet, but those unheard /are sweeter” . By leaving his metaphors unheard, Cavafy allows us to populate them with our own imagination, our own emotion, our own memories. By simplifying the historical to its most basic components, by stripping it down to the universal, to the poetic (for what is poetry, in the end, but our shared imagination), Cavafy makes it possible for us to see the myth in our own terms, apply it to our own lives. And that, after all, is what myth is for.

[falstaff]

Tukaram

Listen

To arrange words
In some order
Is not the same thing
As the inner poise
That’s poetry

The truth of poetry
Is the truth
Of being.
It’s an experience
Of truth.

No ornaments
Survive
A crucible.
Fire reveals
Only molten
Gold.

Says Tuka
We are here
To reveal.
We do not waste
Words.

[Translated from the Marathi by Dilip Chitre]

He really doesn’t waste words, does he? Here it is, the creed of the poet distilled down to its very basics; the poem allowed no more than a single image, one that melts effortlessly back into its principle; the confounding of purity with simplicity to arrive at the gleaming metal of the truth.

[falstaff]

P.S. More about Tukaram - a seventeenth century Marathi saint-poet, part of the Bhakti movement, here and here. Today’s poem comes from Says Tuka (Penguin India, 1991)

Anna Akhmatova

Listen

I called death down on the heads of those I cherished.
One after the other, their deaths occured.
I cannot bear to think how many perished.
These graves were all predicted by my word.
As ravens circle above the place
Where they smell fresh-blooded limbs,
So my love, with triumphant face,
Inflicted its wild hymns.

Being with you is sweet beyond mention,
You’re as close as the heart I call my own.
Give me both hands, pay careful attention,
I beseech you: go away, and leave me alone.
Don’t let me know where you make your homes.
Oh, Muse, don’t call to him from above,
May he live, unmentioned in my poems,
Ignorant of all my love.

[translated from the Russian by Lyn Coffin]

In his introduction to the collection that this poem is taken from (Anna Akhmatova: Poems, W.W. Norton & Co., 1983), Brodsky writes:

“Naturally enough, poems of this sort couldn’t be published, nor could they even be written down or retyped. They could only be memorized by the author and by some seven other people since she didn’t trust her own memory. From time to time, she’d meet a person privately and ask him or her to recite quietly this or that selection as a means of inventory. This precaution was far from being excessive: people would disappear forever for smaller things than a piece of paper with a few lines on it.”

It’s ironic, isn’t it? For centuries poets have been promising their beloveds immortality in verse. “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”, Shakespeare writes, and the sentiment recurs again and again throughout the ages that follow. And yet here we are, in the Russian police state, and suddenly the act of naming has turned fatal, the poem guaranteeing not eternal fame but instant execution.

Akhmatova wrote this poem in 1921, the year her first husband, poet Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed by the Soviets. In the years to come, she would suffer much at the hands of the state - the arrest and death of her friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam, the arrest and death of her third husband, Nikolai Punin and the arrest of her and Nikolay’s son, Lev, whose incarceration would become the subject of her incredible ‘Requiem’.

Knowing the trials that lie ahead, this poem seems prophetic, but even without that context it is a heartbreaking poem. The exquisite violence of that image of love as a scavenger, conveying so perfectly the horror of something as tender as a love poem turned into an instrument of betrayal; the grief and guilt of the first stanza perfectly balancing the self-denial of the second. If there was ever any doubt about Akhmatova being one of the finest lyric poets of all time, today’s poem should put it to rest.

I could go on, but I’ll leave you with another quote from Brodsky, who says it so much better than I ever could:

“her verses are to survive whether published or not: because of the prosody, because they are charged with time in both [mundane and metaphysical] senses. They will survive because language is older than state and because prosody always survives history. In fact, it hardly needs history; all it needs is a poet, and Akhmatova was just that.”

[falstaff]

Robert Frost

Listen

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

It’s that time of the year in Philadelphia. Every time I step out of my apartment I’m reminded of this Frost poem, seeing the wet misery of the trees, the damp carpet of leaves underfoot, the gentle melancholy of the scene. It’s a time of year that cries out for a poem that celebrates “the love of bare November days / Before the coming of the snow” and I can’t think of one more evocative than this.

[falstaff]

Dunya Mikhail

Listen

He is a poor pawn.
He always jumps to the next square.
He doesn’t turn left or right
and doesn’t look back.
He is moved by a foolish queen
who cuts across the board
lengthwise and diagonally.
She doesn’t tire of carrying the medals
and cursing the bishops.
She is a poor queen
moved by a reckless king
who counts the squares every day
and claims that they are diminishing.
He arranges the knights and rooks
and dreams of a stubborn opponent.
He is a poor king
moved by an experienced player
who rubs his head
and loses his time in an endless game.
He is a poor player
moved by an empty life
without black or white.
It is a poor life
moved by a bewildered god
who once tried to play with clay.
He is a poor god.
He doesn’t know how
to escape
from his dilemma.

[translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow]

Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail’s recent collection The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005) is a fascinating book, bursting with strong, direct poems about living in a war zone. Today’s poem is one of my personal favorites from that book, vaguely reminiscent of Amichai’s The Diameter of the Bomb, but with the additional idea of a heirarchical chess game, of the way we are all pawns in someone else’s hands, and that final ‘the-buck-stops-here’ ending. A poem at once poignant and playful, that captures the feeling of helplessness one feels when faced by history.
[falstaff]

Aeschylus

Listen

Agamemnon: Help, help! I am wounded, murdered, here in the inner room!
Chorus: Hush, listen! Who cried ‘Murder’? Do you know that voice?
Agamemnon: Help, help again! Murder - a second, mortal blow!
Chorus 1. That groan tells me the deed is done. It was the king.
Come, let’s decide together on the safest plan.
2. This is what I advise - to send a herald round
Bidding the citizens assemble here in arms.
3. Too slow. I say we should burst in at once, and catch
Murder in the act, before the blood dries on the sword.
4. I share your feeling - that is what we ought to do,
Or something of that kind. Now is the time to act.
5. It’s plain what this beginning points to: the assassins
Mean to establish a tyrannical regime.
6. Yes - while we talk and talk; but action, spurning sleep,
Tramples the gentle face of caution in the dust.
7. I can suggest no plan that might prove practical.
I say, let those who took this step propose the next.
8. I am of the same opinion. If the king is dead,
I know no way to make him live by argument.
9. Then shall we patiently drag out our servile years
Governed by these disgraces of our royal house?
10. No, no! Intolerable! Who would not rather die?
A milder fate than living under tyranny!
11. Wait; not too fast. What is our evidence? Those groans?
Are we to prophecy from them that the king’s dead?
12. We must be certain; this excitement’s premature.
Guessing and certain knowledge are two different things.
Chorus: I find this view supported on all sides: that we
Make full enquiry what has happened to the king.

[translated from the Greek by Philip Vellacott]

It’s perfect, isn’t it?

Here it is, the moment “when Agamemnon cried aloud”. The rightful ruler of the Argives, returned triumphant from Troy, is treacherously assassinated by his wife and her lover. As his death cries echo, Aeschylus traces, in 28 unforgettable lines, the way the initial outrage of the citizenry, their call for rebellion, is tempered and compromised until it becomes little more than meek acquiescence. This failure of the Chorus to act will leave the land in the grip of a tyranny from which only the return of Orestes, in the second play of the trilogy, will rescue it. This is how freedom is lost.

What I love about these lines is partly the sheer theatricality of the scene (the way Aeschylus, by splitting up the Chorus, creates a sense of panic and confusion, bringing this hurried and ultimately ineffective council to life); partly the Beckett like dialogue (”Now is the time to act” says one citizen, another, in words that will shortly seem prophetic says “action, spurning sleep, / tramples the gentle face of caution in the dust” - yet they all do nothing); but mostly the incredible accuracy of Aeschylus’ portrayal, his insight into human nature, which ensures that some 2,500 years after these lines were written, they seem just as relevant, just as real.

[falstaff]

Mirza Ghalib

Listen (to Begum Akhtar sing) [1]

aah ko chaahiye ik umr asar hone tak
kaun jiitaa hai tirii zulf ke sar hone tak

daam-e har mauj mein hai halqah-e sad kaam-e nihang
dekhein kyaa guzre hai qatre pah guhar hone tak

aashiqii sabr-talab aur tamannaa betaab
dil kaa kyaa rang karuun khun-e jigar hone tak

ham ne maanaa kih tagaaful na karoge lekin
khaak ho jaaeinge ham tum ko khabar hone tak

partav-e khur se hai shabnam ko fanaa ki taaliim
main bhii huun ek inaayat kii nazar hone tak

yak nazar besh nahiin fursat-e hastii gaafil
garmii-e bazm hai ik raqs-e sharar hone tak

gam-e hastii kaa asad kis se ho juz marg ilaaj
shamma har rang mein jaltii hai sahar hone tak

Translation (by Sarvat Rahman):

The sighs of love a life-time need, their object to attain,
Who lives long enough for your dark mysteries to attain?

In the net of each ocean-wave open a hundred dragon mouths,
To be a pearl, a water-drop what ordeals must sustain!

True love calls for patience, desire’s of impatience made,
Till suffering consumes me quite, how should my heart remain?

You will not be indifferent, I know, but nevertheless,
Dead and in the dust I’ll be when news of me you obtain.

The morning sun’s ardent rays spell death to each dew-drop,
I, too, exist only until, to glance at me you deign.

A single glance, no more, is the space of life, unaware!
For no longer than the spark’s dance does the gathering’s warmth remain.

The suffering that is life, ASAD, knows no cure but death,
All through the night must the candle burn, no matter what its pain.

Translation (mine) :

It takes a lifetime for a sigh to take effect
Who lives to see your hair perfectly arranged?

A hundred mouths whisper the net of every wave
Look what the speck endures till it becomes a pearl.

Love demands patience, desire is restless
What color shall I paint the heart, until you savage it?

You shan’t ignore me when the time comes, I know, but
I may turn to dust before the news reaches you.

Each drop of dew learns death from the rays of the sun
I too await release at a glance from you.

One glance, no more, fills the span of my life
The dance of a single spark that keeps the company warm.

Life is suffering, Asad, and has no cure but death
The flame burns in every color until the dawn.

The problem with posting Ghalib is a problem of translation. So compressed is Ghalib’s imagery, so rich in sound and nuance his language, that it is almost impossible to render his ghazals in English without mauling them beyond recognition. I admire Sarvat Rahman’s courage in taking on the entire Diwan-e-Ghalib - translating all 234 ghazals while retaining their form - but I have to say that the results, as with the translation above, make me cringe. I’ve tried to provide my own rendition, but even that doesn’t come close to the original. How does one begin to translate a line as brilliant as “dil ka kya rang karoon, khoon-e-jigar hone tak”? How does one convey the richness of its color (the word incarnadined springs to mind), the quality of the sentiment, the sense of quasi-paradox - all without losing the shortness, the simplicity of Ghalib’s original?

Trying to translate Ghalib, I am always reminded of these lines from Byron:

“To such as see thee not my words were weak;
To those who gaze on thee what language could they speak?”

Still, here it is. For those of you who speak Urdu, this ghazal should require no introduction, and its gloriousness should sing from every line. For those who don’t know the language, hopefully there’s enough in these butchered translations of ours to convey the exquisite intelligence that moves through this poem, the sheer lyricism of a master whose every couplet stands as a poem in its own right, and whose words, a century and a half after they were written, continue to be quoted by millions.

[falstaff]

[1] Begum Akhtar only sings couplets 1,3,4 and 7. Another, perhaps more familiar version of the same couplets as sung by Jasjit Singh can be found (also on YouTube) here.

Susan Birkeland

Listen (to Clara read)

Love is no matter what
Mercy is no matter how
Justice is no matter who
Hope is no matter when

Love is no matter how
Mercy is no matter why
Justice is no matter where
Hope is living here and there at the same time

Absolution is cool water in a heat wave
Restitution is the gravitational intention of a compassionate moon
Conversation is sex before bodies
Evolution is the tail of a jaguar in the rain
Love is no matter what

Crime is a fist pointed outward
Sadness is my fist in my own face
Longing is how strangers become friends

Silence is a warm room on a cold night
Reverence is the first touch of my fingers at your waist
Forgiveness is the inevitable scorecard of easy neighbors

Problems are a leg up onto a horse that rides around the sun
Solutions are new wheels on a rusty bike
Wine is the juice of crushed romance

Romance is the time it takes to remember
Remembering is the return of fresh eyes
Fresh eyes are the flashlights of innocence
Innocence is the circle by which

Love is no matter what
No matter when
No matter why
No matter how

Your hand in my basket
practicing scales on a pink piano
folding around
inevitable
inconceivable
you.

Clara writes,

“Susan Birkeland passed away last year - a great loss to the San Francisco poet community.

Her readings were always dramatic, pulling the audience into her world. The Flashlights of Innocence is a good example. One cannot read this poem ‘poorly’, because the language will not allow it to happen.”

[blackmamba]

Xu Zhimo

Listen (to Clara read the original - Cantonese)

Listen (to Clara read her translation - English)

 Chance

Tr. by Clara Hsu

I am a cloud in the sky,
by chance it casts a shadow in your heart.
Don’t be surprised,
or happy,
in an instant it all vanishes.

We meet at sea, in the night,
traveling in different directions.
You may recall,
but perhaps it is better to forget
the glow when we cross paths.

The long promised Xu Zhimo is finally here!

Clara, our new guest contributor, is a mother, a musician, a philanthropist, an activist, a purveyor of Clarion Music Center (a world music shop of exotic musical instruments), a traveler, host of the Poetry Hotel and ultimately, a poet.

When Mjbesq put us in touch, she was in Marrakech, on her way to a couple of days in a desert. After a couple of months, of diligently tagging by email, we finally met and she recorded a couple of poems for me. Here is the first - Clara reads Chance by Xu Zhimo and her translation of the same.

Clara writes,

Xu Zhimo (1897 - 1931) is one of China’s most distinguished 20th Century poets. Xu brings raw emotions into his poetry to express human love and yearns for its eternity. His poems are revolutionary coming out of a culture that encourages conformity and suppresses individual’s innermost feelings. This short poem, however, is more in tune with classical Chinese poetry in its simplicity and philosophical outlook.

[blackmamba]

R.S. Thomas

Listen

For the first twenty years you are still growing
Bodily that is: as a poet, of course,
You are not born yet. It’s the next ten
You cut your teeth on to emerge smirking
For your brash courtship of the muse.
You will take seriously those first affairs
With young poems, but no attachments
Formed then but come to shame you,
When love has changed to a grave service
Of a cold queen.

From forty on
You learn from the sharp cuts and jags
Of poems that have come to pieces
In your crude hands how to assemble
With more skill the arbitrary parts
Of ode or sonnet, while time fosters
A new impulse to conceal your wounds
From her and from a bold public,
Given to pry.

You are old now
As years reckon, but in that slower
World of the poet you are just coming
To sad manhood, knowing the smile
On her proud face is not for you.

I realized the other day that this site is yet to include a single poem by R.S. Thomas - an omission I simply had to set right.

I love this poem not only because it’s such a wonderful and wise description of the patience and dedication that the pursuit of poetry requires, but because over the years, it’s become a kind of personal touchstone, a talisman of a poem that I turn to for comfort each time I read poems I wrote ten years ago and find myself embarrassed by them, or every time I consider how little I’ve achieved as a poet at 28 and wonder if it’s all really worth it.

It would be easy to find counter-examples to Thomas’ central thesis here - Keats springs to mind, as does Rimbaud - but for every boy genius that you can think of there are dozens of perfectly respectable poets who arrive at their best poems after years of apprenticeship to the craft. These are not, perhaps, the great poets of the age, they are the people who will turn out, in their entire lifetime, a dozen, or perhaps only a half dozen truly brilliant poems, and whose collected works, coming in at a little under 200 pages, will be the kind of book that you borrow from the library, read through with pleasure and have forgotten a month later.

There was a time when the prospect of being one of these poets would have depressed me - today it is an aspiration. And it’s precisely this knowledge - this idea that what matters is not whether poetry is loyal to us but whether we are loyal to poetry - that Thomas’ poem celebrates. And to see it expressed so simply and yet so eloquently is something that those of us who know we are not Keats, not Byron, not Rimbaud, can only feel grateful for.

[falstaff]

For more commentary see here.