fave poetry thread

I've never found a translation of this poem that I really liked, but I'll also post one of the better ones....

César Vallejo
Los heraldos negros

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma... Yo no sé!

Son pocos; pero son... Abren zanjas oscuras
en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.

Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma
de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.

Y el hombre... Pobre... pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como
cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa, en la mirada.

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... Yo no sé!


The Black Heralds
(translation by Rebecca Seiferle)

There are blows in life, so powerful... I don't know!
Blows like God's hatred; as if before them,
the undertow of everything suffered
were to well up in the soul... I don't know!

They are few; but they exist... They open dark furrows
in the most ferocious face and the most powerful loins.
Perhaps they're wooden horses of barbaric Attilas,
or the black messengers that Death sends to us.

They're profound lapses of the soul's Christs,
of some adorable faith that Destiny blasphemes.
Those bloodthirsty blows are cracklings of some
bread that in the oven's door burns up on us.

And man.. Poor...poor man! He turns his eyes, as
when a slap on the shoulder calls us by name;
he turns his crazed eyes, and everything he's lived
wells up, like a pool of guilt, in his gaze.

There are blows in life, so powerful... I don't know!

 

How could I have forgotten... one of my all time faves:

The Dagger (translated from Spanish)
By Jorge Luis Borges

A dagger rests in a drawer.

It was forged in Toledo at the end of the last century. Luis Melian Lafinur gave it to my father, who brought it from Uruguay. Evaristo Carriego once held it in his hand.

Whoever lays eyes on it has to pick up the dagger and toy with it, as if he had always been looking out for it. The hand is quick to grab the waiting hilt, and the powerful obeying blade slides in and out of the sheath with a click. This is not what the dagger wants.

It is more than a structure of metal: men conceived it and shaped it with a single end in mind. The dagger that last night knifed a man in Tacuarembo and the daggers that rained on Caesar are in some eternal way the same dagger. The dagger wants to kill, it wants to shed sudden blood.

In a drawer of my writing table, among draft pages and old letters, the dagger dreams over and over its simple tiger’s dream. On wielding it the hand comes alive because the metal comes alive, sensing itself, each time handled, in touch with the killer for whom it was forged.

At times I am sorry for it. Such power and singlemindedness, so impassive or innocent its pride, and the years slip by, unheeding.

 

"....... The world generally has been feeling a great shaking at the foundations of our knowledge again ........ We seem to drift in tides whose seas we do not understand ............"

... so goes one interpretation (by Dr. John E. McKenna) of Irish poet William Butler Yeats' famous, glorious and eminently likeable poem, "Things fall apart:"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

=======

See A.N. Jeffares, The Poems of W.B. Yeats, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1984, pp. 201-5 for an analysis of this poem that appreciates the cosmos of the Irish poet's world.

=======

Another interpretation states: "The falcon of course is man; the falconer is God."

"Man has never been the same since God died," says Millay. "Not that he says much, but he laughs much louder than he used to, and he can't bear to be left alone even for a minute."