translation

Poem-A-Day April 5: torn green dress

See how the budding flower,
Emerging fair from out her torn green dress,
Is beauteous in the garden for her hour,
As Yusuf in his youthful loveliness.

Go, breeze of spring,
Haste to tell Yakub, blinded by his tears,
The tidings that shall end his sorrowing
And lift the darkness from his troubled years.

Hello Friends,

Could you tell that today’s poem excerpt was a translation as you were reading it? We have very few translations of the princess and poet Zeb-un-Nissa’s work from Persian to English; this 1913 translation is by Magan Lal and Jessica Duncan Westbrook, and the style of the translation has a lot more in common with 1900s English poetry than the 1600s Persian poetry of the original. To give you an example of how translations can differ, the same excerpt has also more recently been translated by Lisa Sarasohn as:

Budding, the flower tears through her dress of green.
Blooming, her beauty makes the garden beautiful.
Like Joseph, her loveliness perfumes the air.

Spring breezes, go. Take the news to Jacob, end his sorrow
for the loss of son, wipe darkness from his eyes,
lift the troubles that have weighed upon his spine.

As you can see, it’s very difficult to capture both the poetic form and a poem’s meaning from another language. But key images, like the flower bud tearing through a green dress, persist from the original author. (I’ll let you in on a little secret: Sometimes one image is so good I will pick a poem to share with you just for that one image — today’s torn green dress is one of those.)

What you are largely missing here in translation is Zeb-un-Nissa’s use of form. The ghazal is a difficult poetic form with roots in seventh-century Arabia. Each couplet in a traditional ghazal is its own self-contained poem. The first couplet establishes an end-rhyme, and the second lines of all the succeeding couplets continue this rhyme. The last couplet traditionally contains a reference to the poet’s name — it’s a signature of sorts; Zeb-un-Nissa used the pen name Makhfi or “Hidden One” to reference herself.

As if the ghazal form weren’t difficult enough, a diwan is a sequence of ghazals, ordered according to their rhyme. Sarasohn explains, “The first group of ghazals rhymes with the first letter of the alphabet, the second group rhymes with the alphabet’s second letter, and on down the line.” The excerpt above, ghazal XIV, is from The Diwan of Zeb-un-Nissa.

One of the sad facts of literature is that you pretty much have to have been a princess or a queen for your writing to have survived from the 1600s if you were female. Zeb-un-Nissa is one of those figures whose words have made it to us — a princess from a time when the Mughal or Mogul Empire ruled the Indian subcontinent. A few details from her biography that may be relevant to understanding her as a poet: Zeb-un-Nissa became a Hafiza — meaning “guardian” or “memorizer” — at age seven, meaning at seven years old she had memorized and could recite the entire Quran (114 chapters made up of over 6,000 verses). She was deeply influenced by Islam and the Quran, and nearly all her poetry is religious in content. She never married — some say because she was married to Allah, some say she had affairs with mortal men. Lastly, for reasons that are still debated, Zeb-un-Nissa’s own father (the emperor) imprisoned her for the last 20 years of her life. It is believed that these ghazal were written during those years of imprisonment.

That was a lot of me writing for just a little bit of Zeb-un-Nissa! Apologies if I got a little too carried away in explanations here. But I hope you maybe still got something out of it.

— Ellen

P.S. For a very different interpretation of the ghazal form (in contemporary English, rather than seventeenth century Persian) — and one of my favorite poems of all time — see “Ghazal” by Emily Moore.

Long Finger Poem

Hello Friends,
Since finger length has come up as a topic in our current presidential race, it seemed appropriate to share with you this work by Jin Eun-Young, translated by Peter Campion.
Enjoy.
Ellen

Long Finger Poem

I’m working on my poems and working with

my fingers not my head. Because my fingers

are the farthest stretching things from me.
Look at the tree. Like its longest branch

I touch the evening’s quiet breathing. Sounds

of rain. The crackling heat from other trees.

The tree points everywhere. The branches can’t

reach to their roots though. Growing longer they

grow weaker also. Can’t make use of water.
Rain falls. But I’m working with these farthest stretching

things from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots
of days then years unfurl in the cold air.

■

Poetry Month is here!

Hello Friends!

Each April, I celebrate National Poetry Month by sharing with you all some of what I love about poetry — through 30 poems from 30 poets delivered to your inboxes over 30 days.

As you may recall, 811 is the Dewey Decimal System call number for American Poetry, and that’s the section of my personal library where I’ll be asking you to meet me once a day (mostly, with a few dabblings in international work).

No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! So feel free to invite friends and family to join you in this little poetry month celebration. Just send me an email, or sign up through this blog meetmein811.org — where you can also find an archive of the past eight years of poem-a-days.

Without further ado, here is your first poem! In this translation by Robert Bly, Rilke uses the sunset to embody multiple types of transitions, in-between spaces. He also reminds us that all life, all of the matter that makes us up, all energy, can be traced back to (and may return to) suns.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Sunset

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs—

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

■

Poem-a-Day April 17: Eso es todo.

Hello Friends,

I find Gabriel García Márquez occupying the space in my thoughts where poetry month should be this evening. But Márquez didn’t think very highly of his own early forays into poetry — so I am not going to embarrass him by sharing them, even if I think they were quite good.

Instead, a poem that García Márquez loved all his life: one story goes that a teenage “Gabo” got in trouble with the jesuit fathers in secondary school for memorizing Pablo Neruda’s “Poema XX” and reciting it several times a day. Fittingly, Neruda was just a teenager himself when he wrote “Poema XX,” published in his poetry collection Viente poemas de amor y una canción de desesperada / Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair in 1924, when Neruda was just 19 years old (and three years before Gabriel García Márquez was born).

Later in life, García Márquez would call Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” Neruda, in turn, had the chance to call Márquez’s most famous novel, Cien años de soledad / One Hundred Years of Solitude, “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote.”

Enjoy.
Ellen

XX PUEDO ESCRIBIR

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: «La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a los lejos».

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

XX TONIGHT I CAN WRITE

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that is has lost her.

Pablo Neruda was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 13, 2007.

W.S. Merwin’s English translation of Neruda’s Viente poemas de amor y una canción de desesperada, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was first published in 1969.

Poem-a-Day April 3: The Desert Night

IN THE DESERT

11.

The stillness of the night disturbed your rest.
The piteous communication of coyotes
wept drop by drop into your breast.

So you went outdoors,
were joined together with the desert night,
encircled by mysterious distances,
surrounded by nocturnal fortresses.
But overhead —
An intimate, brightly-laden sky,
A low-lying heaven, heavy with pellucid pearls
and stuffed with sparkling spangles,
is about to fall of its own weight.
It must be lifted up,
supported by a set of chuppah poles.

A wedding in the black of night!
Here comes the bride, the bride!
Make way, here comes the bride!

Hello Friends,

Yitshok Elhonon Rontsh, or Isaac E. Ronch, was born in 1899 in Poland and spent much of his later life in Los Angeles, California, where he composed poems, essays and other works in Yiddish. This excerpt from section 11 of a translation of “In the Desert” was published in 1970.

The desert was the place in Southern California where Ronch felt most viscerally connected to desert scenes and experiences recorded in the Torah. For Ronch, the desert was a landscape that collapsed centuries and continents, and his poems set in the desert frequently blur the lines between his present day reality, visions, the ancient past, and the future.

If you’re interested in the original Yiddish, the entire poetry collection In Midber (In the Desert) is available to download here. If your name is Dara Weinberg and today is your birthday, a 1970 first edition copy of this poetry collection, with dust jacket, illustrated with drawings by Marc Chagall, and signed by Ronch, awaits you the next time you make the journey from Poland to Los Angeles.

Love,
Ellen

Poem-a-Day, April 8, 2011: Factory of Tears

If you’ve been on this list for a few Aprils now, you might recall in 2008, Valzhyna Mort’s Factory of Tears became the first bilingual Belarusian-English book of poetry ever published in the United States. This is another selection from that collection.

What would I wish for

to be a small freckle on the wind’s nose
to ride in a convertible
beside a middle-aged man
a teenager will do

it’s as if everything that has happened
is nothing but Customs which you have to pass through
in order to get into summer
god has tossed a coin
inside me
as if I were a pond
and made a wish
and lingered in the air
and everything belongs to me but hope

and the mountains are kneeling like runners at the starting line
their green t-shirts billowing in the wind
then the mountains are gigantic tortoises

and then he will offer to leave me

the color of his skin is
like the color of the sun at dusk
and the road is parting in front of the wheels
like many grasshoppers as it rushes ahead of us

and like god’s stray eyelashes
the stars are falling, more light! more!
god has no time to make a wish
all he can do is cry out faster! faster!

it’s impossible to fall asleep next to this man
at night all that’s left of my body
is the music of grasshoppers

Poet Valzhyna Mort was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 15, 2008.

Poem-a-Day, April 7, 2011: A long, slow walk

65.

Millets in full rows
Sorghum in sprouts
Long walk so slow
A heart all tossed
Those who know me say: He is distressed.
Those who do not know me say: What is he up to?
Under this easy, wide blue
What sort of man is he?

Millets in full rows
Sorghum in spikes
Long walk so slow
A heart all drunk
Those who know me say: He is distressed.
Those who do not know me say: What is he up to?
Under this easy, wide blue
What sort of man is he?

Millets in full rows
Sorghums in grains
Long walk so slow
A heart all blocked
Those who know me say: He is distressed.
Those who do not know me say: What is he up to?
Under this easy, wide blue
What sort of man is he?

Hello Friends —

For about as long as sorghum has been cycling from sprout to grain, the human heart has been tossing with how we are perceived by those around us — sometimes dependent upon how well they know us — and composing poems about it. You might say all of literature is just a centuries-long, slow walk humans take beneath the same vast sky to contemplate who we are and why we exist.

Sometime after 600 B.C., Confucius compiled a collection of 300 selections of ancient Chinese poetry known as Shin Ching or The Book of Songs. Many of the works in the collection are communal in origin and document the very invention and basis of poetry — the use of repetition, structure, patterns in language for the purpose of being easy to remember and pass on orally to others so that we could all contemplate our existence together.

The poem above is number 65 in the Shin Ching, also sometimes identified by various translations of the first line “Millets in full rows.” This translation comes from Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres by the scholar Wai-Lim Yip, who is especially gifted and articulate about the process of translation.

In case you forgot, it’s National Poetry Month all month! If a poem a day just isn’t enough, you can find more poems, poets, and information about National Poetry Month at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

Love,
Ellen

Poem-a-Day, April 19: ‘Twas brillig

Hi Friends,

It’s that time of year again! As many of you know, I am of the opinion that the poem “Jabberwocky” ought to be read, aloud, at least once a year — you can think of this practice as akin to the Queen’s practice of believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast each morning. And, look! It’s even trendy this year — Johnny Depp is doing it. I was quite delighted to find that Tim Burton had done what I would do if I were to make a movie about Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872) — which is to make the entire movie about the poem “Jabberwocky.”

So, kids, it’s time to channel your inner Mad Hatter: I challenge you to read “Jabberwocky” aloud to someone else today. If you shy away from this challenge because you don’t know what half of the words mean, I refer you to Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” With every poem, a reader in a sense chooses what you mean each of the poet’s words to mean. Reading “Jabberwocky,” especially out loud, simply requires you to make your choices of meaning more conscious acts. You could think of reading aloud as in a sense a minor form of translation — you are translating the written “Jabberwocky” into oral English. (Keith Lim has also compiled a lovely collection of translations of “Jabberwocky” — into languages ranging from Spanish and Japanese to C++ and Klingon.)

And, finally, a bonus poetrivia challenge for you — and there’s a prize! The scene where the Mad Hatter recites “Jabberwocky” in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is cut such that he skips which line(s) of the first two quatrains? First correct answer I receive, judged by email time stamp, will be awarded poetry in a can!, courtesy of Frankenmart.

Best,
Ellen

Jabberwocky

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 8, 2007.

Poem-a-Day, April 10: so close to what I mean

Bilingual Sestina

Some things I have to say aren’t getting said
in this snowy, blond, blue-eyed, gum-chewing English:
dawn’s early light sifting through persianas closed
the night before by dark-skinned girls whose words
evoke cama, aposento, sueños in nombres
from that first world I can’t translate from Spanish.

Gladys, Rosario, Altagracia — the sounds of Spanish
wash over me like warm island waters as I say
your soothing names: a child again learning the nombres
of things you point to in the world before English
turned sol, tierra, cielo, luna to vocabulary words —
sun, earth, sky, moon. Language closed

like the touch-sensitive moriviví whose leaves closed
when we kids poked them, astonished. Even Spanish
failed us back then when we saw how frail a word is
when faced with the thing it names. How saying
its name won’t always summon up in Spanish or English
the full blown genie from the bottled nombre.

Gladys, I summon you back by saying your nombre.
Open up again the house of slatted windows closed
since childhood, where palabras left behind for English
stand dusty and awkward in neglected Spanish.
Rosario, muse of el patio, sing in me and through me say
that world again, begin first with those first words

you put in my mouth as you pointed to the world —
not Adam, not God, but a country girl numbering
the stars, the blades of grass, warming the sun by saying,
¡Qué calor! as you opened up the morning closed
inside the night until you sang in Spanish,
Estas son las mañanitas, and listening in bed, no English

yet in my head to confuse me with translations, no English
doubling the world with synonyms, no dizzying array of words
— the world was simple and intact in Spanish —
luna, sol, casa, luz, flor, as if the nombres
were the outer skin of things, as if words were so close
one left a mist of breath on things by saying

their names, an intimacy I now yearn for in English —
words so close to what I mean that I almost hear my Spanish
heart beating, beating inside what I say en inglés.

Hi Friends,

Did you notice the words “English”, “Spanish”, “words”, “nombres“, “say”, and “close” repeating in this poem? Did you notice that they repeat as the last word of each line?

In any language, the sestina is a challenging poetic form in which the same six words repeat at the end of each six-line stanza — with the word at the end of the last line of the previous stanza becoming the word at the end of the first line of the next stanza — and culminating in all six words incorporated into a tercet. The repetition also allows the end words to take more than one meaning, more than one part of speech — “close” so close to “closed;” in a less strict interpretation, a “nombre” might even become a “numbering,” a “word” become a “world.”

Yet the best sestinas tend to have the ability to flow on the surface like blank verse or even plain speech — such that, if one didn’t know what a “sestina” was from the title, one could read the whole poem without picking up on the underlying complexity of the form — perhaps much like words from two languages can intertwine to flow in a continuous thought, obscuring the underlying complexity of a bilingual processing of signifiers and signified.

So does what is signified beat inside of a signifier? Does a meaning, or meanings, beat inside the sounds or the physical characters of a word? Or does a signified contain all of the words of all the languages that try to mean it beating inside, trying to signify, but frail in comparison to the signified? Does the meaning, or meanings, of a poem beat inside its form? Or if the complexity of a poem’s structure is sometimes subtler than its substance, does a poem’s form beat inside of its meaning?

Julia Alvarez grew up in the Dominican Republic and the United States. “Bilingual Sestina” appears in her 1995 collection The Other Side / El Otro Lado.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, I am sending out one poem per day for the duration of the month. To learn more about National Poetry Month, visit www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Best,
Ellen

Poet Julia Alvarez was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 24, 2009.

Poem-a-Day, April 6: When whatever you want to do cannot be done

Dear Friends,

First off, I have a correction to the April 5 poem-a-day: It turns out that the current year is 2010, not 2261, and therefore Kozan Ichikyo’s 1360 verse has not been remembered “over 900 years later” — at least not yet. My apologies for the error; I switched monks on you at the last minute and failed to update that figure!

Now, today’s poem: comes to us from Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a prominent figure in Punjabi literature and politics and a best-selling modern Urdu poet in both India and Pakistan. This translation is by Naomi Lazard, who collaborated with Faiz to refine her translations of his selected works until his death in 1984.

Be Near Me

Be near me now,
My tormenter, my love, be near me—
At this hour when night comes down,
When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes
With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,
When it comes with cries of lamentation,
                        with laughter with songs;
Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.
At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,
Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil
For hands still enfolded in sleeves;
When wine being poured makes the sound
                        of inconsolable children
            who, though you try with all your heart,
                        cannot be soothed.
When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
—At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face,
                        dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormenter, my love, be near me.

Okay, now I’m going to do two things to you:

1) I’m going to switch translators on you. I tend to prefer Naomi Lazard’s translations of Faiz’s works. However, partly as an excerise in experiencing just how much of a different feel two translators can give you for a poem, I’m also including a more recent translation by the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali below.

2) I’m going to tell you something about the address “my love.” Addressing a poem to “my love” or “the Belovéd” (depending on your translation) is a staple of Urdu poetic tradition, and often carries meanings of lover or dear friend and of God. In addition to those meanings, Agha Shahid Ali makes a compelling argument that Faiz also intends to invoke a political meaning of “the Movement” or Marxist revolution for “the Belovéd.” Ali writes, “The reader begins to infer, through a highly sensuous language, that waiting for the revolution can be as agonizing and intoxicating as waiting for one’s lover.”

So here we go with translation number two:

Be Near Me

You who demolish me, you whom I love,
be near me. Remain near me when evening,
drunk on the blood of the skies,
becomes night, in its one hand
a perfumed balm, in the other
a sword sheathed in the diamond of stars.

Be near me when night laments or sings,
or when it begins to dance,
its steel-blue anklets ringing with grief.

Be here when longings, long submerged
in the heart’s waters, resurface
and everyone begins to look:
Where is the assassin? In whose sleeve
is hidden the redeeming knife?

And when wine, as it is poured, is the sobbing
of children whom nothing will console—
when nothing holds,
when nothing is:
at that dark hour when night mourns,
be near me, my destroyer, my lover,
be near me.

So which translation do you prefer? Do you think which version you read first impacts that feeling? Can anyone speak to how each translation compares to the original (below)?

Does the poem read differently to you once the thought is planted that “the Belovéd” could mean “the movement” or “the revolution”? Did you infer, or do you think you could have inferred, that meaning in the translation or in the original without it having been suggested?

If you’re not quite quenched, see Faiz’s “Before You Came” for one more glass of wine and “When Autumn Came” to let one bird sing.

Best,
Ellen