I don’t love my country. Her abstract glory
eludes me.
But (this may sound bad) I would give my life
for ten of her places, for certain people,
ports, pine forests, fortresses,
for a ruined city, gray and monstrous,
for several of her historical figures,
for mountains
—and three or four rivers.

* * *

José Emilio Pacheco is one of Mexico’s leading contemporary poets. I had posted the Spanish original of this poem, along with somebody else’s translation, to Facebook back in 2009. I forgot all about it until I switched to Facebook’s new Timeline view a couple days ago, which for the first time gave me access to older posts and updates there. After re-acquainting myself with the poem and the substantive comments it elicited from Alison Kent, Miguel Arboleda and Ray Templeton, I decided to post this new translation — in part because I’m fascinated by what the process of translation does to a poem like this.

Already on Facebook there was disagreement over how best to translate “una ciudad deshecha, gris, monstruosa.” The English translation I’d posted put it as “a run-down city, gray, grotesque,” but Alison objected that, in the poet’s native Mexico, this most likely referred to a pre-Columbian ruin. Ray, by contrast, felt it might equally apply to a run-down industrial city in his native U.K. To me, as a country dweller, most cities seem gray, monstrous and dilapidated, though I’m not sure I’d give my life for any of them. At any rate, the point is that our reception of the poem depends very much on whether we read it as a specifically Mexican poem or a more general statement about love of country.

And even the general proposition will strike people differently depending on where they’re from. Here in the U.S., where it’s quite common for ordinary citizens to display the national flag year-round, saying that you don’t love your country is guaranteed to shock and dismay people from across the political spectrum, with the exception of segments of the far left. Even strongly libertarian types will say things like, “I love my country, but I hate my government.” (It’s nearly always O.K. to express contempt for the government here, despite the reverence paid to the Constitution, which famously equates the government with the people.) In many other countries, I gather, displays of the national flag by private citizens are extremely rare.

To me, love of an abstraction is a dangerous thing, and I react to it with I think much the same loathing which the ancient Hebrews reserved for idol-worship. A worshipped fatherland demands blood sacrifice and gives little in return but the sort of “protection” one purchases from gangsters at gunpoint. I find it telling that the kind of super-patriots who treat any questioning of the war machine or the surveillance state as tantamount to treason all too often do not hesitate to condone the despoiling of their country’s land, air and water. “Drill, baby, drill!” they chant at political rallies, and without irony advocate the construction of a massive pipeline across the country’s midsection, to bring Canadian tar sands to Texan refineries, as necessary to reduce our dependence on “foreign oil.” Here in Pennsylvania, we’re in the early stages of a hydrofracturing shale-gas boom that threatens to poison groundwater across the state and destroy some of our last remaining wild places, but those who object on environmental grounds are derided as effeminate tree-huggers at best and anti-American troublemakers at worst. I could go on. But the point is that in this case, as in so many others, destruction of the actual, literal country is licensed by lip-service to the abstract Country.

Translating Pacheco’s poem into English, I recall that there are in fact people who put their lives on the line for mountains and pine forests: the brave souls who chain themselves to cranes at mountaintop removal sites or sit in old-growth trees threatened by clearcutting. This makes me think of the Occupy movement, and then the far longer struggle of those whose country — or countries — my ancestors came to occupy. And having lived in one place for most of the past 40 years myself, I can tell you that becoming attached to any one mountain, river or forest is nearly always a recipe for heartbreak, as you witness the cumulative effects of ecological degradation. No doubt the residents of cities like Detroit or New Orleans feel much the same kind of helpless sorrow these days. The life of a drifter — that quintessential American individualist — becomes more attractive with each passing year.

watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube

Who’d have thought a Chilean poem and an Irish folk song (“The Foggy Dew” on penny whistle, by British software- and web-developer Chris Kent) would go together so well? But the mix of sweetness and melancholy was just right, I thought.

This is one of those videopoems that began with some of my own footage (of a spinner who wishes to remain anonymous). When I thought about what sort of poem to match it with, Gabriela Mistral came to mind almost right away — those who know her work will understand what I mean. Nic Sebastian readily agreed to make and upload a recording to her new site Pizzicati of Hosanna. (How many times have Nic and I collaborated on something now? I’ve lost count. Riches, I got ‘em!)

Dicha can mean happiness, joy, good luck, or good fortune. Many translators, influenced by the title and the “stolen” part, have gone with “fortune,” but I think it’s better to keep our options open. So often, the simplest poems are the hardest to translate…

Riches
by Gabriela Mistral

I have a steadfast joy
and a joy that’s lost:
one like a rose,
the other a thorn.
That which was stolen from me
is still in my possession:
I have a steadfast joy
and a joy that’s lost,
and I’m rich with purple
and with melancholy.
Ah, how beloved is the rose,
how loving the thorn!
Like the double outline
of twin fruits,
I have a steadfast joy
and a joy that’s lost…

I hadn’t expected to be so impressed by Blackwater Falls. The West Virginia state park was just a place to camp, conveniently located close to two microbreweries in the towns of Thomas and Davis, not to mention a portion of the Monongahela National Forest which my hiking buddy Lucy and I planned to explore the next day. But we dutifully went down to look at the falls after pitching our tents, and were blown away (see the photo in my postcard). The tannic color of the falls (whence its name) was striking, and the location in a wooded gorge couldn’t have been more picturesque.

I made an audio recording of the falls, then switched to the video camera. At a certain point, Lucy — who has an excellent eye — drew my attention to the water spraying off a large boulder at the foot of the falls and suggested that might make a good film “for a poem by you or Nic Sebastian.” I saw immediately what she was talking about.

After several more days of relishing the unparalleled silence, breathtaking scenery and wilderness quality of the “Mon,” we made our way back to Central Pennsylvania, and I discovered to my shock that Via Negativa and all its associated sites had been down for two and a half days (sorry about that). But my gloom at the unreliability of my webhost was soon cancelled out by my excitement at seeing what other, more diligent online poets had been doing during my absence. Luisa had continued to write daily poems for publication on Via Negativa even without the benefit of access to The Morning Porch archives for prompts, which is especialy impressive considering all her other commitments. And Nic Sebastian, who had recently decided to close submissions to Whale Sound, her online audio archive of contemporary poetry, had just launched a new audio project called Pizzicati of Hosanna, featuring her readings of work by dead poets in English, French, Spanish and Italian. One poem, Neruda’s “Fábula de la sirena y los borrachos,” seemed like it might make a good fit for my waterfall footage.

I whipped up a fairly literal translation — good enough for subtitling, I thought. But finding the right soundtrack consumed quite a few hours more, using various search terms at Jamendo, ccMixter and Soundcloud. Part of the problem was I couldn’t decide on the mood I wanted to establish. But once it became clear it should be elegiac (rather than, say, angry or dissonant), I quickly found something I thought might work. I shared the result at a private Facebook group where a few of us aspiring videopoets critique each other’s work, and was encouraged by their positive reactions. Brenda Clews suggested I increase the sound of the falls after the poem ends. I decided to go a little further and include waterfall sound throughout the title and credits, using the higher-quality audio from my portable recorder rather than what was on the video.

Here’s my translation, for those with dial-up connections who don’t feel inclined to wait for the video to load:

Fable of the Siren and the Drunks
by Pablo Neruda

All those gentlemen were there inside
when she came in completely naked
they’d been drinking and they began spitting on her
fresh from the river she didn’t understand anything
she was a siren who’d gotten lost
insults streamed down over her smooth flesh
filth drenched her golden breasts
she didn’t know how to cry so she didn’t cry
she didn’t know how to put clothes on so she didn’t put clothes on
they branded her with cigarettes and charred corks
and laughed until they fell down on the bar room floor
she didn’t speak because she didn’t know how to speak
her eyes were the color of distant love
her arms were made of twin topazes
her lips were cut from coral light
and she went out that door as suddenly as she came
no sooner had she entered the river than she was clean
she shone like a white stone in the rain
and without looking back she swam anew
swam toward never again swam toward death

Listen to Neruda himself reading the poem at Palabra Virtual.

Incidentally, speaking of Brenda Clews, she’s just launched a weekly series of blog posts reviewing videopoems, “videopoem Fridays.” Here’s the first installment.

El cementerio está cerca
de donde tú y yo dormimos,
entre nopales azules,
pitas azules y niños
que gritan vívidamente
si un muerto nubla el camino.

De aquí al cementerio, todo
es azul, dorado, límpido.
Cuatro pasos, y los muertos.
Cuatro pasos, y los vivos.

Límpido, azul y dorado,
se hace allí remoto el hijo.

The graveyard isn’t far
from where we sleep, you and I,
among blue prickly-pears,
blue agaves & children
who cry out so vividly
whenever a dead body darkens the road.

From here to the graveyard, everything
is blue, golden, translucent.
Four steps & the dead.
Four steps & the living.

Translucent, blue & golden,
my son grows distant there.

* * *

* * *

* * *

1938-1941
Originals may be under copyright. The translations are my own.

Wikipedia: Miguel Hernández

Waves at Matsushima by Tawaraya Sotatsu (fl. ca. 1600-1643)

Matsushima is a group of islands in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. There are some 260 tiny islands (shima) covered in pines (matsu) — hence the name — and is ranked as one of the Three Views of Japan. Matsushima was very seriously damaged by the Tsunami following the Sendai earthquake in March 2011, with more than 600 people killed.
—Wikipedia, “Matsushima”

hundreds of tiny islands, each
with its own pine tree
like a flag planted by Mother Earth
—Jason Crane, “Matsushima”

* * *

matushima no
iso ni murewiru
ashitadu no
ono ga samazama
mieshi chiyo kana

A thousand years
in the eye of each
& every crane
flocking on the rocky shore
of Matsushima.

—Kiyowara no Motosuke (908-990)

tachi kaeri
mata mo kite min
matsushima ya
ojima no tomaya
nami ni arasu na

Returning
once more to gaze
on Matsushima,
the waves at Ojima lashing
my rush-walled hut.

—Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204)

shimajima ya
chiji ni kudakete
natsu no umi

Islands upon islands—
thousands of shards smashed
by the summer sea.

asayosa o
taga matsushima zo
katagokoro

Morning & evening
like someone at Matsushima—
unrequited love.

—Matsuo Bashô (1644-1694)

Matsushima in Rikuzen Province by Toyohara Chikanobu (1838–1912)

The town was protected by a stunningly beautiful maze of coves and islands, topped with bonsai-shaped Japanese pines, which kept the worst of the tsunami at bay.

The water rose three metres and the town was relatively lightly affected, as the local emergency services chief told a group of stranded tourists earlier this week.

But everything is relative. Tetsuo lived, against the odds, but said some of his neighbours died. He is now staying at a friend’s house.

—The Sydney Morning Herald

* * *

matsushima ya
tsuru ni mi o kare
hototogisu

Matsushima.
Borrow the body of a crane,
oh cuckoo.

—Kawai Sora (1649-1710)

matsushima ya
hito kobushi-zutsu
aki no kure

Autumn dusk—
each island like a fist
at Matsushima.

matsushima ya
kosumi wa kurete
naku hibari

As the light fades
on an islet at Matsushima,
a skylark’s song.

—Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828)

matsushima ya
aa matsushima ya
matsushima ya

Matsushima,
ah, Matushima!
Matsushima.

—Anon. (attr. to Bashô)

You can see a broken plough
and a threshing machine whose skeleton houses
one last gleam of sun.
You see summer shrunk into a scarecrow
whose nightmares disturb the wheat.
You see the irrigation ditch in whose depths your missing friend
grabs hold of the paper boat you launched.
You see the town and fields spread out
like pages in a spelling book
where one day you’ll realize you’ve read
the true history of happiness.

The storekeeper goes out to close the shutters.
The farmer’s daughters herd the chickens in.
In the sky, the eyes of strange fish
begin a menacing vigil.
Better return to earth now.
Your dog comes bounding up to meet you.
Your island sinks in the sea of night.

*

A un niño en un árbol
de Jorge Teillier

El almacenero sale a cerrar los postigos.
Las hijas del granjero encierran las gallinas.
Ojos de extraños peces
miran amenazantes desde el cielo.
Hay que volver a tierra.
Tu perro viene a saltos a encontrarte.
Tu isla se hunde en el mar de la noche.

*

I came across this poem just this morning, and decided to try translating it for the 50th edition of the Festival of the Trees (submissions due by midnight!). The host this time is Growing with Science Blog, and the theme: Trees through a child’s eyes.

Climbing trees was a regular activity for my brothers and me when we were kids. Mom warned us to be careful and look out for each other, but other than that, she and Dad encouraged us to explore, for which I am eternally grateful. We stayed away from fruit trees and other species we knew to have brittle banches, but we certainly didn’t shy away from tackling the tallest trees we could get up into. Usually, these were woods’-edge trees with a convenient ladder of limbs on the field side.

Needless to see, this was free-hand climbing, usually with bare feet for added traction. We tried building tree forts a couple of times, but none of us really had the carpentry skills to make it happen, and besides, if you climb high enough, the leafy branches close in and it’s just as easy to pretend you’re surrounded by walls. Tellier’s poem resonated with me, even though we don’t live in sight of town, because it really captures that shipwrecked experience of being alone in the top of a tree, and seeing how things below seem to grow distant in time as well as in space.

In some way that I can’t quite put into words, climbing trees strikes me as an essential experience — one that teaches you things you can’t learn any other way. Our physiognomy still reflects the arboreal habitat of our not-so-distant ancestors; watching the tree elves in Lord of the Rings or the Na’vi in Avatar, we’re struck by a powerful nostalgia. Trees are almost like godparents, nurturing, teaching us both how to aspire and how to respect our limits. It saddens me to think how many kids these days never get to learn such things.

Under the sky born after the rain,
I hear the quiet slap of oars against the water
and I’m thinking: happiness is nothing
but the quiet slap of oars against the water.
Or maybe it’s nothing but the light
on a small boat, appearing and disappearing
on the dark swell of years
slow as a funeral supper.

Or the light of a house discovered behind the hill
when we’d thought nothing remained but to walk and walk.
Or the gulf of silence
between my voice and the voice of someone
revealing to me the true names of things
simply by calling them up: poplars, roofs.
The distance between the clinking of a bell
on a sheep’s neck at dawn
and the thud of a door closing after a party.
The space between the cry of a wounded bird out on the marsh
and the folded wings of a butterfly
just over the crest of a wind-swept ridge.

That was happiness:
drawing random figures in the frost,
fully aware they’d hardly last at all,
breaking off a pine bough on the spur of the moment
to write our names in the damp ground,
catching a piece of thistledown
to try and stop the flight of a whole season.

That’s what happiness was like:
brief as the dream of a felled sweet acacia tree
or the dance of a crazy old woman in front of a broken mirror.
Happy days pass as quickly as the journey
of a star cut loose from the sky, but it doesn’t matter.
We can always reconstruct them from memory,
just as the boy sent out to the courtyard for punishment
collects pebbles to form resplendent armies.
We can always be in the day that’s neither yesterday nor tomorrow,
gazing up at a sky born after the rain
and listening from afar
to a quiet slap of oars against the water.

***

Thanks to everyone who helped out on Facebook with the line about the solterona loca. I’ll have to make a habit of “friend-sourcing” translation problems from now on. Further critiques are of course welcome, too. This was somewhat freer than my usual attempts at translation.

Mares
by Juan Ramón Jiménez

Siento que el barco mío
ha tropezado, allá en el fondo,
con algo grande.

¡Y nada
sucede! Nada…Quietud…Olas….
—¿Nada sucede; o es que la sucedido todo,
y estamos ya, tranquilos, en lo nuevo?—

Seas

I sense that my boat
has struck, deep down,
against some massive thing.

And nothing happens!
Nothing… silence… waves…
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and we are already resting in the new life?

*

It may be a mistake to try and make a video for one of my favorite poems: I’ll never be satisfied with the results. In this case, my dissatisfaction is especially acute because one of the main things that made the footage so compelling to watch on my home computer — the complex patterns of waves — is excessively pixelated at anything but the highest of resolutions. Also, there’s some absurdity in visually equating the surface of a small, vernal pond with Jimenez’ “Seas.” Oh well.

For the translation, after much thought I decided to borrow from Robert Bly’s translation and render “lo nuevo” as “the new life,” instead of simply “the new,” because I think that is the gist of it. As always with my translations, I’d welcome suggestions of alternatives. I was trying to figure out some way to use “calm,” or a variation thereof, for “tranquilos,” but “becalmed” seemed over-reaching. It’s frustrating to have a clear idea of what the poem means and be unable to quite convey it.

I’ll be sharing this at Moving Poems in a couple of weeks, but here’s a sneak peek. For the Spanish text (or my translation), see “Federico Garcí­a Lorca: two translations,” my post from 2005.

“Gacela” means “ghazal,” but I decided to keep the Spanish word this time to avoid confusion, since Lorca’s notion of what constitutes a ghazal differs so much from the practice of contemporary English-language poets (to say nothing of Arabic poets). This was part of Lorca’s 23-poem cycle Divan del Tamarit, an homage to the great Moorish civilization of his native Andalusia.

Lorca’s free adaptations of the ghazal and qasida reflected the influence of the anthology Poemas Arábigoandaluces translated by Emilio García Gómez, which created a minor sensation among Spanish readers and intellectuals when it was published in 1930. Poets of the renowned Generation of 27, which included Lorca, found it especially revelatory. Rafael Albertí later told an interviewer, “That book opened our eyes to all that Andalusian past, and brought it so close to us that it left me with a great preoccupation for those writers, those Andalusian writers, Arabs and Jews, born in Spain… If one studies Arab-Andalusian poetry carefully, so full of metaphors and miniaturism, we will see that there is a continuity with the later poetry, of Góngora, Soto de Rojas, and centuries later, with our own.” (I’m quoting from the introduction to an English translation of the anthology, Poems of Arab Andalusia, by Cola Franzen.)

The music, as noted in the credits, is by Antony Raijekov. It’s from his Jamendo.com collection Jazz U, to which he applied a liberal Creative Commons license that allows for remixes.

Gakumon wa... haiga by Yosa Buson (photo by ionushi on Flickr, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)

Gakumon wa ketsu kara nukeru hotaru kana

(Study/scholarship as-for, ass from exiting/emitting firefly [exclamatory particle])

All this study—
it’s coming out your ass,
oh firefly!

*

I found this gem while looking for a photo of one of Buson’s haiga (haiku illustration, a proto-Manga-like genre he did much to advance) as a possible addition to Sunday’s post. It comes courtesy of Mexican blogger and man-of-letters Aurelio Asiain, who, as it happens, now teaches at the very college in Japan where I spent a formative year as an exchange student back in 1985-86.

This is as close to an outright simile as a haiku can get. Notice that there’s no firefly in the painting, which acts as a kind of commentary on the poem. In the absence of any additional information, one could certainly read this as a poem about a firefly whose diligent study bears fruit in the radiance coming from his abdomen. But the facial expression of the figure in the painting encourages a more Rabelaisian interpretation. Notice, further, the placement of the text in relation to the figure, the calligraphy suggesting curls of vapor. This is a fart joke.

It translates particularly well into modern American English, since “talking out one’s ass” is such a popular way to characterize know-it-all bloviating. Intellectual pursuits had a much higher value in Edo-period Japan, though, where students and scholars were often poetically said to study by firefly light — a conceit that survives to this day:

“Keisetsu-jidadi” which literally translates into “the era of the firefly and snow,” means one’s student days. It derives from the Chinese folklore and refers to studying in the glow of the fireflies and snow by the window. There is also an expression “Keisetsu no kou” which means “the fruits of diligent study.”

So Buson’s insight consists simply in pointing out where on its anatomy the firefly’s light emerges.

We shouldn’t be surprised that such a humorous haiku came from the brush of one of the greatest haiku masters. Humor and earthiness were primarily what distinguished haiku and haikai no renga from the much older renga (linked verse) tradition in the first place. In social terms, haiku poetry represented a middle-class appropriation and popularization of what had been a very aristocratic pursuit. And Japan was and remains an earthy culture; there’s nothing like the split between classical and vernacular views of the body which has afflicted Westerners since the Renaissance. Buson was able to paint equally well in a high-brow Chinese style and in the cartoonish fashion seen here, just as Chaucer included the Knights Tale and the Miller’s Tale in the same work.