Source: Poetry Poetry (2)
Marina Tsvetaeva
The newspaper grew old in the easy chair and the couch fell asleep
In the emptiness of the sun, a bed inside the beachfront house
The checkered bedspread was kept flat, and the mirror was scratched
One cross-fork after another, a shadow-like fan on top.
Anxious as the beach, I stepped into the kitchen.
My thirst grew into a rusty tap.
The cold air spewing from the open refrigerator indicates white ice flogging
It has crusted from the ice tray to the forests of Siberia.
I drank the water in the frosted bottle, relaxing myself,
The top fan's sheets buzz in silence.
I saw the door that had been unloaded from the vanished wardrobe
Leaning against the surface of a violin, it is supported in space.
I put the ice water back and saw a train parked at the train station
The train is welded in snow and ice, the window frame of the round window,
Frost crochets your face, in dripping patience,
The cry of a gull bird dissolves into a icicle.
You slipped out of the door of your book, wearing a black cloak—
You run in the rain like a crying wall
Old black eyelashes oil, like porcelain broken in
A doll's laugh – your eyelashes are smeared deep black with Cole oil.
Pass a leaf of flying lime or bay through the scenery
Have learned your silence, another language.
Is the grapevine's wrist beating? Each green tendrils
Roll in your throat? Houseflies buzzed in pairs
On a single bed. Ah, your ladder-like rising lark-like
Interrupted song! seaweed-shaped Cyrillic letters,
It's the shorthand of your life, the paw print of the harrier pigeon
Your dashes and hyphens, sand like broken wooden sticks.
It's the season of storms, Tsvetaeva, and some days it's raining
And the sea stood with its head bowed like a horse
Or like a girl leaning over the sink and then plugging in the water pipe,
Suddenly spewing out all the suffering with full force.
But beyond the blue, sometimes a seagull cries
Like spines on faded driftwood. God gradually
Farther and farther away, more and more blue, at this moment, outside the sand dunes of prose,
Running here comes the figure of your little exclamation point.
Seaweed dried her hair, Marina Tsvetaeva,
The Pelican interrupted its flight and nailed it to the cross;
But the bride-like, flying survivors
Seagull, full of her holy feelings
This beachfront house, dresser, a sky blue powder box,
Horizon-like side characters, blank walls—a copy of them tore off
Passport of your photo, a bedside clock,
Ticking without indicating the time, a yellow butterfly dress you forgot,
The sand that shook off my sheets, the graves of pillows,
An ocean of tears. The sun shook its scales.
Time, the eternal half, is like the sea in a window,
The wind blows the fixed canopy sails of your pages.
(Translated by Shen Rui)
32
Midsummer (Selected Translations)
I
The airplane is like a scroll of silver fish drilling through the clouds——
There will be no record of the places we have experienced
There will be no mirror of seawater, no self-proliferation
Corals; these volumes are not made of vanishing stones
The gates, but the broken pages of the damp culture.
Thus a hole was cracked in their parchment, in a piece
In the midst of the huge sun-drenched ruins, the island suddenly appeared:
It has been known to travelers Trolope and Frod 1 as it does
Nothing. Not even people. Projection of the aircraft
Calmly walk through the green jungle like a minnow through the seaweed
undulating. Our sunshine is roman and your white paper
Shared, Joseph 2. Here, as elsewhere
They are all in the same era. In the city, in the colony of mud
The Light never had an epoch. Near the abandoned pier
Around Port of Spain 3, the scorching suburbs fade into words—
Malavar, Diego Martin – The long voyage is like a pity
The spires of the church are so small that you can't hear the bells, and
The sharp cries of the bright white mosque minarets could not either
Coming from the green village. Drop the windows in the dirt
The pages of the book roared, and the sugar cane sank into the verses.
The nouns found their branches as easily as birds, and like them
A cloud of egrets swept across the brown swamp.
It came too fast, this feeling of home that rushed down obliquely—
Sugar cane pounced on the wings, the fence; one when rolling the wheels
A world that stands while shaking the mind.
III
At the Queens Park Hotel, in those white rooms with high ceilings
I went into my original local mirror again. A slippery one in a porcelain basin
Stipa, sliding out of the road to Banaces Hill 4.
Every word I wrote went down the wrong path. I can't
Connect these lines of poetry with the lines of poetry on my face.
The child who died inside me was already on the messy sheets
Left his traces, and that was on the drainage hole of the porcelain basin
It was his faint voice that whispered like a gargling mouth.
Stepping out of the balcony, I remembered what it was like in the morning:
It is like the one in Francesca 5's "Resurrection of Jesus"
A granite corner, a cold, sleeping base
It's like a tiny palm leaf above the Hilton.
In the dewy prairie, gently driven by the grooms,
Horse racing with a squirting nose and delicate ankles in training:
Their ankles were as delicate as brown smoke wafting from a bakery.
Sweat blackened their sides and dew froze
The skin of a fat American taxi parked on the street all night.
In the pitch-black asphalt laneway marked by a ribbon of sunlight
The face of the broken house was closed by the proverb of the Traelne 6
" Millet is the grain of origin and immortality" — and Caroni
The sugar cane fields are touched. Carry the whole summer of burning
A gentle breeze strolled under the dock: the sea began.
WE
Midsummer yawned at the cat and stretched out beside me.
The dusty tree on its lips gradually melts in its furnace
of cars. The heat makes stray bastard dogs stagger.
The Parliament Building was repainted to a rose color while surrounding it
The fence at Woodford Square was still the color of rusting blood.
Casa Rosada 7, the argentine state of mind,
Sing in a shallow voice on the balcony. Monotonous fiery red bush
Use ideographs over Chinese grocery stores
Wipe the damp clouds. The oven-like laneway was suffocating.
In Byrmont, the sad tailors stared at the worn-out sewing machine,
Stitch June and July together tightly and seamlessly.
People waiting for midsummer lightning are like heavily armed sentinels
Waiting in burnout for the deafening gunshots of the rifle.
And I'm dusty by it, it's flat,
The faith that was filled with fear by its exile,
Mountains with a dusty orange glow at dusk,
Even over the stinking harbor
Raised by pilot lights that rotate like police lights. At least
Horror is local. The lascivious scent like a wood lotus.
All night, a revolutionary bark was like a hungry wolf crying.
The moon flashed like a lost button.
The yellow sodium glow on the pier then appeared.
On the street, under the dimly lit windows, the dishes clanged.
The night is friendly, and the future is like tomorrow anywhere
The sun is as ferocious and vicious as it is. I can understand
Borges's blind love for Buenos Aires:
How one feels the streets of the city that swell in its hands.
VII
Our house is near the gutter. Plastic curtains
Or cheap posters that hide dark things behind windows—
Stepped sewing machine, photo, small round pad on
Paper fold roses. Next to the fence of the porch stood a row of red tin sheets.
The height of the passage for people is exactly the size of their door,
And these doors are usually as narrow as coffins, sometimes
On their thin strips are also carved small half-moon shapes.
There is no echo in the mountains. There wasn't even an echo of ruins.
The clearings, along with the chairs on the lawn, were napping.
Any crack in the sidewalk is made up of the world's first map
The initial mistake: its boundaries and powers, caused.
With a pile of red sand and seeds, and burned on the land
Abandoned gravel, a living jungle unfolds
Green elephant ears of wild sweet potatoes and taro.
A small step over a low wall, if you wish
It reminds you of a vine that pushes you forward
childhood. This is the land of all the wanderers, and this is their destiny:
The more they drift, the more open the world becomes.
Thus, no matter how far you wander, your footsteps
Will open more holes, like the net is expanding -
How can you suddenly think of Thomas Van Grova,
How can you pay attention to how they treat Ebeldo,
When exile must draw its own map, when this asphalt road
Take you away from what you do and over the crooked hedges?
XI
The other me, tired of the morning, closed the motel
Bathroom door; and then, rubbing the steamed mirror,
Refuse to say hello to me staring at him from behind.
He muttered softly and stretched my neck in order to
Wipe it clean, and he does it seriously and indifferently
Like a barber applying shaved foam to a corpse – extreme oiling.
If in the basin those few small curls of things
Not hair but tiny six-winged angels, this one
Ancient rituals can become fierce.
He cut our beards with a pair of screaming scissors,
Then, leave it in mid-air and meditate. Certain sadness
Faint but deadly, like when shaving
Guilt. And those who had been illuminated by her clothes
Empty wardrobe. But why the water rushing out of the tap, why
There are several hairs swirling in which the water vortex is able to make
Some people's hands calmly lowered the razor and felt it
In their veins after melancholy sex
Like something dirty is drifting downstream?
This question will make the swans raise their white necks
And the little roosters will step on their little hens and answer quickly.
XII
The abandonment of philosophy was docile by poets
Acts of rebellion, they also despise all science and ridicule their tools;
These lines of poetry will wither, like ephemera, or like elephants
A group of people with their heads against the lights of the hotel piled up on the triangular lintel,
Like Kamikaze Commando 8 or Icarus, burned by empiric radiant light,
Or like an improvisational thought scorched by a glimpse of reason.
Those skinny guys, the Stoics, exactly
How profound? They muttered in a big beard that every child understood
Things: everything has a unique corresponding seasonal hour,
What we would never ever go into the same river or the same bed twice.
The smokeless fire of time frightened Heraclitus—
He saw the lamp of the hotel, he saw midsummer, he saw its interior
A cluster of flame-like light, his eyes escaped from the dazed gaze.
A bathtub in a tomb is equivalent to something pickled like Archimedes' ass
The exact weight. Lift up the ancient Greek hem,
Every girl will see what philosophy is all about.
Genius was arrested not because of his cry of warning,
Rather, it was due to running naked on the street, with a beard and a crotch hanging
Two mature and well-proportioned spheres, shouting wildly,
What it found has actually been known for a long time.
XXIII
With the sound of the green rats running away quickly,
Midsummer leaves rushed to destruction at full speed, like Brixton 9
Roaring angrily in the midst of the riots washed away by the high-pressure water column;
They are restless, facing the flames of autumn - it is in their destiny,
Leaves, like people, die from the scorching sun.
Petioles drag their chain links, and the branches bend widely
It was like pulling every four-wheeled vehicle under the whip of tories 10
The boers of apartheid policy 11 cattle. And that means it to me
The funny childhood myth of England is over – the Ring of the Immortals,
Farmhouse with rose and thatched roofs,
A strong green wind stirred up the hair of Varwick 12.
I used to add luster to Britain's theatre there.
"But black people can't be Shakespeare, they have no experience."
That's right. Their thick skulls flowed with resentment.
When riot police and lepers exchange words with each other
You can go back to sonnets or the Moorish eclipse.
Praise has drawn blood away excess anger from my lines of poetry
In the white, and the snow has made me join the white club, when
The Galiban 13 howled toward the blocked streets of an empire — the Empire
Starting with the unequal dewdrops of Cadmang, it is now
The alleys of Brixban ended and burned like the ships of Turner 14.
(Translated by Hu Xudong)
33
The Island of Croceau
1
Church bells
Like an anvil of God
Hammer the sea into a dazzling shield;
Burning, sea grapes make slowly
Bronze sheets produce metallic heat
Red corrugated iron roof
Roar in the sun.
The earth caves on the tile kilns
Wire-like ribbed air
Tangled like hell in a child's eyes
But it's getting closer, closer.
Below, the city of Skaborough
Plain squares stretch out
Flawless blue sky;
The firmament of our hedonistic philosophy.
The Holy Land and the Promised Land have an open heart
Sing a melodious hymn,
I work hard for God's gift
My Father, God, is dead.
I'm thirty years old, and I don't know until now
Love yourself because you are afraid
Be overhead in the blue sky
Or the rougher sea below
engulf.
From art or alcohol
Every mental trauma
This fear shines every day;
Like his figure turned into an exile
Just as surprising.
On this rock
The bearded hermit built his Garden of Eden:
goats, crops, castles, parasols, gardens,
And the Sabbath Bible, and all the joys
Except for one
A cry that makes him sound in order to have a human voice.
Rotten nuts were exiled by the sun to the Garden of Eden.
Scroll quickly on the tip of the wave
It became his own head
This head rotted because God did not create His kind
The tranquility of this paradise drove him crazy
The spine-shaped figure of a palm tree
In his mind was built keels and rafters.
The second Adam after the Fall
His original corruption
Contains the seeds of innate heresy
Think of men's failures
It is because they have followed their canons.
Craftsmen and exiles
Even the whole kingdom of heaven was in his head
He saw his phantom praying
Not for the love of God, but for the love of mankind.
2
We are here for treatment
Calm in the center of the pustules,
We came from the kitchen with ferocious, sudden quarrels
Thoughts there are like bread
Decomposed in water,
Let the salty sun wash away
A rough head like a coral.
Bathed in the wind like a stone,
As pure as beasts and natural objects.
That imaginary, professional mercy,
Inheriting the gift of poetry from one's own imagination,
Having raised faithfulness with the frugality of a hermit,
Turn its trust to the ends of the earth,
Store it like crazy bread,
Its mind is a white flower that blooms at night.
In a drunken, moonlit room
See my son's head
Wrapped in corpse bristles
Like a drooping nut, lazily leaning into the foam.
Oh, lover, let's die together!
I was carried by a big clock
Walk back in time to childhood
Towards the spire of the gray wooden tower,
Towards harvest and marigolds,
Go to all
A cruel and just God can take them
Embracing in front of his blue chest,
His beard was like a curling cloud
When he hugged my father.
Indecisive and proud of me,
There is no going back.
I can't see hell anymore,
Heaven, the desire of mankind,
I don't have much skill,
Utterly crushed
Crazy against the slanting sun
I'm approaching noon in my life
On the scorched, delirious sand
My figure stretched.
3
Art is blasphemous and pagan,
It reveals the most
Lame Vulcan
Strike Achilles' shield.
Through these blue, changing graves
Blown by the hot wind of heaven
May the mind burst forth with sparks until it
Finally split the model of the human body.
Now Friday's descendants
A group of croesus slaves,
A little girl with a dark complexion
Dressed in a pink cicada-winged gauze dress
With a look of glory
Walk next to a calm microwave.
The waves under their feet
Tame like a tambourine hissing.
Dusk, when they come home
During vespers, the sun caressed
Every garment, the six-winged angel, Angel's,
will burn,
And I came from art and solitude
Nothing can be learned
Nor can it be like a morning bell
Bless them with a numb voice.
(Translated by Wu Qiyao)
34
Nearly forty years old
Insomnia at the age of four, listening to this fine,
Beat hard, early rain
Tell that its coolness paralyzes the bone marrow,
I was nearly forty years old and my weak vision was even closer
A window glass covered with thick frost flowers,
Get closer to that day, with the cold of middle age
Humble, judge my work as
False dawn, without fire and very general,
That will be just because of your life
Shedding only for the usual truth, the style goes beyond parables
Looking for a bad response, albeit
In simple, shiny lines of poetry, in the gushing
The faded sheets under the drain pipes spread out like they did
Pages, and for occasional splashes
Insight and rejoicing; you foresee
Ambition is like a scorching shooting star
Will grope for a damp match, smile, content
The rattle of a bumpy kettle,
Settle for a narrower view than the gaps in the shutters,
Then, look at your sparse foliage and recall the huge
How deeply the cynical taunt planted its seeds,
Measure our seasons with this year-end rain,
And we, like the new students of the school, put the rain
Say it's habitual rather than air convection;
Or, you will stand up with more tragic joy
But more stable self-sufficiency, let your poetry line run on its own,
Until the night when you can really fall asleep,
While measuring how imaginative it is
At low tide, it is regulated like a water level surveyor
Weigh the intensity of the slight rainfall,
When the new moon moves it, do its part
Even when it seems to be crying.
(Translated by Wei Bai)
Egret Derek Wolcott
Translated by Cheng Yi
Scrutinize the light of time to see how long it can take
The morning shadow stretched out on the grass
Sneaking egrets twist their necks to swallow food
At this time you, not them, or you and them have disappeared;
Parrots click and click to launch their ships at sunrise
April ignites the violets of Africa
In the face of a world of drums, your tired eyes are suddenly damp
Behind two blurry shots, sunrise, sunset,
Diabetes is raging silently.
Accept all this with a sober verdict
Inlay each verse with sculptural words;
Learn that the glittering meadows do not have any fences
Lest the egret be stabbed, it groans incessantly at night.
How elegant are these white egrets with red beaks,
Each one is like a sneaking kettle, in the wet season
Lush olive trees, cedars
Soothe the roaring rapids; enter into calm
Beyond desire to get rid of regret,
Maybe eventually I'll get to that point.
In the sunlight, palm leaves hang low like palanquins
Shadows dance wildly beneath them. Overflowing in me
The figure of all sins enters the forgotten
After the green bushes, they will get there,
A hundred suns in the Santa Cruz Valley
Rising and sinking, my love was so futile.
I watched as these giant trees rose from the edge of the meadow
Like an expanding sea, but without a wave peak, the bamboo forest fell into it
Their necks, like horses tied by ropes, yellow leaves
Branches from the concussion were torn off and collapsed like an avalanche;
All of this happened before the rainstorm plummeted,
The sky is like a soaked canvas, sailing in despair
The wind blew in the mess of paper, completely enveloping the mountains
It seemed that the whole valley was a pod that survived the storm safely
And the forest is no longer a tree, but a rushing wave.
When the lightning exploded, the thunder creaked like a curse
And you are safe, hiding in the depths of Santa Cruz
In a dark room, electric light flashed, and the current suddenly disappeared,
You secretly thought, "Who would be a trembling eagle, the perfect egret."
And cloud-colored herons, and even saw the false flames of the dawn
What about the parrots that are all panicked about providing housing? ”
4
These birds continue to act as models for Otterbon (1),
When I was young, a book of snow-white egrets
Or the white heron will be emerald green like Santa Cruz
Open like grass, knowing how beautiful they look,
Perfectly high-headed. They dot the islands,
On the banks of the river, in the ranks of mangroves or in cattle ranches,
Glide above the pond and then polish the ewe
Balance on the back, or in hurricane weather
Escape the disaster and poke with their shocking punches
Pecking out the marks, it seems to be in their mythical arrogance
Studying them is a complete privilege
They flapped their wings and flew from Egypt to the sea
Accompanied by the pharaoh's vermilion heron, its orange mouth and feet
Presenting a quiet silhouette, it decorates the crypt of the church
Then they spread their wings and take off, flapping their wings very quickly,
When they flap their wings, of course, they resemble a six-winged angel.
5
That eternal ideal is wonder.
Cold green grass, quiet trees, over there on the hillside
The jungle followed, and an egret gasped white
Fly into the frame and then use its clumsy footsteps
Standing precariously, so straight, the symbol of the egret!
Another idea is amazing: standing in the tree slightly
An eagle, silent, like a falcon,
Suddenly rushing into the sky, with the same extreme indifference as you,
Hovering above praise or rebuke,
At this moment it fell down and tore a vole with its claws.
The events of the meadow are the same as such public events,
An egret was amazed by the event, and the eagle from above was howling
Rushing to a dead body, a purely abusive love.
6
Halfway through christmas week, I haven't seen them yet.
Those egrets, no one told me why they disappeared,
And at the moment they return at the same time as this rain, orange mouth,
Long pink legs, pointed heads, back to the grass
In the past they used to bathe here in the Santa Cruz Valley
Clear and endless rain, when it rains, raindrops keep falling
Cedar on until it makes the wilderness here a blur.
These egrets have waterfalls and clouds
color. Some of my friends, there are not many left,
Dying soon, these egrets roam in the rain
It seems that death has no effect on them, or that they are like angels
Suddenly rise, fly, and then fall again.
Sometimes those mountains are like friends
It slowly disappeared, and I was very happy
At this moment they were back again, like memories, like prayers.
7
Accompanied by a leisurely leaf falling into the forest
Light yellow swirls against turquoise – this is my ending.
Soon it will be the season of dryness, and the mountains will rust,
The egrets twist their necks up and down, bending and undulating,
Prey on bugs and grubs with their mouths after rain;
Sometimes standing upright like a bowling bottle, they stand
Peel like cotton wool peeled from a mountain;
Then they move slowly, with their fingers spread out on their feet and
Tilt your neck forward to move so wide as one hand.
We share an instinct, that greed for supply
The beak of my pen, picking up the writhing insects
Swallow them like nouns, when it's written
The tip of the pen was reading, angrily throwing off the food its bird's beak rejected.
The choice is the teaching of these egrets
When reading quietly and attentively on the wide, empty meadows
They keep nodding their heads, which is a difficult language to express.
8
We were by the pool at a friend's house in St. Croix
Joseph and I were talking; he stopped talking,
I had hoped he would be happy with this visit.
Gasping pointed out that it was not standing still or striding
Instead, it was fixed to this huge fruit tree, and a sight shook him
"It's like something from Bosch (2)," he said. That big bird
Suddenly it flew here, and maybe the same bird took him there,
A melancholy egret or heron; unspeakable words are always
Accompanying us, like Eumeus, the third companion
What gets him, he loves snow, what makes it appear,
The bird glowed with a ghostly white light.
It's noon or late afternoon, on the grass
The egrets flew quietly together to the heights,
Or sail to the sea-green grass, like a rowing race,
They are angelic souls, like Joseph's soul.
exegesis:
(1) Audubon (1785-1851), American ornithologist, painter and naturalist.
(2) Bosch (1874-1940), a German chemist, won the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.