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While out today I bought a book of poems from a charity store because it was a book of Kenneth Rexroth translations out of the Chinese, and Rexroth has previously torn my brain to giddy shreds
I had heard Rexroth was a polyglot and a skilled translator, but I did not know I'd be reduced to tears on the train home
His first 35 translations are of Tu Fu's work, an 8th-century poet whom he claims is alongside Catullus and Baudelaire as the greatest non-epic and non-dramatic poet in history
One of the poems, just one, was too long for a single page. I did not know this and upon the end of the page thought the poem done - it had reached a moment of such wisdom that I shudderingly re-read the tract and felt something settle over me
There turned out to be nine more lines.
TO WEI PA, A RETIRED SCHOLAR
The lives of many men are
Shorter than the years since we have
Seen each other. Aldebaran
And Antares move as we have.
And now, what night is this? We sit
Here together in the candle
Light. How much longer will our prime
Last? Our temples are already
Grey. I visit my old friends.
Half of them have become ghosts.
Fear and sorrow choke me and burn
My bowels. I never dreamed I would
Come this way, after twenty years,
A wayfarer to your parlor.
When we parted years ago,
You were unmarried. Now you have
A row of boys and girls, who smile
And ask me about my travels.
How have I reached this time and place?
Before I can come to the end
Of an endless tale, the children
Have brought out the wine. We go
Out in the night and cut young
Onions in the rainy darkness.
We eat them with hot, steaming,
Yellow millet. You say, "It is
Sad, meeting each other again."
― acoleuthic, Friday, 17 September 2010 20:16 (thirteen years ago) link
three years pass...
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.
- GMH
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 25 July 2014 21:54 (nine years ago) link
six years pass...
Simon Armitage writes a poem on the occasion of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh.
The Patriarchs – An Elegy
The weather in the window this morning
is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
was always the stuff of minor miracle,
who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.
Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
both inner core and outer case
in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.
They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
with the solar year, but turned their minds
to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
Last of the great avuncular magicians
they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.
The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 17 April 2021 10:53 (three years ago) link
I think there's a rather uncertain mix of the specific and the general here. If this is for the Duke, then why is it so general and generational? But if it's so general, why include the line about 'a zodiac out of sync', apparently specifically referring to his Greek origins and not applicable to other patriarchs?
This:
On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation
-- seems to pick up the tone of parts of the FOUR QUARTETS, and of Auden who was contemporary with them. I'm unsure that 'pipe up' fits well here, even though Armitage is probably trying to imply a hint of a bagpiper playing in tribute.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 17 April 2021 10:56 (three years ago) link
seven months pass...
one month passes...
Good interview here with Louise Gluck, where she talks a bit about Ashbery:
SH: How did you know (your book) was done? The book is quite short, but that brevity feels important to the effect of it.LG: Well, for a long time it wasn’t; it was just skimpy and a little mannered. But during this period, I finally came to understand the poetry of John Ashbery, whose work had eluded me the whole of my life, though I was moved by him as a person. He was a radiant presence, kind of angelic, but the poems just exhausted me. They seemed interminable—in fact, some of them still do—but those that don’t were like nothing I’d ever read. What changed him for me was Karin Roffman’s book [The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life]. It made Ashbery available to me, but it was also in itself remarkable. Did I tell you the story about reading the book and writing her a letter?
SH: No, I just remember talking to you when you were in the middle of reading it, I think a few years ago. It sounded like it fixed something for you at the time.
LG: It did. So I wrote her a letter of ardent appreciation. And then I thought, “I have to write Ashbery.” But when you’re writing to someone you revere, you want to commend yourself to the person; your ego gets involved. Also, I couldn’t say, you know, “I never liked your work, but now I really see how extraordinary it is, though I certainly came to it a little late.” In any case, the letter was hard to write. It was the beginning of the semester at Yale; it was my first night in New Haven for that year. And I thought, “I absolutely have to write this letter. I have to do it. I have to do it this week. As soon as I get home, I have to.” And then I had an e-mail in the very early morning from Frank (Bidart), who said Ashbery had died. And I never wrote my letter. I mean, I’m sure he had other things on his mind. But I would have liked… I would have liked to put some flowers at his feet. I think his work showed me something. But the book I was trying to write came in the most tortured little drips—I thought of it as rusty water coming out of the tap. And then Covid happened, and I thought, “Well, that’s it for writing,” you know.
― deep luminous trombone (Eazy), Wednesday, 19 January 2022 01:47 (two years ago) link