please note John Irons blog, and Elizabeth Eybers poem:

please note an addition to my list of blog links:

John Irons—

... his blog is filled with his wonderful translations from the verse of various countries—

I found it by looking via google for poems in English of the Afrikaans poet Elizabeth Eybers.

/

and: here's a trans by Jacquelyn Pope of Eybers, from PoChiMag:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/237014

...
Here's the trans I found, by John Irons (from his blog):

Poem by the Afrikaans poet
Elisabeth Eybers

The prayer of  stiffening souls

Make us immortal for one single hour,

grant us the folly of one mindless deed!

The eye that for no lasting goal would scour

but, feverish and wide, would only heed

what’s caught in a pale face – the instant’s flare –

not mourning for the ashes when it’s spent,

a scream that hangs there in the listless air

like blood-red rose held in a haze of scent!

Our hearts have never been so still, so bare...

The darkness like a wall begins to tower,

dividing us from life-and-death, and there

we talk of it while late-night hours recede...

Make us immortal for one single hour,

grant us the folly of one mindless deed!  
...




///  

enjoy

I quite liked this poem "for younger readers" :


http://andotherpoems.wordpress.com/2012/12/01/don-share/


...

poems of this genre which succeed (as this one does) are often more enjoyable and give more pleasure

and are yes better-written
 
than most of the "adult" verse in magazines and books . . .

///

a poem by Erich Fried, trans. Stuart Hood:

Erich Fried on the pietistic hogwash of Khalil Gibran

*
Erich Fried:
THE PROPHET (on Khalil Gibran's The Prophet)
      (trans. Stuart Hood)

The prophet said: 
'Only when you drink of silence
will you truly sing
Only when you reach the mountain-top
will you begin to climb
Only when the earth embraces you
will you truly dance'

They made you drink
from the river of silence
but you did not sing
They drove you up
to the highest mountain-top
but you climbed no further
The earth has embraced
your limbs
but you do not dance

The prophet was a false prophet
he erred
or he lied

Those who drowned our dead
did not teach them
to sing
Those who cast down our dead
did not teach them
to climb
Those who bulldozed earth onto our dead
were not their dancing-masters
but their murderers

The murderers will sing
words that have barely changed
to the old tune
The murderers still climb
from peak
to higher peak
The murderers dance over graves
and dungeons

Smilingly the murderers
tolerate the sayings of the prophet
his homilies which still
make everything
beautiful

///

on Tom Clark's blog today:

*

It may be good like it who list
but I do dowbt who can me blame 
for oft assured yet have I myst 
and now again I fere the same 
The wyndy worde[s] the Ies quaynt game
of soden change maketh me agast
for dred to fall I stond not fast
Alas I tred an endles maze
that seketh to accorde two contraries
and hope still & nothing hase
imprisoned in liberte[s]
as one unhard & and still that cries
alwaies thursty & yet and nothing I tast
for dred to fall I stond not fast
Assured I dowbt I be not sure
and should I trust to suche suretie
that oft hath put the prouff in ure
and never hath founde it trusty
nay sir In faith it were great foly
and yet my liff thus I do wast
for dred to fall I stond not fast


Hase: hazard, attempt
ure: use

Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542): It may be good like it who list: transcription from original text (British Library Egerton MS 2711, fol. 22) by Richard Harrier in The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry, 1975

 

 

///

a few of my books

Selected Poems 1960-2012
Collected Sonnets 1970-2012  
The Moon's Memoirs: Collected Short Poems 1960-2012 
Laugh at the End of the Word: Collected Comic Poems
Babblegate: Poems from Childhood  
Love Poems 1960-2012  
Selected Syllabic Verse  
Selected Surrealist Verse  
Never Lend Your Umbrella to a Submarine and Other Poems for Young Readers  
Stickpoems  
One Hundred Rhyming Poems Selected from the Books of Bill Knott  
Aloft: Poems from the Heights  
Downrhymes: 99 Poems of Defeat Despair and Disappointment
A Salt of Seasons: Winter Spring Summer Fall Poems  
Movie Muse: some Film Poems  
One Hundred Sonnets [—a "Selected Sonnets" in disguise]  
Selected Political Poems 1965-2012  
Homages  
Cemetery Poems   
I Hate to Write Prosepoems: a Selection 
Transversions  
Bucks on Roses (Selected Quintains)   
Ekphrastiques du mal  
Orphead: Poems after Classical Myths
Forthfable and other poems derived from Biblical Myths
The Condition: Poems about Music, with a few song lyrics appended
3 Verse Plays: The Sewing Machine / Playing Chicken with Van Gogh / Who's There: a Play for Two Sentries 
Plaza de Loco
Excerpts from the Diary of [deleted]
An Incomplete Inventory of Dorian Gray's Closet
The Naomi Poems
Auto-Necrophilia
Rome in Rome
Outremer
The Unsubscriber
Aurealism: A Study
etc.  
   

dam

*
Looking through some papers this morning I found one of the the "haiku" handouts I distributed to my annual Forms class at Emerson College,

and in it I rediscovered this beautiful little poem by Margherita Guidacci, with an English translation by a  translator whose name to my regret I didn't include and can't remember . . . maybe it's by Ruth Feldman, who translated at least 3 books by Guidacci—

in any case, here's her poem in the original Italian, followed by the trans., which is followed by my "version":

Sera

É crollata la diga del sole, crollato

l'ultimo rosso, l'ultimo rose, l'ultimo grigio.  Sul mondo

ora le grandi acque oscure dilagano in pace.

E no entriamo nell'arca fino alla prossima aurora.

/

Evening

The dam of the sun has given way, gone too

is the last red, the last rose, the last grey.  Now

across the world the great dark waters overflow in peace.

And we take refuge in the Ark until the next dawn.

/

My variant version:

Now the sunset's dam breaks—

waters of darkness drown the world.

What Ark will bear us safe to dawn?

//

And may I please recommend this wonderful book:

A Book of Sibyls, by Margherita Guidacci, translated by Ruth Feldman,

published in 1989—

you can find some inexpensive copies at:

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Sibyls-Margherita-Guidacci/dp/0937672262/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350927144&sr=1-1&keywords=a+book+of+sibyls

/

The first poet on this planet was probably a sibyl, a woman shaman who spoke from earth-evoked and bodily wisdom, and Guidacci's book of sibyls presents the voices of many of those most ancient and renowned: Cumean, Delphic, Phrygian, etc.  Cthonic-timeless its perspectives view us.

/// 

postscript 11/02/12:

another translation, by Catherine O'Brien, from "In the Eastern Sky / Selected Poems of Margherita Guidacci". . . published by the Irish press Dedalus in 1993:

EVENING

The dam of the sun has collapsed, gone too
the last red, the last pink, the last grey.  Across the world
now the great dark waters overflow unhindered.
And we go into the ark to wait for the coming dawn.

///    

   

never

*
What a horrible nightmare last night: I dreamt I was writing prosepoems!  

Or rather in the run-on montage drift-shift of dreams I was sort of writing prosepoems and simultaneously viewing them on pages in magazines with my name plastered above them, printed out in the same magazines (I somehow knew) which had rejected my real poems, my verse poems, they were publishing these damn prosepoems purporting my authorship,

and in the dream I was consumed with feelings of ugh this is horrible, I hate prosepoems, why am I writing/publishing these disgusting things, and yet simultaneously I was feeling somewhat gratified and pleased by the sight of my name in these illustrious journals which had always shunned my work,

but the ultimate emotion I felt was bitterness as these never-to-be-written prosepoems appeared there in prestigious print to mock me  . . . 

I've had worse nightmares of course, dreams filled with fear and insecurity, but this one last night remains in my mind today as a particularly distasteful and miserable visitation . . .

/
I've written a few prosepoems in the past, though as I insist in the preface to the tiny chapbook of prosepoems I self-published under the title of "The I Hate to Write Prosepoems Book," every one of the twelve or so prosepoems I did write in my life seems to me to be a failed real poem, meaning a poem I was unable to turn into verse. 
 

//

p.s.

There should be an app that lets you take a "prose poem" and instantly lineate it,

break it up into lines,

(syllabic or generic blank verse lines, for example),

so that it could then be read to ascertain whether there is indeed any poetry in it—

otherwise, how can you tell?

*

 

///