Hope of Love Poems

“Had there been nothing more than a sandbar in that bend of the river, Bienville would have urged his settlers to camp on it” – Garvey and Widmar, on Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville’s arrival by ship via the Mississippi to the old Indian portage where New Orleans stands today

Cartographers tell us the Crescent City is located at 30° latitude and 90° longitude. However, the hodgepodge mix of this creatured ergosphere is less a geographical certainty than it is a grand mystère. In fact, the ancestral heritage of this forbidden paradis owes as much to the countless cypress tree knees erupting through busted sidewalks and streets as it does to the pure sensate of Mythos itself. What hungers, what treacles here is a multispectrum of sleepless moons whose menses puddle like fresh blood on the hands of the dreamer. Here lies a Great Leviathaness swathed in an archaea of sludge and slime so rooted in chaos, misrule, and anti-aesthetics, she is at once the mother of her own birth. On the other hand, as a personification of culture, our lady is more like an orphaned kid tossed aside by an unworldly world. She is more attuned to feeling than she is to thinking, which is likely one of her greatest attributes. She looks banefully upon the empire of mores oft celebrated by her American counterparts. Her countenance is stalwart in its disapproval of unheresiarchal ruses. Her aliveness is never to be confused with pusillanimous forgiveness. As a shaman, she descries the rise of verisimilitudes unfathomable to messianic humans. The ocean is her cloister. She quaffs only the most prescient pearls. Her parfum is a putrid smelling yoke. To chart the origin of her ABC’s is to track down the abecedarium of sublunary goo cooing from the roots of her upside down tree. One can only wish to grasp, as the Chapitoulas-Choctaw Indians once did, the infinite variance of her reptilian aviary while treading ankle deep with the stars. Consider for a moment the alchemy necessary here. Try recounting the story of your lover’s face for a thousand and one nights as though your very soul depended upon it. This bioregion aches with big life. There is no egg-shaped equivalent to its existence. Actually in the big bang of things, if our galaxy were an inch across, I’d be tempted to say Baby Nola formed the warp and weft of its womb. Furthermore, I seriously doubt her deepest secrets, which the history books might fail to record, will remain out of reach of her poets’ hearts. What is embodied in the people of the city of New Orleans is a richness of natural being so unparalleled and mystifying that it has become a living opus of wonderment. Of course her ever-changing narrative always ends and begins alongside a river that serves as a symbol of her enduring presence—the Mississippi, or more properly the Mesechabe, as it was called by the Choctaw (meaning “Father of the Waters”). Not surprisingly I recently encountered a word with almost the same phonetic signature thousands of miles away on the western coast of Africa—Masechaba, which comes from the Sotho, a narrow Bantu language belonging to the Niger-Congo family (meaning “Mother of the People”). Mere coincidence? I’ll let you handle that one! What is certain is that the relationships between words and water serve as natural a bridge as any between all people, estranged or not; and throughout the ages, this is precisely why the motley assemblage of New Orleans’ citizenry is so profoundly singular in their joie de vivre.

[Born in '67 and raised in New Orleans, poet Dave Brinks' blood is Acadian French and Choctaw. Brinks is editor-in-chief of YAWP: A Journal of Poetry & Art, publisher of Trembling Pillow Press, director of 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series, founder of The New Orleans School for the Imagination, and literary editor of ArtVoices magazine. His poetry and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers, journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, and overseas. His works have aired on NPR’s Hearing Voices and PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and also have been featured in National Geographic Traveler and Louisiana Cultural Vistas. He is the author of six books including the acclaimed The Caveat Onus (Black Widow Press 2009, 240 pgs, ISBN 978-0-9818088-4-0), a section of which appeared earlier on Poems and Poetics..

SIX NIGHT THOUGHTS

1 A night for ponies

2 A night for peonies

3 A night for twisted papers

4 A night for stamps an angry clerk withholds

5 A night for sympathy

6 A night for being old


TWELVE LUNAR MEDITATIONS

1
a knife falls
in the water
grows a second knife

& over each knife
looms an eye –
my second eye trails off


2
life has spirit, death
has only chalk

with chalk a word
is written

but not by you


3
end it here,
the man says
as he puts his thumb on it

the thumb is raw,
behold,
the man is even now alone


4
easy sleep
easy rest

easier to be an animal
than not


5
DIRECTIONS

rub this side of the chain
against that side

how many years before
the chain rubs out?


6
after Nerval

like inserting two pictures
in a single viewer

(he writes)

then moving my hand as if
sketching my signature


7
death has a taste
after we hear of it

a man’s taste
or a woman’s

a child’s taste
or a cat’s


8
someone slips below the sod

the grass grows over him

as if someone has died,
but no one stops to ask


9
A FUTURE POETICS

with inspiration vanished
respiration took its place

is expiration next?


10
there is something
we like to hide

if not our tongues,
our eyes

if not our immortal souls,
our daily vices


11
A MESSAGE FOR THE CRUEL MAJORITY

they will punish the poor for being poor

they will punish the dead for having died


12
the spirit of the dead
means nothing


[These poems were recovered, along with numerous others, for Retrievals, a volume of Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2005, to be published later this year by Mark Weiss & Junction Press. Fourteen previous installments have appeared since 2008 on Poems & Poetics.]

Translation from the Polish Manuscripts by Harris Lenowitz

INTRODUCTION

[Originally written for Rothenberg & Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volume 3, with passages adapted from A Big Jewish Book (a.k.a. Exiled in the Word), but never published as such. Jacob Frank, the eighteenth-century Jewish messiah, was one of a long chain of Messiahs from the time of Jesus and before. See also H. Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights, Oxford University Press, 1998.]

As a time of growing dislocations & deconstructions, the eighteenth-century saw changes of mind that reached into isolated corners of Europe, far removed from the strongholds of both the Enlightenment & the “natural supernaturalism” & radical mysticisms that were among the marks of an emerging Romanticism. The messianic Frankist movement as it affected eastern European Jews involved, like its literary & western counterparts, a shift in language & its attendant symbols that resembled the shifts emerging as well in the dominant cultures.

Of the work presented below, Harris Lenowitz writes as translator: “These are some of the sayings of Yankiev Leivich, Yakov ben Lev, who called himself Yakov Frank and whom some called Wise Jacob. Jacob Frank was a creature of Podolia, Turkey, Poland-in-its-disintegration. He traveled. His father was a traveling preacher. Frank was a peddler too and spoke everybody’s language: Balkan, Turkish, Yiddish, Polish, Ladino, with quotations, citations, and language play from Hebrew and Aramaic. He joined up with Sabbateans, followers of the messianic movement begun by Shabtai Zvi and Nathan of Gaza [in the seventeenth century], continued through Barukhya Russo [d. 1721], and temporarily short one messiah. With them he turned against the Talmud, into the Zohar, and out through the Sabbatean pore. He added some things to the movement: a new emphasis on the Virgin, a passage through Christianity, after the passage through Islam which Shabtai/Nathan originated, on the way to Esau. Perhaps more sex. He became a messiah to thousands of Jews.”

In the “words” written down by his followers, the mini-narratives show a range of transformative experiences that came to him, like vatic prose poems, in the form of dreams & visions or by observations, simple or not, of the people & events to which his way of life had brought him.

[Several of the nearly 3000 sayings and visions follow – from Lenowitz’s complete translation, waiting to be published]:

1. I had a vision in Salonika, as though the following words were said to somebody, Go lead Jacob the wise into the rooms and when you and he come to the first room, I admonish you that all the doors and gates be opened to him. When I entered the first room, a rose was given to me as a sign by which I could go on to the next and so on consequenter from one room to the next. And so I flew in the air accompanied by two maidens [the like of] whose beauty the world has never seen. In these rooms I saw for the most part women and young ladies. In some, however, there were assembled only groups of students and teachers, and wherever just the first word was spoken to me, I immediately grasped the whole matter from it and the full meaning. There was an innumerable number of these rooms and in the last one of them I saw the First [= Shabtai Zvi] who also sat as a teacher with his students, dressed in frenk [= Turkish] clothing. This one immediately asked me, Are you Jacob the wise? I have heard that you are strong and brave-hearted. To this point have I come, but I have not the strength of proceeding from here further; if you want [to], strengthen yourself and may God help you, for very many ancestors took that burden upon themselves, went on this road, but fell. With that, he showed me through the window of this chamber an abyss which was like a black sea, hidden in extraordinary darkness, and on the other side of this abyss I saw a mountain whose height seemed to touch the clouds. At that I shouted, Be what may, I will go with God's help, and so I began to fly on a slant through the air into the depth until I reached its very bottom, where, having felt the ground, I stopped. Walking in the dark, I came upon the edge of the mountain and seeing that because of the steep smoothness of the mountain I had difficulty getting up on it, I was forced to clamber up with my hands and nails and using all my strength until I reached the top. As soon as I stopped there, an extraordinary scent reached me; and there were many True-Believers there. Seized by great joy, I did not [yet] want to go up onto the mountain with my whole body, saying to myself, I will rest awhile here, for sweat poured from my head like a river in flood on account of the tortures which I had borne to climb this mountain; but when I am well rested then I will come up on the mountain towards all the good which is found there. And that is what I did, I let my feet hang and sat with my body and hands at rest on the mountain. Then I went up on the mountain.

2. Being sick once in Dziurdziów, I had a dream like this. I saw an extraordinarily beautiful woman, who had a well of the water of life and another well of clear water, and this [woman] said to me, Put your legs in the water and you will become healthy right away. I did so and became well. At the place where this woman was found, there was a broad beautiful field, in which she, taking me by the hand, said, Come, I will show you my daughter who is still a maiden, and I went with her into the depth of that field which gave off an extraordinary scent, from [many] different flowers. The Maiden, whose beauty nothing in this world could describe, came to meet us there, and she was dressed in a Polish rubran [a tight-fitting, twisted blouse of heavy, usually red, silk] and her uncovered breasts were visible. Having noticed this I suddenly saw from one end of the world to the other. Her mother informed me that if I was desirous to take her for a wife, she would permit it, but I answered that I had a wife and children.

44. My grandmother, my mother's mother was a very learned astrologer. When I was born, all the witches assembled around our home and surrounded it, even their queen was there at their head. There was a dog in our house— a cross between a wolf and a [canine] bitch. This one did not sleep at all, but barked all the time, for if he had fallen asleep even for a moment, then they would have seen to it that he would have never awakened, but he kept watch vigilantly. Then on the 8th day at the circumcision, they surrounded our home as before and wanted to do something evil, but were unable to because that dog kept guard again, and the old grandmother with her craft fought against the evil also, saying, Watch him carefully, bring him up properly, for a new thing will come to the world through him.

451. On the 21st of October, 1784 the Lord saw a dream, I had a golden ring on my hand, and I dropped that ring onto a mirror, which broke into small pieces, Having turned that mirror onto the other side, I found shining glass there also, and likewise a bracelet fell from my hands and broke the other side. He himself gave the interpretation of that, My help hastens to come.

504. In a dream I saw Jesus, having priests around him, sitting at a spring of living and clear water. I noticed that this spring went away from them and came to me.

748. I saw a dream as if I were in a church, totally naked except for a gray cloak such as the Jesuits wear, but the chest was bare like the breasts of a woman. The priests were all prepared for the Resurrection service, but only one priest wore a cloak like mine. All present thought that they would raise something as was the custom at the Resurrection service, but nothing was raised except that priest came to me and sprinkled me with pure water. All the people present laughed, that I was dressed in such a cloak. I wanted to cover my chest, but in spite of all my endeavors, it remained bare.

791. In a dream I saw a very old woman, 1500 years old. Her hair was white as snow; she brought me 2 silver belts and a Walachian sausage. I bought one from her and stole the other.

793. In a dream I saw that I went to a great church having a great window, having neither an altar nor any paintings. The walls were covered with silver. Many Polish lords sat there, they ate and they drank. They asked me to eat with them, but I said I was weak and could not eat. Moreover, I had not heard Mass yet. I went to the sacristy, and the sacristy too was beautiful. I saw that a priest threw off his chasuble and put on another. He went to pray with his hands raised, but without the chalice, after having entered a certain room, before which hung a curtain of silver material. I followed and saw a man lying on the ground. He was about 10 cubits long and rolled in the dirt, but the priest prayed to him. I went to those lords and said to them, Come, I will show you a tasty comedy, how a man is rolling in the dirt and a priest praying to him. But I was dressed in a long Polish zupania [the undergarment of the Polish folk costume] and girdled with a precious Persian belt whose ends were very precious; and I wrapped myself around several times with that belt, but still its end trailed on the ground. The Lord himself interpreted: Some new road is prepared for me.

804. The Lord saw a dream the 14th of June 1784: Two women came to me, and one man 6 cubits tall. They were very beautiful, and they said to me, We have heard in the place where we live that your people have abandoned you and that you do not want to send them on any mission. We have been dead several thousand years and we have worked a lot, and still we have no peace. We ask you, Send us. We will go on your mission wholeheartedly. I answered them, I have already said that I will make revelation to no man, nor bring any near, nor will I send any on a mission. They asked me, But the signal has already gone out that a great deal of blood will flow in the world, and we want to go and rescue many; only you bless us for the way. I am a prostak [an uncultured person], I replied, and cannot make a blessing. They asked me, But you bless your people? I replied, I can say no more than this word: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and this verse: The angel who delivered me & & ... They said to me, We have a book here in which stand blessings. Bless us with that book; we only ask you that you bless us out loud. They gave me the book which was written in large Hebrew letters without dots. They bent their heads and I, after raising my hands above their heads, blessed them. There were beautiful words there, but I do not remember more than two words that were at the end: Du Jankiew, That is Jacob.

852. Her Highness [his daughter Eva] saw a dream on the 5th of July 1784: I saw a little child in my room; one black man came in with horns on his head. I asked him, What do you want here? He answered, I have come to take that child from your house. I will not give you that child, I said. He said, If you will not give him to me willingly, then I will take him by violence. I asked him who he might be? He replied, First I will take the child, then I will tell you who I am. He took the child by violence under one arm and under the other he caught up that French girl who was with me. I asked him again, Who are you? He answered, I am the worst devil of all the devils. The French girl started to scream loudly and to ask that I rescue her from him, but he did not listen to her and left with her. Immediately a great fire began to burn in my room, which I tried to put out, but I couldn't. The Lord came along to put it out, at which a great outcry arose that in the Lord's room it was burning terribly.

868. It would be better for you if you had been taught the wisdom of sorcery; you would have known a great deal.

Translated from Celan’s German by Pierre Joris

[Continued from posting on 5/7/10]

1. Speaker: Mandelstam, like most Russian poets – like Blok, Bryusov, Bely, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Esenin– welcomed the revolution. His socialism is a socialism with an ethico-religious stamp; it comes via Herzen, Mihkaylovsky, Kropotkin. It is not by chance that in the years before the revolution the poet was involved with the writings of the Chaadaevs, Leontievs, Rozanovs and Gershenzons. Politically he is close to the party of the Left Social Revolutionaries. For him — and this evinces a chiliastic character particular to Russian thought — revolution is the dawn of the other, the uprising of those below, the exaltation of the creature — an upheaval of downright cosmic proportions. It unhinges the world.

2. Speaker:

Let us praise the freedom dawning here
this great, this dawn-year.
Submerged, the great forest of creels
into waternights, as none had been.
Into darkness, deaf and dense you reel,
you, people, you: sun-and-tribunal.
The yoke of fate, brothers, sing it
which he who leads the people carries in tears.
The yoke of power and darkenings,
the burden that throws us to the ground.
Who, oh time, has a heart, hears with it, understands:
he hears your ship, time, that founders.

There, battle-ready, the phalanx – there, the swallows!
We linked them together, and – you see it:
The sun – invisible. The elements, all
alive, bird-voiced, underway.
The net, the dusk: dense. Nothing glimmers.
The sun – invisible. The earth ...
Well, we’ll try it: turn that rudder around!
It grates, it grinds, you leftists – come on, rip it around!
The earth swims. You men, take courage, once more!
We plough the seas, we break up the seas.
And to think, Lethe, even when your frost pierces us:
To us earth was worth ten heavens.

1. Speaker: The horizons are darkening – leave-taking takes pride of place, expectations wane, memory reigns on the fields of time. For Mandelstam, Jewishness belongs to what is remembered:

This night: unamendable,
with you: light, nonetheless.
Suns, black, that flare up
before Jerusalem.0,05c hoch

Suns, yellow: greater fright –
sleep, hushaby.
Bright Jewish home: they bury
my mother dear.

No longer priesterly,
robbed of grace and salvation,
they sing a woman’s dust
out of the world, in the light.

Jews’ voices, silent they kept not,
mother, how loud it sounded.
I wake up in my cot
by a black sun, surrounded.

2. Speaker: In 1928 a further volume of poems appears – the last one. A new collection joins the two previous ones also gathered here. “No more breath – the firmament swarms with maggots” – : this line opens the cycle. The question about the wherefrom becomes more urgent, more desperate – the poetry – in one of his essays he calls it a plough – tears open the abyssal strata of time, the “black earth of time” appears on the surface. The eye, talking with the perceived, and pained, develops a new ability: it becomes visionary: it accompanies the poem into its underground. The poem writes itself toward an other, a “strangest” time.

1. Speaker: 1 JANUARY1924

Whoever kisses time’s sore brow
will often, like a son, think tenderly
how she, time, laid down to sleep outside
in high heaped wheat drifts, in the corn.

Whoever has raised the century’s eyelid
– both slumber-apples, large and heavy – ,
hears noise, hears the streams roar
the lying times, relentlessly

Imperious century, with loam-beautiful mouth
and two apples, asleep – yet
before it dies: to the son’s hand, so shrunken,
it bends down its lip.

Life’s breath, I know, ebbs away each day,
one more small one, a small one – and
deceased is the song of mortification, loam and plague,
with lead they seal your mouth.

Oh loam-and -life! Oh centrury’s death!
Only to the one, I’m afraid, does its meaning reveal itself,
in whom there was a smile, helpless – to the inheritor,
the man who lost himself.

Oh pain, oh to search for the lost word.
oh lid and lid to raise, sick and weak,
for generations, the strangest, with lime in your blood
to gather the grass and the weed of night!

Time. The lime in the blood of the sick son
turns hard. Moscow, that wooden coffer, sleeps.
Time, the sovereign. And no escape anywhere...
The snow’s apple-scent, as always.

The sill here: I wish I could leave it.
Whereto? The street – darkness.
And, as if it were salt, so white, there on the pavement
lies my conscience, spread out before me.

Through winding lanes, through slipways
the journey goes, somehow:
a bad passenger sits in a sled,
pulls a blanket over the knees.

The lanes, the shimmering lanes, the by-lanes
the runners crunch’s like apples under the tooth.
The strap, I can’t grab it,
it doesn’t want me to, and the hand is clammy.

Night, carwoman, with what scrap and iron
are you rolling through Moscow?
Fish thud here, and there, from pink houses,
it steams toward you – scalegold!

Moscow, anew. Ah, I greet you, once more!
Forgive, excuse – my misery wasn’t very great.
I like to call them, as always, my brethren:
the pike’s saying and the hard frost!

The snow in the pharmacy’s raspberry light...
A clattering, from afar, an Underwood...
The coachman’s back... the roadway, blown away...
What more do you want? They won’t kill you.

Winter – beauty. And skyward the white,
the starmilk – it streams, streams away and blinks.
The horsehair blanket crunches along the icy
runners – the horsehair blanket sings!

The little lanes, smoking, the petroleum, always – :
swallowed by snow, raspberry colored.
They hear the Soviet-sonatina jingle,
remember the year twenty.

Does it make me swear and damn?
– The frost’s apple-scent, again –
Oh oath that I swore to the fourth estate!
Oh my promise, heavy with tears!

Oh whom will you kill? Whom will you praise?
And what lie, tell me, are you going to make up?
Tear off this cartilage, the keys of the machine:
the pike’s bones you lay open.

The lime in the blood of the sick son: it fades.
A laughter, blissful, frees itself –
Sonatas, powerful... The little sonatina
of the typewriter – : only its shadow!

2. Speaker: That’s how to escape contingency: through laughter. Through what we know as the poet’s “senseless” laughter – through the absurd. And on the way there what does appear – mankind is absent – has answered: the horsehair blanket has sung.

Poems are sketches for Being: the poet lives according to them.

In the thirties Osip Mandelstam is caught in the “purges.” The road leads to Siberia, where we lose his trace.

In one of his last publications, “Journey to Armenia,” published in 1932 in the Leningrad magazine “Swesda,” we also find notes on the matters of poetry. In one of these notes Mandelstam remembers his preference for the Latin Gerund.

The Gerund ! that is the present participle of the passive form of the future.

Proverbs are folk poetry. They express a people's collective wisdom, values, outlook, and spirit; and they do it with a turn of phrase that reveals truth gracefully and memorably — and, frequently, with humor. Unlike a written literature, proverbs are known by everyone—literate and illiterate, young and old--passed on as situations demand them by family, friends, business associates, and acquaintances.



Proverbs connect people, shape attitudes with acquired wisdom, distilled through the ages. Their familiarity, the “deja-vu“ they genetically project, breeds solidarity. For Sephardic Jews, scattered in insular communities throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Europe, after the century of persecution and Inquisition that culminated in their expulsion from Spain or Sepharad in 1492, proverbs were an important means of passing on and reinforcing values and identity. They articulated the unwritten laws of how to be and how to see, and represented the distilled wit and wisdom of Ladino, or Judezmo, the medieval Spanish with a dash of Turkish, Hebrew and other influences, spoken as the main language in Sephardic communities throughout the world until the devastation of the Holocaust.



Ladino and its proverbs set the Sephardim off from their Turkish, Moroccan, Greek or other neighbors, as well as from Ashkenazic Jews. It reinforced their already clannish tendencies. (Archaeological finds in Spain suggest that the Iberian Jews maintained their own communities there from the time when Sepharad was on the frontier of the Roman empire, and through the successive periods of Visigothic, Muslim, and Christian rule.) At the same time Ladino and its proverbs reinforced links between Sephardic communities, peppering the conversations and negotiations along the international Sephardic trade networks throughout the Mediterranean region. And while Ladino reinforced Sephardic clannishness, its proverbs typically expressed a worldliness and cosmopolitan outlook. As the proverb says:



Quien no tiene su casa, es vecino de todo el mundo.

He who has no home is neighbor to all the world.



Spanish is an elegant and expressive language. Its inner dynamic encourages expansiveness and floridity. Spanish literature, from Cervantes to Garcia Marquez (with the recent notable exception of Borges) has been characterized by the prolix. The proverb, on the other hand, turns on spareness and concision. Sephardic proverbs are particularly notable for their music, wordplay, and wit:



El que corre, se cae.

He who runs, falls.



Quien no risica, no rosica.

Whoever doesn't laugh, doesn't bloom.



Along with concision, parallelism and rhyme are other qualities commonly found in proverbs making the saying easy to imprint on memory. Note, for instance, the parallel structure of,



Si Mose morio, adonay quedo.

Moses may be dead, but God endures.



or the rhyme of,



Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal.

A change of scene, a change of fortune.



While the meanings of many of the proverbs are universal, some almost identical to those found in other cultures, others express viewpoints more specific to the experience of Sephardic Jews as a subjugated and often persecuted minority,



Si los anios calleron, los dedos quedaron.

If the rings fell off, at least the fingers stayed.



and the profound wound of diaspora and exile,



Quien no sabe de mar, no sabe de mal.

He who knows nothing of the sea, knows nothing of suffering.



Sephardic proverbs speak with an ancient authority of the collective consciousness. Their particular perspectives subtly remind Sephardim, whether they come from communities in Greece, Turkey, the Middle East,Africa, Asia, Europe, North or South America, of their identity. Their beauty, grace and worldly wisdom evoke a proud heritage in Spain and its golden age of poetry and philosophy.



These proverbs have been gathered over the years from published sources and from relatives. I have organized them into groupings that presented themselves in developing the collection: Family, Self- Reliance, How to Do It and View It, The Value of Keeping Your Mouth Shut, Worldly Wisdom, Human Nature, and God and Mysticism. I am hopeful that these categories will suggest the scope of the proverbs' concerns, and that they will also suggest some of the emphases most important to the Sephardim, reflecting to some degree both their outlook and their history.



[Two groupings of proverbs follow in their entirety.]



HUMAN NATURE





El farto no cree al fambrento.

The well-fed doesn't believe the starving.



Guay! cuando el amares favla leshon hakodesh.

Beware when the ignoramus starts quoting scripture.



Cuando ganeden esta acerrado, guehinam esta siempre abierto.

While the Garden of Eden may be closed, Hell is always open.



El hombre es mas sano del fierro mas nezik del vidro.

A man is stronger than iron and more fragile than glass.



Poco tura la alegria en la casa del cumargi.

Happiness is shortlived in the house of a gambler.



El gamello non mira a su corcova.

A camel doesn't see his own hump.



Ande va la piedra, en el ojo de la ciega.

Where do they throw rocks, but in the eyes of the blind.



Cada gallo canta en su gallinero.

Every rooster sings in his own chicken coop.



Cuando te llaman azno mira si tienes cola.

When they call you a jackass, make sure you don't have a tail.



Quien de todos es amigo, es muy pobre, o muy rico.

Whoever is everyone's friend is either very poor or very rich.



Quien barbas vee, barbas honra.

He who sees beards, honors beards.



En la guerra no se esparten confites.

No one gives out candy during a war.



Un buen pleito trae una buen paz.

A good fight yields a good peace.



Quien da en primero, da con miedo.

Whoever gives first, gives with fear.



Quien no risica, no rosica.

Whoever doesn't laugh, doesn't bloom.



Tanto mi lo quero, que no mi lo cree.

So much is my need, I can't believe my greed.



El mal castigado, sabe bien castigar.

He who has been severely punished knows how to punish severely.



El palo en verde se enderecha.

A green tree can straighten itself out.



Grande i chica talamo quere.

The great & the small all want a marriage bed.



Cuando el gato se va de casa, ballan los ratones.

When the cat leaves the house, the rats dance.



Quien quiere ser servidor, es mal sufrido.

The person who desires to serve suffers the most.



En la boca tengo un grillo, qui me dice: dilo, dilo!

I have a cricket in my mouth that says: "Tell him! Tell him!"



Llagas untadas duelen ma no tanto.

Honorable wounds hurt, but not much.



Ninguno sabe loque me alma consiente.

No one knows what my heart feels.



Quien quere a la rosa, no mira al espino.

Desiring the rose, one overlooks the thorns.



Cuanto mas tienes, mas quieres.

The more you have the more you want.



El haragan es consejero.

The lazy one is the advisor.



GOD & MYSTICISM



Si no viene la hora del dios, no cae la oja del arbol.

Without God's decree, not a leaf falls from the tree.



Si Mose morio, adonay quedo.

Moses may be dead, but God endures.



El Dio es tadrozomas no es olvidadozo.

God may act slowly, but He never forgets.



. Al haragan el dios le ayuda.

God helps the lazy.



Al xefoj se senten las bozes.

When the last prayer is said & done, you finally hear the voices.



Quien al cielo escupe, en la cara la cae.

Whoever spits at the heavens, hits himself in the face.



En el escuro es todo uno.

In the darkness, all is one.



Pasa punto. pasa mundo.

A moment passes, a world passes.



El dios da la llago, y el da la medicina.

God inflicts the wound & provides the medicine.



El dios tiene cargo, y de de la horfigo del campo.

God even takes care of the ant in the field.

Kumamoto, Japan, March 2010

Let us offer up a song, may the gods
of these fields bear witness
The gods look down, the farmers
plant their fields and are glad
– HIROMI ITO, from a local folk song

1
TWO TANKAS

the future rising
as does my name red mountain
summit high above

the earth below in darkness
hole the fathers called sheol

.

soon to be with you
on Aso not Death Mountain
in the other poem

beneath which looms the shadow
of a visionary fish


2
LINES AFTER SHUNATARO TANIKAWA

The language of those who hate me
The language of those who will love me

so that he starts again
until the mud
through which he walks

covers his body
starts again but robs him
of his breath

3
LINES AFTER HIROMI ITO

I must have been born to play,
I must have been born to frolic,

yet in his emptiness, his voidness
he is a real man only
when he murders

so in love with death
he leaves me desperate

the more I look into his eyes
I see a dead bull gutted
but a living man


4
LINES AFTER HIROMI ITO

I left my infant child in my lasciviousness
and slept with many men

—how does she know the time then?
—by fits & starts
—and if the time starts running?
—she runs behind it
—then try to pin her down
& hear her squeal
—a word caught in your throat
is still a word

5
LINES AFTER WAKAKO KAKU

passing through
will sweep all illness away, they say
will change one into infinite blue—
the body whole

840 million thoughts
the sutra says
come every night
& overwhelm the sleeper
looking for a place
to hide
for which he writes
his death poem
as a perfect circle

6
LINES AFTER WAKAKO KAKU

We put logic to rest
We celebrate the outrageous
The last song remaining
is our offering
to the world

people speak at me
& I don’t understand
except my name & yours
& little words like koko & asoko
& those that aren’t words at all
but sounds remembered
first as sounds
the small nouns
crying faith (he wrote)
what poets always knew
what still astounds

NOTE. Renga, the traditional & well known form of Japanese collaborative or linked writing, has its modern counterpart in renshi, generally practiced with projective or open forms but always with the shadow of the ancient orders somewhere in the background. While the renga practice goes back some 800 years or more & follows a wide range of traditional rules & constraints, renshi is tied closely to the freeing up of verse during the upsurge of a new poetics in the half century & more of Japanese “postwar writing.” Its notable Japanese practitioners include Makoto Ooka & Shuntaro Tanikawa, key figures of the modernist or postmodernist “postwar” groupings, & an occasional foreign participant such as British poet Charles Tomlinson in the late 1990s.

My own brush with renshi came this March, a four-day event in the southern Kyushu city of Kumamoto, where I was the fifth wheel with Tanikawa, Hiromi Ito, Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, & Wakako Kaku. For this the chosen site in Kumamoto was the happily alternative Orange cafe & bookstore, as a result of which the place for writing, unlike some other renshi that I know of, was open rather than private, a small area at the rear of the equally small cafe, which was however closed off to outside business during our time there. Even so, people came & went freely, which only enhanced the sense of writing in public – in-the-open, so to speak. That & the relative speed required gave it – to my mind at least – a performative & improvisatory feeling, while responding – always – to what came before & after. For all of that it was the sense of writing that dominated the proceedings – pen & paper augmented by the computers that all six of us brought to the event. At the end the Japanese poets used brush & ink (& long strips of Chinese paper) to transcribe their work in calligraphic form, as did Jeffrey Angles who functioned – largely for my benefit – as our principal translator. There was also – to top it off – a public reading & discussion, a paying event that drew over 400 people to an auditorium adjacent to the city’s Literature Museum.

So, while I'm limiting the offering here to my own six poems & brief cuts (in italics) from the poems to which they linked, at a later time I would like to publish the renshi as a whole & to discuss, or have the others discuss, the strategies behind the links. The over-all restraints (laid down by Tanikawa as the master of our ceremonies) were minimal – to keep the poems short & to avoid the links being too direct or obvious. There was also a degree of referencing to earlier works & sources, a practice in which I was happy to engage, as a further instance, let’s say, of “othering” or “writing through.” (Hiromi Ito in this regard drew all her entries from earlier, largely oral, sources.) And there were also references to matters that came up in conversation, which would be more difficult to uncover but had a resonance for some of us that may carry over (or not) to those who read us.

Of all such “distant links” (soku), the fifteenth-century poet-monk Shinkei wrote in his Sasamegoto, a masterwork of renga poetics & of poetics over all: “A soku poem is said to be one wherein it does not matter that the upper and lower part are put together in a seemingly unnatural and arbitrary way so long as they cohere in the mind.” (For which see Murmured Conversations: a Treatise on Poetry and Buddhism by the Poet-Monk Shinkei, translated by Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, Stanford University Press, 2008.)

J.R.

Translated from Celan’s German by Pierre Joris

[To be published shortly in a volume dedicated to Celan's principal work on poetics, The Meridian, complete with alternate versions and extensive excerpts of related source materials (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).]

1. Speaker: In 1913 a small volume of poetry was published in St. Petersburg, entitled “The Stone.” These poems clearly carry weight; as the poets Georgij Ivanov and Nikolai Gumilev admit, one would like to have written them oneself, and yet ! these poems estrange. “Something,” remembers Sinaida Hippius who was centrally involved in the literary life back then and who had a way with words, “something had gotten into them.”

2. Speaker: Something strange — as various contemporaries report — which also applies to the author of the volume, Osip Mandelstam, born 1891 in Warsaw and who grew up in St. Petersburg and Pawlowsk and about whom it is known, among other things, that he studied philosophy in Heidelberg and is presently enamored of Greek.

1. Speaker: Something strange, somewhat uncanny, slightly absurd. Suddenly you hear him break into laughter ! on occasions where a completely other reaction is expected; he laughs much too often and much too loudly. Mandelstam is oversensitive, impulsive, unforeseeable. He is also nearly indescribably fearful: if, for example, his route leads past a police station, he’ll make a detour.

2. Speaker: And among all the major Russian poets who survive the first post-revolutionary decade — Nikolai Gumilev will be shot in 1921 as a counter-revolutionary; Velimir Khlebnikov, the great utopian of language, will die of starvation in 1922 — this “scarety cat,” anxious Osip Mandelstam will be the only defiant and uncompromising one, “the only one,” as the younger literary historian Vladimir Markov notes, “who never ate humble pie”.

1. Speaker: The twenty poems from the volume “The Stone” strike one as strange. They are not “word-music,” they are not impressionistic “mood poetry” woven together from “timbres,” no “second” reality symbolically inflating the real. Their images resist the concept of the metaphor and the emblem; their character is phenomenal. These verses, contrary to Futurism’s simultaneous expansion, are free of neologisms, word-concretions, word-destructions; they are not a new “expressive” art.

The poem in this case is the poem of the one who knows that he is speaking under the clinamen of his existence, that the language of his poem is neither “analogy” nor plain language, but language “actualized,” voiceful and voiceless simultaneously, set free under the sign of an indeed radical individuation which, however and at the same time, remains mindful of the limits imposed on it by language and of the possibilities language has opened up.

The place of the poem is a human place, “a place in the cosmos”, yes, but here, down here, in time. The poem – with all its horizons – remains a sublunar, terrestrial, creaturely phenomenon. It is the language of a singular being that has taken on form; it has objectivity and oppositeness, substance and presence. It stands into time.

2. Speaker: The thoughts of the “acmeists” or, as they also call themselves, the “Adamists,” grouped around Gumilev and his magazines “The Hyperborean” and “Apollo,” move along the same (or similar) orbits.

1. Speaker: The thoughts. But not, or only rarely, the poems themselves.

1. Speaker: “Acme”, that means the high point, maturity, the fully developed flower.

2. Speaker: Osip Mandelstam’s poem wants to develop what can be perceived and reached with the help of language and make it actual in its truth. In this sense we are permitted to understand this poet’s “Acmeism” as a language that has born fruit.

1. Speaker: These poems are the poems of someone who is perceptive and attentive, someone turned toward what becomes visible, someone addressing and questioning: these poems are a conversation. In the space of this conversation the addressed constitutes itself, becomes present, gathers itself around the I that addresses and names it. But the addressed, through naming, as it were, becomes a you, brings its otherness and strangeness into this present. Yet even in the here and now of the poem, even in this immediacy and nearness it lets its distance have its say too, it guards what is most its own: its time.

2. Speaker: It is this tension of the times, between its own and the foreign, which lends that pained-mute vibrato to a Mandelstam poem by which we recognize it. (This vibrato is everywhere: in the interval between the words and the stanza, in the “courtyards” where rhymes and assonances stand, in the punctuation. All this has semantic relevance.) Things come together, yet even in this togetherness the question of their Wherefrom and Whereto resounds – a question that “remains open,” that “does not come to any conclusion,” and points to the open and cathexable, into the empty and the free.

1. Speaker: This question is realized not only in the “thematics” of the poems; it also takes shape in the language – and that’s why it becomes a “theme” – : the word – the name! – shows a preference for noun-forms, the adjective becomes rare, the “infinitives,” the nominal forms of the verb dominate: the poem remains open to time, time can join in, time participates.

2. Speaker:A poem from the year 1910:

The listening, the finely-tensed sail.
The gaze, wide, empties itself.
The choir of midnight birds,
swimming through silence, unheard.

I have nothing, I resemble the sky.
I am the way nature is: poor.
Thus I am, free: like those midnight
voices, the flocks of birds.

You, sky, whitest of shirts,
you, moon, unsouled, I see you.
And, emptyness, your world, the strange
one, I receive, I take!

1. Speaker: A poem from the year 1911:

Mellow, measured: the horses’ hoofs.
Lantern-light – not much.
Strangers drive me. Who do know
whereto, to what end.

I am cared for, which I enjoy,
I try to sleep, I’m freezing.
Toward the beam we drive, the star,
they turn – all this rattling!

The head, rocked, I feel it burning.
The foreign hand, its soft ice.
The dark outline there, the fir trees
of which I know nothing.

2. Speaker: A poem from the year 1915:

Insomnia. Homer. Sails, taut.
I read the catalog of ships, did not get far:
The flight of cranes, the young brood’s trail
high above Hellas, once, before time and time again.

Like that crane wedge, driven into the most foreign –
The heads, imperial, God’s foam on top, humid –
You hover, you swim – whereto? If Helen wasn’t there,
Acheans, I ask you, what would Troy be worth to you?

Homer, the seas, both: love moves it all.
Who do I listen to, who do I hear? See – Homer falls silent.
The sea, with black eloquence beats this shore,
Ahead I hear it roar, it found its way here.


1. Speaker: In 1922, five years after the October revolution, “Tristia,” Mandelstam’s second volume of poems comes out.

The poet ! the man for whom language is everything, origin and fate ! is in exile with his language, “among the Scythians.” “He has” ! and the whole cycle is tuned to this, the first line of the title poem ! “he has learned to take leave ! a science”.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[From Eugen Gomringer, The Book of Hours and Constellations: Gomringer by Rothenberg, Something Else Press, 1968]