In the History of Our Love - Yehuda Amichai

With this selection, Amichai solidifies his lead as the most represented poet here.  And deservedly.  (Do "click" on his name on the left column to see why.  You'll agree and also see the biographical information on an amazing life.)   In this one, the analogy used in the last stanza to convey connectivity and isolation is just brilliant.  It takes Donne's "no man is an island" a step further, and that is just a great finish to the earlier lines' riff on permanence/impermanence.  There is also no doubt that Amichai is writing from deep experience.  It's the voice of a man who has loved well, loved deeply and loved completely.... and, thus, knows also the weight of loss.  What's striking to me about Amichai's love poetry is how powerfully and passionately he can write about both that state of grace that is being "in love" AND its aftermath.  (Sadly, just calling it a "state of grace" defines it as being a finite interval.  And do all "states of grace" inevitably have a "fall"? ) I envy that ability to express joy and sorrow equally well, as my own best writing is skewered towards the latter....
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In the History of Our Love

                                    transl. from Hebrew by Ben and Barbara Harshaw

In the history of our love, always one is

A nomadic tribe, the other a nation on its own soil.

When we changed places, it was all over.

Time will pass us by, as landscapes

Move behind actors standing in their places

When they make a movie.  Even the words

Will pass by our lips, even the tears

Will pass by our eyes.  Time will pass

Every one in his place.

And in the geography of the rest of our lives,

Who will be an island and who a peninsula

Will become clear to each of us in the rest of our lives

In nights of love with others.

                                             Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

Explosion - Delmira Agustini

(Note: READ the poem FIRST, before this commentary.) Delmira Agustini (1887 - 1914)... She was a rising poet in Uruguay, known for original imagery while exhibiting a strong command of traditional Spanish meters and forms, when she died at the age of 27.  The circumstances of her death increased her popularity.  Married but a few weeks, she had separated from her husband but agreed to see him one last time. She was found dead with him the next morning in a short-time hotel in Montevideo, the victim of a murder-suicide.  It gives this selection poignancy to contrast the exuberance and happiness at finding Love with its outcome.  And a commentary on the dark side of the passion.  (Check out this poem from an earlier posting, which has some marvelous lines about that flip side - loss - of love.  But without a murderous rage directed at the love object.)  

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Explosion

                               transl. from Spanish by Perry Higman

If life is love , blessed be it!

I want more life to love!  Today I feel

a thousand years of ideas are worth nothing

next to one azure minute of feeling.

My heart was dying, sad and slow….

Now it blooms in light like a flower of Phoebus:

Life bursts like a violent sea

where the hand of love strikes its blow!

Today my melancholy, with broken wings

went out into the night, sad, cold;

like an old mark of sorrow

it dissolves in distant shadows….

My whole life laughs, kisses, sings!

My whole life is a mouth in bloom!

                                             Delmira Augustinin - Uruguay

Song of Yue - Song Lian

Better known for his prose and role as a high court-official in the administration of the first Ming Dynasty Emperor, Song Lian was also charged with compiling the official history of the previous dynasty (Yuan).  This little poem comes by way of a small book of Chinese love poems edited by Qiu Xialong, about whom I've written earlier.  This streak of Chinese poems is not entirely intentional.  Tonight, I read poetry by Mary Oliver and several Brazilian poets looking for one that would be appealing, but was not successful.  

I chose this one for its perfect use of a pair of scissors to express separation and joining.  It's so simple, so elegant..... and written almost 800 years ago!  I am continually mindful of how emotional states know no boundaries of time or culture.  We yearn, we love, we mourn the same way, irrespective of time and place. 

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Song of Yue

                            transl. from Chinese by Qiu Xialong

It is not just a day or night that I have

missed you, Lord.

It is like a broken pair

of Bingzhou scissors –

one blade is far in the south, and the other,

far in the north.

When can the pair

be joined to cut out a wedding gown?

                                                    Song Lian  - Chinese 1310-1381

Reply to "Phoenix Hairpin" (to the tune of) - Tang Wan

This is the only translation I could find (from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry) of Tang Wan's poem in reply to her ex-husband Lu You's poem.  (See two postings below.)  There is something unsatisfying about it: I can't tell whether it's the poem or the translation.  Somehow, given how she must have felt, the fullness of her feelings doesn't come across.  There is flame but little heat and I can't believe that is how it was for her.  The sorrow of a love torn asunder, a love big enough to kill her less than a year after that meeting: it just doesn't come through strongly enough.  We know his broken heart lasted the rest of his life, another forty years, but that's what a great love will do. I wonder, if given the option of a short or long life after a loss like that, which would be the easier.  But we are not given that choice.  I know.

Addendum: Jan. 22, 2011.  Since no longer being able to add more poems after the fire of Dec. 21., I have been "visiting" poems whose physical copies burned.  I feel that I have done Tang Wan a disservice with my original remarks.  I see her sorrow now as so deep, so profound that it's past the stage of torrents of tears and words.  She is now at a place where what remains is the bleakness of the loss and a vocabulary of images as stark and limited as her life.  I remember reading somewhere that the purest truths are said in the shortest sentences and with the simplest of words.  (No, not Hemingway.)  Read with that in mind, I can feel her devastation in my marrow.  Contrast it with his, forty years after that chance encounter... and leave me a comment.)
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 Reply to “Phoenix Hairpin”  (to the tune of)  -  Tang Wan

Human relationships are short.

Human intentions are evil.

When rain accompanies evening, flowers fall easily,

but morning wind is dry.

Tearstains remain.

I want to write you my feelings

but I only whisper to myself, leaning against banister.

Hard!  Hard!  Hard!

We are separate.

Today is not yesterday.

My sick soul moves like a swing between us.

A cold blast from a horn.

The night is late.

Afraid of questions,

I swallow my tears and smile.

Hide!  Hide!  Hide!

                                                             Tang Wan - dates unknown, Song Dynasty ,

The Shen Garden - Lu You

 This is the poem that Lu You wrote forty years after the chance meeting with his beloved, Tang Wan, as described in the previous posting (Nov. 2nd).  The translation is by a very interesting person, Qiu Xiaolong, a Chinese-born poet/professor at Washington University who writes in both Chinese and English, as well as translating T.S. Eliot (!) and others into Chinese.  Qiu is also the author of a detective story series set in modern day Shanghai: they are a great read as both social commentary and a good crime yarn.  I highly recommend them.  (The first one is called "Death of A Red Heroine" and this is a link to a review of it.)

As previously noted, translations are tricky business, even between languages from the same "family", like the Romance languages.  (As close as Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are to each other, I've seen some terrible choices migrating a poem from one to the other.)  Going from a pictograph-based language like Chinese to English takes amazing skill and double sensitivity to intent and result.  Simply, it takes another poet, but a poet aware of his own ego, limitations, and biases.  Of the translations I have read, this one fulfills the task the best.

When revisiting the past by recalling a memory, nothing has aged.  Going back to a physical place, one must be prepared for the opposite, and the consequences depend on one's preparation and expectations.  In this poem, Lu appears to have been ready and thus not jarred by the changes: his tone is observational and accepting, not questioning or raging.  Someday, I hope to be that way myself about the past.
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The Shen Garden

                                    transl. by Qiu Xiaolong

I

The sun is sinking behind the city wall

to the sad notes of a shining bugle.

In the Shen Garden,

the pond and the pavilion appear

no longer to be the same,

except the heart-breaking spring ripples

still so green under the bridge,

the ripples that reflected her arrival

light-footed, in such beauty

as would shame a wild goose into fleeing.

II

It’s forty years since we last met,

the dream broken, the scent vanished,

in the Shen Garden, the aged willows

produce no more catkins.

I’m old, already turning into the dust

of Mount Ji, when I shed a drop of tear

at this old scene.

                                                      Lu You – 1125-1210

"Phoenix Hairpin" (to the tune of) - Lu You (Song Dynasty)

Lu You, one of the four great poets of the Southern Song Dynasty, was also half of one of the great Chinese love stories.  That story has: a childhood true love leading to marriage; a disapproving and jealous mother-in-law; lovers forced to split up; a bittersweet - and brief - reunion; and a tragic death.  All of it memorialized in poems - now almost 1,000 years old! - by the participants, poems that can be seen inscribed on the walls of the place where the key event occurred.  (No wonder the story has been made into at least one TV show...)

The love of Lu's life was his cousin, Tang Wan.  They had grown up in the same household and wedded when he was twenty, but married life lasted only one year, as his mother never liked Tang and forced Lu to cast her out and divorce, which he did out of filial duty.  Lu moved away to continue his studies and a career of many ups and downs whose focus was regaining northern China for the Song Dynasty.  (Lu You is known as the "Patriotic Poet" for his many poems - several thousand of  which survive - urging the unification of China.)

Almost ten years after the divorce, Lu had a chance encounter with Tang Wan and her new husband during a visit to the Shen Garden (in modern day Shaoxing).   Societal rules did not allow them to speak directly, but she received permission from the husband to have contact.  The sources I've read conflict on whether she sent a servant to him with wine or handed him the cup herself.  Regardless, it is said her eyes were brimmed with tears, that he got drunk on the wine, and then composed immediately this poem on a wall of the Garden.  

Later, Tang saw the poem and wrote one in reply, also on the wall.  And there the poems are today, side-by-side.


She died, many say of a re-broken heart, a year after that brief, public reunion.  She was only twenty-nine years old.  Twenty-nine years old.


In 1199, some forty years later, when he was seventy-five years old, Lu You revisited the garden and wrote two poems - "Shen Garden" - recalling the event.


This poem is in "Ci" form, which are meant to be sung.  A tune is selected first, to which words are then written.  It is not uncommon for different poets to use the same tune but write different verse to fit it.

I am a sucker for tragic love stories, hence the selection.  It takes no effort at all for me to dive into their pain.

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 “Phoenix Hairpin” (To the Tune of)
 
Pink soft hands, yellow rippling wine,
The town is filled with Spring, willows by palace walls.
The east wind is biting, happiness is thin,
heart full of sorrow, so many years apart.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

Spring is as of old; the person is empty and thin.
Traces of tears show through the sheer silk.
Peach blossoms falling, glimmering pond freezing,
The huge oath remains, the brocade book is hard to hold.

Don't, Don't, Don't!

                                                             Lu You -  1125 – 1210, Song Dynasty

 

Note: This poem also shows how hard it is to translate poems from Chinese.  The forms are SO different, each character's meaning so rich that it needs, in English, several words to explain.  The triple "wrong" meant that it was wrong for them to end up apart; wrong of his mother to drive her away; and wrong of him to obey mom and leave Tang. “East Wind” refers to his mother and the rules that made him obey her wishes.  He and Tang are the willows separated by the palace wall, ie. the rules that didn't allow them to talk directly.  The tears on the silk are her tears from their encounter.  The “brocade book” refers to his work and career.
 

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"Clean and Even Music" (to the tune of) - Emperor Li Yu

 Li Yu, the last Emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty, only ruled for fourteen years, but during his reign, his support of the arts made his kingdom an important cultural center.   Personally talented as a musician, painter, and calligrapher, he is recognized for his contributions to a lyric form of poetry which the succeeding Song Dynasty further developed.  It was also a poem that caused his death at the age of forty-one, when he was ordered to drink poisoned wine by first emperor of the Song Dynasty, who had conquered and imprisoned him.  (Li's poem, to the tune "Beauty Yu", had been sung by the Song Emperor's own female court musicians!  Not hard to see how that could have annoyed him....)   I include here as it is a - real - killer of a poem....

Today is also the anniversary of my father's passing, eleven years ago. He suffered a massive heart attack and died in a hospital emergency room with me at bedside.   He was eighty-four years old at the time.  I chose the poem below because lamentation for a loss applies also to filial love.  And because the line about someone being so far away that not even a dream can reach them is particularly meaningful: he is infrequently now in my dreams, though I think of him regularly and keep his memory.  I miss him and am now more glad than mortified when I recognize him in how I speak or laugh a certain way sometimes.
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 “Clean and Even Music”  (to the tune of)

Since you left, Spring is half gone

and everything I see breaks my heart:

a chaos of plum petals falling by steps like snowflakes.

I brush them off and they cover me again.

Migrating wild geese bring me no word of you.

The road is so long that my dream cannot reach you.

The grief of departure is like spring grass

-- the farther you go, the deeper it grows.

                                                                       Emperor Li Yu (aka Li Houzhu “last ruler”)

And the killer poem:


"Beauty Yu:  (to the tune of)

 Will Spring blooms and autumn never end?
These memories are too much.
Last night east wind pierced my narrow tower again,
and I saw lost kingdoms in the clean bright moon.
The carved railings and jade steps must still be there,
though lovely faces must have aged.
How much sorrow do I feel?
Like river water in spring, it flows to the east.

A Mutual Lullaby - Yehuda Amichai

With this one, I think Amichai takes the lead with most poems here....  And is it any wonder? PLEASE read some of the others and you'll see why.  It's worth learning Hebrew just to get their full impact!

As for including this one..... read it.  

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A Mutual Lullaby


For a while I've been meaning to tell you to sleep
but your eyes won't let sleep in, and your thighs
won't either. Your belly when I touch -- perhaps.
Count backward now, as if at a rocket launching,
and sleep. Or count forward,
as if you were starting a song. And sleep.
Let's compose sweet eulogies for each other as we lie together in the dark.
Tears remain longer than whatever caused them.
My eyes have burned this newspaper to a mist
but the wheat goes on growing in Pharahoh's dream.

Time isn't inside the clock
but love, sometimes, is inside our bodies.
Words that escape you in your sleep
are food and drink for the wild angels,
and our rumpled bed
is the last nature preserve
with shrieking laughter and lush green weeping.
For a while I've been meaning to tell you
that you should sleep
and that the black night will be cushioned
with soft red velvet - as in a case
for geometrical instruments --
around everything that's hard in you.

And that I'll keep you, as people keep the Sabbath,
even on weekdays, and that we'll stay together always
as on one of those New Year's cards
with a dove and a Torah, sprinkled with silver glitter.
And that we are still less expensive
than a computer. So they'll let us be.

                                                                                     Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

See?  I didn't want to ruin it for you, dear reader, with extraneous comments/observations.

Sonnet LXIX - 100 Sonnets of Love - Pablo Neruda

Regardless, of how this poem arrives on your physical (or virtual) doorstep - by dogsled, singing messenger,  snail-mail, spam, or even in a blog you stumble upon, it should be taken very, very seriously as a reminder that life is short and The Beatles had it almost right: Love may not be all you need, but without it, what is the rest?  And if it arrives by carrier pigeon with a flash-drive attached to a leg or delivered by Federal Express, you would be a fool NOT to run - not walk - to the person who sent it.  How much more could you ask for from someone IF their other actions match the ardor, passion, and devotion in these words???

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Sonnet LXIX
                                          transl. - Stephen Tapscott

Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence,
without you moving, slicing the noon
like a blue flower, without you walking
later through the fog and the cobbles,

without the light you carry in your hand,
golden, which maybe others will not see,
which maybe no one knew was growing
like the red beginnings of a rose.

In short, without your presence: without your coming
suddenly, incitingly, to know my life,
gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind:

since then I am because you are,
since then you are, I am, we are,
and through love I will be, you will be, we’ll be.

                                                                                              Pablo Neruda

Sonnet LXVI - I do not love you - Pablo Neruda

As promised, another from Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets.  I wish you could read it in Spanish: some of the passion is diluted in translation, as I hold firmly that certain love-poetry can only be "pulled off" in their origin.  This one is a declaration of love that speaks true, as it acknowledges that when we love someone, we at once see him/her perfectly well AND, simultaneously, not at all, in order to love them and their shortcomings.  (If YOU are loved THAT well, pay attention!)
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Sonnet LXVI
                                         transl. by Stephen Trascott

I do not love you – except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
from waiting to not waiting for you
my heart moves from the cold into

the fire. I love you only because it’s you
I love; I hate you no end, and hating you
bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
is that I do not see you but love you

blindly. Maybe the January light will comsume
my heart with its cruel
ray, stealing my key to true

calm. In this part of the story I am the one who
dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you
because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.

                                                                                         Pablo Neruda

Sonnet LXV (100 Sonnets) - Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda needs no introduction, least of all by me, as THE giant and most popular South American poet writing in Spanish.  I could easily post all 100 of his love sonnets, one per day, and no reader would have reason to complain that either the subject (Love) or "mission" of this blog was shortchanged.  But that would cheat you from your own discovery of their range and passion.  I will, however, post a few, one after the other beginning with this one (in addition to the four already posted over the last few months), so that a grouping can give a better flavor than a single one.  Call it a tasting bite.  Neruda divided the "100 Sonnets of Love" into sections called Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Night.  This one is from Evening and needs no explanation.   
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Sonnet LXV
                                      transl. Stephen Tapscott

Matilde, where are you? Down here I noticed,
under my necktie and just above my heart,
a certain pang of grief between the ribs,
you were gone that quickly.

I needed the light of your energy,
I looked around, devouring hope.
I watched the void without you that is like a house,
nothing left but tragic windows.

Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens
to the fall of the ancient leafless rain,
to feathers, to whatever the night imprisioned;
so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.

                                                                Pablo Neruda

How Can A Pain In The Chest Be Softened - Majnun Laila

This poem comes from a tragic Arab love story based on a (supposedly) real person, Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, who lived in the late 600s A.D. in the northern Arabian peninsula,  fell in love with a woman (Layla), was not allowed to marry her, and became a mad poet living in the desert.  (He became known is "Majnun-e Layla" or "Layla's Madman".)  Really.  In another version, they lived in India.  Versions of the poems were collected in later centuries by Persian writers and passed into their literary realm.  (There is a 1933 Indian movie (Laila Majnun) as well as a more recent Bollywood version.)  

Regardless, someone wrote the group of poems about star-crossed lovers,  from which comes  this one.  I can't vouch for the quality of the translation, but given that these poems began in folklore, the vernacular tone is not surprising.  No matter: the ache of the longing cuts through the centuries and the language barrier.  The last two lines resonate to the point where, if I were a bridge, they would be an army of words marching across with such force and cadence that I would collapse.
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How Can A Pain In The Chest Be Softened?

How can a pain in the chest be softened?
The darts of death are closer than your hands.
Too much loss; too much want; absence. I tremble,
You can’t come to me, I can’t come to you.
Our love is a small bird tied by a child,
The bird sips the lake of death and the boy
Goes on with his game. He doesn’t have the sense
To feel the bird’s pain: and the wings can’t fly.
I know a thousand roads, a thousand places,
But without a heart there is nowhere to go.

                                                                       Majnun Laila ( ? -682) Arab

A short poem by 'Unsuri ( ? - 1039/1040), from Persia (now Iran - mostly), in the ruba'i form (four-line stanza). By his time, the poetry that had emerged there had shed some of the Arab influences and both the imagery and subjects contained more from the songs from Central Asia.  Persian poetry also had more references to gardens and fruits, which was a bit missing from desert Arab writings. 'Unsuri was named "Lord of the Poets" by Sultan Mahmud, in whose court he served.  One of his duties was to evaluate the talent of any poets who wished to be part of the royal entourage.  (A great gig, if you ask me: to be gate-keeper against potential rivals!)  In this poem, I think there is a little oddness in the translation - not that I read Persian! - because I read the meaning as being that "she", being his love, is the one that "takes" those three things (grief, tears, fancy) from him.  Do you agree?
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Untitled

Three things have modeled themselves on three of yours –
Rose on cheek, grape on lip, beauty on face.
Three things each year are taken from three of mine –

Grief from heart, tears from cheek, fancy from eye.

                                                                     Abdul Qasin Hasan Unsuri - Persian (Tajik)

What He Said - Kapilar

One objective of this blog has been to show how the need for lovers to write about experiences is both universal and timeless.  Today's selection, dating from roughly 1800 - 2000 years ago and from the Tamil-speaking region now covering present-day Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and southern India, does both.  It comes from the Eight Anthologies (circa 1st - 3rd century), the earliest recorded Tamil-language poetry.  Kapilar, the author, is considered one of the great Sangam "school" poets, well-regarded in his society, and a poet in the court of the king.  This poem is an "interior" poem, so-called as they are "...dramatic monologues in which five landscapes (hill, seashore, forest, arable land, desert) and their contents (birds, beasts, trees, tribes, characteristic arts and occupations) correspond to the phases of love (first union, anxious waiting, infidelity, elopement, patient waiting and reunion)".  These would contrast to "exterior" poems that were meditations "... and sometimes grim elegies".  One does not need to be in that time and place to appreciate the poet's feelings about the secrecy of a clandestine love.
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What He Said

My love is a two-faced thief.
In the dead of night
she comes like the fragrance
of the Red-Speared Chieftain’s forest hills,
to be one with me.

And then, she sheds the petals
of night’s several flowers,
and does her hair again
with new perfumes and oils,
to be one with her family at dawn

with a stranger’s different face.
                                                                            Kapilar - Tamil

Buffo - Wislawa Szymborska

Another by Szymborska, the Nobel Laureate from Poland.  I'm not quite sure how to categorize it.... I like its concept and breadth, the ironic tone that ends in a note of.... of what?... about love.  You tell me!
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BUFFO

First, our love will die, alas,
then two hundred years will pass,
then we’ll meet again at last—

This time in the theater, played
by a couple of comedians,
him and her, the public’s darlings.

Just a little farce, with songs,
patter, jokes, and final bows,
a vaudeville comedy of manners,
certain to bring down the house.

You’ll amuse them endlessly
on the stage with your cravat
and your petty jealousy.

So will I, love’s silly pawn,
with my heart broken, my joy gone,
my crown tumbling to the ground.

To the laughter’s loud refrain,
we will meet and part again,
seven mountains, seven rivers
multiplying out pain.

If we haven’t had enough
of despair, grief, all that stuff,
lofty words will kill us off.

Then we’ll stand up, take our bows:
hope that you’ve enjoyed our show.
every patron with his spouse
will applaud, get up, and go.

They reenter their lives’ cages,
where love’s tiger sometimes rages,
but the beast’s too tame to bite.

We’ll remain the odd ones out,
silly heathens in their fools’caps,
listening to the small bells ringing
day and night.
                                                                  Wislawa Szymborska - Polish

The Lark - Bernart de Ventadorn

No assembly of love poetry would be complete without something by the Troubadors of the early medieval period.  These writers of courtly ballads about love for unattainable women set the stage and tone for the notions of Romantic love that softened the edges of what was a brutal - and brutish - period.  Bernart de Ventadorn (1148-1195, according to Ezra Pound's sources) was one of the best French troubadors and his ballads have survived to today.  This one is not his best known, but I chose it because the translator from oc (a medieval Provencal language) to English is Pound, one of the great - and controversial - literary figures of the 20th century.  Aside from his own poetry and essays and ideas about writing, Pound had a great interest in poetry from other cultures and times and brought those to the attention of English-speaking audiences through his translations. 
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The Lark
                                             transl. from Oc by Ezra Pound

When I see the lark a-moving

For joy his wings against the sunlight,

Who forgets himself and lets himself fall

For the sweetness which goes into his heart:

Ai!  what great envy comes unto me for him whom I see so

   rejoicing!

I marvel that my heart melts not for desiring.

Alas!  I thought I knew so much

Of Love, and I know so little of it, for I cannot

hold myself from loving

Her from whom I shall never have anything toward.

She hath my heart from me, and she hath from me all my wit

And myself and all that is mine.

And when she took it from me she left me naught

Save desiring and a yearning heart.

                                                                       Bernart de Ventadorn - French

Advice for Good Love - Yehuda Amichai

 This is the seventh poem by Amichai that I have selected.   If you've read the others, you should be getting an idea about his "voice" and how strong it is.  As I have noted before, to read his poems is to stand in the shadowless landscape of a noon-day sun, when every rock is both sharply outlined yet also shimmering from the rising heat.  His poems are those rocks.
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Advice for Good Love

                                     transl. from Hebrew by Amichai and Ted Hughes (!)

Advice for good love: Don’t love

those from far away.  Take yourself one

from nearby.

The way a sensible house will take

local stones for its building,

stones which have suffered in the same cold

and were scorched by the same sun.

Take the one with the golden wreath

around her dark eye’s pupil, she

who has a certain knowledge

about your death.  Love also inside

a ruin, like taking honey out of 
the lion’s carcass that Samson killed.

And advice for bad love: With

the love left over

from the previous one

make a new woman for yourself,

then with what is left of that woman

make again a new love,

and go on like that

until nothing remains.

                                                                     Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

Sonnet LI (100 Love Sonnets) - Pablo Neruda

Given that this - and the earlier one - come from the "100 Love Sonnets" volume  (in Spanish - 1960), it's a good bet that, before this blog is done, there will be more here!  Neruda's love poetry was his most popular in South America, more so than his political ones.  These sonnets were dedicated to his third wife, Matilde Urrutia.  (He was sensitive enough to delay publication, so as to not hurt the feelings of the ex-wives.)  In the dedication, he called the verses "... little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them".  Sigh...
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Sonnet LI

                                                                    transl. from Spanish by Stephen Tapscott

Your laugh: it reminds me of a tree

fissured by a lightning streak, by a silver bolt

that drops from the sky, splitting the poll,

slicing the tree with its sword.

A laugh like yours I love is born

only in the foliage and snow of the highlands,

the air’s laugh that bursts loose in those altitudes,

dearest: the Araucanian tradition.

O my mountain woman, my dear Chillán volcano,

slash your laughter through the shadows

the night, morning, honey of the noon:

birds of the foliage will leap in the air

when your laugh like an extravagant

light breaks through the tree of life.

Pablo Neruda

Gifts - Song from ancient Wei (modern Henan)

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 I found this in a bilingual Chinese publication "Selections from The Book of Poetry", in the section of folk Songs, all translated by Prof. Xu Yuanchong (1921 - ?).  "The Book of Poetry" is THE book of poetry, China's first ancient poetry collection, compiled around the 6th Century BCE (Before Christian Era), around the same time as the Illiad and the Odyssey.  The compiler is attributed to be Confucius (!) and the 305 poems selected by him from the several thousand known in his time.  This book, along with five others (on rites, music, changes, ancient texts, and the Spring and Autumn Annals) are the "Six Classics" he used as textbooks for his disciples.  (Aside: one reason for the decline of China is that the imperial civil service examinations continued using those classics as their basis INTO THE 19th century!  Thus, China's best and brightest were selected by their ability to expound on 2,500 yr old texts, while knowing DIDDLY about modern technology, administration, etc. Oy veh!)  This folk song comes from the river valleys of Henan Province and at least as old as when it was selected (2,500 years ago).  Prof. Xu, the translator,  taught at Peking University, was educated in China and in Paris, and is a noted translator of Chinese texts into English and French as well as in the other direction.  (He translated, among others, "Madame Bovary" into Chinese and the poems of Mao Tse Tung into English.)  His bio states that he is "...proclaimed as the only expert in the world who can translate Chinese poetry into English and French rhyme.."

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Gifts - Song from Wei, modern Henan Province, China

                                

                                                                             transl. by  Prof. Xu Yuanchong

She throws a quince to me;

         I give her a green jade

Not in return, you see,

         But to show acquaintance made.

She throws a peach to me;

         I give her a white jade

Not in return, you see,

         But to show friendship made.

She throws a plum to me;

         I give her jasper fair

Not in return, you see,

         But to show love fore’er.

                                                           Songs collected in Wei, modern Henan

Four Songs - Tzu Yeh

 Some suggest that the group of 117 short poems known as the "Tzu Yeh songs" were authored by more than one person.  However, the compositional style of back-to-back couplets was new and suggest a single author.  As a "wine-shop girl", she would have been ".... trained in music, dance, calligraphy, history..." (Hamill), making her a very early precursor - by roughly 1,300 years - of Japanese "geishas".  I'm sure some doctoral student somewhere has done a cross-cultural comparison of female entertainers in ancient cultures - from the Greek hetaerae to "wine-shop girls" to geishas - and what was included in their range of offerings, from chaste to carnal.)  This grouping of Tzu Yeh songs first showed up in a compilation dating to the second half of the 4th Century A.C.E. (After Christian Era - the new "A.D.")  I've selected four of them for this posting: I may add others at another time.  (Sorry, no photo!)
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Four songs   

                                                  transl. from Chinese by Sam Hamill

The Lotus Lover

A green lotus on waves of transparent blue:

the flowers grow red and new.

You want to collect these lovely flowers?

I’ll give my lotus bud to you.

And End to Spring

Your leaving brought an end to spring;

longing burns through summer heat-waves.

Will I ever lift my dress for you again?

My pillow ever hold your lovely face?

A Smile

In this house without walls on a hill

the four winds touch our faces.

If they blow open your robe of gauze,

I’ll try to hide my smile.

Song

Winter skies are cold and low,

with harsh winds and freezing sleet.

But when we make love beneath our quilt,

we make three summer months of heat.

                                                                      Tzu Yeh - Chinese