Poetry Magazinei Pad Edition

founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe
March 2012
translation
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONRO E

volume cxcix t number 6
CONTENTS
March 2012
POEMS
gottfried benn 487 Asters

Express Train
Caryatid
Evenings of Certain Lives
Divergences
Left the House
Fragments 1953
Translated by Michael Hofmann
geoffrey brock 502 Alteration Finds

paolo febbraro 506 Fable and Moral
Translated by Geo≠rey Brock
edith södergran 508 A Life

Now it is fall
Strange Sea
Translated by Averill Curdy
eugene dubnov 512 Lips

Translated by Anne Stevenson and
Eugene Dubnov
john matthias 514 After Quevedo

After “Las Formas Puras,”
After Lorca
alain borer 519 Sleep Log
Translated by Mark Irwin and
Alain Borer
a.e. housman 524 To my Comrade, Moses J. Jackson,

Sco≠er at this Scholarship
Translated by A.E. Stallings
marina tsvetaeva 528 Bound for Hell

Translated by Stephen Edgar
roberto sosa 530 The Poor
Translated by Spencer Reece
paul claudel 532 The Day of Gifts

Translated by Jonathan Monroe Geltner
jorge luis borges 535 To the One Who is Reading Me

Music Box
Translated by Tony Barnstone
antonio porchia 538 From “Voices”

Translated by Gonzalo Melchor
said 542 Psalms

Translated by Mark S. Burrows
M A R I N A T S V E TA E VA : E I G H T P O E M S
marina tsvetaeva 552 From “Poems for Moscow”

“Where does such tenderness
come from?”
From “Poems for Blok”
“I am happy living simply”
From “An Attempt at Jealousy”
“ A kiss on the forehead”
From “The Desk”
From “Poems to Czechoslovakia”
Translated by Ilya Kaminsky and
Jean Valentine
T H E P O E T RY O F K A B A L L A H
peter cole 573 Introduction

anonymous 576 Each Day
From Those Whose Beauty
the Depths Are Lit
yehudah halevi 578 Where Will I Find You
anonymous 580 Release, Please
ya’akov hakohen 581 Prayers for the Protection and
Opening of the Heart
yosef gikatilla 582 The Nut Garden
anonymous 583 Incantation Against Lilith
yitzhak luria 584 Hymn for the Third Meal
anonymous 586 Peace Be Upon You
contributors 590
back page 605
Editor christian wiman
Senior Editor don share
Associate Editor fred sasaki
Managing Editor valerie jean johnson
Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt
Reader christina pugh
Art Direction winterhouse studio
cover art by michael bierut

“100 Dot Pegasus,” 2011
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POEMS
gottfried benn
Asters
Asters — sweltering days

old adjuration / curse,
the gods hold the balance
for an uncertain hour.
Once more the golden flocks

of heaven, the light, the trim —
what is the ancient process
hatching under its dying wings?
Once more the yearned-for,

the intoxication, the rose of you —
summer leaned in the doorway
watching the swallows —
one more presentiment

where certainty is not hard to come by:
wing tips brush the face of the waters,
swallows sip speed and night.
G OT T F RI E D B EN N 4 87
Express Train
Brown. Brandy-brown. Leaf-brown. Russet.

Malayan yellow.
Express train Berlin-Trelleborg and the Baltic resorts.
Flesh that went naked.

Tanned unto the mouth by the sea.
Deeply ripened for Grecian joys.
How far along the summer, in sickle-submissiveness!
Penultimate day of the ninth month!
Parched with stubble and the last corn-shocks.

Unfurlings, blood, fatigue,
deranged by dahlia-nearness.
Man-brown jumps on woman-brown.
A woman is something for a night.

And if you enjoyed it, then the next one too!
O! And then the return to one’s own care.
The not-speaking! The urges!
A woman is something with a smell.

Ine≠able! To die for! Mignonette.
Shepherd, sea, and South.
On every declivity a bliss.
Woman-brown drapes itself on man-brown:
Hold me! I’m falling!

My neck is so weary.
Oh, the sweet last
fevered scent from the gardens.
48 8 P O E T RY
Caryatid
Renege on the rock! Smash

the oppressor cave! Sashay
out onto the floor! Scorn the cornices —
see, from the beard of drunk Silenus
from the unique uproar of his blood
the wine dribble into his genitals!
Spit on the obsession with pillars:

ancient rheumatic hands quake toward
gray skies. Bring down the temple
by the yearning of your knees
twitching with dance.
Spill, spread, unpetal, bleed

your soft flowers through great wounds.
Dove-hauled Venus girds her loins
with roses —
see the summer’s last pu≠ of blue
drift on seas of asters to distant
pine-brown coasts; see
this final hour of our mendacious
southern happiness
held aloft.
Evenings of Certain Lives
You don’t need always to be scrubbing the tiles, Hendrickje,

my eye drinks itself,
drinks itself to death —
but other drink is in short supply —
the little Buddha there,
Chinese grove god
in exchange for a ladleful of Hulstkamp,
please!
Never painted anything

in frost-white or ice-skater blue
or that Irish green
in which the purple shimmers through —
always my own monotone,
my compulsion to shadows —
not pleasant
to pursue that path so clearly.
Greatness — where?
I pick up the slate-pencil and certain things appear
on paper or canvas
or whatever the heck else —
result: Buddha bronze hocked for booze —
but I draw the line at homage under ornamental plants,
banquet of the painters’ guild —
something for the boardroom!
... Creaking,
little sheep squeaking, chromotypes
Flemish, Rubensish —
for the grandchildren
(same idiots!)
Ah — Hulstkamp,
49 0 P O E T RY
hits the spot,
midpoint of colors,
my shadow brown,
stubble aura around heart and eye —
G OT T F RI E D B EN N 491
ii
The blocked chimney smokes

— the Swan of Avon blows his nose —
the tree stumps are wet,
clammy night, emptiness mingled with draft —
enough characters,
the world is overpopulated as it is,
plentiful peach-fall, four rosebuds
per annum —
asperged,
set to tread the boards
by this hand,
grown wrinkled
and with sluggish veins!
All the Juliets and Ophelias,

wreathed, silvered, sometimes murderous —
all the soft mouths, the sighs
I extracted from them —
the original actresses long since turned to smoke,
rust, leeched dry, rats’ pudding —
Ariel too, away with the elements.
The age takes o≠ its frockcoat.

These lousy skulls of lords,
their trains of thought
that I pushed into extremes —
my lords makers of history
all of them crowned and sceptered illiterates,
great powers of the cosmos —
yes, like so many bats or kites!
49 2 P O E T RY
Sir Goon wrote to me lately:
“the rest is silence” —
I think that’s one of mine,
could only be mine,
Dante dead — lacuna
of centuries
to my logomachic quotes —
what if they didn’t exist,

the booty never brought to light,
the booths, the sca≠olds, the cymbals
never clashed —
gaps? Gap teeth maybe,
but the great monkey jaws
would grind on
emptiness, mingled with draft —
the tree stumps are wet
and the butler snores in porter dreams.
Divergences
One says: please no inner life,

manners by all means, but nothing a≠ective,
that’s no compensation
for the insu≠erable
di∞culties of outward-directed expression —
those cerebralized
city-Styxes
when my little prince

pokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot
it melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst,
and it’s no di≠erent now
the contraries are not easy to reconcile

but when you survey the provinces
the inner life
has it by a neck.
49 4 P O E T RY
Left the House
Left the house shattered, it hurt so bad,

so many years as a man, compromise,
in spite of partial success in intellectual tussle
he was never anyone of Olympian allure.
He walked slowly through the dreamscape

of the late autumn day, barely distinguishable
from early spring, with young willows
and a patch of waste ground where blue jays screamed.
Dreamy exposure to phenomena

that to nature in its administration
of various cycles — young and old alike —
are inseparably part of a single order — :
so he drank his gin and accepted a dish

of sausage soup, free on Thursdays
with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance
of sorrow and pleasure.
ii
He had been reading on the park bench

and stared into the gray of the last roses,
there were no titans, just shrubs
thinned out by fall.
He put down his book. It was a day like any other

and the people were like all people everywhere,
that was how it would always be, at least
this mixture of death and laughter would persist.
A scent is enough to change things,

even small flowers stand in some relation to a cedar of Lebanon,
then he walked on and saw the windows of the furriers
were full of warm things for the winter ahead.
49 6 P O E T RY
iii
All very well, a gin and a few minutes

in the park at noon, with the sun shining,
but what when the landlord comes by, there are problems
with your tax return, and the girlfriend’s in tears?
Shattered: how far are you allowed to push your I,

and see peculiar things as somehow symptomatic?
Shattered: to what extent are you obliged to play by the rules —
as far as a Ludwig Richter canvas?
Shattered: no one knows. Shattered and you turn

equally pained to singular and universal —
your little experiment with destiny will end
gloriously and forever, but quite alone.
Damned evergreens! Vinyl whines!

Gin, sun, cedars — what use are they
to help the self reconcile landlord, God, and dream —
voices warble and words mock —
left the house and closed his reverie.
Fragments 1953
A day without tears is a rare occurrence

culpable absent-mindedness
practically an episode
when men still wore starched collars,

and stu≠ed cotton wool between their toes
hobbled about in pain, pedicure hadn’t been invented,
but you would see faces that were worth a second look
those were years when something whispered
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
49 8 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
This latest sample of Gottfried Benn spans four decades, almost his
whole career: from “Express Train,” first published exactly a hun-
dred years ago in the quarterly Pan in 1912, the year Benn qualified
as a doctor and also started to publish, to poems and drafts from the
early- and mid-fifties. But rather than separating them out like the
seven colors of a spectrum, it is simpler and most useful to group
the first three together, and the second four; a trivium and a qua-
drivium. They are respectively early and late in feeling; meridional
and hyperborean; sunny and chill; exotic and domestic; boisterous
and resigned; an Indian summer, and a dreich and featureless winter
(always the two prime atmospheres and auras of Benn).
Life is a cycle, divided up into seasons like a year. Sap rises, and
leaves fall. “Like the generation of leaves, the lives of mortal men,”
Homer says. Youth is always summer — in the special case of the poet,
his at once anticipatory and retrospective intelligence, always want-
ing complexity and conflict, always wanting more — often a sort of
island- or exo-summer, most typically an arrière-garde. Hence the
emphasis on Indian summer. Two of the poems have the word “last”
in them, and the third a refrain of “once more”: summer for Benn,
you understand, is hardly a time of easy and uncomplicated abun-
dance. Benn was a creature of habit. He worked complainingly and
hard, never made very much money, found it increasingly di∞cult
to leave his practice and Berlin, never traveled very far or took very
much time o≠. Mediterran — the long, painful open a of the final
vowel in German — remained a Nietzschean buzz-word for him, not
that he got there very often. Once, in the twenties, he drove with a
rich friend (in the rich friend’s car) through France and Spain. But
we are not talking Rilke here. Merano in the Tyrol was a favored
destination: the presence there of palm trees signaled “the South” to
Benn. Though “South” remained a broad church. Unqualified cities
like Brussels (where he was posted during wwi) were filed away
there, as was, in “Express Train,” Germany’s chilly, nudist Baltic
coast. A week here or there — and often in September or October —
was about the size of it, for him. Poets can’t be choosers.
It was just as well that Benn’s early style and lifelong a∞liation
was Expressionist: gaudy, neo-primitive, volatile, provocative, anti-
rational. The brain is eclipsed by its older neighbors: the glands, the
senses (including the oldest sense, the sense of smell). Expressionism
doesn’t count days or verify destinations. It might be the humdrum
Baltic — shallowest and newest and saltiest of seas — but it feels like
the Aegean, if not the South Pacific, in the poem, and in the poet’s
rhapsodic imagination. Expressionism hymns a simpler physis, the
body under its own management. Down with the boardroom (hence
“my neck is so weary” and “bring down the temple”), away with the
little pin-striped simpleton or puritan upstairs! Expressionism is
an as-if, or an if-only: if only the body could write or paint! Poems
like “Express Train” or “Caryatid” or “Asters” are literary equiva-
lents to the brash, paradisiac canvases of Emil Nolde or Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner or Ferdinand Hodler.
The last four poems are, so to speak, about life’s “second mo-
ment”; they are all about winter and age. “Evenings of Certain Lives”
is biographical, about Rembrandt and Shakespeare old; the three
remaining poems are autobiographical, from the last five years of
Benn’s life. Sunlight, color, rapture, pleasure are all at a premium.
Ataraxy is a memory. Great historical figures lead lives no less
fraught and empty than ... someone like Benn. The depressant alco-
hol dulls pain in lives already depressed. Rembrandt — an invention
of the twentieth century, before that he was accounted dowdy — is
every bit as housebound and surly and preoccupied as his creator;
the Shakespeare to whom Benn gives voice is the Shakespeare post-
Tempest, when he has hung up his pencil and doesn’t even care to
remember his own lines. What is civilization, these poems seem to
ask, what if the cymbals “never clashed”? A head of froth, a meniscus,
a gloss o≠ the top, optional, irrelevant.
Benn’s view of life, often called nihilistic, seems to me more like
momentary or maybe molecular. People are born and die basically
alone, and the tiny, tiny minority that do anything of importance
(i.e. make art) live just like the rest. Only their insistence on solitude,
a gesture of refusal — Rembrandt’s “no” to brilliancy, and “no” to
society painting — a lifelong obduracy, tell them apart. They make,
500 P O E T RY
in the end, no di≠erence whatsoever, leave life as they found it. “The
great monkey jaws” — those of history — grind on, man is unevolved,
unimprovable, inconsolable. Progress is a false god. For the gross of
working people, whose horizons are low, and whose ambitions and
expectations remain resolutely pragmatic, maybe conditions can be
improved, but that isn’t the role of art. (As a doctor, Benn did what he
could, though he was a medical pessimist). But for the artist — which
was what interested Benn, life without art being entirely value-
less — nothing has changed in thousands of years: still solitude, still
doubt, still want of recognition; always questioning and at odds
with life; always “the insu≠erable / di∞culties of outward-directed
expression.”
Yeats says the poet “is never the bundle of accident and inco-
herence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea,
something intended, complete.” Not so Benn, not in these last poems.
He is absolutely the bundle seated — if not to breakfast exactly, then at
least in the corner of the bar after work, where he downs two or three
beers, smokes his Junos, listens to the radio, listens to the chatter of
the other customers, scribbles something lugubrious on a pad. It is rare
for art to be so perspicuous, to be made from so very little, so to pair
grace with dailiness, discretion with unmistakeableness, a shy wistful-
ness with humility. He makes Larkin seems like an equestrian — like
Byron, like Flashman. — mh
geoffrey brock
Alteration Finds
i. delirium, after rimbaud
How many hours I kept

that vigil by your side —
entire nights, eyes wide,
as you so sweetly slept.
What I was wondering:

why you yearned to evade
the real. No one has prayed
harder for anything.
It wasn’t for your life

I feared, but for mankind.
Did you, in the end, find
secrets for changing life?
502 P O E T RY
2. defaced, after rilke
The head we cannot know,

nor its bright fruit, the eyes.
And yet the body has
its gaze: a lamp turned low.
Or else the breast would cease

to dazzle, the hips fail
to curve into that smile
that begets more than a kiss.
And flesh would lose all life,

not flare till there’s no blind
it can’t see you behind.
You must change your life.
G EOF F REY B RO CK 50 3
3. denial, after seferis
The afternoon grew hotter

along our secret shore.
We thirsted in the glare
but couldn’t drink the water.
On golden sand we traced

your name beside the sea.
The wind came like a sigh;
our writing was erased.
How passionate our life,

how full of sex and song,
spirit and heart — how wrong!
And so we changed our life.
504 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
“Alteration Finds” began with an attempt to translate a poem —

George Seferis’s ³ǱȡȞȘıȘ” (1931) — from a language I don’t know
at all. By reading other translations, some of which I liked but none
of which I loved, I came to love, or imagine that I loved, the original
whose contours I glimpsed through the veils of translation. I had read
about the original, had heard it read and sung, and had questioned two
Greek-speaking friends about certain words and phrases. But having
no Greek, I hadn’t read the poem itself, and so it seemed fraudulent
to call my version a translation. On the other hand, precisely because
I couldn’t consider it a real translation, I felt freer to take liberties.
I began to think of it as that naughty hybrid, an “imitation.”
I first read Rilke’s 1908 sonnet about the marble torso of Apollo (or
rather, translations of it, since I don’t read German either) some dozen
years ago, around the time of a painful change — divorce — in my own
life. As may happen with poems, this one acquired private meanings
related to the circumstances of my original experience of it: the head-
less Apollo became, for me, an emblem of the other/lover, whose mind
is fundamentally unknowable. Since the original has been translated
so often, I allowed myself to stray again into imitation, imposing the
Seferis poem as a formal model and whittling away the marble of the
original — even ditching Apollo, though I hope his ghost remains.
In the Rimbaud section I take a di≠erent kind of liberty, since the
original — a snippet of the “Délires I” section of Une saison en enfer
(1873), in which the poet gazes on his sleeping lover (Verlaine) and
longs to know his mind — is in prose. Seferis again provides the mod-
el, and oddly the snippet’s final phrase — changer la vie — became a
protest slogan in France in 1968, much as Seferis’s poem became
a protest anthem in Greece in the sixties. And Rilke’s final phrase
has become something of a slogan itself, of course, an existentialist
exhortation that echoes widely in many contexts.
Instead of saying what I think the point of all this is, I’ll say some-
thing about the title, which, like the sections of this poem, has been
torn from its original context, and which, I hope, might fly here like
the last shred of an ancien régime flag over a fallen — but perhaps not
ruined — city.
GEOF F REY B ROCK 50 5

paolo febbraro
Fable and Moral
He fell and died, the skier,

high up there in the snow.
And now, spring having come,
his father leaves his home,
dark in the valley, to throw
a hook in the heavy river.
Translated from the Italian by Geo≠rey Brock
506 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
I’m drawn to this cameo less for the moral than for the rich ambiguity
of the fable. On first reading, I saw it chiefly as a poem of grief, saw
the father’s casting of a line into the river — which, swollen with
snowmelt, must bear with it at least the memory of the son and
perhaps his actual body — as a morbid and even pathetic but also
tender attempt to recover the irrecoverable. Think of the skier as
Icarus, the father as Daedalus trawling the Mediterranean.
But that presumes a sympathetic rather than agonistic father-son
relationship — a presumption which, if we do think of the Greeks,
we might reconsider. Indeed when I asked the poet about this poem,
the Greek father he mentioned was not Daedalus but Cronus. — gb
PAOLO F EB B RARO 50 7
edith södergran
A Life
That the stars are adamant

everyone understands —
but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave
or peace below every gray stone.
If happiness never comes, what is a life?
A lily withers in the sand
and if its nature has failed? The tide
washes the beach at night.
What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web?
What does a dayfly make of its hours?
(Two wings creased over a hollow body.)
Black will never turn to white —

yet the perfume of our struggle lingers
as each morning fresh flowers
spring up from hell.
The day will come

when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse
and all goes still —
when nothing remains but the dayfly
folded in a leaf.
But no one knows it.
508 P O E T RY
Now it is fall
when all the golden birds

fly home across the blue deep water;
On shore I sit rapt in its scattering
glitter;
departure rustles through the trees.
This farewell is vast and separation draws close,
but reunion, that also is certain.
My head on my arm I fall asleep easily.

On my eyes a mother’s breath,
from her mouth to my heart:
sleep, child, and dream now the sun is gone. —
EDI T H SÖ DERGRAN 50 9
Strange Sea
Implausible fish bloom in the depths,

mercurial flowers light up the coast;
I know red and yellow, the other colors, —
but the sea, det granna granna havet, that’s most dangerous
to look at.
What name is there for the color that arouses
this thirst, which says,
the saga can happen, even to you —
Translated from the Swedish by Averill Curdy
510 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
I found small trace in Edith Södergran’s work of those elements that

usually act upon me, such as the solicitations of sonic e≠ect or a tem-
peramental syntax, to draw me into poems. I had read that she was
largely responsible for modernizing Swedish poetry, and yet much
of her work as I encountered it in translation struck me as a bit old-
fashioned, like the early work of Rilke or Yeats. I was attracted to the
task of translating a poet whose aesthetic runs so counter to my own,
whose own poems may well have been a form of translation since
she chose to write in Swedish rather than the German or Russian in
which she may have been more at ease.
The poetry of her work resides in what she says rather than how
it is said; her mood is often declarative and her landscape is the
elemental one of lyric poetry, of sea, tree, rose, and stone. Södergran’s
poems often seem to arrive from the shore of something vast, whether
that is the sea, or mortality, or a poetic ambition so high that it may
strike some readers a century later as a politely unmentionable blem-
ish because it is so earnest. Gender and illness, as well as circumstances
of history, language, and geography — all of these combined to place
this poet on the margin, where she persevered to make of her poems
a center. Educated as a girl in St. Petersburg, following the political
unrest in Russia she and her mother lived for reasons of economy
and health at the family’s summer home in the provincial village of
Raivola (now Roshchino) near the Finnish-Russian border. Her work
was often greeted with indi≠erence, misunderstanding, or worse.
And having watched her father die of tuberculosis one year before
she received the same diagnosis at sixteen, many of the poems pos-
sess an unmistakable urgency as — through fatigue, melancholy, and
despair — they reach out for life. — ac
EDI T H SÖ DERGRAN 51 1
eugene dubnov
Lips
What is the structure of lips

That take care of sounds,
That can scream loud and long,
That can wait and be silent?
Yesterday I was mastering words
And kissing lips lightly —
Their loving weakness
Now remains on my own
Hardworking lips,
Exacting, as if forever,
My terrible punishment.
Translated from the Russian by Anne Stevenson and Eugene Dubnov
512 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
I began co-translating Eugene Dubnov’s poems in the mid-eighties

after John Heath-Stubbs introduced us in London. I had recently
returned from a British Council sponsored visit to the ussr (as
it was then) where I had met and sympathized with a number of
Russian poets whose work I would have liked to translate. Alas, I was
stumped by my ignorance of Russian. That Dubnov was in the habit
of translating his own poetry into English “cribs” struck me as an
opportunity I would be foolish to ignore. We worked together hap-
pily in London before he took a teaching position in Oxfordshire and
I moved north to Durham and Edinburgh. In the early years of this
century Dubnov contacted me again. John Heath-Stubbs and Peter
Porter, among his principle translators, had died, but he still wished
to publish a collection of his poems in English. Would I be willing to
work with him by e-mail? I was happy to do so, and after two or three
years we had produced so many translations and revisions of former
translations that we decided to put together a collection.
“Lips” began its English life as a translation by Peter Porter, which
Dubnov asked me to revise. It seemed more sensible to start again and
allow the wit of the original to govern the tone of the English poem
in which love, taken lightly, becomes a “hardworking” punishment
when it comes to writing a poem about it. Although “Lips” seems
a simple achievement, it went through many e-mailed drafts. The
secret of translation, Eugene and I agree, is to be faithful in English
to the original’s tone and meaning. Poetry in Russian tends to be
strict as to rhyme and meter; attempting to produce the same form
in English can produce strained, unnatural verses. The translation we
finally came up with combines, we think, just the right quantities of
seriousness and wit. — as
EU G EN E DU B N OV 51 3
john matthias
After Quevedo
In memory of Octavio Paz
not even lost in death the memory

of why we burned, and therefore still
a fire consuming all obsequious delay,
now polvo, dust, of a desire but still alive
and aching, not even lost to you

within our common urn, urgent as an ash
still burning alma, soul, still
and moving toward you, la muerte, my amor —
not even lost in death, memoria,

and feeling some reply, alma, memory and ash,
ash burning still, still
and moving toward you, dust and dust, ash
alma and amor constante

más allá de la muerte, constant
even in our common urn, polvo enamorado.
514 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
This is more of a trespass than a translation. I am by no means a

Quevedo scholar and even my knowledge of Spanish is rusty enough
to require assistance from existing translations and commentaries.
A year ago I wrote an essay called “Grand Old Dirty Old Men,”
which ended with a reading of two late books by Octavio Paz, The
Double Flame: Love and Eroticism and An Erotic Beyond: Sade. Late in
his life, Paz was haunted by Quevedo’s baroque masterpiece, “Amor
constante más allá de la muerte.” Paz finds Quevedo breaking with
both Christianity and Platonism in his poem, and in fact “violating”
both traditions in a kind of double heresy. Readers not familiar with
Spanish baroque poetry may initially think of John Donne when
encountering the poem for the first time. But it is perhaps more
radical than anything by Donne. Calling the poem blasphemous, Paz
is in fact thrilled as well as unnerved by the imagery of mortal desire
lasting beyond death, and finds Quevedo’s poem to be itself the urn
containing immortal remains still with mortal longings: “Although
the body deteriorates into formless matter, that matter is animate.
The power that animates it and imbues it with a terrible eternity is
love, desire.” My version mixes the dust of the beloved with that of
the lover in that urn, and it retains fragments of the original “matter”
of the Spanish like tiny pieces of bone in the ash.
The second source of my own fascination with the poem is much
more distant. Ever since I was a student of Yvor Winters, I have found
two of his poems, “The Marriage” and “The Cremation,” as haunting
as Paz finds “Amor constante más allá de la muerte.” Winters knew
the Spanish baroque tradition well, and he made some translations
from its canon of great poems. Here is the end of “The Marriage”:
When flesh shall fall away, and, falling, stand

Wrinkling with shadow over face and hand,
Still I shall meet you on the verge of dust
And know you as a faithful vestige must
And, in commemoration of our lust,
May our heirs seal us in a single urn,
A single spirit never to return.
JOH N MAT T H I AS 51 5
But the two dusts in my Quevedo version do not reduce to “a single
spirit,” because it is not “lust” that is being commemorated but “Amor
constante” (constant love) “más allá de la muerte” (even beyond
death) that is being celebrated, and in a way that should appall even as
it stimulates the imagination of a reader who might perhaps have fed
on Baudelaire or Poe. That reader must actually try to see the conver-
gence, the movement of the particles in the urn as they grope toward
each other. Only a baroque style, it seems to me, can achieve this;
and I have exaggerated the tortuousness of that style in my hom-
age, which, again, is also a trespass. Winters’s “The Cremation”
asks in its middle stanza:
And where is that which made you just?

Which gathered light about the bone
And moved the tongue, in earth’s despite?
In Quevedo it is all there in the urn, and preternaturally alive.
516 P O E T RY
After “Las Formas Puras,” After Lorca
In memory of Anthony Kerrigan
The pure shapes of things shake and are fall

ing under the cry of bajo el cri cri
and chirping of the six margaritas
daisies that I loved but now know deflower
when the men bent upon murdering me bend
down in cabinets and on cli≠s and in cafes
where some flamenco guitarist breaks his fingers
on the grave accents / / / breaks
his fingers on the acute
\\
hunting now
even in the graves under walls of tall iglesias
the well where I am not hides from
those who dug the gold from wisdom teeth
of the wise and dig it still and dig it
also from between my thin skeleton’s bowed ribs
but Ah
\\
will not find me any more but less

than six, the moon, de pronto, loss itself
disarticulated bones in hiding place pues encore
my absence from I am
comprendo nonetheless the names
of pure shapes of things that shake and are fall
ing all loss los nombres under cry cry
the pure shaping things out of their somersault
out of themselves
J OH N MAT T H I AS 51 7
Translator’s Note
This poem is even less a “proper” translation than the Quevedo

version that precedes it. It is dedicated to the memory of Anthony
Kerrigan because Tony and I used to kill the time now and then
doing what he called, after Lorca, some hechos poéticos, slowly
improvised ri≠s or improvisations in which we’d feed each other a
line from a text and the other would do something with it and then
toss it back — which is not, by the way, what Lorca meant by the term.
Kerrigan, of course, was one of the great Spanish language transla-
tors of the twentieth century, who played these games with me now
and then to amuse himself. We were down the hallway from each
other at Notre Dame for about a decade. When I found “After ‘Las
Formas Puras,’ After Lorca” in an old notebook recently, I realized
that it derived from the hechos game with Tony some twenty years
ago. I discovered its actual source in the last stanza of the third poem
in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, one of the “Poems of Solitude at
Columbia University”: “Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos,” or “Fable
of Three Friends to Be Sung in Rounds.” Only a few of the last
twelve lines of the “Fable” are consecutively translated, and other
lines are either imported from other Lorca poems or inventions
based on Lorca’s words and phrases. Still, my working definition of
“translation” is as broad as I can make it, and so by a stretch this hecho-
derived poem belongs in a group of translations rather than a group
of original poems. — jm
518 P O E T RY
alain borer
Sleep Log
Derelict thoughts
(scattered over the South Pacific)
of one dying in the ship’s hold
somewhere between 15– 30 degrees latitude
and 135 – 150 degrees southern longitude
at the crux of time stretched to its limit.
The ocean never finishes in the wake of boats.
An unceasing torment infinitely prolonged

that I would not wish on my worst enemy.
Especially since my worst enemy is myself.
I cross the South Pacific like a deserted countryside

on a winter’s night: not even a beast in sight.
Reduced to its own insularity, I becomes island.
When seasick there’s no place for Narcissus: one

cannot drink one’s own likeness.
ALAI N B ORER 51 9
In this singular life we can only scout new places.
Other than obligation, what keeps us on this earth?
Every day approaches death — some more than others.
In the year 14,000 the Southern Cross will shine over Paris ...
We will no longer exist, neither perhaps will Paris ...
But I will be here in a certain manner, if only to know it.
There is no black box or recorder for ships. They disappear completely.

A ship’s black box is called the co∞n. But the only co∞ns that one
sees on the ocean are the ships themselves.
There is also a black box within you. It’s the frailness of humans;
they wear that fragility on the outside — Eros, a child, a book.
For boats, there are packages heavier and not hurried:

I travel like that, a package in order, but a piece of mail.
The universe is curved like a banana.
5 20 P O E T RY
I am an atheist because God does not believe enough in me.
He was so afraid of death that arriving in old age he

felt stupid.
— To search for God without expectation.
Life opens, gives and invites you — or it goes to hell.
One must live to write. Our time here is for utterance.
— Sad animal post-cogitum.
Linger only with healthy ideas. Salty ones.
Stupor is second nature.
There are those born too soon and those born

too late who preserve with haunting smiles the mistakes,
the traces. And the one born at the right moment is
forever vivid, intensely illuminating each instant.
A LAI N B ORER 52 1
To write is to leave the world’s surface, to descend
under the sea; the smallest pencil is my tuba.
One doesn’t report great things from grand

events, the one su≠ering from depression thinks.
After his world tour, Bougainville extravagantly
gave his name to a flower; the botanist La Billardière
gave his name to a type of grass — not bad; and you,
to what? — A pail for vomit?
Translated from the French by Mark Irwin and Alain Borer
5 22 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
“Sleep Log” contains excerpts from six black pages in the middle of
Le ciel & la carte: Carnet de voyage dans les mers du Sud à bord de La
Boudeuse, preceded and followed by two hundred pages of narration
that attempt to describe the Pacific’s vastness and the solitary thoughts
of this traveler enclosed in a dark and stinking cabin close to the engine
room, constantly rocking up and down, turning to starboard, then to
the portside. This traveler is sick comme une bête (as a beast), as they
say in French. Alone with a metal bucket in his cabin, gazing through a
porthole, Alain Borer meditates on the extreme, what one would call a
near-death experience. Le ciel & la carte o≠ers an itinerary to salvation
through culture, humor, and poetry.
The reverse printing of white text on a black background in “Sleep
Log” (Somniloques) heightens the hallucinatory e≠ect of a speaker
both in mid-voyage and mid-text. “Sleep Log” also marks the transi-
tion from a more discursive and sometimes historical narrative to one
that seems to spring somewhat deliriously from the subconscious and
signals a kind of descent and return of the spirit, echoing the voice in
Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre” or Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym of Nantucket, only in a more playful manner.
Traveling on a replica of the Boudeuse, the three-mast ship with
which Bougainville discovered Tahiti in 1768, Borer embarks in order
to meet the “Sea Peoples.” Earlier, Édouard Glissant, an editor at
Éditions du Seuil in Paris, had brought back a book about Easter
Island, and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio had written a book on
Polynesia, but neither of the two famous writers had navigated on
the ship. (Thanks here to Claudia Moatti for providing details on the
historical background of Le ciel & la carte.)
Borer, a renowned authority and author of three books on the
poetry and life of Rimbaud, also directed a film, Le Voleur de feu,
when he visited many of the places where Rimbaud lived and worked
in Ethiopia. He was twenty-seven when he made the film, the same
age as Rimbaud when he arrived in Ethiopia. — mi
A LAI N B ORER 52 3
a.e. housman
To my Comrade, Moses J. Jackson, Sco≠er at this Scholarship
As we went walking far and wide

Through silent fields and countryside,
We watched together star signs brim
And rise above the ocean’s rim,
And planets too, that fret with light
The icy caverns of the Night.
These constellations we now mark,
When we were not, in formless dark,
A poet, centuries before,
Would watch from the Italian shore
Drop in the sea, and mindful Earth
Had made him mortal from his birth,
He set on high his music’s bars
Among the everlasting stars,
To those to come, clear warning sign
To place no faith in the divine;
For sacred to the pole unfurled
Above, and compassing the world,
These songs yet su≠ered sad disgrace
And almost sank without a trace:
Though to our strand this wreckage came,
It scarcely owned its author’s name.
Mine not to exhort the gods
Or stars that vex our mortal odds,
But love of virtue quick to fade
Makes me seek fame with human aid.
A man, I chose a man to stand
At this front page and my right hand —
Who thrive or perish in my pages,
Brief friend, your name should last the ages.
I send these lines to you who went
Where stars rise in the Orient,
From here where constellations sink
Below the ocean’s western brink.
Take them: for that day will come
524 P O E T RY
To add us to the canceled sum
And give our bones to earth to rot
(For we have no immortal lot,
And souls that will not last forever)
And the chain of comrades sever.
Translated from the Latin by A.E. Stallings
A.E . H OU S MAN 52 5
Translator’s Note
Edmund Wilson’s 1938 essay on A.E. Housman, and W.H. Auden’s

sonnet from the same year (perhaps written under the essay’s influ-
ence), portray Housman as a tragically divided person, the passion
of the poet renounced (“kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer”)
for dry-as-dust scholarship and venomous invective (“savage foot-
notes on unjust editions”). Wilson saw, in Housman’s turning from
his early work on the Latin love elegist, Propertius, to the didactic
poet of astronomy, Manilius, an emblem of the poet’s turning away
from creative life and the imagination to the sterile re-creation of
textual scholarship.
Yet in these verses, dedicated to Housman’s Oxford roommate, the
formative friend and unrequited love of his life, the poet’s supposedly
antithetical interests curiously synthesize. They are composed not in
the dactylic hexameter of Manilius but in Propertius’s elegiac couplets.
The stars are both astronomical phenomena and the conventional
backdrop of lovers. And in fact, Housman’s interest in astronomy was
one of his earliest passions; Laurence Housman, in his a≠ectionate
biography of his brother, remembers that, as children, Alfred had ar-
ranged his brothers on the lawn to show them the relative motions of
the earth and moon to each other and the sun. (Alfred was the moon.)
Housman is famously supposed to have dismissed Manilius with:
“the brightest facet of [his] genius was an eminent aptitude for doing
sums in verse.” Generations of critics have taken his pronouncement at
face value, perplexed that he would expend such energy on the second
rate. But here his attitude to his fellow stargazing poet is sympathetic,
even admiring; we are reminded that Housman referred to his own
verses as “solitary stars.” (And a renaissance in Manilius studies is
rescuing his sidereal epic, The Astronomica, from B-list status.) The
shipwreck that “scarcely own[s] its author’s name” is the manu-
script (anonymous in antiquity), salvaged from oblivion by Poggio
in the 1400s, its fragments pieced together by editors over the ages.
Housman does not depict his scholarship as an empty exercise in self-
mortification; rather, he presents himself as a hero, seeking virtue and
fame in a noble enterprise.
A classical poet would traditionally invoke the Muse to stand
526 P O E T RY
by his side — here the muse is Jackson. The dedication is also a love
poem, with its promise to immortalize the beloved. Jackson’s going
to where stars rise in the Orient is a reference to his moving to India,
a permanent separation. The poem places Jackson in the light of the
rising sun, while Housman appears on the other side of the globe, in
England, that ultima thule where the lights are ever westering. We
are put in mind of the sundered companions of mythology, Theseus
and Pirithous, the latter of whom had to remain in the underworld
as punishment for their exploits there. Housman fans will know this
image from his sublime translation of Horace’s “Di≠ugere Nives”
(according to Housman, the most beautiful poem in the Latin lan-
guage.) Housman ends it:
Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,

Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.
In Horace, the chain is literal, and though Pirithous is “dear” there

is no “love of comrades”; reading the end of the Manilius dedication,
one is struck by the similarity. Housman channels Horace via his
own translation, or transformation, of it. This dedication is one of the
frankest of his love poems, if “closeted” in Latin, and belongs in the
mainstream of his work rather than at its margins. (Even Wilson ac-
knowledged that the voice here is straight out of A Shropshire Lad, and
Gilbert Murray reckoned these Latin verses the best since antiquity.)
My translation risks being a parody, but I aim for sincere imitation.
I wonder if Housman would be appalled, or merely wryly bemused,
to know that the Latin text of this poem as it is promulgated on the
Internet has been adulterated with textual error. No doubt the
mindless duplication of the Internet blogger would have earned
one of his to-whom-it-may-concern zingers (which he collected in
a notebook). “If Mr. ________ were a postage stamp he would be a
very good postage stamp; but adhesiveness is not the virtue of a critic.
A critic is free and detached.” — aes
A.E . H OU S MAN 52 7
marina tsvetaeva
Bound for Hell
Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,

Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell —
We, who have sung the praises of the lord
With every fiber in us, every cell.
We, who did not manage to devote

Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway
Above a cradle — in a flimsy boat,
Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away.
Every morning, every day, we’d rise

And have the finest Chinese silks to wear;
And we’d strike up the songs of paradise
Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair,
We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran,

Whether we sewed or not) — yet we have been
Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan:
The world was ours, each one of us a queen.
First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled,

Then plaited with a starry diadem;
We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled:
But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them,
Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden

Where apple trees from paradise are found.
No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent
And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.
Translated from the Russian by Stephen Edgar
528 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
Because I am a writer of formal verse myself, it is this aspect of poetry

which usually draws me to try my hand at translation. The beauty of
translation, of course, is that, whereas the original is a unique entity,
you may have any number of translated versions of it, so there is room
for many approaches. But on this subject Anthony Hecht, in an in-
terview with J.D. McClatchy, referred to Galway Kinnell’s remarks
about rhyme and meter in his (Kinnell’s) translations of Villon:
“I decided against using [them].... It may be that in our day these
formal devices have become a dead hand, which it is just as well not
to lay on any poetry.” To which Hecht responded: “I think Kinnell
is wrong here, both in his theory of translation and of poetry.” And
I can only say that I agree.
Tsvetaeva is an extremely concise poet. Partly this is perhaps
just a function of the Russian language — the absence of articles,
the e∞ciency of inflections — though even by comparison with
Akhmatova and Mandelstam she does seem to pack a lot into few
words. This I found impossible to replicate; I had to give myself some
breathing space, some elbow room, and expand the line from tetram-
eter to pentameter. One quite extraordinary feature of this poem, in
the Russian, is the absence of a single main finite verb. It begins, and
ends, with infinitives, and all the other verbs, apart from “sang” in
the relative clause in stanza one, are participles, a long involved trail
of them in the dative plural, in agreement with “nam,” “for/to us.”
In the face of this extreme concision of expression and idiosyncratic
grammatical construction, I very nearly gave the game away at the
first stanza. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to rework the sense
into an English form. But my unconscious must have been working
on the job all the while, because that night I woke up at some ungodly
hour and, being unable to get back to sleep, began again on that open-
ing stanza in my head and arrived at a solution. The following day
I was able to work my way through the poem, stanza by stanza. — se
MARI N A T S VETAE VA 52 9
roberto sosa
The Poor
The poor are many

and so —
impossible to forget.
No doubt,
as day breaks,
they see the buildings
where they wish
they could live with their children.
They
can steady the co∞n
of a constellation on their shoulders.
They can wreck
the air like furious birds,
blocking out the sun.
But not knowing these gifts,

they enter and exit through mirrors of blood,
walking and dying slowly.
And so,
one cannot forget them.
Translated from the Spanish by Spencer Reece
530 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
Anglican missionaries first arrived in Honduras in 1768. Sponsored

by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which, in turn, was
backed by a royal charter from England, these missionaries introduced
themselves with the explicit aim of enlightening the Hondurans, whom
they referred to in their tracts as “infidels” and “heathens.” In the nine-
teenth century, American banana companies established plantations,
and by 1913 these companies controlled most of the production.
Today, Honduras is the poorest Spanish-speaking country in the
Western Hemisphere. In the cities, legless beggars plead around the
rotaries. The hills in the country are denuded and look like poorly-
shaved chins. Thousands of Hondurans leave the country every year
to find work.
In the summer of 2009 I went to San Pedro Sula as an Episcopal
priest in training. One night after dinner, I was introduced by
my bishop to his favorite poem, Roberto Sosa’s “Los Pobres.” He
felt “Los Pobres” captured the tone of long-silenced Hondurans.
I had come to work in an orphanage for abused and abandoned girls.
There were seventy girls I lived and worked with that summer. The
stories of their pasts were terrible. Some had been so malnourished
that their intellects were damaged. But after receiving food and per-
manent shelter, these girls came to life the way Lazarus must have.
Most evenings I spent alone in my room with dictionaries, flash-
cards, and lizards. I first memorized Sosa’s poem, then, bit by bit,
tried to put it into English. I spoke the poem in Spanish to myself
before I completely knew what I was saying. Spanish generally felt
lush in my mouth, but the music of “Los Pobres” was sharp and blunt.
As I began to comprehend more Spanish, I found the poem’s tune
magnifying its harsh intent. The poem became my anthem. I began
to want to bring the words into English for others to hear without it
becoming one more pillaged thing. I wanted it to be about Sosa and
Honduras and the girls and not me. First published in 1969, “Los
Pobres,“ in its sparse language, captures the pain of that overlooked
country. Stripped of baroque excess, the poem hangs on the page like
a crucifix. — sr
RO B E RTO S OS A 53 1
paul claudel
The Day of Gifts
It’s not true that Your saints have won everything: they left me with
sins enough.
Someday I’ll lie on my deathbed, Lord, ill-shaven and yellow as a
lifelong drunk.
And I’ll make a general examination of myself, looking back over all
my days,
And I’ll see that I’m rich after all, ripe and rich with evil in its
unnumbered paths and ways.
I haven’t lost one single chance, Lord, to make matter for You to
pardon.
Now I hearten myself with vice, having long ago sloughed o≠
virtue’s burden.
Each day has its own kind of crime, plain to see, and I count
them like some paranoid miser.
If what you need, Lord, are virgins, if what you need are brave men
beneath your standard;
If there are people for whom to be Christian words alone would not
su∞ce,
But who know rather that only in stirring themselves to chase after
You is there any life,
Well then there’s Dominic and Francis, Saint Lawrence and Saint
Cecilia and plenty more!
But if by chance You should have need of a lazy and imbecilic bore,
If a prideful coward could prove useful to You, or perhaps a soiled
ingrate,
Or the sort of man whose hard heart shows up in a hard face —
Well, anyway, You didn’t come to save the just but that other type
that abounds,
And if, miraculously, You run out of them elsewhere ... Lord, I’m
still around.
532 P O E T RY
And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn’t held a little
something back from You,
Hasn’t in his free time fashioned something special for You,
Hoping that one day the idea will come to You to ask it of him,
And maybe this little that he’s made himself, kept back until then,
though horrid and tortuous, will please Your whim.
It would be something that he’d put his whole heart into, something
useless and malformed.
Just like that my little daughter once, on my birthday, teetered
forward with encumbered arms
And o≠ered me, her heart at once full of timidity and pride,
A magnificent little duck she had made with her own two hands, a
pincushion, made of red wool and gold thread.
Translated from the French by Jonathan Monroe Geltner
PAU L CL AU DEL 53 3
Translator’s Note
Paul Claudel is virtually unheard of in the English-speaking world

today. This is not surprising, since his oeuvre is almost totally un-
available in English. He is also unknown, I suspect, because of his
vehement religious commitment.
His output was vast and formally varied, but it is as a lyric reli-
gious poet that Claudel made his greatest contribution to the modern
canon. It is in this work, coeval with the dramatic works, that Claudel
developed his characteristic method of versification, the long and
deeply rhythmical “verset,” which did so much for the development
of twentieth-century French prosody. To an English speaker, this
resembles Whitman’s style, which is as it should be, for Claudel
learned much from the American.
Claudel’s spiritual inclinations are not precisely my own, but I see
great value in reintroducing a poet as consistently committed to a cath-
olic (in the sense of all-encompassing) system of belief as was Claudel.
Such poets are extraordinarily rare. George Santayana called them
philosophical poets when he identified Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe
as the paragons of the type. Claudel is not of the stature of those po-
ets. But he speaks with enormous conviction and consistency, while
remaining capable of sudden turns and unexpected formulations of
ancient ideas and sentiments. This is where his charm finally lies, and
not primarily in the cosmic scope of his work or his religious optimism.
All of the stanza breaks in “The Day of Gifts” are my own, and
margins have been altered to produce specific points of enjamb-
ment. It is possible to decrease the margins to a point where most of
Claudel’s long versets can fit into a single line, but I feel this would
detract from the aesthetic experience of reading the poem, and make
it harder to determine a proper vocalization. Nor is it how the poems
usually appear. So, if individual versets are going to take up multiple
lines anyhow, one might as well take advantage of the fact and make
the enjambments contribute as much as possible; in other words,
to make of the accidental something intentional. Not to think too
deeply on such a minor matter, but you could say that that principle
was one Claudel applied throughout life generally, and perhaps to his
poems themselves. — jmg
534 P O E T RY
jorge luis borges
To the One Who is Reading Me
You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver

(those forces that control your destiny)
the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be
your irreversible time is that river
in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read
his brevity? A marble slab is saved
for you, one you won’t read, already graved
with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
And other men are also dreams of time,
not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust
like you; the universe is Proteus.
Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead,
the fatal shadow waiting at the rim.
Know this: in some way you’re already dead.
J O RG E L U I S B OR GES 53 5
Music Box
Music of Japan. Parsimoniously

from the water clock the drops unfold
in lazy honey or ethereal gold
that over time reiterates a weave
eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.
I fear that every one will be the last.
They are a yesterday come from the past.
But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight
garden, what vigils by an unknown sea,
and from what modest melancholy, from
what lost and rediscovered afternoon
do they arrive at their far future: me?
Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play
I am. I want to be. I bleed away.
Translated from the Spanish by Tony Barnstone
536 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
Jorge Luis Borges was unapologetic about his sonnets. He liked his
rhymes to be true, and he liked to create sentences the size of stanzas
in order to emphasize the sonnet’s modular structure. Borges also
made it clear that he expected the same dedication and craft from
his translators, that he did not want his sonnets translated into loos-
ened form or into free verse. (His comment on such translations was
simple: “Try harder.”)
My love a≠air with Borges’s sonnets goes back to my earlier love
a≠air with his fabulist fiction. I love how he uses the sonnet as a ma-
chine for thinking, for literary and philosophical games, and I love
finding the poems populated by my old friends: the tigers, riddles,
labyrinths, and mirrors that recur so often in his prose. Borges is
not merely a philosophical poet; he is a visionary one. When the
poet addresses “the One Who is Reading Me,” his imagination
travels to the future, where a marble tombstone awaits the reader.
Paradoxically, the reader is posited to be a dream of time, a chang-
ing river draining irreversibly toward the sea (death), and yet also
invulnerable because of the certainty that he or she will become dust:
who can kill the dust?
In “Music Box,” the dripping golden music carries the poet’s
imagination to a past Japan of mountain shrines and unknown seas,
and in that astral projection the poet finds himself bleeding away
into time, like music. How else to capture this vision except in the
music box of the sonnet, whose hidden gears turn to make the music
chime and keep time?
Of course, we can’t keep time in a box; time has a box prepared
for us. Understanding this is what allows us to value what life we
have. My father tells a story about Borges. One day the great man
was walking down the streets of Buenos Aires when a man rushed up
to him and exclaimed, “Borges, you are immortal!” Borges, with his
characteristic dry wit, replied, “Don’t be so pessimistic.” — tb
J O RG E L U I S B OR GES 53 7
antonio porchia
From “Voices”
Some things become such a part of us that we forget them.
I want because of what I wanted, and what I wanted, I wouldn’t want

again.
The passing of a soul is light, extremely light, almost silence.
There are pains that have lost their memory and don’t remember why
they are painful.
Convince me, but without convictions. Convictions no longer

convince me.
We don’t forgive being as we are.
At the last moment, my whole life will last a moment.
Man is a thing children learn. A childish thing.
538 P O E T RY
Don’t speak to me. I want to be with you.
There are those fallen who don’t get up so as not to fall again.
The dream that doesn’t feed on dream vanishes.
Translated from the Spanish by Gonzalo Melchor
A N TON I O POR CH I A 53 9
Translator’s Note
Ever since they were self-published in 1943 by their fifty-eight-year-

old author, Antonio Porchia’s writings have defied classification:
what are these brief texts? (“Never say I write aphorisms, I would be
humiliated,” Porchia is reported to have said.) And how could there
be no name for something so utterly recognizable? Roberto Juarroz,
the renowned Argentine poet and one of Porchia’s closest friends,
once wrote that the “voices,” as Porchia called them, were perhaps
simply “depth”: that was all, “depth itself.”
Porchia was born in Italy in 1885, but after the death of his father
in 1906, emigrated with his mother and six siblings to Argentina. To
earn a living and support his family, Porchia worked for many years
as a basket weaver and stevedore at the Buenos Aires port. In 1918
he and his brother bought a printing press in the city, where Porchia
would be employed for the rest of his working life.
His friends were mostly painters and sculptors he met in the
working-class neighborhood of La Boca: under their initiative, their
“Association of Arts and Letters Impulso” acted as self-publishing im-
print for the Voices in 1943 and 1948. Juarroz recalls how when the
printed books arrived in the studio they took up too much space; not
knowing what to do with them, Porchia donated all the copies to a
charitable organization stocking public libraries.
Those who knew him describe him as silent, self-e≠acing, infinitely
generous. In summer he wore an old pajama jacket; in winter, a sweater
and scarf held by a hairpin. Assiduously he would save apples, wine,
bread, and salami for his visitors. “He wrote very little, four or five
sentences a year,” the sculptor Libero Badii says. “But he worked on
each one with a rigor that was not only internal but of a wordsmith.”
“Voices is almost a biography,” Porchia once said. “Which almost
belongs to everyone.” Borges, in his preface written for the Fayard’s
French edition in the late seventies (Porchia was, for a time, relatively
known), remarked how in every piece “the reader feels the immediate
presence of a man and his destiny.”
I think this is key: Porchia’s voices, these odd brief texts, were
not written for or toward something, but simply as something: as an
inextricable part of his life. If “they occurred to him,” as he put it,
540 P O E T RY
Porchia wrote them down; if they didn’t, he did not. When people
asked for them, he gave them away; when an editor tried to “correct”
what he thought was “bad” grammar, Porchia took them back. This
was not hardheadedness or vanity. As Juarroz says, he “was a being of
exemplary humility, but at the same time he had that incontrovertible,
unmodifiable something, which makes us think of central trees, the
ones the whole forest seems to lean on.”
Porchia, Juarroz remembers, was never bothered by money,
reputation, or any other worries. One of his favorite sayings was:
“know how to wait.”
A N TON I O POR CH I A 54 1
said
Psalms
lord
pray
pray loudly against the noise of the human hand
which seeks to drown you out
and appear on quiet soles
so that we might understand your footsteps
exert yourself
in order to recognize our prayers
even when they appear in a di≠erent garment
because no prayer ever looses itself from the source of the one praying
542 P O E T RY
lord
take up the speech
by which i pray to you
grant me the gestures
which have grown within me in your absence
so that i might remain true to my uneducable nature
and take your weakness upon me
S AI D 54 3
lord
you should always wander and never let yourself
settle down
because there are no longer any dwelling places
only footsteps
be loud and penetrating
sympathize with me and my stirrings
lead me
all the way to your bread
so that my word might wake
544 P O E T RY
lord
stay by me
even if i nourish myself from ashes and salt
be still and listen to that name
which i lend to you
because i want to distinguish you from the idols
grant me patience to endure those who are vain
with their empty words
and the converts
who are zealous to confirm their opposite
and grant
that my waiting be full of revolt
S AI D 54 5
lord
when you arrive
we will be light
bread and water
the table is set and the door opened
come and take your place among us
free me of the belief
that you are only faithful from a distance
and speak with me
in the unharried language of animals
who from far o≠ lie in wait for us
with their unadulterated hunger
Translated from the German by Mark S. Burrows
546 P O E T RY
Translator’s Note
I first met SAID in Munich in May 2010. The occasion was a

poetry reading held in the city’s old Rathaus. An attentive audience
had gathered, filling every seat in the spacious ceremonial hall;
above us, carved shields ornamented the wooden ceiling, represent-
ing the towns and cities of the medieval Bavarian kingdom. The
reading featured contributors to a volume of poetry entitled Die
Ho≠nung fährt schwarz, which literally means “hope rides black,” an
idiom slighting those taking public transportation without paying.
To describe hope as such a freeloader would startle a proper German,
though it is no stranger or less suggestive than Emily Dickinson’s
description of it as
the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
Midway through the evening, as the invited poets stood one by one
to read from their work, the writer who goes by the name SAID came
to the podium, a thin volume in hand. As he began to read, I recog-
nized a depth of voice resonant in the poems, though I had never heard
him before. He had selected a handful of short pieces from his Psalms;
I chose the five poems translated here from that collection.
In keeping with the genre, his psalms function as a kind of one-
sided conversation, that ancient gesture toward transcendence we call
prayer. In one of these, this son of a secular Iranian family who had
immigrated to Germany as a young student in 1965 begs to
remain true to the god of [his] childhood

who o≠ers light and comfort
and hears us in that no-man’s land
between arriving and fleeing.
What kind of “god” does the poet turn to in these psalms? Not the
formal deity worshiped by Muslims, Jews, Christians, and others, and
S AI D 54 7
not the elaborated god staked out in speculative theological dis-
course. Rather, this herr or “lord,” the ancient biblical ascription used
in most of these poems, is the one beyond names whom humans have
turned to across the spectrum of religious cultures in their anguish
and fear, in celebration and gratitude. And we, dwellers in this “no-
man’s-land,” find ourselves unhoused of certainties, wandering like
migrants in a barren and uncharted borderland where — as he puts
it — love implores us “to bring forth a harvest.” His psalms lure us to
yearn for such a harvest.
But these are not psalms of ease. As with many of the ancient psalms
in the Hebrew scriptures, SAID’s poems find their voice in the situ-
ation of exile, one that is often existential rather than geographical.
Is his choice to include ninety-nine poems in this collection an allu-
sion to the ancient Muslim tradition ascribing this number of names
to Allah? Perhaps, though the herr SAID addresses in these poems,
consistently refusing every capitalization, seems unbounded by the
ordering of religious convention. His “lord” conforms to Feuerbach’s
conviction, so influential on Nietzsche and central to the modernist
critique of theism, which views religious language as projections of our
human nature. As he concedes in one of these psalms:
look lord
you and i
we are one truth
and when we whisper with each other
so we become a bridge
for the feet of lovers.
SAID’s psalms call for “whispering” of this sort against the rising
noise of intolerance so dominant in our world. His invitation that we
“become” such bridges over the wastelands of human hatred and fear,
so much of it sponsored by religious absolutists, o≠ers a welcome
alternative to the reigning violence of war. The hope that “rides
black,” for dwellers in this “no-man’s land” we inhabit, promises
nothing less than this, and demands nothing more. — msb
548 P O E T RY
MA RI N A T S V E TA EVA : E IG H T POE M S
New versions from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine
Marina Tsvetaeva with her dog in Savoy, France.
marina tsvetaeva
From “Poems for Moscow”
From my hands — take this city not made by hands,

my strange, my beautiful brother.
Take it, church by church — all forty times forty churches,

and flying up the roofs, the small pigeons;
And Spassky Gates — and gates, and gates —

where the Orthodox take o≠ their hats;
And the Chapel of Stars — refuge chapel —

where the floor is — polished by tears;
Take the circle of the five cathedrals,

my coal, my soul; the domes wash us in their darkgold,
And on your shoulders, from the red clouds,

the Mother of God will drop her own thin coat,
And you will rise, happened of wonderpowers

— never ashamed you loved me.
March 31, 1916
55 2 P O E T RY
“I won’t leave you!” Only God can say this — or a peasant with milk
in Moscow, winter 1918.
My “I don’t want to” is always “I cannot.” In me there is no arbitrari-

ness. “I cannot” — and meek eyes.
1919 – 20
Note: All prose quotations are from Marina Tsvetaeva’s critical writings and journals.
MARI N A T S VETAE VA 553

“Where does such tenderness come from?”
Where does such tenderness come from?

These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger —
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark

(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ve never heard words like this

in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
Where does this tenderness come from?

And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes — longer than anyone’s.
1916
55 4 P O E T RY
I don’t eavesdrop, I listen in. Like a doctor to someone’s chest. And,
often, you tap, and there is no echo!
It was forbidden for the bourgeoisie to use horses for removing snow
from the streets. So the bourgeoisie, without a second thought, hired
themselves a camel. And the camel hauled the snow. And the soldiers
laughed out loud. (I saw this with my own eyes, on Arbat Street.)
1919 – 20

From “Poems for Blok”
Your name is a — bird in my hand,

a piece of ice on my tongue.
The lips’ quick opening.
Your name — four letters.
A ball caught in flight,
a silver bell in my mouth.
A stone thrown into a silent lake

is — the sound of your name.
The light click of hooves at night
— your name.
Your name at my temple
— sharp click of a cocked gun.
Your name — impossible —

kiss on my eyes,
the chill of closed eyelids.
Your name — a kiss of snow.
Blue gulp of icy spring water.
With your name — sleep deepens.
April 15, 1916
55 6 P O E T RY
The cruel words of Blok about very early Akhmatova: “Akhmatova
writes poems as if a man is watching her, but you have to write as if
God is watching you.”
1932
To love — is to see a man as God intended him, and his parents failed
to make him.
To fall out of love — is to see, instead of him: a table, a chair.
1919 – 20

“I am happy living simply”
I am happy living simply:

like a clock, or a calendar.
Worldly pilgrim, thin,
wise — as any creature. To know
the spirit is my beloved. To come to things — swift

as a ray of light, or a look.
To live as I write: spare — the way
God asks me — and friends do not.
1919
55 8 P O E T RY
The mysterious disappearance of the photographer on Tverskaya
Street, who long and stubbornly took (free) pictures of the Soviet
elite.
Not long ago, in Kuntsevo, I suddenly crossed myself when I saw an

oak. Evidently the source of prayer is not fear, but delight.
1919 – 20
MARI N A T SV ETAE VA 559

From “An Attempt at Jealousy”
How is your life with that other one?

Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars
and a long coastline —
and the memory of me
is soon a drifting island

(not in the ocean — in the sky!)
Souls — you will be sisters —
sisters, not lovers.
How is your life with an ordinary

woman? without the god inside her?
The queen supplanted —
How do you breathe now?

Flinch, waking up?
What do you do, poor man?
“Hysterics and interruptions —

enough! I’ll rent my own house!”
How is your life with that other,
you, my own.
Is the breakfast delicious?

(If you get sick, don’t blame me!)
How is it, living with a postcard?
You who stood on Sinai.
How’s your life with a tourist

on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?)
is it to your liking?
How’s life? Do you cough?

Do you hum to drown out the mice in your mind?
560 P O E T RY
How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising?
How’s kissing plaster-dust?
Are you bored with her new body?

How’s it going, with an earthly woman,
with no sixth sense?
Are you happy?

No? In a shallow pit — how is your life,
my beloved? Hard as mine
with another man?
1924

“A kiss on the forehead”
A kiss on the forehead — erases misery.

I kiss your forehead.
A kiss on the eyes — lifts sleeplessness.

I kiss your eyes.
A kiss on the lips — is a drink of water.

I kiss your lips.
A kiss on the forehead — erases memory.
1917
562 P O E T RY
You can’t buy me. That is the whole point. To buy is to buy oneself
o≠. You can’t buy yourself o≠ from me. You can buy me only with
the whole sky in yourself. The whole sky in which, perhaps, there is
no place for me.
1919

From “The Desk”
Fair enough: you people have eaten me,

I — wrote you down.
They’ll lay you out on a dinner table,
me — on this desk.
I’ve been happy with little.

There are dishes I’ve never tried.
But you, you people eat slowly, and often;
You eat and eat.
Everything was decided for us

back in the ocean:
Our places of action,
our places of gratitude.
You — with belches, I — with books,

with tru±es, you. With pencil, I,
you and your olives, me and my rhyme,
with pickles, you. I, with poems.
At your head — funeral candles

like thick-legged asparagus:
your road out of this world
a dessert table’s striped cloth.
They will smoke Havana cigars

on your left side and your right;
your body will be dressed
in the best Dutch linen.
And — not to waste such expensive cloth,

they will shake you out,
along with the crumbs and bits of food,
into the hole, the grave.
564 P O E T RY
You — stu≠ed capon, I — pigeon.
Gunpowder, your soul, at the autopsy.
And I will be laid out bare
with only two wings to cover me.
Late July 1933

From “Poems to Czechoslovakia”
Black mountain
black mountain
blocks the earth’s light.
Time — time — time
to give back to God his ticket.
I refuse to — be. In
the madhouse of the inhumans
I refuse to — live. To swim
on the current of human spines.

I don’t need holes in my ears,
no need for seeing eyes.
I refuse to swim on the current of human spines.
To your mad world — one answer: I refuse.
They took — suddenly — and took — openly —

took mountains — and took their entrails,
they took coal, and steel they took,
they took lead, and crystal.
And sugar they took, and took the clover,

they took the West, and they took the North,
they took the beehive, and took the haystack,
they took the South from us, and the East.
Vari — they took, and the Tatras — they took,

they took our fingers — took our friends —
But we stand up —
as long as there’s spit in our mouths!
May 9, 1939
566 P O E T RY
Today (September 26, Old Style) on John the Theologian’s feast
day, I am forty-eight years old. I congratulate myself. Knock on
wood — for getting well, and maybe for forty-eight years of a soul’s
uninterrupted existence.
My di∞culty (in writing poems — and perhaps other people’s dif-

ficulty in understanding them) is in the impossibility of my goal, for
example, to use words to express a moan: nnh-nnh-nnh. To express a
sound using words, using meanings. So that the only thing left in the
ears would be nnh-nnh-nnh.
September 1940

Translator’s Note
Tsvetaeva, whose early years were spent largely in Western Europe,

once said that her “native language was German.” How do we ex-
plain this fact about the poet Boris Pasternak called “the most Russian
poet of us all”?
Poets are not born in a country. Poets are born in childhood.
What, then, is Russian about Marina Tsvetaeva?
Tsvetaeva understood audial and linguistic work that play such

an enormous role in folk song. Folk song is for the most part a
litany, joyful or grieving. There is an element of lamentation,
an element of tongue-twister and pun, there are echoes of spell,
incantation, even exorcism in a folk song—there is a pure play
of sounds—it is always partly hysterical, near the fall into tears
or laughter, and partly zaum.*
— Vladimir Khodasevich
Was she a “di∞cult” poet? Perhaps. But first we must clarify what
“di∞cult” meant for that country:
One of our poets used to say proudly, “Though some of my

verses may be obscure they are never prosaic.” There are
two kinds of obscurity; one arises from a lack of feelings and
thoughts, which have been replaced by words; the other from
an abundance of feelings and thoughts, and the inadequacy of
words to express them.
— Alexander Pushkin
One of the first reviews of her debut collection blamed Tsvetaeva

for “too muchness,” for an over-abundance of lyricism. Tsvetaeva’s
response? “There cannot be too much of lyric because lyric itself is
too much.”
*
Zaum refers to pure play of language, “beyonsense.”
568 P O E T RY

So how does one attempt to translate work that even Russian

poets find too hard? Translators usually cite Tsvetaeva’s famous
temperament. (“Next time I will be born not on a planet, but on a
comet!”) With bravery, they announce their ambition to imitate her
music in English — to stay “faithful” to the music.
The danger of this “faithful” position is that attempting to imitate
the sounds of the great master in a new language produces just that:
an imitation that cannot rise to the level of the original. This may oc-
cur because of the translator’s lack of skill or because the “receiving”
language — English, in this case — is an entirely di≠erent medium, at
a very di≠erent point in its development, a point at which the par-
ticular sound e≠ects mean entirely di≠erent things.
Jean Valentine and I do not claim to do better. In fact, we do not
claim to have translated Tsvetaeva. If translation, as most transla-
tors are eager to claim, is “a closest possible reading,” then it is not
translation, it is notation, midrash: to translate is to inhabit. The
meaning of the word eros is to stand outside of one’s body. This we
do not claim to have achieved. (We wish we could, one day!) No,
we are simply two poets who fell in love with a third and spent two
years reading her together. These are fragments, notes in the margin.
(Erase everything you have written, Mandelstam says, but keep the
notes in the margin.)
Jean and I have vastly di≠erent temperaments from this poet. But
we are drawn by her magnetism, and so we continue reading her
together. Just that: reading lines, fragments, moments; two years of
two poets reading a third is an homage. — ik
MARI N A T SVETAE VA 569

THE P O E T RY O F KA BBA L AH
peter cole
Introduction
The stakes couldn’t be higher: extraction of light from the contain-

er of sound; ascent to the Throne of God and direct vision of His
Glory; the eradication of coarseness and the forces of darkness; a path
to redemption, sometimes through sin; the achievement of erotic
union on high — which is to say, the sacred marriage of feminine and
masculine aspects within the Deity. “Great is the power of the poem
recited for the sake of heaven,” writes one late-seventeenth-century
North African Kabbalist poet. “It unites all the [spiritual] qualities
like a sacrificial o≠ering, aligns the [heavenly] channels, and gives
rise to e≠ulgence in all worlds — above and below.”
In this Kabbalistic context, poems not only depict a mystical pro-
cess, they produce it. Seeking a return to the primordial harmony
destroyed with the catastrophe of creation and Adam’s transgression
in Eden, those who compose and utter the lines of mystical hymns
take part in the continual reconfiguration of the cosmos. For the
letters of the alphabet, or aleph-bet, are, a medieval Iberian Hebrew
text tells us, nothing less than “the powers of God ... engraved on
the throne.... They are called the angels of the living God.” And
according to late-phase Hasidic Kabbalah, the letters of the Torah
are each “a palace or chamber inhabited by the divine presence.”
Combined in the proper manner, they lead to the revelation of the
Infinite’s radiance.
As with the gain, however, so with the potential for debilitating
strain in the scheme of this at once conservative and truly experi-
mental poetics, where the level of risk is raised to an almost impossible
pitch. The Talmud warns of the threats that await a person who would
hazard the halls of the upper palaces — apostasy, insanity, and death
(spiritual or actual). Of the famous four sages who entered that place
of esoteric interpretation seeking knowledge of this potent sort, only
one returned in peace.
Given the danger that attends to Kabbalistic inquiry, why, then,
submit oneself to an equivalent peril on the literary plane — the
gauntlet of abstractions and the incessant mixing of mythic metaphors
that dominate the textual landscapes of Kabbalah? What, apart from
a historical and armchair sense of the intense religious experience
PET ER COL E 573

of spiritual adepts, does Kabbalah — and specifically the poetry of
Kabbalah — have to tell us as readers today?
For one, long before Frenchified notions of trace and erasure
took hold, a Kabbalistic poetics was drawing attention to aspects
of language-in-action that slip readers into (as D.H. Lawrence put
it in a wholly di≠erent context) a “dawn-kaleidoscopic” world of
ramifying meaning where absence and presence evoke one another.
Contemporary literary culture tends to doubt the power of poetry
and is suspicious of verse that takes as its subject its own medium.
But hymns treating the (implicitly parallel) nature of divine and hu-
man creation, and the language that leads to that creation, lie at “the
heart of the heart” of Kabbalah’s country. No less an authority than
Gershom Scholem — the great twentieth-century scholar of Jewish
mysticism and a writer of almost clairvoyant powers — identified
“the indissoluble link [in Kabbalah] between the idea of the revealed
truth and the notion of language,” calling this perhaps the most im-
portant legacy that Judaism bequeathed to the history of religions.
He writes of the conviction held by many Kabbalists that
the language — the medium — in which the spiritual life of man

is accomplished, or consummated, includes an inner property,
an aspect which does not altogether merge or disappear in the
relationships of communication between men ... in all such
attempts there is something else vibrating.
So it is that Kabbalistic poems in Hebrew and Aramaic, Ladino,

Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic have moved generations of readers who
may have understood only a small part of that literature’s esoteric
import. Working like verbal spirit traps, the poems of the Jewish
mystical tradition precipitate a sense of transcendence, which
becomes palpable long before it is fathomable.
That core element Scholem discerned, out of which all other quali-
ties of speech and the world are formed, points to the Name of God
as the metaphysical origin of language. Hence the Provençal Kabbalist
Isaac the Blind’s circa-1200 image of the inverted tree of divine might,
whose roots (in heaven) consist of this Name, and the letters of which
are branches and leaves that dangle down and appear as flickering
flames of words and things. (“The letter,” according to Isaac, “is the
element of cosmic writing.”) And so, too, the idea put forth in the thir-
teenth century by the Kabbalist and visionary poet Avraham Abulafia
574 P O E T RY
that letters are “the mystery that lies at the basis of the ‘host’ (of all
things) ... every letter is a sign (symbol) and indication of creation.”
As Abulafia saw it, the mind, hand, pen, ink, and parchment form a
continuum analogous to that of the worlds on high and below.
There is, to be sure, more to the poetry of Kabbalah than an embrace

of language as a pertinent subject for verse, and the poems in the
anthology from which this portfolio is drawn are also highly charged
carriers of actual practice — crystallizations of both the simplest and
most abstruse notions that have occupied Kabbalistic circles from the
early Middle Ages and into the twenty-first century. While the con-
ceptual range of the poetry seems at first glance rarefied (and in need
of being “translated” by readers into a form fit for their own use),
the questions that the poems engage could not be more substantial.
They cover a broad spectrum of timeless concerns, asking, for in-
stance, what it means to maintain a vital connection through speech
to the spirit and why consciousness of majesty matters in the world
of an ordinary week. From early on, this tradition considers how first
things are bound to what comes last, and where the present stands in
relation to both. Beginning in the eleventh century — though some
would say much earlier — Eros enters the esoteric equation, and the
poems take up the question of how that might inform a faithful exis-
tence. (In fact, the erotic dimension of Kabbalah becomes so central
that coupling, the endlessly complex interplay between masculine
and feminine aspects of creation, has been described as being, for
Kabbalists, “the secret and foundation of all existence.”) Later, the
tradition looks at the ways in which a perception of cosmic exile al-
ters our sense of being in place, and where and how darkness and
evil figure in this mix. From the start, however, the hymns of the
Jewish mystical tradition demonstrate how song — almost magically,
and at times with actual magic — can conduct and preserve transfor-
mative knowledge, even for those who don’t quite know what they
know. Moreover, they show how a vision of the manifold linkage of
all things and all degrees of thought and feeling might be registered
in the cadence and weave of a line of verse, a series of wedded sounds
in the air.
PET ER COL E 575

anonymous
Each Day
Each day as dawn approaches,

the King sits in majesty
and blesses the holy creatures:
To you, my creatures, I speak,
before you I declare —
Creatures who bear the throne of my glory
with all your heart, and willingly with your soul —
Blessed is the hour of your creation,
and exalted is the constellation
beneath which I gave you form.
May the light of that morning continue to shine
when you came into my mind —
for you are a vessel of my desire
prepared and perfected on that day.
Be silent, creatures of my making,
so I might hear my children pray.
Notes to individual poems can be found at the end of the portfolio.
576 P O E T RY
From Whose Beauty the Depths Are Lit
When one stands before the throne of glory, he begins reciting
the hymn that the throne of glory sings each day:
King of kings,
God of gods
and Lord of lords,
encircled by braided branches of crowns —
encompassed by branching commanders of radiance —
who covers the heavens with wings of His splendor
and in His majesty appears on high;
from whose beauty the depths are lit,
whose glory flashes across the sky —
proud envoys shoot forth from His form,
powerful creatures explode from His crown,
and princes course from the folds of His robe.
All the trees rejoice at His word
as the grasses delight in His joy —
and His words pour forth as fragrance
in flames of issued fire,
pro≠ering pleasure to those who search them
and peace to those who make them live.
AN ON Y MOU S 57 7
yehudah halevi
Where Will I Find You
Where, Lord, will I find you:

your place is high and obscured.
And where
won’t I find you:
your glory fills the world.
You dwell deep within —

you’ve fixed the ends of creation.
You stand, a tower for the near,
refuge to those far o≠.
You’ve lain above the Ark, here,
yet live in the highest heavens.
Exalted among your hosts,
although beyond their hymns —
no heavenly sphere
could ever contain you,
let alone a chamber within.
In being borne above them

on an exalted throne,
you are closer to them
than their breath and skin.
Their mouths bear witness for them,
that you alone gave them form.
Your kingdom’s burden is theirs;
who wouldn’t fear you?
And who could fail
to search for you —
who sends down food when it is due?
578 P O E T RY
I sought your nearness.
With all my heart I called you.
And in my going out to meet you,
I found you coming toward me,
as in the wonders of your might
and holy works I saw you.
Who would say he hasn’t seen
your glory as the heavens’
hordes declare
their awe of you
without a sound being heard?
But could the Lord, in truth,

dwell in men on earth?
How would men you made
from the dust and clay
fathom your presence there,
enthroned upon their praise?
The creatures hovering over
the world praise your wonders —
your throne borne high
above their heads,
as you bear all forever.
Y EH U DAH H ALE V I 579

anonymous
Release, Please
Release, please, this bound one

by the power of your right hand.
Receive the song of your people,
exalt us, Lord, and make us
pure. Almighty one, protect
those who seek your oneness:
Bless them and cleanse them — bestow
upon them your merciful justice.
Mighty one, holy one, in your
goodness guide your assembly.
Turn, sole one on high,
to those who remember your sanctity,
and accept our cry and plea —
You who fathom all mysteries.
58 0 P O E T RY
ya’akov hakohen
Prayers for the Protection and Opening of the Heart
May the Name send its hidden radiance

to open the gates of deliverance
to His servants — and shine in their hearts,
which now are shut in silent darkness.
May the great King be moved

to act in perfection and righteousness —
to open the gates of wisdom for us
and waken the love of old, the love of ancient days.
ii
By the power of the hidden Name I-am-that-I-am,

and by the dew of Desire and Blessing, the dead will live again ...
iii
I-am is the power of your Name in concealment,

and one who knows its mystery dwells in eternity’s instant.
Over the world, it pours forth abundance and favor,

and on it all worlds hang, like grapes in a cluster.
Send the dew of blessing, the dew of grace;

renew my dispensation, and grant me length of days.
Bring light to my eyes with your teaching, and let not the husks
that surround your hosts obstruct me.
May Heaven and Adam’s children judge me with mercy.
Sustain me with their strength and fortune —

but do not leave me in need of the gifts of men.
YA’ AKOV H AKOH EN 581

yosef gikatilla
The Nut Garden
The Nut Garden holds things felt and thought

and feeling for thought is always a palace —
Sinai with flames of fire about it,

burning though never by fire devoured.
On all four sides surrounded so —

entrance is barred to pretenders forever.
For one who learns to be wise, however,

its doors are open toward the East:
he reaches out and takes a nut,

then cracks its shell, and eats ...
58 2 P O E T RY
anonymous
Incantation Against Lilith
Veiled in velvet, is she here?

Leave o≠, leave o≠:
You shall not enter,
you shall not emerge.
It is neither yours nor your share.
Return ... Return:

The sea is swelling;
its waves are calling.
I hold to the holy portion —
I am held in the holiness of the King.
AN ON Y MOU S 583
yitzhak luria
Hymn for the Third Meal
Prepare the feast

of perfect faith,
the delight of the Holy King.
Prepare the feast of the King.
This is the feast

of the Lesser Presence;
the Ancient Eminence and Field of Apples
assemble with Him for the feast.
Sons of the Palace —

you who yearn
to behold the radiance
of the Lesser Presence —
be seated here
at this Sabbath table,
adorned and crowned
with the name of the King.
Exult in your being

part of this gathering
among the guardian
angels’ wings,
and rejoice now

within this hour
of favor which knows
not what anger brings.
58 4 P O E T RY
Draw near me here —
see my power,
without the judgments
of judgment’s terror.
Those without
may not enter,
for they are dogs
of rancor and gall.
I hereby call
to the Ancient of Days
to summon His will
to drive them away —
for when His favor

in this room is shown,
the husks are rendered
null and void.
He drives them into

holes in the ground,
conceals them deep
in caverns of stone.
And so it is
now and till twilight—
within the Impatient
One’s delight.
Y I T Z H AK LU RI A 585
anonymous
Peace Be Upon You
Peace be upon you —

ministering angels,
angels of heaven —
from the King who is king of all kings,
the Holy One, blessed be He;
in peace be your coming —
angels of peace,
the Holy One, blessed be He.
Bless me with peace —

angels of peace,
the Holy One, blessed be He,
in peace be your leaving —
angels of peace,
angels of heaven,
the Holy One, blessed be He.
58 6 P O E T RY
Notes
Jewish mystical tradition once held that by reciting the visionary

hymns known as the “Poems of the Palaces” (or Heikhalot) — of
which the first two poems in this portfolio are examples — a man
might, if he didn’t fall prey to any number of potentially fatal ob-
stacles along the way, ascend through the seven heavens and approach
the throne of God. There he could behold the Divine Glory and par-
ticipate in the celestial liturgy. Experience in this circa second- to
ninth-century ce literature is acoustic rather than psychological in
the conventional sense — though this does not mean that emotional
struggle and insight aren’t at the core of the work. Central to the
quest of these poets who, as the tradition describes them, go down
to the chariot, or vehicle of vision, is their verse’s ability to animate
what we today would think of as “abstraction” — to set up a palpable,
percussive current and timbre linking syllable to syllable and word
to word in a progression toward heightened perception and, in some
cases, ecstasy.
Yehudah HaLevi is perhaps the best-known literary figure in Jewish

history. Hardly a Kabbalist, he is nonetheless looked to by later
mystical practitioners as a distinguished and discerning precursor
because of his Sufi-like surrender to trust in God and His presence.
“Release, Please,” most likely composed in Babylonia in the tenth cen-

tury, is a plea for strength employing gentleness, or a gentle poem
invoking might. Now part of the Sabbath liturgy, it can be read in
both straightforward and mystical fashions, as it encodes a forty-two
letter name of God within its Hebrew lines.
PET ER COL E 587

The poems attributed to Ya’akov HaKohen are taken from a longer
prayer that Scholem describes as “a mysterious hymn.” It employs
symbolism characteristic of the Kabbalah of its day, including men-
tion of the kelippot — shards, shells, or husks that embody the forces
of evil in the world.
The initial word of the thirteenth-century poet Yosef Gikatilla’s

Hebrew title (Ginat Egoz — The Garden of Nuts) stands for Gematria
(numerology), Notarikon (acronymns or acrostics), and Temurah (per-
mutation of the letters, as in anagrams). The implication of this
acronym is that the esoteric manipulation of letters is like a garden
wherein ultimate nourishment can be found. A case in point is the shift
from “east” to “eats,” where wisdom and knowledge of the mystical
teachings lead one into the heart of a given word, where the secrets
of existence lie. The play isn’t, in fact, in the Hebrew, but the English
here presents an opportunity to account for the sort of anagrammatic
permutation that runs through so much of this work.
The incantation against Lilith appears in the Zohar, a work most

likely compiled in the late thirteenth century in north-central
Spain. By the eighth century the legend had taken shape that Lilith
was Adam’s first wife. Created from the earth with her husband,
she refused to give up her equality, fought with him about how they
should have sex, then pronounced the four-letter name of God and
flew away. In Kabbalistic lore she is both a strangler of children and
a seducer of men.
Lilith grows jealous of pious couples, whose sexual congress on
the Sabbath evening brings about a union of the masculine and femi-
nine aspects within the Godhead. Envious of all this, she prowls the
earth, looking for husbands and wives who violate the sanctity of
their intimacy by having intercourse by lamplight. When she finds
58 8 P O E T RY
such a couple, she pounces and takes possession of the soul of their
o≠spring.
Yitzhak Luria left behind him almost nothing in the way of theo-
retical, ethical, or confessional prose, and only a handful of poems,
but he comes down to us as one of the most vital figures in Jewish
history — a myth-maker of major proportions and a charismatic per-
sonality whose recalibration of Jewish thought continues to alter the
consciousness of Jews and non-Jews alike. Addressed to the baroque
countenances of God as he envisioned them, Luria’s three Aramaic
hymns for the Sabbath meals “suggest the grandiloquent gestures of
a magician,” and, says Scholem, “read like the hymns of a mystery
religion.” The third hymn, translated here, is at once a convocation
and an exorcism.
Among the most beloved components of the Sabbath rites developed

in the Galilean town of Safed in the sixteenth century is the rhythmi-
cally enchanting and quietly haunting anonymous hymn that begins
“Shalom Aleichem” — “Peace Be Upon You” — which was sung in the
home after the men of the house returned from the field on Friday
evening. The poem is addressed to the Sabbath angels, and it might
best be read as a hymn for the peace of the household, which in turn
becomes part of the larger harmony of existence.
PET ER CO LE 589
C O N T R I BU TO R S
tony barnstone’s * newest project is a folk-rock cd, Tokyo Burn-

ing, with musicians John Clinebell and Ariana Hall, based on his book
Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (BkMk Press, 2009).
gottfried benn (1886 – 1956) served in the German army’s medi-
cal corps during wwi and used his clinical experiences as inspiration
for his first collections of poetry, Morgue und andere Gedichte (1912)
and Fleisch (1917).
michael bierut * is a partner in the international design consul-
tancy Pentagram, a faculty member at the Yale School of Art and the
Yale School of Management, and the author of Seventy-nine Short Es-
says on Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).
alain borer* is a poet, novelist, art critic, and playwright, as well as
an internationally-known specialist on the work of Arthur Rimbaud.
His published works include Rimbaud in Abyssinia (William Morrow,
1991), Icare & I don’t (Editions de Seuil, 2007), and Le ciel & la carte
(Editions de Seuil, 2010), winner of the Pierre Mac Orlan Prize.
jorge luis borges (1899 – 1986), the great Argentine writer of
fiction, poetry, and essays, was one of the pioneers of magical realism.
geoffrey brock is the author of Weighing Light (Ivan R. Dee,
2005) and the editor of the FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian
Poetry (2012). He teaches at the University of Arkansas.
mark s. burrows’s * new Rilke translation, Prayers of a Young Poet,
will appear this year and his translation of SAID’s Psalms in 2013,
both from Paraclete Press. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
paul claudel (1868 – 1955) spent his career as a diplomat, serving
the French government. A devout Roman Catholic from the age
of eighteen, he is best known for his prolific dramatic output, most
notably The Tidings Brought To Mary and The Satin Slipper.
peter cole’s The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish
Tradition is forthcoming in April from Yale University Press.
590 P O E T RY
averill curdy’s first book of poems will be published in 2013 by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She lives in Chicago and teaches creative
writing at Northwestern University.
eugene dubnov * was born in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1949 and studied
psychology at Moscow University before emigrating to the West in
1971 to become a student at the University of London.
stephen edgar has two books forthcoming this year: in Australia,
his eighth collection, Eldershaw (Black Pepper), and in the us, The
Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (Baskerville Publishers).
paolo febbraro* is a poet and critic. His collections of verse
include Il bene materiale (Libro Scheiwiller, 2008) and Deposizione
(LietoColle, 2010).
jonathan monroe geltner* is completing a book of speculative
fiction and a collection of discursive, lyric essays on cycling in France
and America.
yosef gikatilla * (1248 – c. 1325) was a Spanish Kabbalist and
student of one of the leading Jewish mystics of the day, Avraham
Abulafia, who was the founder of prophetic Kabbalah.
ya’akov hakohen * belonged to a circle of Jewish mystics that was
active in mid-thirteenth-century Castile and Provence.
yehudah halevi * (c. 1075 – 1141) is considered to be one of the
greatest Hebrew poets. He lived in both Muslim and Christian Spain
before rejecting its culture of Jewish-Arab hybridization and leaving
for Israel in 1140. His most famous work is the philosophical text
called the Kuzari.
michael hofmann’s annotated translation of Joseph Roth’s letters
was just published by W.W. Norton; Impromptus, his Gottfried Benn
translations, is expected later this year from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
a.e. housman * (1859 – 1936) published two books of poetry in his
lifetime: A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). More Poems
(1936) was released posthumously, as was his Complete Poems (1939).
mark irwin is the author of six collections of poetry, two volumes of
translation, and a recently completed book of essays on contemporary
American poetry entitled “Monster.” American Urn: New & Selected
Poems (1987 – 2011) will appear next year from Ashland Poetry Press.
C ON T RI BU TORS 59 1
ilya kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press,
2004) and co-editor of the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry
(2010). He lives in San Diego.
yitzhak luria* (1534 – 1572) was raised in Egypt and, late in life,
came to the Galilee town of Safed. While he left behind almost no
writing apart from a handful of poems, he is responsible for the
articulation of a highly complex and potent revision of Kabbalah’s
principal mythic vision.
john matthias has published fourteen books of poems, most
recently Trigons (2009) and Collected Shorter Poems (2011), both
from Shearsman Books. He is professor emeritus at the University
of Notre Dame and co-editor of Notre Dame Review.
gonzalo melchor’s * poetry translations have appeared or are
forthcoming in Poetry London and Poetry Review.
antonio porchia * (1885 – 1968) worked for many years as a
basket weaver and printing-press operator in Buenos Aires.
spencer reece is the chaplain to Bishop Carlos Lopez-Lozano of
the Reformed Episcopal Church in Spain.
said* is a native of Iran and has lived in Germany since 1965. He has
published eight volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of
essays, children’s books, and radio plays. Titles appearing in English
include Landscapes of a Distant Mother (University of Chicago Press,
2004) and the forthcoming Psalms, translated by Mark S. Burrows
(Paraclete Press, 2013).
edith södergran (1892 – 1923) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia,
and educated at a German-language girls school there. Before her
death at age thirty-one, Södergran published five collections of poetry.
roberto sosa * (1930 – 2011) spent his early life working menial
jobs to support his family. Sosa published Los Pobres, his first book, in
1969, which won the Adonais Prize in Spain. He edited the magazine
Presente and taught literature at a university in Honduras.
a.e. stallings’s most recent book is a verse translation of Lucretius,
The Nature of Things (Penguin, 2007). Stallings is a 2011 Guggen-
heim fellow and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
592 P O E T RY
anne stevenson is an American living in the uk. Her books in-
clude Poems 1955 – 2005 (2005) and Stone Milk (2007), both from
Bloodaxe Books, and the forthcoming Astonishment. She is recipient
of the Poetry Foundation’s 2007 Neglected Masters Award.
marina tsvetaeva (1892 – 1941) is considered one of the most im-
portant twentieth-century Russian poets. She was born in Moscow
and, after many years spent in exile in France, returned to Russia in
1939. With the outbreak of war she was evacuated to Yelabuga, where
she committed suicide.
jean valentine is the author of eleven poetry collections, most
recently Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). She lives
and works in New York City.
* First appearance in Poetry.
C ON T RI BU TORS 59 3

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THE BANFF CENTRE
Writing Programs
Apply by June 15, 2012 for: Wired Writing Studio

Writing With Style (Fall) Intended for poets and writers at
Whether you have attended many early or intermediate stages in their
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Program Dates: Program Dates:
September 9 -15, 2012 October 1 - 13, 2012
Program Director: Elizabeth Philips (2 week on-site residency in Banff)
Faculty: David Carpenter, and
Janet McNaughton, David O’Meara, October 31, 2012 - March 30, 2013
Dianne Warren. (20-week online residency)
Program Director: Fred Stenson
Faculty: Peter Behrens, Don Domanski,
Self-directed Residencies Chris Fisher, Charlotte Gill, Jessica
and other writing Grant, Barbara Klar.
programs available.
For more information:

1.800.565.9989
arts_info@banffcentre.ca
www.banffcentre.ca/writing
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Five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships are awarded annually
through a national competition open to young poets.
Each fellowship is in the amount of $15,000.
Complete rules and application forms are available

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P O E T RY F O U N DAT I O N . O R G

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THE BOHO DANCE

The Boho Dance is an imagined conversation
between Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. With
poet John Starrs as Whitman and playwright Beau
O’Reilly as Ginsberg, comedy and entertainment
ensue, with musical accompaniment by Troy
Martin.
saturday, march 10, 7:00 pm

sunday, march 11, 3:00 pm
POETRY FOUNDATION t 61 WEST SUPERIOR STREET t CHICAGO

POETRYFOUNDATION . ORG / EVENTS
Recent titles by John Matthias
at Shearsman Books
Collected Shorter Poems, Vol. 2

paperback, 282 pages, 9 x 6 ins, $23.00, isbn 9781848611801
This is the first volume to be released in an ongoing project collecting
all the poems of John Mattthias. Two volumes of shorter poems and
one of longer poems will form the complete package and, with this
initial release in the year that the poet turned 70, these books will
bring back into a print a major body of work that readers on both
sides of the Atlantic need to know better. The Longer Poems will appear
in the latter half of 2012, and the Shorter Poems, Vol. 1 in mid-2013.
Who Was Cousin Alice? and Other Questions

paperback, 370 pages, 9 x 6 ins, $22.00 isbn 9781848611689
Who Was Cousin Alice? & Other Questions attempts to answer both
the first question posed in the title about John Matthias’ early family
memories, and then to raise and engage, in a series of memoirs and
critical essays, a large number of others. These range from a search for
some answers about his wife’s British family in ‘Kedging in “Kedging
in Time”,’ to the literary imaginations of ‘Grand Old Dirty Old Men’,
an examination of erotic writing of the old and aging as a manifesta-
tion of “late style.” Other essays consider Auden, Roy Fisher, Mul-
doon, Berryman, Hass, Pinsky, Michael Anania, and ‘British Poetry
at Y2K.’
MARCH EVENTS
Shoot the Canon

Poetry presents poets performing covers of and reading dis-
coveries from the last 100 years of the magazine, featuring
Christian Bök, Peter Gizzi, K. Silem Mohammed, Tracie
Morris, Vanessa Place, Sina Queyras, Keith and Rosmarie
Waldrop, and others making it new all over again.
thursday, march 1, 6:00 pm
poetry foundation | 61 west superior street
Illinois Poets Past and Present

Christina Pugh, Susan Hahn, Laurence Lieberman, Ed
Roberson, and Kevin Stein read their own work as well as
poems by famed Illinois poets of the past — Gwendolyn
Brooks, Archibald MacLeish, G.E. Murray, Carolyn Rod-
gers, and Carl Sandburg. A reception, featuring live music,
follows. Co-sponsored by Fifth Wednesday Journal.
friday, march 2, 5:30 pm
poetry foundation | 61 west superior street
Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Levine

The uk and us Poets Laureate appear together for a reading
and conversation moderated by Poetry senior editor Don
Share. Co-sponsored with the Association of Writers and
Writing Programs with Blue Flower Arts.
friday, march 2, 8:30 pm
international ballroom north & south
hilton chicago hotel | 720 south michigan avenue
POETRYFOUNDATION . ORG / EVENTS

back page
March 1944
When the nation went to war in 1941, several contributors to Poetry

went with it. Even editor Peter De Vries served for a time. After being
inducted at Fort Sheridan outside Chicago, he was sent to Camp
Joseph T. Robinson in Arkansas, where his work brought him unex-
pected attention. “In the course of processing I encountered another
o∞cer,” wrote De Vries to business manager Geraldine Udell, “who,
glancing at my occupational report, leaned back, sucked on his coke,
laced his fingers behind his head and asked for my opinion on every
contemporary poet in the land while buck privates pile up behind me
like a log jam.” High blood pressure and a persistent sinus infection
cut short De Vries’s military career. Poetry’s greatest contribution to
the war e≠ort involved the promotion of Liberty Bonds. Appearing
alongside this Liberty Bond advertisement from March 1944 is one
for a book by respected Canadian poet A.J.M. Smith and one for
New World Poems, purportedly written by Chinese-American poet
Chen Wei Lu but actually the work of Wisconsin-born Granville
Trace and published by the Colony Press, based in the then-utopian
community of Atascadero, California, founded by St. Louis publisher
Edgar G. Lewis.
Paul Durica
“Back Page” is a monthly feature of artifacts from the last one hundred years of Poetry.

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founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONRO E

gottfried benn 487 Asters

geoffrey brock 502 Alteration Finds

edith södergran 508 A Life

eugene dubnov 512 Lips

john matthias 514 After Quevedo

a.e. housman 524 To my Comrade, Moses J. Jackson,

marina tsvetaeva 528 Bound for Hell

paul claudel 532 The Day of Gifts

jorge luis borges 535 To the One Who is Reading Me

antonio porchia 538 From “Voices”

said 542 Psalms

marina tsvetaeva 552 From “Poems for Moscow”

peter cole 573 Introduction

cover art by michael bierut

Poetry t March 2012 t Volume 199 t Number 6

Asters — sweltering days

Once more the golden flocks

Once more the yearned-for,

one more presentiment

Brown. Brandy-brown. Leaf-brown. Russet.

Flesh that went naked.

Parched with stubble and the last corn-shocks.

Man-brown jumps on woman-brown.

A woman is something for a night.

A woman is something with a smell.

Woman-brown drapes itself on man-brown:

Hold me! I’m falling!

Renege on the rock! Smash

Spit on the obsession with pillars:

Spill, spread, unpetal, bleed

You don’t need always to be scrubbing the tiles, Hendrickje,

Never painted anything

The blocked chimney smokes

All the Juliets and Ophelias,

The age takes o≠ its frockcoat.

what if they didn’t exist,

One says: please no inner life,

when my little prince

the contraries are not easy to reconcile

Left the house shattered, it hurt so bad,

He walked slowly through the dreamscape

Dreamy exposure to phenomena

so he drank his gin and accepted a dish

He had been reading on the park bench

He put down his book. It was a day like any other

A scent is enough to change things,

All very well, a gin and a few minutes

Shattered: how far are you allowed to push your I,

Shattered: no one knows. Shattered and you turn

Damned evergreens! Vinyl whines!

A day without tears is a rare occurrence

when men still wore starched collars,

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

How many hours I kept

What I was wondering:

It wasn’t for your life

The head we cannot know,

Or else the breast would cease

And flesh would lose all life,

The afternoon grew hotter

On golden sand we traced