Look, as we promised each other,
we changed nothing and the world
is as wonderful as it was, the rain
tarries this year, but it will come:
it will come as long as we’re still here.
Look, as we agreed,
I am in one place, you in another.
We didn’t become one, which is also natural,
and in your weakness and in mine
there looms a promise, too:
after memory forgetfulness is all.
And if the road already may incline downward
in the famed sloping print of life’s curve,
it does, in some sense, aspire upward,
and aspiration is a great thing in life,
on this, too, we agreed, you surely remember.
And if now I’m alone and aching and ailing more than ever,
this, too, was a choice,
if not always conscious. And if you too are alone,
it makes my loneliness less just
and this should sustain you as well.
How fortunate that we’ve agreed on so little:
on parting, on loneliness and fear, the basic certainties,
and there’s always something to return to,
you will see how young we will be in the end,
and the end, when it comes, will be almost just.
And everything, you will see, will be almost welcome.
Even the freest people seem to be boxed in, not able to resist the noxious fumes of the confines they have built.
What is the investment for? And how could one stop oneself from making it? It is the natural impulse – to give and give. One gives because s/he wants to and can do nothing else. But this can lead to unintentionally fractious relations, or at least fractious feelings. Or at least an impasse.
But at some point, the question comes: what is one investing in? If the scales come out weighed down on only one side, the imbalance chokes everything, and the walls close in.
Another example of a poem that could be translated so very differently.
The Shapelessness
–Ágnes Nemes Nagy
The shapelessness, the endlessness.
I almost fall before I cut away
My statement from the timelessness.
With sand I wall a bucketful of sea
Against a waste of nothingness.
Perpetual indifference should be
Intolerable to consciousness.
Original
A formátlan, a véghetetlen.
Belepusztulok, míg mondatomat
a végtelenből elrekesztem._
Homokkal egy vödörnyi óceánt
kerítek el a semmi ellen.
Ez a viszonylagos öröklét
ép ésszel elviselhetetlen.
I have sometimes considered the people who move to other countries and go so “native” that they begin to lose touch with the intricacies of their own native language, often without really becoming native in the adopted language. What is this linguistic limbo, then? I have, sometimes to my detriment, clung fiercely to the native language. Sometimes it is not about locating oneself or one’s identity in another language, place or culture but, like this poem highlights, asserting an identity (almost generationally) – one’s own way of saying things, even though perfectly adequate words and expressions exist for the concepts one wants to express. (Sure, this is not always the case, as when we discuss things like Tinder, Siri, Amazon, Google… linguistic shortcuts that eventually represent a whole category of activities or things.)
Losing a Language
–WS Merwin
A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say
but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words
many of the things the words were about
no longer exist
the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I
the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak
somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently
so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away
where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other
we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners
the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass
when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie
nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers
this is what the words were made
to prophesy
here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw
Time Passing, Beloved
–Donald Davie
Time passing, and the memories of love
Coming back to me, carissima, no more mockingly
Than ever before; time passing, unslackening,
Unhastening, steadily; and no more
Bitterly, beloved, the memories of love
Coming into the shore.
How will it end? Time passing and our passages of love
As ever, beloved, blind
As ever before; time binding, unbinding
About us; and yet to remember
Never less chastening, nor the flame of love
Less like an amber.
What will become of us? Time
Passing, beloved, and we in a sealed
Assurance unassailed
By memory. How can it end,
This siege of a shore that no misgivings have steeled,
No doubts defend?
Last night, my last living grandparent died. It was not unexpected when it finally happened but was somewhat sudden in that the end came about quickly. I don’t have a lot to say about it; we were not close, she lived far away, and I didn’t really know her. I didn’t/don’t really know much of that part of the family.
But this, I suppose, is sad. I feel a certain sadness for her children, as it’s difficult to lose a parent (undoubtedly). It’s hard to come up with words about a woman I didn’t really know. When the other grandparents died, it was devastating, but I was really close to them.
I was not close to this grandmother; she was virtually a stranger. What do you say about someone whom you never really knew, whose life was defined by getting married and having children when she was a child herself and whose later life was pretty much dominated by Jehovah’s Witnesses?
I have small, incomplete memories of Marie, the distant grandmother who died, from the way my late grandfather pronounced her name, a rushed “Mree” (usually sneering or yelling), to the giant pancakes or the homemade loaves of bread she used to make.
I seem to recall that she had a crush on the late James Garner, circa Rockford Files time, which came to mind not so long ago when Mr Firewall told me about an episode (“The Empty Frame”) he had caught in reruns (yes, they are still showing Rockford in some parts of the world). The best parts happen at 42:15, when Rockford exclaims, ‘Pardon me all to hell!’
Immediately thereafter (42:30) when the episodes ‘villains’ discuss their failure to adhere to their initial socialist/hippie principles:
“Hey, David, will you knock off that stale 60s rhetoric? You’re looking at the new Jag, she wants a Kenzo wardrobe, I’m sick and tired of hearing about the pigs up on Gorki Street and the storming of the Winter Palace!”
“I’m not buying a new Jag; I’m buying a paramilitary vehicle…”
“We all sold out the day she got her first 50-dollar haircut and you and I said we liked it!”
I only saw her a handful of times in my life; the most memorable was in the early 80s. I recall that she bought some candy bars one evening, and my brother and I begged for one before bed, and in her very West Virginia way of speaking, she smiled and said, “I reckon we can have one tonight…”.
Untitled
–Nadia Tuéni Oh Nocturnal weavings, the Voyagers of the Orient count your courtesies upon the fingers of a year.
The wind and its allies
open themselves up just like a woman.
And all speaks of all.
The sounds I imagine are rivers or sobs.
Oh night sun as free as death,
as at that instant when each observes the other.
That is why I have stolen away underneath my tongue a land,
and kept it there like a host.
Original
O Nuits élaborées
les Voyageurs d’Orient comptent vos politesses
sur les doigts d’une année.
Le vent et ses alliés s’ouvrent tels une femme. Et tout parle de tout. Les bruits que j’imagine sont rivière ou sanglot. O soleil de la nuit libre comme la mort, on dirait cet instant où chacun se regarde. Aussi ai-je enfermé sous ma langue un pays, gardé comme une hostie.
