Ovid. The Last Years.
Black waves smash against the high shore,
Ever more clouds hang high over Tomi,
Soon a storm will descend from the bruised, blue mountains
And forms will dissolve into the night gloom.
Yet thoughts still play with the ripples of words
And fingers quickly drum out a rhythmic phrase.
Don't insult the ears of the gods or Augustus with
too insistent pleas. Take care since a No
Might condemn one here forever. To the edge
Of the world. The sea takes on the grim expression of despair.
The coarse grunts of barbarian speech.
Hopelessly empty days and nights of exile.
The elegant arrangement collapses into a whine .
It is more and more difficult to care about appearance.
Filth and feeling forgotten sculpt this alien landscapes
A chasm of disgust deprived of sunshine's sense of scale.
An August Pastoral
Early Autumn. The poplars shed their
leaves and the afternoon sky
pales like a condemned man
standing in front of a firing squad.
The forest brushes
delicately against the horizon,
the air stands still like a stammerer
confronted by a consonant.
Summer is burning itself out
suicidally. The grasses have yellowed.
From now on time bestows
a merciless ripening
on endurance as apples
redden, fate takes satisfaction
in the rustling of the leaves, and the
blowing of the wind,
the dry touch of thoughts
and even rounded, fragrant
sentences. One after the other
like water drops or the ticking
of a clock, a pear tree drops its load.
The plum-tree exudes its juices.
Bees buzz and swarms of
flies drive away approaching voices.
Lines of verse evaporate. The glow
penetrates them, sweat glues eyelids together, and
like Castor and Pollux, shirts are fused
against the body, as if someone
were wounded in the chest, like
a consumptive or a confessor.
There were to have been flocks of sheep,
shadows and fires on the hilltops:
nature a la fin de siecle
but here -
waves break against the shoreline,
a ship shudders,
a dog moans, and very occasionally
the sound of a word draws out
its own shadow - silence again, so
voices subside ever more richly
into whispers. Senility is forever
sending young regiments into battle
as the fullness overflows.
One snake silently slithers past
and arches its Roman nose
that is Augustus's month.
Dante and the Poets
They were five, and the wanderer made six.
What they spoke of, he would not deign to say
As they faced the road, which placed in their mouths
The seals of an unfathomable, yet fearful future .
With a sense of foreboding about things for which the time
will come for poetry to speak out, things mean so little that
they can simply be thrown to the mercy of their times.
What is left unsaid today will explode in a scream
And the hungry eye of things swarms over what comes
Next, as that book fell to the ground
When fate carved out a seal from the words of a romance .
Ulysses and Penelope
For K.
Speak softly. It is June, here are the hills.
The year exaggerates the shadows of our
Bodies. Hands. Lips. A white forehead.
A light breeze then, and the smell of fields.
Ridges accumulate step by step.
The cities have been destroyed. Weeds
Have overgrown the streets.
The graying art of navigation still miscalculates.
Joy and fear, like an inheritance, are here with us .
One wave bursts after the last one.
Say this: Let dusk fall and
Seagulls screech. For what has been,
what awaits us, what is here now let
kisses stream on murmuring quietly.
Wilanów
to Barbara Torunczyk
One bird's exotic cry. The splashing of ducks.
Agitated by some unexpected steps.
An expanse of sadness. Graying rows of willow trees.
A palace looms up through a rainbow. The fountains were silent.
Intentions were left unsatisfied.
The wave delicately slid into the shore .
The clamor of the city. Malevolent chimney stacks.
Magically contorted bodies of fauns
And nymphs are overgrown with mosses.
Indulgent forms of trees and bushes.
Beyond the water a forest dallied defiantly in the distance.
All that remained was to look courageously out towards
The other side and tap the dry rhythm out in silence
With one's shoe. The first blossoms
Were bursting out on the trees. A wind was blowing And leaves rustled -
leaves? - the shadows of leaves, On our way. I also had to follow in their
footsteps.
2.
Where ever the poet entered at a slow pace,
The gardener was computing the distances between trees
On his fingers, fountains overflowed with octaves of droplets.
And when it rained then a downpour added to the rainbow.
Where have the Chinese temples and pagodas gone,
And the allegories of the four seasons on the walls
And the ceilings decorated with the outlines of mountains
And plump female bodies. Fanfares.
The dull scent of wax and the wizened stream of sunshine
Through the viewfinders provided by door-frames
And hurtling pirouettes performed by the cupids.
Tulczyn, Niemirów or Versailles - interrupted dreams.
This is now another season. Laughter is dozing here.
Pearly chimes of the clavichord, wigs, beauty spots,
The mad chases down tree-lined avenues
And the reverberation of Mozartian tunes.
It is essentially a question of numerals, of addition.
The power of arithmetic and disintegration.
With his fingers the poet taps out syllables in time,
Then praises its passing and drinks more wine.
3.
I wandered around the park. I touched statues.
I investigated the taste of the fountains' water.
I have lost the measure of things. The bells' sounds
Have changed into song. I listened to the bells.
I have lost the measure of things. Its rhythm is too disconnected.
Dust and rubble poured through my fingers, And I saw around me rubble and dust,
and death, The unceasing running of water.
A sound too soft. The heart's speech too
Lightweight. Rhythm has sunk beneath the waters.
Fallow springtime has scattered
A fiery rainfall of flowers.
Translated by Donald Pirie
An Unsuccessful Pilgrimage, Oh, To A Particular Place
Through the woods, thick mud
(it rained a little while before),
along the roadside, once again,
the same road,
turning our backs to
the road sign with
the name of the town (in which
I was yet to spend many
days more)
I climbed up the hill
to higher regions,
which isn't to say they were high:
by any decent mountain standards
it was nothing but a mound
compared to, with all due respect,
the features of Morskie Oko.
I sat down in an arbor.
The remains of an excavation. Fitfully
cheerful information on
tiny rectangles:
"Magic Abode," "Swindlers' Den,"
(smoke + fire,
the soothsayer's
bloodshot eyes), "Sanctuary"
and finally: "Church," "The Poor
Friars," in this way they
seized
the inheritance of generations.
A neophyte range
erupted here.
I tallied the hours.
My ear sadly attempting to catch
whether the leaves weren't whispering
news of a rout
(in those days I was
pretty faint-hearted, but I'm
not anymore), or if it wasn't
the signal for retreat.
The columns did not thunder,
nor did smoke burst forth.
The defeated escaped
to the forests or over
oceans to other
sands.
Few traces
remained (beyond
little signs and excavation
pits, nothing).
Nevertheless, when a fire
incinerated the remains
of the church roof, when nuns
with the Lord in their hands
stopgapped the city wall
by shouting, didn't
the map of
fate re-
turn?
And once again, only the sky
was in charge.
Once again it's started
to pour and drenched
my uniform and
the complete absurdity
of this trip
(like the old belief
of those who were burned
on the pyre)
has been revealed.
What work could I possibly do now,
even with my notebook in hand,
with all these vacationers about, in clouds
of tedium, on this mountain-peak?
Yet another half-deserter,
a pseudo-Levite absentee.
Memory
That vigorous feeling the day after tomorrow:
that fate won't go to bed with me and that
I still might be useful for something in
his plans;
That sweltering afternoon, when, sweating profusely,
I inserted my hand in the space between your thighs
firmly convinced that in this way I'd live much
longer;
Those moments, when it was revealed, by a hair's breadth
away from the mystery, that at last we would sail
on to the open sea, and it would just roll on and
carry us;
That very second when I swore to myself, always
to return to him, because in him
I'd find an image of that strength that drove me
away;
And the moment when - while I was reading Mickiewicz -
I suddenly realized that I would always betray
anyone, anyone at all, because there is no
point from which I could even begin
to start counting.
Translated by W. Martin
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