#poems in translation

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

​Li Qingzhao

Translated by Wendy Chen

[victusinveritas]

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

It establishes the universal ideas in language,

And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice

With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.

It puts what should be above things as they are,

Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.

It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,

Giving us the estate of the world to manage.

It saves austere and transparent phrases

From the filthy discord of tortured words.

It says that everything is new under the sun,

Opens the congealed fist of the past.

Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia

And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.

As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,

The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.

Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

-Czesław Miłosz translated by Robert Pinsky

[toomagazineperfection]

All that I can word about.

All that I pain about.

I can call about and out.

I was a staring stranger.

Haunted by you.

Is a world wreck of home poets.

Is a world, you?

Wreck you.

Baby, pain.

I.

Sunidhi

[sapphireshorelines]

Forugh Farrokhzad, tr. Sholeh Wolpe

[dervishlatino]

Mi belleza morisca (Traducción al español)

Quiero besar las láminas de plata que bailan en las sombras del claro de luna, pues sus destellos me recuerdan a tu sonrisa que me encanta.

Pero, bajo la luz de la luna, mi anhelo aterciopelada, suavemente, juega con el silencio turquesa entre nosotros, mientras desgarró el lago tranquilo de tu corazón.

Como una linterna morisca, tu brillo derrite mi piel glacial, lentamente, antes de deshacerme como hielo en un día caluroso de verano.

✦ @dervishlatino | NNF نشوان نازاريو فيريرا ✦

[metamorphesque]

musings on July

"NW" Zadie Smith, "the Hands of Friendship" in Yerevan (@metamorphesque). "Jane Eyre" Charlotte Brontë (@flowerytale), Franz Kafka’s Diaries (@hungryfictions), "Summer night by the beach" Edvard Munch, "A Magic Mountain" Czeslaw Milosz (tr by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee), "Answer July" Emily Dickinson, "Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed" Vincent van Gogh, The Diaries of Franz Kafka (@shisasan)

[emfudya]

Dare to be stupid

[soracities]

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, from "Lamps" (trans. Sarah Maguire & Sabry Hafez), My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre (ed. Sarah Maguire) [ID'd]

[druid-for-hire]

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

Late Spring by Li Qingzhao (translated by Wendy Chen)

[theoptia]

Gennady Aygi, from The Sunday Poem; “Silence” (translated by Sarah Valentine)

Text ID: to grow accustomed to silence / like the beating of one’s heart

[toomagazineperfection]

In a person. I loved in me.

I would love it to be accurate and he would love in me to know he ever did her mistake. I was me. I would ask to know love and you. I was you. I was you. It was me to love happens. In him, love blossoms . He was worried to the death of a happening. I caused a scene to forget. In a love in me. I deserve love in a love. I would ask in love and forget in evening. I get. I was a lover and I would know you sleep. By tongue, tonight I see. O so, my sorrow would mean love at work. I would forget him to so as to love in making love happen. In love, he looks nice. He wears nice in my love. O was my love a good blow off the mind. I was. Seeing a man in a mole mark. In his love, he would wear a body of mine. I would wear mine in dead. In love and he. I would write the greatest love story and a relationship would be perfect of stance in hum. I would mean to say. I would love everyone. O would love. I would allude. I would respect. I would eat. I would eat feet. I. Would smell it. And I would beg, don't love to get or beg pardon in love but love for. You make a perfect sacrifice to know love kind of is a love and respect. I would win to love. I would love beautiful. I would win beauty. Of course, your cold lips smear mine. Like a perfect arch, she sits. My mother and I form vampire mates. I would smoke and kill him if he ever did. I would know. Why. I would know love existing between lies. And he framed a man in you. Dead in you. Love in you. Hear in you. God in you. Absolute beauty of a girl existing in a lith, ask? Men pursue to honor in me, so I win.

To love, you must get. I. I was me. I love painting. I love him. I would die him. I would like him. I would love a girl of grit and honor a glory of two. I would scar. I would love in me. I would love to know me. I would know me. And paint. And I love to know me. I know me. I was a girl of honor deity and found respect in scar. Her. I. Was a God existing in between love and her, she becomes. It loves it loves lonely. I was an animal. I killed to love. I beg to give and he gave. I would love. I was giving and a happening of pretense of a person in me is a way of perfect life. I.

I would love me.

I would love letters and God honors in me l. I was dense and knew myself. I was honor and love and would you draw a love phone in me. I was an honorary mother. I would love and she would know. I love body parts. Boy parts is a favorite book of mine. I was a winning of a girl. In fate of time, she disappeared. In time, she loved. She is love and she happens to seem selfless and kind, generosity brings in her love mansion. A love and she has everything. I was. I was love. I was me. I am. Me. I am her. Seeing is sin. Begging is pardon. In me, love for a myth tulle in a world and she wants to know. Everyone would love for a much love that is her. In me, she would love much. In tiny, she would glance many. I was perfect. In writing, I would know. I would help needy and selfless and facade I . I was feet in me. Throwing tantrums of a boy I knew. I. Would wait for food and water to arrive. I would love in me. I would ask in problem, I would win to serve and justice could cure myth. It would serve. I would love me into a girl. I was perfect. And my man loves me as I am. I was through me, a love happens. I would forget because greatness is the greatest affair to know you would love in her and she loves in you to make a wound of love and it was a happy moon. In you, love was knit and love me.

It is ganges love and God loves me receipt. And I love me. I was love in you. I love you. I think and you. It's glory beyond respect and it's teeth of grit beyond man. She loves. Like.

Office boy love and girl receipt. I was love to prove me wrong. I was staring everyone. I was seeing one. I was respecting one. I was leaving in time to see me as affair. It was one. And I loved him. Because love happens through someone.

She.

Sunidhi

[sapphireshorelines]

Yosano Akiko, from Women Are Plunder

[heartssarrow]

- Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet.

[droplets-of-neptune]

"If I were to carry you on my back

And roam the earth with you, the sweetness of your love would make me feel as though I am carrying a rose... So I neither tire nor grow weary in that."

[metamorphesque]

"To forget, to forget ...", Vahan Teryan (translated by Tathev Simonyan)