Tashi Aged Four

January 25, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A little of me goes trotting off
    In a bright red swimsuit.
The ocean’s barely stirring.
    But a little of her is already
Slipping away without our knowing,
    Since – with me gone –
She will never have run
    So well for anyone else
Out to the sparkling pleat
    The sea folds over anew
Rising towards the spade and bucket
          That mark out our forgetting.

by Jacques Réda

Original poem © Jacques Réda, 2009. Translation © Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer, 2009.

From Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets, 1938-2008, edited and translated by Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer, Anvil Press, 2009.

Anvil Press Poetry writes:

‘Tashi Aged Four’ by Jacques Réda is almost my favourite piece from this anthology of French poetry. Poems about children by their parents or grandparents flirt with sentimentality – but it’s resolutely avoided here, as it is in Ted Hughes’s ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, or Victor Hugo’s poems in L’art d’être grand-père (The Art of Being a Grandfather).

The poem is simply an elaboration of a fleeting incident: his reaction to seeing his grand-daughter “trotting off” on the beach. From this, with the device of “a little of me” linking with “a little of her”, he weaves a meditation on time and the human condition: one that is light and natural as his passing thoughts. It is done with such firm delicacy – and, I think, tenderness.

The poem is of course a translation, and it’s a testament to the translators’ skill in capturing the poet’s voice that one hardly notices this fact. Jennie Feldman’s translations of a selection of Jacques Réda’s poems, Treading Lightly, was published by Anvil in 2005. You can find out more about that book and Réda here.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern. You can read more about Anvil here.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

“Could it be true…”

November 2, 2009April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Could it be true we live on earth?
On earth forever?

Just one brief instant here.

Even the finest stones begin to split,
even gold is tarnished,
even precious bird-plumes
shrivel like a cough.

Just one brief instant here.

by Nezahualcoyotl

From Flower and Song: Aztec Poems, translated and introduced by Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt.

This book has recently been published by Anvil Press to coincide with the British Museum’s exhibition Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler (September 2009–January 2010).

Two young poets who grew up in Mexico became fascinated in the 1960s by the fabled Aztec poems composed before and during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521. They encountered these extraordinary poems largely in Spanish translations, made from the texts recorded by the early friars who followed in Cortés’s wake.

Nezahualcoyotl, the original author of this poem, was King of Texcoco. He lived from 1402–1472. He is the most famous of the Nahuatl-language poets, considered by his contemporaries to be the best master of the classical style. Many tales are told of his wisdom as judge, public servant, philosopher, and teacher.

Nahuatl is unlike any European language – so different that Michael Schmidt doubts whether meaningful translations can be made, the cultural context of the poems being so alien and having, in any case, been destroyed. But all we can know of Aztec poetry is what these two gifted poet-translators have given us. It may be inadequate of course, but the poems are fascinating and often quite beautiful. Schmidt and Kissam’s introduction to Flower and Song is also a superb, distilled account of the background to the Aztec empire: from its way of life and its fall, to the role of poetry in Aztec life, and how the poems were preserved. It is an ideal introduction to the British Museum exhibition.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern. You can read more about Anvil here.

Collected, Selected, Neglected …

March 23, 2009April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

… My poems …
I write them, I forget them, I misplace them! They come back,
then I change them – though they can’t change the world,
they change me … Sometimes they disagree with me.
They are my inheritance – but who are the heirs?
Who needs this improbable, almost useless fortune, no matter
how poor people are,
while the great oppressors maintain and adore others’ poverty?
Why should I collect them (some of them are really pitiful)?
Why should I select them (am I the impartial judge of their
supposed value)?

Better neglect them, those rags of paper and words, leave them
on their own.

We disappear in the chilly global warming
of Stepmother Earth …

by Nina Cassian

Nina Cassian has been living in New York since 1985, when she was warned not to return to Romania, then still under Ceausescu’s iron grip, from a trip abroad. An involuntary exile, she quickly began to learn English – to such good effect that her latest collection of poems is her first composed entirely in English. (Her last collection had mixed her own original English with translations by others, and before that her poems were only published in translations.)

This is perhaps not a typical Cassian poem, but its wry humour is attractive. The apparent modesty about her poems is not, I think, self-deprecatory but a perfectly serious self-assessment of their place in the greater scheme of things. Question: why Stepmother, rather than Mother, Earth?

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

Two poems

February 9, 2009April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

MOTHER

What peace
between the folds
of her old black dress, grimy
from blowing into the fire,
peace always
as long as her head
covered my own
with whitened hair.

 Translated by Richard Burns

TICKLED THE LAUGHTER

The memory is dear to me
like the often too short
meals of my hungry childhood.
From hardened hands yellow flour
into boiling water
while the fire
crackling on the stones
tickled the laughter
from my eyes tearful with smoke.

 Translated by Peter Jay and Linda Lappin

by Aldo Vianello

from Selected Poems by Aldo Vianello. Translations by Richard Burns, Peter Jay, and Linda Lappin.

Aldo Vianello is a little-known poet from Venice, now in his early seventies. He has never been abroad; his work is firmly rooted in the city he has loved all his life. His poems are mostly quite short, so I have given two which are connected as they both reflect his childhood and focus on his mother. The second shows how his mainly straightforward style can be suddenly sharpened by a twist of syntax – here, the omission in line 4 of words to the effect of “she poured”, which quicken and dramatize the image.

Vianello’s first English selection, Time of a Flower, translated by Richard Burns, was Anvil’s first publication in 1968. His new, bilingual Selected Poems, with additional translations by Peter Jay and Linda Lappin, appeared in 2008 as part of Anvil’s 40th anniversary celebration.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

Cold Spell

November 17, 2008April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Back from the grave my mother chills the air
as she used to. “It wasn’t like that at all,” she says,
speaking from a frosted pane on the stairs.

She shakes herself into her shape – quite
a feat after nineteen years under ground:
“You know I did my best for you, despite

the sacrifices – which I gladly made,”
almost as if now dead she spoke her mind,
who in this life left much she meant unsaid.

My childhood passed as if she wasn’t there.
What I remember most was her blank face
turned to the window, empty as the air.

There are many things I am tempted to say
like: “Yes, but you always lied” or “You never asked
what I thought and wouldn’t listen anyway”,

but I half believe the claim because I know
how tenderly I felt at first for her flesh
that winter underneath its ice tattoo.

But now it is the season of stone-hard ground
and she is back again in modern dress,
a new lilt to her voice, more refined.

“Give me what I never had,” I say, and love’s
blast furnace barbecues my face. It’s still
not what I want but I can’t get enough

and slam out to the cold night, leaving you
your angry tears, to gulp the icy air
and breathe the distance as I used to do.

by Julian Turner

from Orphan Sites
Anvil, 2006
Copyright © Julian Turner 2006

This must have been a hard poem to write from the personal point of view, but it is done without over-dramatization and with not only great power but understanding and restrained feeling. Turner’s technical skill quietly reinforces what’s going on in the poem: you hardly notice them, but both the rhymes and the way that colloquial rhythms play against the metre are finely handled. It isn’t one of Julian Turner’s funnier poems, for sure (read the books for those), but it’s a compelling poem.

Julian Turner was born in Cheadle Hulme, near Manchester in 1955. He lives in Otley, West Yorkshire, and works for the mental health charity Mind. His first collection Crossing the Outskirts appeared in 2002 and Orphan Sites, his second, came out in 2006.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

Edgar

July 1, 2008April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

(i.m. Edgar Bowers, 1924-2000)

A few things that recall you to me, Edgar:

A stately 80s Buick; hearing a car
Referred to by a coaxing sobriquet—
“Now come on, Captain, don’t you let me down.”
French spoken in a conscious southern accent;
An idiom calqued and made ridiculous
(“Eh, mettons ce spectacle sur le chemin”).
“Silly,” dismissive in its deep contempt,
“Oh, he’s a silly; an amiable silly,
But still a silly.” Or the words I first
Encountered in your captious conversations,
“Tad”, “discombobulated”, “catawampus.”
The usage that you gave me once for “totalled”—
“Oh cruel fair, thy glance hath totalled me.”

Most recently, in Cleveland’s art museum,
The French medieval tapestries brought back
Your unabashed reaction to their beauty,
And how, for once, you’d stood there almost speechless,
Examining Time’s Triumph inch by inch,
Enraptured by its richness, by the young man
Proud in his paradisal place, until
You saw what his averted gaze avoided—
The old man, beaten, bent double by fate’s blows,
Driven from youth’s charmed, evanescent circle:
And how you’d wanted to be sure I’d seen him.

by Dick Davis

rom A Trick of Sunlight
Anvil, 2007; Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006
Copyright © Dick Davis 2006

This poem in memory of the American poet Edgar Bowers is from Dick Davis’s seventh collection. Unfashionably perhaps, Davis rejoices in the traditional tools of rhyme and metre, though this poem is a slight exception with its unrhymed, conversational address to the dead friend. His poetry has been applauded by Thom Gunn, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht among others. Its wit, intelligence and grace often (and startlingly) achieve an immediacy and rawness of vision.

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England. He is a professor of Persian at Ohio State University. He has also published translations of prose from Italian and poetry and prose from Persian. His previous collection, Belonging, was chosen by The Economist as a Book of the Year.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

To the Boy Elis

June 16, 2008April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Elis, when the blackbird calls in darkest wood,
This is your destruction.
Your lips drink the cool of the blue rock-spring.

When your brow softly bleeds, forsake
Ancient legends
And dark readings of the flight of birds.

But you walk with soft steps into the night
Where purple grapes hang thickly
And you move your arms more gracefully in the blue.

A thorn-bush sounds
Where your moonlike eyes are.
O how long, Elis, have you been deceased.

Your body is a hyacinth
Into which a monk dips his waxen fingers.
Our silence is a black cave

From which at times a gentle beast emerges
And slowly lowers heavy eyelids.
Black dew drips onto your forehead,

The last gold of decayed stars.

by Georg Trakl, translated by Margitt Lehbert

Margitt Lehbert’s deft and attentive translations of Trakl’s poems and her introduction to The Poems of Georg Trakl are a fine guide to a poet now regarded as among the most original of the twentieth century. Surreal, expressionist and starkly beautiful, his poems responded to his own pain and to the traumas of the First World War with work of unique depth and power. Although he is a complex and difficult poet in many respects, he translates well into a complex and difficult English.

Born in Salzburg, Austria, he lived from 1887 to 1914, mainly in Vienna. He died after a drug overdose in a military hospital in Krakow, Poland. Margitt Lehbert has translated Elizabeth Bishop, Carol Ann Duffy and Les Murray for German publishers, and Sarah Kirsch into English for Anvil. She lives in southern Sweden where she runs a small press, Edition Rugerup.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

Muriel

May 27, 2008April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We are sorting her chest of drawers—
This for me, This for you, This was so much hers—
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’
We are meeting the jaunty lawyer
And signing his forms and discussing the weather.
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

She used to play cards at this table,
Now it’s covered with cake-crumbs after the funeral.
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’
We wash cups in the broken sink
And it’s time to go and she rings me. ‘I think
I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

And now it’s winter and snow,
She’s no light, she’s no heat, she is ill, did I know
She’ll never have a friend like that again?
She spent Christmas with cousins, she died there.
I cannot remember her face, but I hear
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

by Ruth Silcock

This is from Ruth Silcock’s third collection. She brings a sharp yet compassionate eye for the oddities of human behaviour to her poems about the extraordinary lives and deaths of ‘ordinary’ people: children, senior citizens in residential homes, doctors, orphans, nurses, grannies, social workers at a dance. A lifetime’s accumulated wisdom, and the experience gained during her career as a social worker, enrich these cheerful poems that frequently address uncheerful subjects such as ageing and death.

Born in Manchester in 1926, Ruth Silcock studied at Girton College, Cambridge before devoting herself to social work. She has written several children’s books. Anvil has published her previous collections, Mrs. Carmichael (1987) and A Wonderful View of the Sea (1996).

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

The Third Way

April 7, 2008April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We set out early, riding through the day
on the broad summer roads of Logres,
yet further out from Camelot
the paths grew narrower, & woodland nearer.
Approaching the borders of the other land,
one of us – or sometimes more – would start,
glimpsing some dream-creature among dim trees,
very close now; no more familiar wolf & boar,
but faun or centaur would appear for a moment,
then flick away into the undergrowth, leaving us
uneasily wondering whether to doubt
or to speak. It was difficult here to see birds,
and they seemed changed, and knowing.
We came with falling night
to the place where three ways meet,
the Road against Reason,
the Road without Mercy,
the Road without a Name.

And the third way brought us here,
to the Waste City;
demons that obeyed the enchanter Virgilius,
giants, or worse, must have built the nodding walls,
the vaulted palace and huge towers
whose ruin is our silent home;
we cannot read its inscriptions
or decipher its mosaics;
the images of Emperor & City are distorted
as by a witch’s mirror or pack of cards;
we find no living soul here
but ourselves, who cannot leave.

by Sally Purcell

Sally Purcell is an unusual poet and it is not easy to choose a single representative poem by her. She published four main collections of poetry and prepared the last of them just before her final illness at the age of 54. This poem, like so many of hers, draws on folklore and mediaeval sources. Her poems have a dramatic tension, are fluid in rhythm and diction, and alive with a sense of the numinous. Anvil published her Collected Poems, edited by Peter Jay and with an introduction by Marina Warner, in 2002.

Sally Purcell was born in Bromsgrove, Worcs in 1944. She studied French and Provençal at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and continued to live and work in Oxford (as typist, barmaid, researcher and, above all, writer) until her death in 1998.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

The Potter’s Field

February 18, 2008April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

or A Wanderer’s Song

Since I am a stranger, since I am a guest,
Bury me in the Potter’s Field, that which is called
The field of blood. Here is calculated
The utility of a kiss on a bearded
Cheek, by night, beneath the olives,
In the smoky light of torch and legend.
He who lies there will lie forever
Between the hanged and the crucified
And moulder in frightful balance.
Bury me in the Potter’s Field,
Because it was bought, in the words of the book,
To bury strangers in. Wayfarers, rovers
Lay claim to it: those who seek
Peace in movement, security in rootlessness,
Are otherwise suspicious, and usually keep
Their silence, if not always about the same;
Their shadows are dusty from the road
And a little denser than most—
So bury me with my shadow:
The weeds will grow blacker in the Potter’s Field.

by Ivan V. Lalic, translated by Francis R. Jones

Translated poetry is sometimes regarded as a second-hand or inferior form of poetry, but in the hands of an imaginative translator as close to the poet and the poetry as is Francis Jones, one feels that the poems might well have been written originally in English. And Lalic himself, a Serbian with idiomatic English who translated a lot of English poetry into Serbian, thought that Jones’s translations were a perfect mirror of his poems.

This poem is from what is possibly Lalic’s finest collection, published in Jones’s translation in 1989. It needs no comment and is a good example of Lalic’s marvellous work. He was born in 1931 and died in 1996. Anvil hopes to publish his Collected Poems in English in 2008.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.