Something Like That

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PARRA LAUGHS like he’s condemned to hell
but when haven’t poets laughed?
at least he declares that he’s laughing

they pass the years pass
the years
at least they seem to be passing
hypothesis non fingo
everything goes on as if they were passing

now he starts to cry
forgetting that he’s an antipoet.

00 00 00

MY CORPSE and I
understand each other marvelously
my corpse asks me: do you believe in God?
and I respond with a hearty NO
my corpse asks: do you believe in the government?
and I respond with the hammer and sickle
my corpse asks: do you believe in the police?
and I respond with a punch in the face
then he gets up out of his coffin
and we go arm in arm to the altar

00 00 00

THE TRUE PROBLEM of philosophy
is who does the dishes

nothing otherworldly

God
the truth
the passage of time
absolutely
but first, who does the dishes

whoever wants to do them, go ahead
see ya later, alligator
and we’re right back to being enemies

00 00 00

~Nicanor Parra~
(translation by Liz Werner)

Chronos

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In Santiago, Chile
The days are interminably long:
Several eternities in a day.

Like the vendors of seaweed
Travelling on the backs of mules:
You yawn – you yawn again.

Yet the weeks are short
The months go racing by
And the years have wings.

~Nicanor Parra~

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Nicanor Parra was a beautiful poet, often overshadowed by his more famous compatriot and comrade, Pablo Neruda.

Born in a small town of southern Chile in 1914, Nicanor Parra “has taught us – has forced us – to come to poetry with new eyes. More than that, he has made us look with new eyes at all the things of this world : airplanes and pencils, crankshafts and flies and pianos. He has redefined the poem in such a way as only a few have done. And in doing so he has redefined the world in which the poem is written and the hand that writes it …”

There was this one line in a poem I read by him as a teenager which has stayed with me forever

In America liberty is a statue

unfortunately, I just can’t seem to find the poem now.

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Skipping Without Ropes

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I will, I will skip without your rope
Since you say I should not, I cannot
Borrow your son’s skipping rope to
Exercise my limbs; I will skip without

Your rope as you say, even the lace
I want will hang my neck until I die;
I will create my own rope, my own
Hope and skip without your rope as

You insist I do not require to stretch
My limbs fixed by these fevers of your
Reeking sweat and your prison walls;
I will, will skip with my forged hope;

Watch, watch me skip without your
Rope; watch me skip with my hope –
A-one, a-two, a-three, a-four, a-five
I will, a-seven, I do, will skip, a-ten,

Eleven, I will skip without, will skip
Within and skip I do without your
Rope but with my hope; and I will,
Will always skip you dull, will skip

Your silly rules, skip your filthy walls,
You weevil pigeon peas, skip your
Scorpions, skip your Excellency Life
Glory. I do, you don’t, I can, you can’t,

I will, you won’t, I see, you don’t, I
Sweat, you don’t, I will, will wipe my
Gluey brow then wipe you at a stroke
I will, will wipe your horrid, stinking,

Vulgar prison rules, will wipe you all
The hop about, hop about my cell, my
Home, the mountains, my globe as your
Sparrow hops about your prison yard

Without your hope, without your rope,
I swear, I will skip without your rope, I
Declare, I will have you take me to your
Showers to bathe me where I can resist

This singing child you want to shape me,
I’ll fight your rope, your rules, your hope
As your sparrow does under your super-
vision! Guards! Take us for a shower!

~ Jack Mapanje ~

A Malawian poet.

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Aparna who introduced me to this poem had this to say “he was imprisoned by the malawian government for a while. the reason this poem is so dear to me is that it narrates the reselience of the human spirit even when faced with the worst of situations. imprison, kill, torture, demean, do whatver you want, but the human spirit never dies, never stops hoping and most importantly never burns out!”

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The Cat

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Again and again through the day

I meet a cat.

In the tree's shade, in the sun, in the crowding brown leaves.

After the success of a few fish bones

Or inside a skeleton of white earth

I find it, as absorbed in the purring

Of its heart as a bee.

Still it sharpens its claws on the gulmohar tree

And follows the sun all day long.

Now I see it and then it is gone,

Losing itself somewhere.

On the autumn evening I have watched it play,

Stroking the soft body of the saffron sun

With a white paw. Then it caught

The darkness in paws like small balls

And scattered it all over the earth.

~ Jibanananda Das ~

(translated by Lila Ray)

The Dictators

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An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence.

~Pablo Neruda~

(Listen to this song after reading this poem)

Sonnet XI

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I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

~Pablo Neruda~

(Thanks to Aparna for this poem)

XX

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Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write for example, ‘The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to a pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

~Pablo Neruda~

Paas Raho… (Stay Close)

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You who demolish me, you whom I love,
be near me. Remain near me when evening,
drunk on the blood of the skies,
becomes night, in one hand
a perfumed balm, in the other
a sword sheathed in the diamond of stars.

Be near me when night laments or sings,
or when it begins to dance,
its steel-blue anklets ringing with grief.

Be here when longings, long submerged
in the heart’s waters, resurface
and everyone begins to look:
Where is the assassin? In whose sleeve
is hidden the redeeming knife?

And when wine, as it is poured, is the sobbing
of children whom nothing will console-
when nothing holds,
when nothing is:
at that dark hour when night mourns,
be near me, my destroyer, my lover,
Be Near Me.
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This translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Paas Raho (Be Near Me), was posted by Aneed (profile at http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=15066736210512669981) in the Faiz community (thread at http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=70320&tid=2480337969859442245&start=1)

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I really like this poem and have tried to translate it myself earlier. But never with such success as the one posted above.

Faiz says “Tum mere paas raho, jab siyah raat chale, aasmano ka lahu pee ke siyah raat chale, marham-e-mushk liye, nishtar-e-almas liye”

and see here the effortless translation (first stanza) which reads well as a poem in its own right.

Whenever I read this poem in urdu i felt it so close to Neruda’s “Tonight I will sing the saddest lines” but it never seemed so in English when I was through with my attempts at translation. Here I feel Aneed, or whoever translated it, has succeeded. Congratulations!!

Read it softly, langourously; let the words roll for a while more on your tongue like mellow wine; savour this poem for it is among the best ever written.

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