The translator thanks Heri Lesmana Hardjo and Indrawati Gunawan for their help and advice, and acknowledges the German translations of W. A. Braasem and Janheinz Jahn, published in Reis und Hahnenschrei, an anthology of Indonesian poetry, (1957) and Ulli Beier’s translations from the German, published in the chapbook Only Dust (1969).
I Fill the Earth With My Song…
I fill the earth with my song
I stab mankind with my plea
for alms
a cup of hope
a bowl of love
because the land
where the sun’s lament is over
and the cock has stopped its crowing
is not far
the street is lonely
as a cemetery
but far from it
because this dying
is a guttersnipe
who taunts the passers-by
I fill the earth with my song
I stab mankind with my plea.
I Once Knew a God…
I once knew a god
we played together
drinking cordial eating cake
now god is gone
did he run away?
I saw him in the treetops
a mist descended in search of god
then carried him up
to the stars
god is happy there
drinking cordial eating cake
but here the trees shed tears of blood
and curses rain from the sun
a thousand gods howl in the sky.
Beloved
Yes I know
you are a bottomless sea
a place where silvery fish
satisfy their hunger with time and space
until only shells are scattered about.
Night Butterfly
Your lips are soft and moist
like a doormat trodden
by a thousand joyous feet
rushing into the chamber of lust
whose walls are smothered with dust
only dust.
It’s Time…
It’s time
the moon is nodding off
in its blue chair
let’s go
don’t look back
jackals are already devouring our tracks
filling the sky with footsteps and dust
making virgins tremble in lonely beds
awakening gales
hurry
before heaven closes its gate
before we shrivel to ash.
LUCRETIUS
Translated by Emma Gee
We know almost nothing about Lucretius, except a story, probably made up centuries after his life, that he drank a love potion, went mad and died before putting the final gloss on his work, his De rerum natura, ‘On the Nature of the Universe’, written c.55 BC. It is a poem, in six books of Latin hexameters, which explains every aspect of the world through two components only: atoms and void. Its physical system encompasses everything, from the quantum to the very large; from the identity of the human self to the physics of colour.
Lucretius’ work is not abstruse or irrelevant. Its immediacy is breathtaking: science is an urgent task; religion can and should be critiqued with glorious abandon; we must rethink the lies and delusions we shore our lives up with. He speaks to us as much as to his Roman audience – challenges us, makes us hoot with laughter, provokes indignation, shame, anxiety. This is not so much because we see the embryo of our own contemporary thought in him, although this is also true; but because we still feel.
Lucretius’ text was transmitted to the modern age by the slenderest of threads. The text disappeared between antiquity and the Middle Ages, until its rediscovery in 1417. There’s little doubt that, though the historical and physical connection between us and Lucretius is so exiguous, his impact on Western culture is one of nuclear ferocity.
This is not a translation, although I have consulted Lucretius for every word and agonized over every hexameter, with an awareness of the issues Classical scholarship brings to the text. Where there is metaphor in the text I have often replaced it with my own, contemporary image; where there’s visual wordplay with letters, or soundplay with phonemes, as there frequently is, I have aspired to equivalence in visual texture or sonority, not necessarily in translation. I have retained Lucretius’ ‘formulaic’ repetitions, but not slavishly. I have resisted the urge of English to dissolve into iambic pentameters, and tried to convey the roughness of Lucretius’ sound-world.
Atoms Are Eternal
atoms live forever
though their colours are expressed in different weaves
things don’t unravel
until they meet with that degree of tearing
balanced to their weft.
even then they don’t degrade to nil –
everything just resolves
into its Primary Parts.
the raindrops Father Sky scatters
in the womb of Mother Earth –
these seem to die
but then we see
the shining spikes of crops
prick though the land;
the neon green of foliage
lights up the branches
the trees stoop down to give us fruit –
us and the beasts.
from this source we see cities
put forth their flowers of children
from here the woods’ uncurling fronds
sing all about with voices of new birds;
herds make a lying-place in crushed grass
tired of schlepping their fat about
and leave a stamp of themselves
upon the richness of their fodder
their tight udders a snowy freefall of milk drops
from this source too their newborn calves
lurch across green velvet fields
on crazy limbs, trying to play,
high on milk too pure for their tiny minds.
of everything we see
nothing perishes foundation-up:
it’s all about exchange of matter
nothing dies that doesn’t gift a life.
Venus
Imagine there’s a god
a goddess even
let’s call her the Goddess of Love
no Botticelli Venus climbing out of a shell
but Nature – anarchic Aphrodite;
she builds things up then kicks them
down again like an angry toddler.
the selfish gene, the pleasure principle
she fills to brim the ship-enduring sea
crop-heavy earth; coaxes every living thing
beneath the sliding signs of heaven
to leap into the light.
the clouds scud escort when she comes
Architect Earth throws down the red carpet
the mirror sea blinks back the smiling sky.
she flings the veil from day’s Spring face
shoots down the little birds midair
each one a sounding bell
struck through the heart
the whole dawn chorus a reckless
cascade of notes tumbling
mi-re-do
down from above.
bent on increase she
goads every species wild or tame
to buck the winter off
cross seas and mountains
ford foamy rivers
follow where libido leads
in an orgy of replication.
you too: she’ll flatter you
into thinking you’re in love; seduce you
with cottonwool clouds and lambs
lull you with soft summer –
then she’ll say: ‘Think you can come at me
with your dragnets and carbon footprint?
I’ll truss your machismo up
and crack your neck till you beg for mercy.’
can this dominatrix turn
&n
bsp; our wars to love? of course, for she rules all:
without her no sun would ever rise
above the holy borderlands of light.
she’s the god I’d call
to beat my song’s bronze gong:
the tart who starts the music,
turns the stars, turns you on.
Time
Time has no existence of its own
outside our need for order:
what’s done in time past
what begs our attention now
which result will follow.
time is a human fabrication:
it has no abstract life
apart from things in rest and things in motion.
history’s an illusion
an accident of nature
whether on a global or a village scale:
world wars, genocide
the Scandals of the Old House –
be careful these don’t take on
the lives of characters
in an historical drama
living in the here-and-now:
these events were products
of specific times, specific races
now (thank god) consigned to
death’s oblivion.
History is a Trojan Horse of the mind:
it infiltrates walled cities
and fans the flames of war
by stealthy parturition of ideas.
we allow ourselves to be seduced
by history’s illusion like a love-story:
it’s kindled in our hearts no less
than a lover’s face in an adulterer’s breast.
we like to think there’s more to life
than bodies moving about in space:
but in reality
there is no possible reconstruction
of any momentary union of Void and Body
events we can base ideas on
such as justice, love or peace:
just the chance coalescence of the past.
Win
Think about phenomena whose only explanation
is the behaviour of unseen particles.
first among these is wind.
wind’s whirling lashes white horses
swoops on ships
rips clouds like kids pull fairy floss apart
other times
it builds up to a rant from threatening mutter
courses plains, a lethal spinning cone
or winds about the woods
and when it leaves
the hills are dressed in matchstick tresses
like Mount St Helens
just by force of air.
wind’s matter, dark to sight
sweeps like a massive broom
the sea, sweeps earth, sweeps
the clouds of heaven even,
snatching them in sudden eddy -
wind is like a river
only one you can’t see.
its unseen forces
proliferate destruction by impulse
just as when water’s gentle nature
suddenly turns nasty
when rain upstream
brings about a personality shift
a mountain-fed apocalypse
measuring its water pressure in tens of tons
grabs whole chunks of forest, little islands
with mini plantations riding on them
grinds boulders in its way
like ball bearings
then hurls them down
a lethal Niagara
brushes ancient bridges aside
with a dismissive gesture
and spreads destruction’s effluent everywhere.
gusts of wind have to behave the same:
with the same muscle as a river
they fall upon locations at their whim
propel things before their breath’s rocket thrust
snatch them up when impulse takes them
in a great spinning cone which walks the earth
poised in gravity-defying slow motion
while at its core a hungry vortex
whirls too fast for the eye to see.
with equal force
my reiterated hammer-blows of proof
break open wind’s matter dark to sight
and so we see it engaged in underhanded emulation
of acts which in rivers are overt.
CAITLÍN MAUDE
Some time ago, I was invited to give a lecture on Irish language poetry at the Irish Writers’ Centre. As I read, one poem in particular took me by surprise – ‘Aimhréidh’ by Caitlín Maude. It’s a poem that I’ve loved for years, but I had always read it silently, alone. I looked out to the audience and noticed that some people were weeping. Maude’s poetry assumes a greater poignancy due to what we know of the poet’s life – that she died of cancer at the age of just 41, leaving bereft a husband, a young son, family and friends, and many admirers of her work.
Caitlín Maude was a writer who loved Dublin, and felt creatively nourished by all the rush and noise of the city. That night, as I walked past pubs, taxis and chippers, I felt her walk with me. I had been awarded a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and just before I left, I was told by a friend of Maude’s that she, too, had visited in the last year of her life. I spent many mornings reading and translating Caitlín’s poems to English, and thought of her often as I sat at my desk and gazed out at Annamaghkerrig Lake. She, too, must have looked at that glassy surface during her stay.
A versatile artist, aside from her work in literature, theatre, and politics, Caitlín Maude is perhaps best known for her music. She was a gifted singer in the traditional sean-nós style, and in recordings, her voice lilts high as a lark. We are fortunate to be left with the legacy of Caitlín’s poems, this beautiful echo of her life. Across the decades, her words sing to us, still.
My gratitude to Caomhán Ó Luain, Caitlín’s son, who gave permission last year for these translations to be published.
Driving the Cattle
It is neither watercress
nor food
bitter undertooth
this cud
which I chew fiercely
this fitting taste of my days
’hup! Ya bitch, hup!
if it was the right gap
you wanted to avoid
on you go then my dear, onwards,
a day of long grass stretches kindly for you
I chew keenly
of my bitter cud
until I empty
I chew until
the lustrous saliva fills
to teeth
and the spittle
I cast out fiercely.
A ripe bulk
of berries sweetens
along the path.
Captivity
I am an animal
a wild animal
from the tropics
celebrated far and wide
for my beauty
once
I’d shake the forest trees
with my roar
but now
I lie down
and stare through one eye
at that solitary tree over there
people come in their hundreds
every day
who would do anything at all
for me
except release me.
Poem
We live from day to day
with ‘more’ and ‘less’
death and life
it is not a petty smell
the smell of death
but the smell of life
is an immense smell
it’s a small constriction
the constriction of death
but too great a catch in the throat
is the deep emotion of lif
e
A Spell of Work
Hand me a hammer
or a hatchet
that I might smash
and batter
this house
that I might make a threshold
of the lintel
and floors of the walls
that all the sod-scraw
and roof and
chimney would come down
with the strength of my sweat
Now, hand me over
the boards and the nails
till I build
this other houss…
But oh Lord, I am tired!
SAKYIL TSETA
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi
Sakyil Tseta is a poet and essayist, from the town of Rebkong in north-eastern Tibet and a member of the Third Generation, a new group of Tibetan poets and writers constituting a new literary movement centered around the border town of Xiling (Xining in Qinghai) at the edge of the Tibetan plateau. These writers write primarily in Tibetan as opposed to Chinese. Sakyil published his first piece in a literary magazine run by the local monastery, and since then he has published his work in all four of the Third Generation anthologies of contemporary Tibetan writing. ‘Rebkong’ was published in March 2013 on the popular and prestigious online journal Gedun Chopel. The poem is an ode to the poet’s hometown Rebkong, which has a hallowed place in the Tibetan consciousness – it has produced many of Tibet’s most famous scholars and writers and is known for being a literary and intellectual cradle. This poem is a celebration and assertion of, and also mourning for, Tibetan identity, culture and history.