A little spring poetry for a gray Sunday

[malsperanza]

Ezra Pound:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.



* * *
Nazim Hikmet:



Things I Didn't Know I Loved

it's 1962 March 28th
I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don't like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn't know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it
I've never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

and here I've loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can't wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you'll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I know this has troubled people before
and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before
and will be said after me

I didn't know I loved the sky
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard
the guards are beating someone again
I didn't know I loved trees
bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino
they come upon me in winter noble and modest
beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish
"the poplars of Izmir
losing their leaves. . .
they call me The Knife. . .
lover like a young tree. . .
I blow stately mansions sky-high"
in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief
to a pine bough for luck

I never knew I loved roads
even the asphalt kind
Vera's behind the wheel we're driving from Moscow to the Crimea
Koktebele
formerly "Goktepé ili" in Turkish
the two of us inside a closed box
the world flows past on both sides distant and mute
I was never so close to anyone in my life
bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé
when I was eighteen
apart from my life I didn't have anything in the wagon they could take
and at eighteen our lives are what we value least
I've written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I'm going to the shadow play
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather's hand
his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
with a sable collar over his robe
and there's a lantern in the servant's hand
and I can't contain myself for joy
flowers come to mind for some reason
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky
I didn't know I loved flowers
friends sent me three red carnations in prison

I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I'm floored watching them from below
or whether I'm flying at their side

I have some questions for the cosmonauts
were the stars much bigger
did they look like huge jewels on black velvet
or apricots on orange
did you feel proud to get closer to the stars
I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don't
be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract
well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to
say they were terribly figurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them
they are our endless desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad
I never knew I loved the cosmos

snow flashes in front of my eyes
both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind
I didn't know I liked snow

I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherry-red as now
in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors
but you aren't about to paint it that way
I didn't know I loved the sea
except the Sea of Azov
or how much

I didn't know I loved clouds
whether I'm under or up above them
whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts

moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois
strikes me
I like it

I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved
rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette
one alone could kill me
is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks
I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty
to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return

Nazim Hikmet
19 April 1962
Moscow
Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)


* * *

Conrad Aiken:


From A Letter from Li Po, part VIII

...Text into text, text out of text. Pretext
for scholars or for scholiasts. The living word
springs from the dying, as leaves in spring
spring from dead leaves, our birth from death.

And all is text, is holy text. Sheepfold Hill
becomes its name for us, anti yet is still
unnamed, unnamable, a book of trees
before it was a book for men or sheep,
before it was a book for words. Words, words,
for it is scarlet now, and brown, and red,
and yellow where the birches have not shed,
where, in another week, the rocks will show.
And in this marriage of text and thing how can we know
where most the meaning lies? We climb the hill
through bullbriar thicket and the wild rose, climb
past poverty-grass and the sweet-scented bay
scaring the pheasant from his wall, but can we say
that it is only these, through these, we climb,
or through the words, the cadence, and the rhyme? ...

... and we, Li Po, the man who sings, sings as he climbs,
transposing rhymes to rocks and rocks to rhymes.
The man who sings. What is this man who sings?
And finds this dedicated use for breath
for phrase and periphrase of praise between
the twin indignities of birth and death?
Li Yung, the master of the epitaph,
forgetting about meaning, who himself
had added 'meaning' to the book of 'things,'
lies who knows where, himself sans epitaph,
his text, too, lost, forever lost ...
And yet, no,
text lost and poet lost, these only flow
into that other text that knows no year.
The peachtree in the poem is still here.
The song is in the peachtree and the ear...

Conrad Aiken

Comments

[noblerot.livejournal.com]

Ezra Pound: The only fascist I ever (almost) loved...

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Pound aestheticizes, and Aiken intellectuallizes, but Hikmet seems like a lovely, balanced humanist. I had never heard of him before, and just did a quick Google search, read a brief history of his life. Thank you for introducing me to him. Are you a longstanding admirer?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Hey, Black Dog, whattup?

I found Hikmet about a year ago, I don't remember how. I don't know his work well, but what I have read I like very much.

Do you know the whole Aiken poem? (http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Conrad_Aiken/5718) I think it's a little better than that. Aiken isn't a great poet, but he has some wonderful passages here:

Exiled are we. Were exiles born. The 'far away,'
language of desert, language of ocean, language of sky,
as of the unfathomable worlds that lie
between the apple and the eye,
these are the only words we learn to say.
Each morning we devour the unknown. Each day
we find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,
a sunflower splendor of which none knows the source...

As for Pound, ah well, as Gaffer Gamgee says, If I could grow apples like that, I would call myself a gardner.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Hey yourself! High-fives you, then low-fives you, then on the side, than all that really annoying finger stuff that's really just messing with the other guy's head.

Didn't mean to dis Pound or Aiken, but just to find some principle of order in the triptych. As for the second Aiken passage: Now of course you've got my critical adrenaline going. The image of use/misuse of the gratuitous "sunflower splendor" is wonderful and chilling; I think the extravagant potential of days, and the sense of responsibility in living them adequately, can feel exactly like that. But the "exile" stuff that precedes it rings false for me, like a received idea used arbitrarily for portentious effect. Perhaps I have ears of clay.

As for Pound, I love his rhetoric, love the sound of his poems ("the tea-rose tea gown et cetera/supplants the mousseline of Cos . . .") And sometimes, at least for instance in the heavily anthologized Chinese "translations," the emotional effects are really stunning. But his meaning is tricky. The little imagist couplet I honestly find chilling -- beautiful but dehumanizing.

My, I'm being argumentative, aren't I? Only because it's fun, though.

Apart from that, not a lot up, doing ok, hope the same with you. I would mention that my copy of Howard's End has migrated from a pile to the short stack at my right hand, but you might fairly accuse me of being just a tease.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

*flashes sekrit gang signs in iambic pentameter*

Always glad of an excuse to read a few lines of poetry closely, and with a sharp ear...

We are exiles: It is, as you say, a truism, and all truisms ring a little hollow and taste a little cheap. Yet I will defend Aiken; I buy the sincerity of the feeling: he is trying to write about why the poems of an alien culture move him, and finding that Li Po is beyond him, remains alien. But what remains is the power of language itself, and what he and Li Po share is an exile from all but the essentials: beauty, desire, seeking. The liquor of Words.

Aiken has a nice way with a metaphor (as of the unfathomable worlds that lie / between the apple and the eye), but he is not quite master enough to overcome the echoes of Yeats, of Wordsworth, of Shakespeare and make poetry his own.

Each day we find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,
a sunflower splendor of which none knows the source.

Now Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

It is possible that Aiken is not merely imitating Wordsworth, but attempting to answer him. I like to think so.

Pound the imagist: Indeed, indeed, he lacks heart, he lacks sympathy; he lacks Eliot's immense compassion. He was not a divided man; at the end of the day he was as much a fascist in his poetry as his politics. But I will defend this couplet still: the ability to find the purely, inhumanly beautiful in an experience as relentlessly and unbeautifully human as the subway at rush hour is a rare skill. To render it with such transcendent clarity is a gift. I am willing, I suppose, to be reduced to Pound's pure, heartless apparition of the Platonic Beautiful. He has gotten me through my evening commute more than once.

But if you want an antidote to Pound's icy perfection, here is Dan Pagis's imagist answer to fascist perfectionism (though it is not exactly a spring poem):

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i . . .

(translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell, 1996)