R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 7

Song

In the first frame you stretch for the sky.
You are sure you can touch it,
Even though you are six and may have to jump.
It is so blue today that you wonder why
It doesn't drip onto the trees as it bleeds
Into the Penobscot and flows out to sea.

In the second frame it is pink rose evening.
You sit on a patio. Your lover is far away
And probably will not tell you about the girl
He met in Prague. He still loves you, friends say,
But you know he is like the sky,
Even by stretching you cannot hold him.

In the third frame you sleep.
Stars wink through whisps of cloud.
You have had many lovers
And written two books of poetry,
About how life is like a sky.

You have never seen a sky as blue
Or as certain as the one you saw at six.
You cannot say this man or that man means anything.
You no longer think that by stretching
You can take love from the sky.
It is too high and changes too quickly
And while we dream changes us.

Rukhsora Among the Virtues

"O man, what is good? or what is required of thee, but to do justice, love, mercy," (Micah 6.8)


I want Justice in the street
and in my salad: for my moods
riding south, the light music
of drums and guitars on Sanibel,
and in the evening, assurance
that you have remembered
again to disappoint me.

I want Mercy in the city
and from the lips of those
whose tears flowed from my guile;
and in the twilight a callow
repose from all responsibility--
an immunity from forgiveness,
for having craved and got
the comfort of regret.

I want Love in my book
and in your unconceited eyes,
read backwards from end to mystery,
love as the frustration of a boy
who cannot sort the tangled strings
of his old Guignol (put hectically
in the basement trunk a year ago.)
Love as something that comes fàster
to the heart, but lives on paper.

23 May 2019

Das Unbekannte

I am familiar, familiar
like the dull hum
of the swirling fan
you have learned
to ignore, familiar.
But you are Africa, 
Al Andalus and Babylon
and the Tigris running.
You are incense burning,
slicing the hot days into
vapours of dizzy grace,
the taste of gingered
coffee, cardamom, 
crushed eucalyptus
to my unknowing soul,
a voice lost between
weeping and rejoicing-- 
like the tears of sacrifice, 
Abraham shed hearing,
he imagined, God’s forbidding voice.
You are young lambs in spring
bleating songs of tentative praise.
Not speaking the word stranger
Calling me without speaking..

Because we are closer

--you have the right to be still,
as every word I say pushes
like the hands of a tomten
at the gates of what I feel.
He is s not seen, but never far away,
and his presence is as certain
as what stands between us.
The words he speaks flame like candles
in a warm house set in the cold places.

This ancient guardian who was with me
as a child: he is yours now.
He craves to be invisible, and known,
speaks in his tongue eloquently of love,
buries his words in shafts of darkness,
and covers his tracks in perfect snow.

He speaks while you are dreaming,
makes promises and praises your eyes
in a language of frozen quiet.
And when you wake, you will know
that the words came anyway
and you knew them before you woke.

You have the right to be still
in the dark nights
that remind me of the darkness
of your hair. The northern quiet
is full of this meaning, and I will lie
thinking like the rain of what
I might say to be visible and known
to you, as you lie silently
inside the gates of what I feel.

Evening Song from Hansel and Gretel

Abends, will ich schlafen gehn,
vierzehn Engel um mich stehn:
zwei zu meinen Häupten,
zwei zu meinen Füßen,
zwei zu meiner Rechten,
zwei zu meiner Linken,
zwei die mich decken,
zwei, die mich wecken,
zwei, die mich weisen
zu Himmels Paradeisen!

In the evening when I sleep
Fourteen angels doth me keep:
Two at my head
Two at my feet
Two left. Two right
Two tucking the sheet
Two to tell me when to rise
Two to lead me to paradise.
(R. Joseph Hoffmann)

Spring Song on Ile de Chien

Something close to spirit--
a word, perhaps,
or lavender dripping in the wind
or the eremite leaf
that tips the limb
and points conspicuously to Easter.

Our words are sometimes soft,
sometimes glisten,
sting like medusae
unrooted by a murdering wave
and roll southward drowning
towards the leeching sand:

Unsung protoplasm.
vein and tentacle undulating
in the island sun.

So to the terrified child
who hardens at the words:
tender, we will say,
hopeless
dying by seconds--
Their residue is beauty,
silver shining underfoot,
slow and ephemerally hot.

R Joseph Hoffmann
Harvard University, 1978

A German Blouse

At the start I think 'I must hurry'--
Only time for goodbyes
Not flat or rounded sentences
To remind me of your voice
(And voices are accomplices to lies)
I hurry to escape the noise.

I will spend the next two months
In your tears, or in your memory,
Never far from your shadow at evening
Or your morning footsteps. No island
Holds us for long, no waves
Pause from walloping the ledges:
What lasts needs imagination,
Because time swallows the immortal gods.

Meanwhile the stars do nothing:
The same that lit Jacob on his way
Shone insouciant on his dead children
in Polish ditches.
They do nothing, Do not judge
Or know what time is, or when to hide.

I hurry past you against the tide,
Afraid of a beginning,
Wanting from your softness
What rocks, waves, islands
Even stars cannot provide.

Rilke at Nineteen

Wandelt sich rasch auch die Welt
wie Wolkengestalten,
alles Vollendete fällt
heim zum Uralten.
Über dem Wandel und Gang,
weiter und freier,
währt noch dein Vor-Gesang,
Gott mit der Leier.
Nicht sind die Leiden erkannt,
nicht is die Liebe gelernt,
und was im Tod uns entfernt,
ist nicht entschleiert.
Einzig das Lied überm Land
heiligt und feiert.

The world reshapes itself
Like any cloud,
Whatever is completed
Returning home to its old self.
But soaring above Change and Passing.
Wider--freer---
Sounds thy prelude,
The god upon his lyre.
We do not understand pain
Nor have we learned love
And what keeps us from death
Is not revealed .
Only the Song above the grave
Sanctifies and brings joy.


(tr. Joseph Hoffmann)
________________________________

Rilke has been a victim of dynamic translation since his death. The problem of any translation is that the translator sometimes imposes meanings on words absent in the original and sometimes misses meanings deliberately in the the pursuit of euphony. Rilke was a lyric poet whose images were rooted deep in mythology, religion, and history. You have to read him from inside his head before you can choose what English equivalents are best suited to convey the total sense of a line. Here is a stab at improving on some awful renderings of a a section of Orph. sonnet XIX.

Gloss for Edward Taylor

"What tender love is this in chilly form,
In manner chilly see." (Edward Taylor, Harvard College, 1671)

Purpose to act,
this child will show
God beneath the weather.
Slip we may,
Groceries relinquish to the slush
(Satan’s byway)

But pure white him
On whom we fuss,
Immaculate like snow new fallen.
And his breath blisters us unmasked
Drives backward to the pursuing villain;
And riddles our way with fact.

(Harvard College, 1979)

To Find You

I came back to find you,
expecting you were waiting at Osh,
your mother distracted by a souvenir
of your father's other wife,
you skipping out with a lie and kisses
promising not to be late but holding
me in a dull park until you were full
of my words and an oath to return--
Promise tomorrow you said: Promise
you will come at six -- now you can go.

Searching for you
was like looking for the perfect snowflake,
for you were everywhere
and nowhere, the argent ring
your grandmother thrust at you
with a shackled whisper, never to lose it
as she pressed it into your
chapped and slender hand.
Never you said to her (at fourteen);
but then, after a month, at a birthday party,
you traded it for a box of mints.

I took the measure of your age.
I looked for you at every crosswalk, turn,
pushing through airports, searching queues
for Vienna, Moscow, Petrograd.
I returned hoping
there was a balcony in Bishkek where
you were coughing over a swig of Tequila.
"I will find her thin and unchanged",
Remembering the woman who sold us seats
To Aida at twice the local price
when she heard my accent,
and the day you stood in front of my chair
and would not let me twirl away,
locking me in your mad stare
until you could be certain of my sad love.
.
I cannot find you. You are evensong
sung by the ghosts who possessed you.
After failed unhappy days every night
is a closed shop, a taxi lumbering home,
me nodding in the back without you,
a park without lovers or oaths.

I sniff the air like a wolf thrown off track
by his beautifully feathered wolfen
prowling the potted tar of Asanbai,
towards Edgars, in and out of snow,
next to the Marx-Engels bronze,
remembering those last days without you--
silent, deathly, fearsome, pale--
the thwarted contrition, bloody vengeance,
hands beating errors on my chest,
a code without appropriate loving words
Oh my single white rose, braid, and ring.