Forche, Carolyn [Forché];
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness
W.W. Norton, 1993, 812 pages
ISBN 0393033724, 9780393033724
topics: | poetry | anthology
One of my favourite anthologies, illustrating the power of extreme situations to bring out the surge of emotion that distills into poetry.
[cummings served in WW1, where he refused to hate the
germans. perhaps because of such views, was arrested
and imprisoned along with a number of others, in a
large room; basis for his work an enormous room,
which describes the inmates in the room - many of whom
were imprisoned just because they couldn't speak
french, and many others who were outright insane.
a rebel both in life and in poetic form, olaf has a lot of cummings
in him. ]
XXX
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"
straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"
our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died
Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
p.121 Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meows, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
[considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th c. after revolution, husband fought in civil war for the white russians; after their defeat, fled to prague. not liked among exiles because she admired Mayakovsky's poetry (considered pro-Soviet). despite official disapproval, returned from exile in 1939. Daughter imprisoned, husband killed by secret police. evacuated from moscow w her son in 1941, committed suicide. Poems to Czehchoslovakia protests the Nazi conquest. p.124]
A white low sun, low thunderclouds' and back
behind the kitchen-garden's white wall, graves.
On the sand, serried ranks of straw-studded forms
as large as men, hang from some cross-beam.
Through the staked fence, moving about, I see
a scattering: of soldiers, trees, and roads;
and an old woman standing by her gate
who chews on a black hunk of bread with salt.
What have these grey huts done to anger you,
my God? and why must so many be killed?
A train passed, wailing, and the soldiers wailed
as its retreating path got trailed with dust.
Better to die, or not to have been born,
than hear that plaining, piteous convict wail
about these beautiful dark eyebrowed women.
It's soldiers who sing these days. O Lord God.
Better to die, or not to have been born,
than hear that plaining, piteous convict wail
about these beautiful dark eyebrowed women.
It's soldiers who sing these days, O Lord God.
[tr. David McDuff and Jon Silkin]
-- VI
[tr. Elaine Feinstein]
They took quickly, they took hugely,
took the mountains and their entrails.
They took our coal, and took our steel
from us, lead they took also and crystal.
They took the sugar, and they took the clover
they took the North and took the West.
They took the hive, and took the haystack
they took the South from us, and took the East.
Vary they took and Tatras they took
they took the near at hand and far away.
But worse than taking paradise on earth from us
they won the battle for our native land.
Bullets they took from us, they took our rifles
minerals they took, and comrades too:
But while our mouths have spittle in them
The whole country is still armed.
-- VIII
[tr. Elaine Feinstein]
What tears in eyes now
weeping with anger and love
Czechoslovakia's tears
Spain in its own blood
And what a black mountain
Has blocked the world from the light.
It's time--It's time--It's time
to give back to God his ticket.
I refuse to be. In
the madhouse of the inhuman
I refuse to live.
With the wolves of the market place
I refuse to howl.
Among the sharks of the plain
I refuse to swim down
where moving backs make a current.
I have no need of holes
for ears, nor prophetic eyes:
to your mad world there is
one answer: to refuse!
[1938]
[tr. Mary Maddock] You, walking past me, not toward my dubious witchcraft -- if you only knew how much fire, how much life, was wasted and what heroic passion there was in a chance shadow, a rustle... and how my heart was incinerated expended for nothing. O train flying in the night, carrying away sleep at the station... though I know that even then you wouldn't know -- if you knew -- that's why my speeches are abrupt in the perpetual smoke of my cigarettes -- in my lighthaired head-- how much dark and menacing need!
[tr. Mary Maddock] --I ... In my melodious city cupolas burn, and a vagrant poet sings of the bright cathedral I give you my chiming city, Akhmatova! and my heart. --II I hold my head and think
I hold my head and sing in this late hour, at daybreak. The furious wav3e that hurled me into its spindrift! I sing of you, you -- alone like the moon in the sky! You swoop down like a crow into my heart, hooknosed, piercing clouds. Your anger is deadly, like your approval.
[his last poem, may be considered his suicide note]
[from At the top of my voice, tr. George Reavey]
Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I'm in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And as they say, the incident is closed.
Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.
[Notes to this poem, from Bedbug and other poems
tr. George Reavey and Max Hayward.
[After Mayakovsky's suicide on April 14, 1930, this poem was found,
untitled, among several pages of scribbled lines in his notebook. It
is presumed to be either a continuation of At the top of my voice or
part of the projected lyrical introduction to that poem. M used the
middle quatrain ("And as they say... hurts." as an epilogue in his
suicide note, except he changed the line, "Now you and I are quits" to
"Now life and I are quits".
In the suicide note he also included a further wordplay- he altered the
sentence "incident is closed" ischerpan, to read isperchen -
suggesting "the incident is too highly peppered", hence spoiled. ]
Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;
What silly beggars they are to blunder in
And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—
No, no, not that, — it's bad to think of war,
When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it's been proved that soldiers don’t go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.
Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand.
Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen,
And you’re as right as rain...
Why won’t it rain?...
I wish there’d be a thunder-storm to-night,
With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,
And make the roses hang their dripping heads.
Books; what a jolly company they are, 15
Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,
Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green,
And every kind of colour. Which will you read?
Come on; O do read something; they’re so wise.
I tell you all the wisdom of the world
Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet
You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,
And listen to the silence: on the ceiling
There's one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;
And in the breathless air outside the house
The garden waits for something that delays.
There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,—
Not people killed in battle,—they’re in France,—
But horrible shapes in shrouds — old men who died
Slow, natural deaths,—old men with ugly souls,
Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.
You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You’d never think there was a bloody war on!...
O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft ... they never cease—
Those whispering guns — O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop — I’m going crazy;
I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.
I. Wednesday on a barge and you Saturday like a flag the days have crowns like kings and dead men lissome as a kiss my hand rests on chained foreheads A child cries for her doll and we'll have to start over again Monday and Tuesday cold-blooded four Thursdays off from work II. a thread unravels a shadow falls a butterfly exploded chrysalis or glow worm III Who mounts the storm a balloon honey or silver moon Four by four Let's look for the children the parents of children the children of children the bells of springtime the beginnings of summer the regrets of autumn the silence of winter an elephant in his bathtub and the three sleeping children singular singular tale tale of the setting sun [trans. Paulette Schmidt]
It is perfectly natural for the sun to shine initially in the upper lefthand corner of the first page of this book. Brilliant Sun! At first, an exclamation of joy and in response the acclamation of the world (even through tears, but it makes them shine). There is every reason to believe (curious expression) that we are inside of the sun; or at least inside of the system of its power and its love. The day is the pulp of a fruit, the sun is the pit. And we, drowned in this pulp like its imperfections, its spots, its defects. We are symmetrical in relationship to its center. Its rays envelop us, run past us, and then go on to play far ahead. Night is the spectacle, the consideration; but the day is a prison, the forced labor of the sky. This star is pride itself. The only instance where pride is justified. Satisfied by what? Satisfied with itself, dominating everything. Everything created is lit by it, warmed by it, recreated by it. "The sun dispels the clouds, recreates them, and then goes through the rider, without even using all its strength..." (La Fontaine, Phoenix and Boreas). Brusquely, the flashes of light and heat together blanch the outside of the sails. But in the long run, cold currents of water in the bath always win out. The animates a world which it had first damned to extinction: it is then only a feverish or agonizing animation. In the last stages of its rule, it creates human beings capable of contemplating it; then they die, altogether, and yet they remain as spectators (or escorts). The sun, animating, lighting what contemplates it, plays a psycho- complicated game with it, flirts with it. At times, its nozzle inundates us, at times, only the roof or a large window. In the great barrel of the sky, it is the radiant bung, often enveloped in a rag of dull clouds, but always humid, so powerful is the interior pressure of the fluid, so impregnating its nature. At the moment of his death, Goethe saw the bung give way and the fluid (pure and dangerous) spurt out, and he said, "More light." That may indeed be death. Dazzling sea-urchin. Clew. Dented wheel. A blow of the fist. Tomahawk. Bludgeon. Here, the first and last are all mixed up. Drums and drumbeat. Every object finds its place between two rolls of the drum. [trans. Serge Gavronsky]
p.333
I sink into bed
on the first Monday after Pentecost
and bless myself
since I'm not a Christian
Yet my ears still wander the sky
my eyes keep hunting for underground water
and my hands hold a small book
describing the grotesqueness of modern white society
when looked down at from the nonwhite world
in my fingers there's a thin cigarette-
I wish it were hallucinogenic
though I'm tired of indiscriminate ecstasy
Through a window in the northern hemisphere
the light moves slowly past morning to afternoon
before I can place the red flare, it's gone:
darkness
Was it this morning that my acupuncturist came?
a graduate student in Marxist economics, he says he changed
to medicine to help humanity, the animal of animals, drag
itself peacefully to its deathbed
forty years of Scotch whiskey's roasted my liver and put me
into the hands of a Marxist economist
I want to ask him about Imperialism, A Study --
what Hobson saw in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century
may yet push me out of bed
even if you wanted to praise imperialism
there aren't enough kings and natives left
the overproduced slaves had to become white
Only the nails grow
the nails of the dead grow too
so, like cats, we must constantly
sharpen ours to stay alive
Only The Nails Grow - not a bad epitaph
when K died his wife buried him in Fuji Cemetery
and had To One Woman carved on his gravestone
true, it was the title of one of his books
but the way she tried to have him only
to herself almost made me cry
even N, who founded the modernist magazine Luna
while Japan prepared to invade China
got sentimental after he went on his pension;
F, depressed
S, manic, buildds house after house
A has abdominal imperialism: his stomach's colonized his legs
M's deaf, he can endure the loudest sounds;
some people have only their shadows grow
others become smaller than they really are
our old manifesto had it wrong: we only looked upward
if we'd really wanted to write poems
we should have crawled on the ground on all fours --
when William Irish, who wrote The Phantom Lady, died
the only mourners were stock brokers
Mozart's wife was not at his funeral
My feet grow warmer as I read
Kotoku Shusui's Imperialism, Monster of the Twentieth Century, written back in 1901
when he was young N wrote "I say strange things"
was it the monster that pumped tears from his older eyes?
Poems are commodities without exchange value
but we're forced to invade new territory
by crises of poetic overproduction
We must enslave the natives with our poems
all the ignorant savages under sixty
plagued by a surplus of clothes and food-
when you're past sixty
you're neither a commodity
nor human
trans. Christopher Drake
--biography
RYUICHI TAMURA (1923-1998). Influential post-WWII Japanese poet. Founded the
path-breaking magazine Arechi (The waste land) in 1947. Members of
poetry groups in Japan have a membership fee, which helps pay for the poetry
collections -- not considered dishonourable... Edited the annual anthologies
Waste land poetry from 1951 to 1958 with work by Nobuo Ayukawa, Toyoichiro
Miyoshi, Saburo Kuroda, Masao Nakagiri, Taro Kitamura, Koichi Kihara - ; the
group came to be known as the Arechi group. Their poetry is marked by a
sense of bleakness and pessimism tinged with desperation, loaded with images
of desolation from the post-war years.
His Kotoba no nai sekai ("World without words", 1962), established
him as a major poet.
bio: wiki
bio and poems: poetryinternationalweb
review of Arechi group by Yoko Sugiyama, Comparative Literature
journal, 1961 : http://www.jstor.org/stable/1769001:
The titles of the poems sugggest the nature of Arechi poetry:
"The Age of Illusion," "Empty City," "To a
Precipice,". "Winter," "Inside and Outside."
trasnlator Takako Lento on his early poems
[bio: Aleksander Wat (1900-1967). Polish Jewish family. Studied philosophy
at U. Warsaw, publ a first book of poems 1919. Committed leftist;
arrested for editing communist magazine. 1939 fled Warsaw into
Soviet Russia, but arrested there and sent to many prisons including
thhe dreaded Lubyanka in Moscow. After release in 1941, insisted on
retaining his Polish citizenship, for which he was arrested again.
Returned to Poland 1946 but was silenced by the Communist govt until
the post-Stalinist thaw when a book of poems publ 1957. Lived in
Europe and US till his suicide 1967.
Work is a blessing,
I tell you that, I -- professional sluggard!
Who slobbered in so many prisons! Fourteen!
And in so many hospitals! Ten! And innumerable inns!
Work is a blessing.
How else could we deal with the lava of fratricidal love towards fellow men?
With these storms of extermination of all by all?
With brutality, bottomless and measureless?
With the black and white era which does not want to end
endlessly repeating itself da capo like a record
forgotten on a turntable
spinning by itself?
Or perhaps someone invisible watches over the phonograph? Horror!
How, if not for work, could we live in the paradise of social hygienists
who never soak their hands in blood without aseptic gloves?
Horror!
How else could we cope with death?
That Siamese sister of life
who grows together with it -- in us, and is extinguished with it
and surely for that reason is ineffective.
And so we have to live without end,
without end. Horror!
How, if not for work, could we cope with ineffective death
(Do not scoff!)
which is like a sea,
where everyone is an Icarus, one of nearly three billion,
and, besides, so much happens all around us
and everything is equally unimportant, precisely, unimportant
although so difficult, so humanly difficult, so painful!
How then could we cope with all that?
Work is our rescue.
I tell you that -- I, Breughel the Elder (and I, for one,
your modest servant, Wat, Alexander) -- work is our rescue.
[Sain-Mande, July 1956]
tr. Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan
tr. Greek Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard p.490
An odd, reclusive man, Cavafy worked in the Department of
Irrigation, Alexandria, Egypt. [from intro bio by Forche]
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Constantine Cavafy (Konstantinos Kavafis) lived an uneventful life whose bareness attests not only to the poet's withdrawal from public life, but also hints at the esoteric quality of his verse. Described by E. M. Forster, one of his most ardent admirers, as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing at a slight angle to the universe," Cavafy was a solitary individual with a cosmopolitan heritage... from Yianna Liatsos' article on Cavafy in Facts-on-File Companion to World Poetry. Cavafy's first volume of collected poems (the 154 poems that constitute his "canon" to this day) was not published in Greece until 1935, two years after his death. His daily life was the humdrum routine of working at an uninteresting job, living simply at the home he shared with his mother, Haricleia, and having few intellectual associations, but Cavafy dedicated his afternoons and evenings to the pursuit of pleasure — studying literature, history, and archaeology, working on his poetry, and pursuing secretive and transitory homosexual affairs. Between 1891 and 1904 Cavafy completed several prose works, including an editorial written in English and published in Rivista Quindicinalen that argued for the return by Britain of the "Elgin Marbles," removed in 1806 from the Parthenon in Athens.
A formative voice in modern Turkish poetry. Contrary to the rhymed
stylization of traditional turkish poetry, he introduced free verse
and colloquial diction. As a communist, he was subject to persecution
both under allied occupation (till 1922), and also in Kamal Atarurk's
newly liberated Turkey, where the communist party was banned. He
would be repeatedly arrested. In 1938 (in the last year of Ataturk's
presidency) he was arrested for inciting rebellion in the Turkish
army. The charges were that his 1935 long poem, "The Epic of Sheik
Bedrettin." about a 15th c. peasant rebellion against Ottoman rule,
was subversive and were corrupting military cadets. He was sentenced
to twenty-eight years.
His friend Pablo Neruda relates Hikmet's account of how he was treated
after his arrest:
Accused of attempting to incite the Turkish navy into rebellion,
Nazim was condemned to the punishments of hell. The trial was
held on a warship. He told me he was foced to walk on the ship's
bridge until he was too weak to stay on his feet, then they stuck
him into a section of the latrines where the excrement rose half
a meter above the floor. My brother poet felt his strength
failing him: my tormentors are keeping an eye on me, they want to
watch me suffer. His strength came back with pride. He began to
sing, low at first, then louder, and finally at the top of his
lungs. He sang all the songs, all the love poems he could
remeber, his own poems, the ballads of the peasants, the people's
battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. And so he vanquished
the filth and his torturers.
He spent much of his adult life in prison. A change in government
after elections in 1950 enabled his amnesty. A year later, after two
attempts on his life, he escaped to the Soviet Union, where he died
in 1963.
He never got the wide international recognition in his life (he won
Russia's International Peace Prize). But today, one of the leading
tr. turkish Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993) composed 1938 1 I carved your name on my watchband with my fingernail. Where I am, you know, I don't have a pearl-handled jackknife (they won't give me anything sharp) or a plane tree with its head in the clouds. Trees may grow in the yard, but I'm not allowed to see the sky overhead... How many others are in this place? I don't know. I'm alone far from them, they're all together far from me. To talk anyone besides myself is forbidden. So I talk to myself. But I find my conversation so boring, my dear wife, that I sing songs. And what do you know, that awful, always off-key voice of mine touches me so that my heart breaks. And just like the barefoot orphan lost in the snow in those old sad stories, my heart -- with moist blue eyes and a little red runny rose -- wants to snuggle up in your arms. It doesn't make me blush that right now I'm this weak, this selfish, this human simply. No doubt my state can be explained physiologically, psychologically, etc. Or maybe it's this barred window, this earthen jug, these four walls, which for months have kept me from hearing another human voice. It's five o'clock, my dear. Outside, with its dryness, eerie whispers, mud roof, and lame, skinny horse standing motionless in infinity
outside, with all its machinery and all its art, a plains night comes down red on treeless space. Again today, night will fall in no time. A light will circle the lame, skinny horse. And the treeless space, in this hopeless landscape stretched out before me like the body of a hard man, will suddenly be filled with stars. We'll reach the inevitable end once more, which is to say the stage is set again today for an elaborate nostalgia. Me, the man inside, once more I'll exhibit my customary talent, and singing an old-fashioned lament in the reedy voice of my childhood, once more, by God, it will crush my unhappy heart to hear you inside my head, so far away, as if I were watching you in a smoky, broken mirror... 2 It's spring outside, my dear wife, spring. Outside on the plain, suddenly the smell of fresh earth, birds singing, etc. It's spring, my dear wife, the plain outside sparkles... And inside the bed comes alive with bugs, the water jug no longer freezes, and in the morning sun floods the concrete... The sun-- every day till noon now it comes and goes from me, flashing off and on... And as the day turns to afternoon, shadows climb the walls, the glass of the barred window catches fire, and it's night outside, a cloudless spring night... And inside this is spring's darkest hour. In short, the demon called freedom, with its glittering scales and fiery eyes, possesses the man inside especially in spring... I know this from experience, my dear wife, from experience... 3 Sunday today. Today they took me out in the sun for the first time. And I just stood there, struck for the first time in my life by how far away the sky is, how blue and how wide. Then I respectfully sat down on the earth. I leaned back against the wall. For a moment no trap to fall into, no struggle, no freedom, no wife. Only earth, sun, and me... I am happy.
tr. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk
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
[...]
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
We are born with dreams in our hearts,
looking for better days ahead.
At the gates we are given new papers,
our old clothes are taken
and we are given overalls like mechanics wear.
We are given shots and doctors ask questions.
Then we gather in another room
where counselors orient us to the new land
we will now live in. We take tests.
Some of us were craftsmen in the old world,
good with our hands and proud of our work.
Others were good with their heads.
They used common sense like scholars
use glasses and books to reach the world.
But most of us didn’t finish high school.
The old men who have lived here stare at us,
from deep disturbed eyes, sulking, retreated.
We pass them as they stand around idle,
leaning on shovels and rakes or against walls.
Our expectations are high: in the old world,
they talked about rehabilitation,
about being able to finish school,
and learning an extra good trade.
But right away we are sent to work as dishwashers,
to work in fields for three cents an hour.
The administration says this is temporary
So we go about our business, blacks with blacks,
poor whites with poor whites,
chicanos and indians by themselves.
The administration says this is right,
no mixing of cultures, let them stay apart,
like in the old neighborhoods we came from.
We came here to get away from false promises,
from dictators in our neighborhoods,
who wore blue suits and broke our doors down
when they wanted, arrested us when they felt like,
swinging clubs and shooting guns as they pleased.
But it's no different here. It's all concentrated.
The doctors don’t care, our bodies decay,
our minds deteriorate, we learn nothing of value.
Our lives don’t get better, we go down quick.
My cell is crisscrossed with laundry lines,
my T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks and pants are drying.
Just like it used to be in my neighborhood:
from all the tenements laundry hung window to window.
Across the way Joey is sticking his hands
through the bars to hand Felipe a cigarette,
men are hollering back and forth cell to cell,
saying their sinks don’t work,
or somebody downstairs hollers angrily
about a toilet overflowing,
or that the heaters don’t work.
I ask Coyote next door to shoot me over
a little more soap to finish my laundry.
I look down and see new immigrants coming in,
mattresses rolled up and on their shoulders,
new haircuts and brogan boots,
looking around, each with a dream in their heart,
thinking they’ll get a chance to change their lives.
But in the end, some will just sit around
talking about how good the old world was.
Some of the younger ones will become gangsters.
Some will die and others will go on living
without a soul, a future, or a reason to live.
Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes,
but so very few make it out of here as human
as they came in, they leave wondering what good they are now
as they look at their hands so long away from their tools,
as they look at themselves, so long gone from their families,
so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed.
Jimmy Santiago Baca's life is an amazing story. After being deserted
by his parents at age two, Baca hardly attended school, and learned
to read and write while in solitary confinement in jail on drug
charges. He wrote some poems and sent a few poems to Denise Levertov,
who began mentoring him. This poem is from his first book, 1977.
Gray-blue shadows lift shadows onto an oxcart. Making night work for us, the starlight scope brings men into killing range. The river under Vi Bridge takes the heart away like the Water God riding his dragon. Smoke colored Viet Cong move under our eyelids, lords over loneliness winding like coral vine through sandalwood & lotus, inside our lowered heads years after this scene ends. The brain closes down. What looks like one step into the trees, they’re lifting crates of ammo & sacks of rice, swaying under their shared weight. Caught in the infrared, what are they saying? Are they talking about women or calling the Americans beaucoup dien cai dau? One of them is laughing. You want to place a finger to his lips & say "shhhh." You try reading ghost talk on their lips. They say "up-up we go," lifting as one. This one, old, bowlegged, you feel you could reach out and take him into your arms. You peer down the sights of your M-16, seeing the full moon loaded on an oxcart. from Dien Cai Dau (1988)
[one of my most powerful poems in the selection. The images
of the casual tourist is set off against the inhuman conditions
very powerfully.]
explore the beauty of our land
discover where the sun shines
where shadows linger eternally
where peace sits ready to walk away
where wild game waits to sniff at your presence
and scamper away
discover the lie of our mountain humps
where low and where high
the drakensberg and its inns
where the tugela falls and then flows
and gives rise to a rich promise
by all means make these discoveries
but don't be in haste
to climb
to tumble
and to pronounce
discover the vast empaty spaces
that go a-begging for settlement
and the silence in between
where the taste of seasoned waters
can bewitch the mind and make one
succumb to a blabbering of sorts
discover these spaces and feel excited
but don't be amazed
they are rushed by some
they are rationed by others
yet they are crowded by none
discover the many nations of our land
for ours is the land of tribes
the afircan
the english
the afrikaner
the coloured
the indian
the jew
and etc, etc, and etc
discover that we are far from being an ignorant people
for ours is a land of many tribal universities
where many read unbiased tribal newspapers
for ours is the land of the sabc
the guardian of modern-day twists
discover the thirst of our wonderful land
and the hungered mind fed on human experiments
discover the love that is there
sitting awake waiting to be used
and the hate
that swells and flows as it feeds on fear
and when the feet begin to ache
blisters about to burst
and when the ears begin to itch
the hearing wounding the soul
don't grumble
don't groan
discover how people distrust one another in the room
discover how people talk round the point
discover how people are made to live a lie
and when the flesh begins to twitch
feeling failing to unknot a fear
and when the eyelids begin to whistle
teas those tears
squeeze
but don't cry
and when you feel the pain begin to understand
how i sink it at times
in sweetened streams that flow my way
and when you marvel at how i fall on knees to pray
take it you are right
you haven't begun to understand how i was made before
time was
discover the hope that lives with despair
discover the rats gnawing at this hope
discover the concern of all non-tribal people
discover the land that has gone sulky to a vision
Links
* bio: wiki
* poems: http://southafrica.narod.ru/engels/sepamla.htm
(see also, his "To Whom it may Concern")
[page nums added to http://isbndb.com/d/book/against_forgetting/library/198.html]
Introduction
Acknowledgments
Siamanto (1878--1915) 55 Grief The Dance Vahan Tekeyan (1878--1945) 59 Forgetting Prayer on the Threshold of Tomorrow Dream The Country of Dust
Edward Thomas (1878--1917) 66 The Owl Guillaume Apollinaire (1880--1918) 67 Shadow Post Card The Little Car Stanzas Against Forgetting Gottfried Benn (1886--1967) 71 Monologue Fragments Siegfried Sasson (1886--1967) 75 A Working Party The Death-Bed Repression of War Experience Georg Trakl (1887--1914) 79 A Romance to Night Downfall In the East Grodek Wilfred Owen (1893--1918) 81 Dulce et Decorum Est Anthem for Doomed Youth Exposure e.e. cummings [Edward Estlin] (1894--1962) 84 (The Stalin Epigram Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance Leningrad I was washing outside in the darkness Marine Tsvetayeva (1892--1941) 124 A white low sun from Poems to Czechoslovakia You, walking past me from the cycle Akhmatova Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893--1930) [Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky] 129 |from At the Top of My Voice Past one o'clock Daniil Kharms (1905--1942) 135 Symphony No. 2 The Beginning of a Beautiful Day (A Symphony) An Event on the Street Natalya Gorbanevskaya (1936-- ) 137 Sukhanovo Joseph Brodsky (1940-- ) 141 The Berlin Wall Tune To Urania Elegy Irina Ratushinskaya (1954-- ) 145 `Try to cover your shivering shoulders' `But only not to think'
Antonio Machado (1875--1939) 150 Rainbow at Night Coplas Today's Meditation Federico Garcia Lorca (1898--1936) 152 Little Infinite Poem Rundown Church The Quarrel Casida of Sobbing Rafael Alberti (1902-- ) 157 The Warlike Angels Punishments The Angels of the Ruins Wystan Hugh Auden (1907--1973) 160 Spain 1937 September 1, 1939 Epitaph on a Tyrant Miguel Hernandez (1910--1942) 167 I go on in the dark, lit from within War Waltz Poem of Those in Love and Inseparable Forever July 18, 1936-July 18, 1938 Tomb of the Imagination Lullaby of the Onion
Gertrude Stein (1874--1946) 179 Scenes from the Door Max Jacob (1876--1944) 181 War In Search of the Traitor Moon Poem The Horrible Today Ezra Pound (1885--1972) 183 from Pisan Canto LXXIV H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886--1961) 188 from The Walls Do Not Fall 1, 2, 6, 9, 10 Saint-John Perse (Alexis Saint-Leger Leger) (1887--1975) 194 from Exile Yvan Goll (1891--1950) 197 Your Sleep The Last River Lackawanna Elegy Paul Eluard (1895--1952) 200 November 1936 Meetings Nazi Song Dawn Dissolves the Monsters To Her of Whom They Dream Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock) (1896--1963) 206 Waking For Robert Desnos Philippe Soupault (1897--1990) 208 Poems from Saint Pelagia Prison One o'Clock Condemned You Who Sleep Bertolt Brecht (1898--1956) 211 The God of War When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain From a German War Primer To Those Born Later The World's One Hope Benjamin Peret (1899--1959) 219 Hymn of the Patriotic War Veterans Nungesser und Coli Sind Verreckt 221 Francis Ponge (1899--1988) 222 The Sun as a Spinning Top (I) 222 The Silent World Is Our Only Homeland 223 The Water of Tears 226 The Prairie 227 Robert Desnos (1900--1945) 230 Ars Poetica 231 The Night Watchman of Pont-au-Change 233 Letter to Youki 237 Jacques Prevert (1900--1977) 238 Song in the Blood 238 Barbara 240 Salvatore Quasimodo (1901--1968) 242 19 January 1944 242 Man of My Time 243 To the Fifteen of Piazzale Loreto 243 Auschwitz 244 Stanley Kunitz (1905-- ) 245 Father and Son 245 Night Letter 246 The Last Picnic 248 Louis MacNeice (1907--1963) 249 Prayer Before Birth 249 Brother Fire 250 Troll's Courtship 251 Rene Char (1907--1988) 253 Argument 253 Unbending Prayer 254 Man flees suffocation 254 Leaves of Hypnos No. 128 254 Disdained Apparitions 256 Gunter Eich (1907--1972) 256 Inventory 257 Old Postcards 258 Geometrical Place 260 Seminar for Backward Pupils 262 Cesare Pavese (1908--1950) 263 August Moon 263 Words from Confinement 264 George Oppen (1908--1984) 265 Route 266 Anna Swir (Anna Swirszczynska) (1909--1984) 274 I Am Afraid of Fire 274 A Conversation Through the Door 275
(Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan) At five in the morning I knock on his door. I say through the door: In the hospital at Sliska Street your son, a soldier, is dying. He half-opens the door, does not remove the chain. Behind him his wife shakes. I say: your son asks his mother to come. He says: the mother won't come. Behind him the wife shakes. I say: the doctor allowed us to give him wine. He says: please wait. He hands me a bottle through the door, locks the door, locks the door with a second key. Behind the door his wife begins to scream as if she were in labor. We Survived Them 276 White Wedding Slippers 276 Stephen Spender (1909-- ) 277 Ultima Ratio Regum 277 Air Raid Across the Bay at Plymouth 278 Rejoice in the Abyss 279 Epilogue to a Human Drama 280 Dylan Thomas (1914--1953) 281 A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London Ceremony after a Fire Raid 282 Robert Lowell (1917--1977) 284 Memories of West Street and Lepke 284 Howard Nemerov (1920--1991) 286 Night Operations, Coastal Command RAF Models Ultima Ratio Reagan Erich Fried (1921--1988) 288 One Kind of Freedom Speaks Exile My Girlfriends What Things Are Called Janos Pilinszky (1921--1981) 293 Harbach 1944 Passion of Ravensbruck On the Wall of a KZ-Lager Frankfurt 1945 Ilse Aichinger (1921-- ) 296 Glimpse from the Past In Which Names Enumeration Louis Simpson (1923-- ) 298 The Runner Richard Hugo (1923--1982) 324 Napoli Again A View from Cortona The Yards of Sarajavo Anthony Hecht (1923-- ) 327 'More Light! More Light!' 'It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It' Denise Levertov (1923-- ) 329 Christmas 1944 Fragrance of Life, Odor of Death In Thai Binh (Peace) Province Weeping Woman Tamura Ryuichi (1923-- ) 333 My Imperialism October Poem Standing Coffin Spiral Cliff Alan Dugan (1923-- ) 340 Memorial Service for the Invasion Beach Where the Vacation in the Flesh Is Over On an East Wind from the Wars Portrait from the Infantry Ingeborg Bachmann (1926--1973) 343 Early Noon In the Storm of Roses A Kind of Loss Gunter [Wilhelm] Grass (1927-- ) 345 Music for Brass In the Egg Saturn Charles Simic (1938-- ) 349 Butcher Shop The Lesson Begotten of the Spleen Prodigy Toy Factory
Nelly Sachs (1891--1970) 361 O the Chimneys O Sister But Look You Gertrud Kolmar (1894--1943) 364 Judith The Sacrifice Miklos Radnoti [Miklós Radnóti] (1909--1944) 368 Forced March Letter to My Wife Peace, Horror Picture Postcards Seventh Eclogue Primo Levi (1919--1987) 373 Buna Shema For Adolf Eichmann Annunciation Voices Jiri Orten (1919--1941) 377 Whispered The Last Poem Paul Celan (1920--1970) 378 Night Ray Death Fugue There Was Earth Inside Them I Hear That the Axe Has Flowered A Leaf Tadeusz Borowski (1922--1951) 383 The Sun of Auschwitz Two Countries Project: Flag Dan Pagis (1930--1986) 385 Autobiography A Lesson in Observation Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car Draft of a Reparations Agreement Edith Bruck (1932-- ) 388 Childhood Pretty Soon Equality, Father Irena Klepfisz (1941-- ) 391 Bashert
Tudor Arghenzi (1880--1967) 408 Testament Psalm Aleksander Wat (1900--1967) 410 Before Breughel the Elder To Be a Mouse From Persian Parables Imagerie d'Epinal Vitezslav Nezval (1900--1958) 413 Walker in Prague The Lilac by the Museum on St. Wenceslas Square Prague in the Midday Sun Moon over Prague Jaroslav Seifert (1901--1986) 419 The Candlestick Never Again Vladimir Holan (1905--1980) 421 In the Yard of the Polyclinic Children at Christmas in 1945 Resurrection To The Enemies Peter Huchel (1903-1981) 426 Landscape Beyond Warsaw Roads The Garden of Theophrastus Psalm Attila Jozsef (1905-1937) 429 Attila Jozsef To Sit, to Stand, to Kill, to Die The Seventh Freight Trains Ondra Lysohorsky (1905-1989) 434 22.6.1941 At a Sunlit Window Ballad of Jan Palach, Student and Heretic Czeslaw Milosz (1911-) 437 Dedication A Task Child of Europe On Angels Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) 443 Kaunas 1941 Pruzzian Elegy Latvian Songs Elderblossom Tadeusz Rozewicz (1921-) 448 Massacre of the Boys Pigtail What Happens Questions about Poetry since Auschwitz Ion Caraion (1923-1986) 451 Song from the Occupation Time Remember The Enveloping Echo Tomorrow the Past Comes Ultimate Argument Wislawa Szymborska (1923-) 455 The Terrorist, He Watches Still Children of the Epoch Any Case Hunger Camp at Jaslo Once we knew the world well Zbigniew Herbert (1924-) 460 What I Saw Report from the Besieged City Painter The Wall The Trial Nina Cassian (1924-) 466 Temptation Vowel Horst Bienek (1930-) 467 Vorkuta Exodus Resistance Our Ashes Sarah Kirsch (1935-) 473 Legend of Lilja Pictures Mail Gojko Djogo (1940-) 477 The National Hero The Wooden Handle The Black Sheep Stanislaw Baranczak [Stanisław Barańczak] (1946-) 479 If China December 14, 1979: A Poetry Reading February 8, 1980: And No One Has Warned Me Tomasz Jastrun (1950-) 482 The Seed The Polish Knot Scrap Hat Jan Polkowski (1953-) 484 The world is only air I Don't Know That Man Noli Me Tangere
Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) 490 Waiting for the Barbarians The City George Seferis (1900-1971) 492 A Word for Summer The Last Day Our Sun Last Stop Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) 498 Letters from a Man in Solitary 498 Since I Was Thrown Inside 501 Things I Didn't Know I Loved 504 The Evening Walk Yannis Ritsos (1909-) 509 Unanswered Underneath Oblivion Audible and Inaudible Afternoon The Missing After the Defeat Not Even Mythology Odysseas Elytis (1911-1991) 513 Anniversary The March toward the Front The Autopsy The Sleep of the Brave
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984) 523 Once Again the Mind No Sign of Blood The Tyrant A Prison Daybreak
Edmond Jabes (1912-1991) 532 The Beginning of the Book The Book The Desert Notebook, II The Desert, II Fadwa Tuquan (1917-) 536 Face Lost in the Wilderness After Twenty Years I Won't Sell His Love Behind Bars, Sel Song of Becoming Abba Kovner (1918-1987) 542 What's Not in the Heart It's Late Potato Pie To Myself Yehuda Amichai (1924-[2000]) 548 Ibn Gabirol Like Our Bodies' Imprint God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children Two Songs of Peace If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem -- Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa'id) (1930-) 552 The New Noah Elegy for the Time at Hand A Mirror for the Twentieth Century Mahmoud Darwish (1941-) 562 Earth Poem We Travel Like Other People Prison Psalm 2
Cesar Vallejo (1892-1937) 570 The Black Riders The Rollcall of Bones Have You Anything to Say in Your Defense? Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) 573 The Dictators America, I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, in Caracas They Receive Instructions Against Chile Nicanor Parra (1914-) 579 Warnings Inflation Letters from the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair Sentences Modern Times Manifesto Claribel Alegria (1924-) 587 We Were Three From the Bridge Angel Cuadra (1931-) 594 In Brief Brief Letter to Donald Walsh (in memoriam) Heberto Padilla (1932-) 602 In Trying Times Nuclear Umbrella History Sometimes I plunge into the ocean ... Song of the Juggler Roque Dalton (1935-1975) 604 My Neighbor Love Poem Otto Rene Castillo (1936-1967) 606 Before the Scales, Tomorrow Apolitical Intellectuals Distances Ariel Dorfman (1942-) 613 I Just Missed the Bus and I'll Be Late for Work Last Waltz in Santiago Vocabulary Teresa de Jesus Proverbs Curfew The Flag of Chile
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) 625 Letter to the Academy Madrid - 1937 Let America Be America Again Richard Wright (1908-1960) 631 I Have Seen Black Hands Between the World and Me Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) 635 Breaking Open Thomas McGrath (1916-1990) 644 Nocturne Militaire Blues for Warren Go Ask the Dead Fresco: Departure for an Imperialist War The End of the World Daniel Berrigan (1921-) 654 My Name Prayer Rehabilitative Report: We Can Still Laugh Galway Kinnell (1927-) 656 Another Night in the Ruins Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) (1934-) 660 Incident Balboa, the Entertainer Political Poem Quincy Troupe (1943-) 663 Poem for My Father Boomerang: A Blatantly Political Poem Ray A. Young Bear (1950-) 667 The Song Taught to Joseph From the Spotted Night A Drive to Lone Ranger Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952-) 672 Immigrants in Our Own Land Like an Animal How We Carry Ourselves Oppression
Etheridge Knight (1931-1991) 681 The Idea of Ancestry A Poem for Myself To Make a Poem in Prison Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane Walter McDonald (1934-) 685 The Children of Saigon Christmas Bells, Saigon The Last Still Days in a Bunker John Balaban (1943-) 688 The Guard at the Binh Thuy Bridge News Update For the Missing in Action Yusef Komunyakaa (1947-) 691 Starlight Scope Myopia After the Fall of Saigon Boat People George Evans (1948-) 694 Revelation in the Mother Lode Eye Blade Bruce Weigl (1949-) 703 Burning Shit at An Khe The Way of Tet The Last Lie Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag James Fenton (1949-) 708 Cambodia Dead Soldiers Lines for Translation into Any Language
Es'kia Mphahlele (1919-) 716 A Poem Homeward Bound Dennis Brutus (1924-) 720 On the Island from Poems About Prison Under House Arrest Prayer Sipho Sepamla (1932-) 724 The Odyssey Measure for Measure Silence: 2 I Remember Sharpeville The Law That Says Wole Soyinka (1934-) 731 I Think It Rains Harvest of Hate Massacre, October '66 Civilian and Soldier Breyten Breytenbach (1939-) 735 Dar es-Salaam: Harbour of Peace Exile, Representative Journey First Prayer for the Hottentotsgod The Struggle for the Taal Jack Mapanje (1944-) 742 After Wiriyamu Village Massacre by Portuguese On His Royal Blindness Paramount Chief Kwangala On Being Asked to Write a Poem for 1979 Jeremy Cronin (1949-) 744 The Naval Base (Part III) Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang (A Person Is a Person Because of Other People) Group Photo from Pretoria Local on the Occasion of a Fourth Anniversary (Never Taken)
Bei Dao (1949-) 754 The Answer Stretch out your hands to me An End or a Beginning Resume Accomplices Duoduo (1951-) 760 from Thoughts and Recollections Wishful Thinking Is the Master of Reality At Parting Untitled Looking Out from Death.
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
--Bertolt Brecht
Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness collects poetry by
over 140 poets who, according to the anthology's editor Carolyn Forché,
"endured conditions of historical and social extremity during the twentieth
century — through exile, state censorship, political persecution, house arrest,
torture, imprisonment, military occupation, warfare, and assassination." By
gathering work that she defines as, "poetic witness to the dark times in
which they [the authors] lived," Forché intended Against Forgetting to reveal
the ways in which tragic events leave marks upon the imagination.
Against Forgetting is organized according to historical tragedy, starting
with the Armenian Genocide and proceeding through the twentieth century to
the pro-democratic demonstrations in China.
In the introduction, Forché bemoans the scarcity of material translated from
African and Asian literatures; however, in spite of this challenge Forché
assembles a diverse group of poets from five continents. Familiar voices from
America and Europe, like Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell,
Charles Simic, and H.D., mix with poets from Africa (Wole Soyinka and Dennis
Brutus), Asia (Bei Dao and Duoduo), the Middle East (Ali Ahmad Sa’id and
Yehuda Amichai), and Latin America (Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo).