Status Updates From Modern European Poetry

(Benn)...In his tense, songlike, strongly rhythmic, almost (but not quite) "beautiful," sometimes severely parodistic poems, studded with neologisms, he has raised a latter-day Darwinian literature, so to speak, to its loftiest artistic level. With bitter mockery and an absolute ethics he attacked everything idiotic, "Bolshevist," everything smacking of artificially and sanctimoniously postulated "human freedoms"

(Gottfried Benn)...his work was aimed at the annihilation of the rational, causal, logical world. He performed autopsies on history and man's intellectual heritage as he did on the bodies which we see in his earliest poems. Artistically his goals became "the transmutation of words" and "the creation of a new lyrical syntax"...

Gottfried Benn

Looking at the world through his microscope he saw man as creature, "a poor braindog, draped and encumbered by God," and found that man's genius had brought him...total dissolution. For the poet the only answer to this was the work of formative, expressive artist. Clearly the so-called world of reality was not the true one. Benn's concern from the first was not the empirical but the metaphysical...

The Wind Is Quiet

The wind is quiet, lord of the oldest keening,
Shall I be the last to arm myself for the dead?
Already the fire is memory only and ashes
And sound of a wing folded, and sound of a face dead

Are you willing to love only iron of the grey water
When the angel of your night will come to close the harbor
And shed in the motionless water of the harbor
The last flickers of light caught in the dead wing?

Yves Bonnefoy p.88-94

Lovely intro to Bonnefoy on p.88

Includes: Theatre, Another Voice, Thus We Will Walk, The Wind Is Quiet, The Iron Bridge, Here, Still Here,

Translators: Galway Kinnell & Jackson Mathews (The Wind is Quiet, The Iron Bridge, Here, Still Here)

Festival of the Moon

He went away to find the lands where white
Sobs of demonic rivers overflow
His mouth was open to the cosmic snows
He held the image that he loved so tight
His body by itself cast two shadows

The night of the sea pressed his open eyes
The man glided down the slopes of day
The dead man drank from the ocean's lips
And lived again because he had known love

Robert Sabatier p.82-87

Includes: The Boatmen, Festival of the Moon, Mountebanks, Vegetal Body, Mortal Landscape, The Voyages, Living Light

,b>Claude Vigée p.75-81

Included poems: The Enemy of Spring, The Cosmic Comedian, The Phoenix of Mozart, Blues, Chorale in December, Song, April, Epiphany - all translated by Patricia Terry

René Char p. 67-74

The Rampart of Twigs (translated by Jackson Mathews)

-This poem is crazy. I'm not sure what it means but it's entertaining.

"Young men, choose the dew of women, their lunatic cruelty to which your violence and your love can retort, rather than the dead ink of pen-murderers. Be swift muscular fish, keep to the rapids."

Robert Desnos

The is great commentary on the poet on p.54

In spite of the quite extraordinary diversity of his work, it has an unmistakable unity of tone which seems, according to René Bertelé, to prove Desnos' assertion that a poet during his lifetime elaborates one great poem, of which only fragments can be brought to consciousness.

Jacques Prévert p.48-53

Of No Age by Paul Eluard translated by Patricia Terry

The sky will be growing larger
We were tired
Of living in sleep's ruins
In the low shadow of rest
Of fatigue of relaxing

The Earth will assume the shape of our living bodies
We will force ourselves on the wind
The sun the night will pass into our eyes
And never change them

~This is favorite~

We Have Made The Darkness Ours by Paul Eluard

translated by George Reavey

...

I laugh still at the haughty woman
You treat like a sorry beggar
At the madmen you respect and the simple folk in whom you revel
And in my head that softly blends with yours and with the night
I marvel at the strange semblance you assume
A strange woman that resembles you that resembles all I love
And is always new

**Paul Eluard p. 28-34**

Like a long-haired dog who grips between his jaws
His little one almost dead, and fights the seafoam.
But closer now the foam of the abyss. . .
The universe around me utters a cruel sigh,
And the deep gorge of the sky rises.
Since all rejects me here, and even dream,
What could this realm, empty of land, promise?

Ah! even in death I have trouble sleeping,
I want to make forever a bit of now;

The Grief of the Dead
...

Of panic-stricken hopes and abrupt memories -
What use in the sky is a heart which carries on
As if still under the sun, and can't learn how to die.
Have you seen my eyes wandering in this place
Where the near and far alike refuse all shore;
Blind and without a cane or strength or faith,
I seek a body, the one I had before.

Metamorphosis in Blood

While you put on new hands so cruelly
My last sad skin needs no analysis;
I grope in vain toward metamorphosis
In silence where assassins multiply

Hungry for each other and eating our fill
To extinction, what's morose has come to die
At our feet. Sinners! Watch the endless trial
Where a rose takes the stand to testify

French Poetry: p 1- 94 Jules Supervielle p. 13-20

Includes poems: Prophecy, Flame Tip, The Wake, Regretting the Earth, The House Surrounded, Metamorphosis in Blood, The Poet, The Raindrop, The Grief of the Dead, The Survey, You Disappear all translated by Patricia Terry

Look up translations for L'Enfant de la Haute Mer, Gravitations, les Amis inconnus, La Fable du Monde, & his surrealist novel L'Homme de la Pampa

He must recreate poetry when he translates; he must be a poet at the moment of translation...To say further that the poem should not "read as translation" seems in a way to be denying the dark deed. But by this we mean that the poem in translation should read as a good poem in English. As soon as awkward compromises of misguided literalness are made, the translator is unfaithful to the quality of the original.

Willis Barnstone provided a lovely introduction to this anthology, in his trademark understated style. At the very bottom of the last page of the introduction he writes:

*The most serious and painful omission is that of the Greek poet from Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy, who, for reasons of copyright, could not be included.

I can almost feel his pain from this omission. I really like this introduction by W. B.

Six years in the making, this volume represents the combined efforts of eight editors and literally dozens of translators. In the process of preparing this book, thousands of poems were read and considered. The work of virtually every European poet in the languages represented was considered...The result is a singular monument to the glories and varied splendors of some of the greatest poetry of our time.

My hands scoop up a storm of lightning, boulders,
strident axes thirsting, hungering
for catastrophes.
I want to dig the earth up with my teeth.
I want to scrape the dirt off bit by bit
with sharp and burning teeth
I'll hollow out this pit until I find you,
kiss your noble head, ungag your mouth,
and bring you back to life.
Back to my orchard and the fig tree where
your soul will brush its wings
-Miguel Hernandez

Your spotless soul,
your lazy essence of an
angel! Hot as flame
your ear of a tigress
rests against my cheek.
The fiery
flower lies tattered in the gardens.
You finger the branches. And dive
in a thicket of shade, in love
with the dark

Leonardo Sinisgalli