The following poems are translations by Steven Heighton. The first, "Like a Man", is from The Address Book. The other three are from his collection Patient Frame.
LIKE A MAN
(Catullus)
Enough of this useless moping, Catullus,
it’s over, write it off.
Back then
when she was yours, the sun always shone
and you were on her like the sun,
insatiable, as she was, and she’ll
never have it so good again.
Always at her heels, her side, or
inside her, Catullus, and that was
fine, whatever you wanted she wanted
and the sun—there’s no denying it—
always shone.
Now she’s changed, gone cold,
and you’ll have to be the same—
not pitiful, like this, no whiner, idler,
sorry stalker, tavern fixture.
Take it like a man.
So here’s so long.
When Catullus makes up his mind, girl,
that’s it. He
won’t come haunting
your doorway, nights, like love’s hunched
beggar . . . but then again, who will?
Your nights will be as cold as his!
How will that suit you for a life?
Who’ll come to see you then? Who
flatter you on your looks, give you
what he gave you all the time, and
take you around, kiss you,
be your fan? And
you, girl—
who are you going to kiss,
yes, and bite. . .?
Ah, Catullus,
enough, you know it’s over.
And you’re taking it like a man.
REMORSE
Jorge Luis Borges
I stand guilty of
the worst sin any man
can commit. I’ve failed to be happy.
Let the glaciers
of oblivion
bear me off and
bury me—no pity.
My parents gave me
breath so I could leap
bare into life’s
daring, gorgeous game, and savour
the earth: its
rivers, winds and anthered fire.
I’ve defrauded
them. I wasn’t happy. The hopes
of their joining
lie squandered, my mind given
to such sterile
symmetries as these careful
lines—High Art,
weaving trifles from trifles.
They bequeathed me
courage. I was craven.
Yet I’m not alone,
for it’s always close by me,
this shadow of
having been a man of sighs.
SONG FOR SENNA’S EYES
J. E. Villalta
When I came
without Senna, her
name
surprised me,
surging from
my throat and
tongue—
how I loved the
shadows under Senna’s eyes.
And her thighs
clamped round my
ears
so that her flesh,
for an hour,
shut out the
world, I
loved the shadows
under Senna’s eyes.
And our mutely
sung
duet of tongue
on tongue, not in
staved
harmony but
unison—how I loved
the shadows under
Senna’s eyes!
Now with Senna
gone, my mind feigns
calm, but body
runs
in sleep to find
her,
as if not yet
resigned, nor ever—
how I loved the
shadows under
Senna’s eyes!
FRAGMENTS OF A VOYAGE
1
Gale-borne
toward new shorelines forever
in the
harbourless night, without pause, washed away—
on this ocean
of ages, why may we never
drop anchor for a single day?
2
Now the crewmen sit to their oars in order and slip
the cable from the bollard hole and heave backwards
so their oarblades chop at the swell and churn up water
while over the captain sweet sleep irresistibly
falls so fathomless and sound it might almost be the
sleep
of death itself.
And the ship like a team of stallions
coursing to the crack of the lash with hoofs bounding
high and manes blown back foamlike off the summits of
waves
lunges along stern up and plunging as the riven
rollers close up crashing together in her wake
and she surges on so unrelenting not even a bird
quick as the falcon could have stayed abreast. . . .
So she leaps on splitting the black combers bearing
a man who has suffered years of sorrow and turmoil
until his heart grew weary of scything a path home
through his enemies, or the furious ocean. . . .
3
A song I can shape you— my story of sailing
and travel sing truly— how often outlasting
struggle and hardship, heart-straining days
I bitterly abided and bore, in my sorrow,
full cargos of cares. I’ve known my hull cumbered
while surf in its seizures clawed at the ship’s prow
so I on the nightwatch was often tormented.
As we pitched athwart cliffs I, fettered by hoarfrost
and clamped to the deckboards, my feet in ice shackles,
felt only my heart hot with fear seething round it
while hunger gnawed outward consuming both body
and seawearied soul.
Landsmen know little
of their luck not to sail here, to rest on the shoreline,
while I, raked by sorrows on the icewater sea,
must outweather winters in regions of exile,
by kin uncompanioned, where
icicles dangle
and hail drives like iron, with nothing to hear except
seas in their heaving and the glacier wave.
At times the swan’s wail
I hold to my heart now; in lieu of men’s laughter
the clangour of gannets and curlew for laughter;
the mewing of seagulls for the drinking of mead.
4
At sea, storms hallowed my night-watches with joy;
lighter than a cork I danced over waves known
as the unceasing rollers of drowned men, ten
nights, never missing the vapid eyes of the quay-
lanterns in port.
Sweet as the tart flesh of green
apples to a child, the salt water seeped through my
pinewood hull, rinsed splotches of vomit and cyan wine
clean off me, tore my anchor and rudder away.
And ever since that time I’ve bathed in the poem
of the sea, steeped and milky with stars, guzzling
the green azures, where at times the ecstatic flotsam
of a drowned man, pale and pensive, will be sinking. . .
.
5
But those journeys had no harbours. As time passed
my crewmen seemed to merge with the oars—pulsing
dip and heft of oarlocked oars—their iced
or sun-seared features seeming to mirror
the painted prow’s stern features, while the waking
sea, athwart and astern, riled up by rudder
and sea-trowelling blade, gave back their likeness
too. Man by
man my Argonauts slipped to slumber,
left the benches empty. Each now rests ashore,
his final berth there marked by his oar.
And no one remembers their names. Justice.
1: Alphonse de
Lamartine; 2: Homer, from The Odyssey, Book XIII; 3: from The Seafarer (anonymous Anglo-Saxon), 4: Arthur Rimbaud, from Le
Bateau Ivre; 5: George Seferis, from “Argonauts”.
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