poetry for the soul
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » General Edinburgh
OT: well versed
(161 posts)-
Posted 7 years ago #
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Posted 7 years ago #
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We guess there must be edges
We hear of loosened hinges
We see this stylised rage
This performance
Are we to applaud?
Critique? Review?
Or quote anew, as on this page?Posted 7 years ago # -
I vote for door 4.
Antilamentation
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.- Dorianne Laux
Posted 7 years ago # -
Posted 7 years ago #
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@bax
Excellent misdirection. Had an in-head timewarp event caused by the nineties text followed by the Captain Scarlet intro.
Posted 7 years ago # -
@bax one of my friends up north played keyboards in The Shamen (he left before they were "famous" but he did get to play support to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Apparently they were "miserable [words]"). Now he's a music teacher and a pillar of the community.
Posted 7 years ago # -
This is the most painful thing I've read in a wee while:
Loch Thom
1
Just for the sake of recovering
I walked backward from fifty-six
Quick years of age wanting to see,
And managed not to trip or stumble
To find Loch Thom and turned round
To see the stretch of my childhood
Before me. Here is the loch. The same
Long-beaked cry curls across
The heather-edges of the water held
Between the hills a boyhood’s walk
Up from Greenock. It is the morning.And I am here with my mammy’s
Bramble jam scones in my pocket.
The Firth is miles and I have come
Back to find Loch Thom maybe
In this light does not recognise me.This is a lonely freshwater loch.
No farms on the edge. Only
Heath grouse-moor stretching
Down to Greenock and One Hope
Street or stretching away across
Into the blue moors of Ayrshire.2
And almost I am back again
Wading in the heather down to the edge
To sit. The minnows go by in shoals
Like iron-filings in the shallows.My mother is dead. My father is dead
And all the trout I used to know
Leaping from their sad rings are dead.3
I drop my crumbs into the shallow
Weed for the minnows and pinheads.
You see that I will have to rise
And turn round and get back where
My running age will slow for a moment
To let me on. It is a colder
Stretch of water than I remember.The curlew’s cry travelling still
Kills me fairly. In front of me
The grouse flurry and settle. GOBACK
GOBACK GOBACK FAREWELL LOCH THOM.- W. S. Graham
Posted 7 years ago # -
CYCLIST
Every time I get killed by a motor vehicle, God hands me a fresh life. I want to see how long it takes you to learn sense and leave the road to those mad buggers. I suck a Rescue Remedy pill from Gould's in Crowndale Road and wobble home. I bet it's because I go around saying that religion is irrelevant to my life.
- Ivor Cutler
Posted 7 years ago # -
(thematically relevant to forecast! Also slightly obsessed with how this is put together - though lacking the critical language to explain why... )
The Rain
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is itthat never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for mesomething other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting outof the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.- Robert Creeley
Posted 7 years ago # -
GLASGOW ZEN
On the oneness of self and universe
IT'S AW WAN
TAE MEOn the ultimate identity of matter and spirit, form and mind
WHIT'S THE MATTER?
NUTHIN!On the suchness of things.
AYE, THIS IS IT
THIS IS THE THINGOn identity in difference
SIX AN
HAUF A DOZENOn the implicit dualism of value judgements
IT'S AWFUL
GOOD- Alan Spence
Posted 6 years ago # -
this week in atheist has existential* crisis, reads a lot of poetry & feels compelled to share it news:
*mid-life probably really, but existential sounds much better
God speaks to each of us as he makes us
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.Give me your hand.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, I 59 (Translated by Anita Barrows & Joanna Mac)
Posted 6 years ago # -
Like I say I don't much care for poetry but don't mess with Queneau;
Quand bien même serais-je à l'étal de boucherie
Exposé dépecé comme un très pauvre bœuf
Quand
Lien môme mon chef aux narines fleuries
D'un œil glauque attendrait l'oignon et le cerfeuilQuand bien môme mon ventre aux tripes déroulées
A la curiosité s'ouvrirait bien sanglant
Quand bien même mon cœur sur une assiette ornée
Rejoindrait mon cerveau mon foie et mes rognonsNul ne saurait trouver parmi mes côtelettes
Mes viscères et mes abats
Le chardon qui fleurit semé par la conquêteQue rien ne déracinera
Le vivace chardon qui plante ses racines
Dans les sols les plus secs et les plus rebutants
Le chardon sans pitié qui frotte ses épines
Pour de rudes douleurs parallèles au tempsThe complete works of Burns in seventeen lines?
Posted 6 years ago # -
Le chardon qui fleurit semé par la conquête / Que rien ne déracinera
I needed some help from Google translate because I'm thick at langauges but - like.
Posted 6 years ago # -
@unhurt
I am with Nabokov that poetry is essentially untranslatable. The best you can do is to present the original and a literal translation side by side. Your two lines;
The thistle which flowers sown by conquest
That nothing will uproot
This is the only book of poetry I've ever read rather than dipped into. Queneau is genius.Posted 6 years ago # -
A good translation is a creative exercise though, you do get something that didn't exist before. Not the same & not a replacement but still valuable - er, if the translator is good enough, anyway (especially as none of us will live long enough to learn all the languages that poetry has been written in, though I suppose it's a bit different when you speak both the original and the translated languages...).
Slightly off topic but the Granta Idea of Canada event sent me off to find out a wee bit about Chiac . Some glorious example sentences! & now I'm finding out about "Acadieman"...
Posted 6 years ago # -
Since when were 'gosier' and 'quérir' archaic? Clearly I need to allow automatic updates.
Agree that new poetry is created by translation. One of the problems (for me anyway) is that when you read the original you have a very different idea of the words the poet might have used but didn't. Translate that, Google.
Posted 6 years ago # -
Well, that's okay though? - each different translations produces a different new poem. There can't be a "correct" version, I would think, though some might be generally judged to better capture something important from the original. (Also - perhaps have at it yourself?)
There's a great Penguin Classics book, Homer in English, which collects (excerpts from) different English translations of the Iliad and Odyssey (plus poems inspired by both) through time. If you like that sort of thing.
Posted 6 years ago # -
perhaps have at it yourself?
You are a bad person and you have made me take something on that is several levels above my IQ and pay-grade.
The Thistle
Nothwithstanding that I were on the butcher's slab
Displayed diced like a low-grade roast
Not
Wish sanding my crown with flowering nostrils
Its murky eye awaiting the onion and the parsleyNot wish sanding my belly, the guts uncoiled
Would open up to a blood-soaked curiosity
Notwithstanding my heart on a gilded plate
Alongside my brain my liver and my kidneysNone shall find amongst my cutlets
My organs and my offal
The thistle sown by conquestThat nothing will uproot
The perennial thistle which sinks its roots
In the driest, most hopeless soils
The merciless thistle which rubs its spines
For rustic pains parallel with the timesPosted 6 years ago # -
@iwrats, you should dedicate your translation to the dear departed Jonny Halliday
Posted 6 years ago # -
@gembo
We lost Johnny and Rochefort in the same year. Screening of L'Homme du train in order? I watched the DVD last night with great sadness.
Posted 6 years ago # -
You are a bad person and you have made me take something on that is several levels above my IQ and pay-grade.
Agreed to part one - but it did come out rather well, so clearly my moral failings are for the greater good.
Posted 6 years ago # -
Yes unhurt, from a utilitarian ethical perspective you done good.
Posted 6 years ago # -
@iwrats, I immediately thought of that movie on announcement Of Johnny's death.there is also the Jean luc Godard one wth the billiards table with no pockets and th gangster who washes his hands before peeing.
Billiards sounds quite French? Is it the French word for billiards (without pockets)
Posted 6 years ago # -
Is it the French word for billiards (without pockets)
Is that not snoucœur?
@unhurt
The impossibility of translation brutally exposed. Perhaps @SRD could have a go? The 'Quand Lien môme' bit is intractable and 'chef' deeply problematic.
Posted 6 years ago # -
That was where I really needed and was failed by Google translate. Word salad (meat salad). However despite its possible impossibility this review of a translation makes it sound v appealing to me (bilingual edition too so you might even almost approve).
@gembo the French for "pocket billiards" might skate close to Rule 2...
Posted 6 years ago # -
unhurt billiard tables in France do not have pockets so you cannot play pocket billiards :-)
iwrats the heart of a snou?
Posted 6 years ago # -
billiard tables in France do not have pockets so you cannot play pocket billiards
Feel like this explains SOMETHING. Just not sure what.
Posted 6 years ago # -
I told my old man I was taking him to a club with heated tables when he visited me in the République once. I think he was relieved when it turned out to be a billiard hall.
French billiard tables have no pockets, but in serious clubs they are also heated in winter to keep the baize fast and the cushions bouncy.
Posted 6 years ago # -
@iwrats the Godard movie had very fast balls bouncing off cushions at speed
Posted 6 years ago #
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