Love poems, of a sort...
I'm getting into the spirit of poetry month. Here are four of my favorite unromantic love poems.
A thousand years, you said,
as our hearts melted.
I look at the hand you held,
and the ache is hard to bare.
-- Lady Heguri (tr. by Bownas & Thwaite)
She who is always in my thoughts prefers
Another man, and does not think of me.
Yet he seeks for another's love, not hers;
And some poor girl is grieving for my sake.
Why then, the devil take
Both her and him; and love; and her; and me.
-- Bhartrhari (tr. by John Brough)
Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Lying together there goes back so far
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind.
-- Philip Larkin, "Talking In Bed"
(I have never found a translation of this poem I'm satisfied with.)
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
-- Catullus, Carmen 85
The sense of which is:
I hate and love. Why do I do it, perhaps you ask?
I don't know, but I feel it happen and I'm tortured.
But I'll can the commentary, since I love to talk about this poem and problems with translating it -- at exhaustive length.
A thousand years, you said,
as our hearts melted.
I look at the hand you held,
and the ache is hard to bare.
-- Lady Heguri (tr. by Bownas & Thwaite)
She who is always in my thoughts prefers
Another man, and does not think of me.
Yet he seeks for another's love, not hers;
And some poor girl is grieving for my sake.
Why then, the devil take
Both her and him; and love; and her; and me.
-- Bhartrhari (tr. by John Brough)
Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Lying together there goes back so far
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind.
-- Philip Larkin, "Talking In Bed"
(I have never found a translation of this poem I'm satisfied with.)
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
-- Catullus, Carmen 85
The sense of which is:
I hate and love. Why do I do it, perhaps you ask?
I don't know, but I feel it happen and I'm tortured.
But I'll can the commentary, since I love to talk about this poem and problems with translating it -- at exhaustive length.