[update] more thoughtful now than anything else;
VIII
Ghazal of Dark Death
I want to sleep the sleep of apples,
far away from the uproar of cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.
I don't want to hear that the dead lose no blood,
that the decomposed mouth is still begging for water.
I don't want to find out about grass-given martyrdoms,
or the snake-mouthed moon that works before dawn.
I want to sleep just a moment,
a moment, a minute, a century.
But let it be known that I have not died;
that there is a stable of gold in my lips,
that I am the West Wind's little friend,
that I am the enormous shadow of my tears.
Wrap me at dawn in a veil,
for she will hurt fistfuls of ants;
sprinkle my shoes with hard water
so her scorpion's sting will slide off.
Because I want to sleep the sleep of apples
and learn a lament that will cleanse me of earth;
because I want to live with that dark child
who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.
Gacela VIII
De la muerte oscura
Quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas,
alejarme del tumulto de los cementerios.
Quiero dormir el sueño de aquel niño
que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar.
No quiero que me repitan que los muertos no
pierden la sangre;
que la boca podrida sigue pidiendo agua.
No quiero enterarme de los martirios que da la hierba,
ni de la luna con boca de serpiente
que trabaja antes del amanecer.
Quiero dormir un rato,
un rato, un minuto, un siglo;
pero que todos sepan que no he muerto;
que hay un establo de oro en mis labios,
que soy el pequeño amigo del viento Oeste;
que soy la sombra inmensa de mis lágrimas.
Cúbreme por la aurora con un velo
porque me arrojará puñados de hormigas;
y moja con agua dura mis zapatos
para que resbale la pinza de su alacrán.
Porque quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas
para aprender un llanto que me limpie de tierra;
porque quiero vivir con aquel niño oscuro
que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar.
- Federico García Lorca, translation by Catherine Brown
Was reading through the Introduction that Christopher Maurer wrote for the Penguin Bilingual Edition of Federico García Lorca's Selected Poems. That was this morning.
I'm not finished with it, but I'm at work and have a to-do list to see to.
It's a wonderful read; I like Maurer doesn't just focus on Lorca and the overview of this poet's work, but how there are bits and snatches of history interspersed in the discussion.
I like learning about history this way. Sir Isidro did it like this with my class in high school - how it wasn't just dates and places and momentous events, but people. Always people.
It's a quirk. Not entirely sure if it's good or bad, but I like it when facts read like a story, when there's someone in the middle of it all. I think this might be why I everything I know of WWII can be traced back to how one of my first favorite books was The Diary of Anne Frank.
The collection I'm reading is Kam's slpwlkngdreamer. Its no secret that I have a distressing shortage of poetry books at home (will change this, but I'm always so nervous on which collections I should buy), so I always turn to the best friend for resources. I asked her a few days ago if I could borrow it since I've yet to acquire a copy of my own. I've been recently hit by a feverish need to go through pages and pages of poems.
We were both introduced to Lorca in a Poetry Techniques class I had under Dr. Marj Evasco. Some of you who've been plagued by my LJ updates for as far back as that class might recall me constantly flailing over poetry for a time. It seems so long ago now, almost a year, if not more. My memory fails me today and I'm too lazy to poke through my archives.
We took up some of his poems from Primero Romancero Gitano - The Gypsy Ballads, which were beautiful in their own way, but which I found difficult to latch onto. I've often said it was because I was hung up on Rilke. But having thought it over to death, it's more that while I've always been interested in gypsies, I just didn't like Lorca's gypsies. :( I dunno. It's me, really.
In any case, I didn't really give Lorca much thought until Kam let me thumbed through this same book some days after she first bought it. And then I found myself tripping and stumbling over the poems from The Tamarit Divan. Fell inlove with two: Qasida of the Weeping (which bes later read out loud at the Lopez Museum for our class poetry recital) and Qasida of the Rose (which I did when it was my turn). Will post those here, eventually. Have taken them down the old-fashioned way - pen in hand over paper.
I want and need to commit those two to memory. I remember I did with Qasida of the Rose and I can still pull up bits of verse, but that's no good unless I have the whole.
I've been reacquainting myself with poetry again. It's terrifying and I can only work on one every so and so days, but I don't think I'm doing too bad. I thank the unexpected muse who's taken up residence in the house in my head though, and the fact that (I said this already, I know) I finally finished reading through Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan. Finished, but keep on going back to. It's the language. I thirst for it.
I've taken down and noted (if not marked) various pages - I never used to do that to my books. But now I can flip to favorite scenes easy enough depending on whether I'm inclined to laugh or cry, can locate verses that always seem new when I read through them.
The crying, I try to avoid on the commute - train or otherwise, but sometime's I can't help it. So yes, if you see a strange little girl with a black gibbous moon marking the center of her neck, on the metrorail, her hair a curtain on either side of her face as she discreetly wipes away one or two tears; if the book on her lap has a cover as red as her terracotta-shaded nails - yup, that would be me.
But anyway. Reading through Maurer's Introduction made me itch to get to the office so that I could access the internet and read through these. Old essays, five of them. The last three, if I am allowed to say, far more honest than the first two.
The fourth one, which I called "Chasing Kites: Journal the Fourth - Dance. Write. Move. They are not so different.", is my favorite. But the closing of the third essay, still takes my breath away; the fifth one is something that I want to sit down, have tea and really think on. I knew I was afraid of risk. It's only now, when I read my words all over again, that I think I'm actually preparing myself to understand just how.
Here is truth: It is difficult to apologize for what I
am only sometimes sorry for. Yes, I set the bitter birds
loose, their cage irrelevant as they raced up to disperse
near-invisible; cloud after vicious cloud, bleeding you dry.
I suppose I had hoped to prove a point, hoped to try
and test how far I might go, how much of you I could hurt
before finally you'd say: Enough! I have taken your worst
words, have read these back to myself and now I am tired.
Let me be honest. It is silence that unnerves me the most.
A silence of absence where those who had known some better
place in your regard speak as though the world
were still wide enough to lose a body in; where letter
after letter, I find your name waiting in the spaces, a ghost
stepping back to be seen only out of the corner of my eye.
Ghazal of Dark Death
I want to sleep the sleep of apples,
far away from the uproar of cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.
I don't want to hear that the dead lose no blood,
that the decomposed mouth is still begging for water.
I don't want to find out about grass-given martyrdoms,
or the snake-mouthed moon that works before dawn.
I want to sleep just a moment,
a moment, a minute, a century.
But let it be known that I have not died;
that there is a stable of gold in my lips,
that I am the West Wind's little friend,
that I am the enormous shadow of my tears.
Wrap me at dawn in a veil,
for she will hurt fistfuls of ants;
sprinkle my shoes with hard water
so her scorpion's sting will slide off.
Because I want to sleep the sleep of apples
and learn a lament that will cleanse me of earth;
because I want to live with that dark child
who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.
Gacela VIII
De la muerte oscura
Quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas,
alejarme del tumulto de los cementerios.
Quiero dormir el sueño de aquel niño
que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar.
No quiero que me repitan que los muertos no
pierden la sangre;
que la boca podrida sigue pidiendo agua.
No quiero enterarme de los martirios que da la hierba,
ni de la luna con boca de serpiente
que trabaja antes del amanecer.
Quiero dormir un rato,
un rato, un minuto, un siglo;
pero que todos sepan que no he muerto;
que hay un establo de oro en mis labios,
que soy el pequeño amigo del viento Oeste;
que soy la sombra inmensa de mis lágrimas.
Cúbreme por la aurora con un velo
porque me arrojará puñados de hormigas;
y moja con agua dura mis zapatos
para que resbale la pinza de su alacrán.
Porque quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas
para aprender un llanto que me limpie de tierra;
porque quiero vivir con aquel niño oscuro
que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar.
- Federico García Lorca, translation by Catherine Brown
Was reading through the Introduction that Christopher Maurer wrote for the Penguin Bilingual Edition of Federico García Lorca's Selected Poems. That was this morning.
I'm not finished with it, but I'm at work and have a to-do list to see to.
It's a wonderful read; I like Maurer doesn't just focus on Lorca and the overview of this poet's work, but how there are bits and snatches of history interspersed in the discussion.
I like learning about history this way. Sir Isidro did it like this with my class in high school - how it wasn't just dates and places and momentous events, but people. Always people.
It's a quirk. Not entirely sure if it's good or bad, but I like it when facts read like a story, when there's someone in the middle of it all. I think this might be why I everything I know of WWII can be traced back to how one of my first favorite books was The Diary of Anne Frank.
The collection I'm reading is Kam's slpwlkngdreamer. Its no secret that I have a distressing shortage of poetry books at home (will change this, but I'm always so nervous on which collections I should buy), so I always turn to the best friend for resources. I asked her a few days ago if I could borrow it since I've yet to acquire a copy of my own. I've been recently hit by a feverish need to go through pages and pages of poems.
We were both introduced to Lorca in a Poetry Techniques class I had under Dr. Marj Evasco. Some of you who've been plagued by my LJ updates for as far back as that class might recall me constantly flailing over poetry for a time. It seems so long ago now, almost a year, if not more. My memory fails me today and I'm too lazy to poke through my archives.
We took up some of his poems from Primero Romancero Gitano - The Gypsy Ballads, which were beautiful in their own way, but which I found difficult to latch onto. I've often said it was because I was hung up on Rilke. But having thought it over to death, it's more that while I've always been interested in gypsies, I just didn't like Lorca's gypsies. :( I dunno. It's me, really.
In any case, I didn't really give Lorca much thought until Kam let me thumbed through this same book some days after she first bought it. And then I found myself tripping and stumbling over the poems from The Tamarit Divan. Fell inlove with two: Qasida of the Weeping (which bes later read out loud at the Lopez Museum for our class poetry recital) and Qasida of the Rose (which I did when it was my turn). Will post those here, eventually. Have taken them down the old-fashioned way - pen in hand over paper.
I want and need to commit those two to memory. I remember I did with Qasida of the Rose and I can still pull up bits of verse, but that's no good unless I have the whole.
I've been reacquainting myself with poetry again. It's terrifying and I can only work on one every so and so days, but I don't think I'm doing too bad. I thank the unexpected muse who's taken up residence in the house in my head though, and the fact that (I said this already, I know) I finally finished reading through Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan. Finished, but keep on going back to. It's the language. I thirst for it.
I've taken down and noted (if not marked) various pages - I never used to do that to my books. But now I can flip to favorite scenes easy enough depending on whether I'm inclined to laugh or cry, can locate verses that always seem new when I read through them.
The crying, I try to avoid on the commute - train or otherwise, but sometime's I can't help it. So yes, if you see a strange little girl with a black gibbous moon marking the center of her neck, on the metrorail, her hair a curtain on either side of her face as she discreetly wipes away one or two tears; if the book on her lap has a cover as red as her terracotta-shaded nails - yup, that would be me.
But anyway. Reading through Maurer's Introduction made me itch to get to the office so that I could access the internet and read through these. Old essays, five of them. The last three, if I am allowed to say, far more honest than the first two.
The fourth one, which I called "Chasing Kites: Journal the Fourth - Dance. Write. Move. They are not so different.", is my favorite. But the closing of the third essay, still takes my breath away; the fifth one is something that I want to sit down, have tea and really think on. I knew I was afraid of risk. It's only now, when I read my words all over again, that I think I'm actually preparing myself to understand just how.
Here is truth: It is difficult to apologize for what I
am only sometimes sorry for. Yes, I set the bitter birds
loose, their cage irrelevant as they raced up to disperse
near-invisible; cloud after vicious cloud, bleeding you dry.
I suppose I had hoped to prove a point, hoped to try
and test how far I might go, how much of you I could hurt
before finally you'd say: Enough! I have taken your worst
words, have read these back to myself and now I am tired.
Let me be honest. It is silence that unnerves me the most.
A silence of absence where those who had known some better
place in your regard speak as though the world
were still wide enough to lose a body in; where letter
after letter, I find your name waiting in the spaces, a ghost
stepping back to be seen only out of the corner of my eye.