poetics from lately
Could I have picked a more pretentious post title? Maybe not. Even so though, today I got out of class in Harvard's Semitic Museum and there was a streak of skywriting turning yellow against the setting sun. To my left the herbarium with five million dried plants in glass held its quiet, wreathed heavily in snow. I'm translating a sonnet cycle by Shaul Tschernikovsky, who wrote from 1890 on in difficult Hebrew, defiantly, about the Greeks. I read his translation of Goethe's "Prometheus" into Hebrew and the fifteen sonnets I am translating are about the sun. It's called "To The Sun," and the epigram is a quotation from the Talmud in Tractate Succot, saying, "And the rabbis deemed that it was all right, when no sun shone on the Holy Temple, for the people to pray facing the sun in the east" (obviously a very rough translation). In Hebrew, in Petrarchan meter, to the sun!
Here's sonnet #2 because I feel like it. My translation is terrible, the poems are much more rigidly structured and they rhyme... I want to make this into a longer project, and perhaps I can bring back the sophistication of the language, but for now I'm just focusing on conveying the images (which is hard enough in his Hebrew, let me tell you):
Like one of the golden ears in wheat-stalks heavy with grain,
that rose in full beauty and will flourish in all of its plenty,
like a single grain that hides within its breast its secrets,
a guarantee of eternal life, and a remainder of something already;
like the ear of grain stolen from the field, that suckled at the village's breast,
and wet with the juice of life, dreaming a dream of her beauty,
I also grew! and yet my soul thirsts for more.
ah, day will chase day! and will I collect this debt?
ere my dream comes! my path is hidden from my eyes.
as I turn this way and that--I turn: what is mine, who is mine?
and have I come to the border? or have I passed it already?
did my father lie to me, did he not guard what came from his mouth?
I am a bud of grain, and my father is my sun,
and he summoned for me the hot rains, and commanded the mountain mists.
Tschernikovsky love. They called him "The Greek," but he was a Russian.
All my classes are making me think a lot but not work too hard, which is, I think glorious. It leaves me time to be in love, which is a good thing to sandwich into a schedule. Love has crept up on me suddenly, not unpleasantly, as if I'd eased my body into cool water. Suddenly the whole flesh is engaged; every pore is present. It's a good thing to walk around in winter continually being surprised at your own joy.
Here's sonnet #2 because I feel like it. My translation is terrible, the poems are much more rigidly structured and they rhyme... I want to make this into a longer project, and perhaps I can bring back the sophistication of the language, but for now I'm just focusing on conveying the images (which is hard enough in his Hebrew, let me tell you):
Like one of the golden ears in wheat-stalks heavy with grain,
that rose in full beauty and will flourish in all of its plenty,
like a single grain that hides within its breast its secrets,
a guarantee of eternal life, and a remainder of something already;
like the ear of grain stolen from the field, that suckled at the village's breast,
and wet with the juice of life, dreaming a dream of her beauty,
I also grew! and yet my soul thirsts for more.
ah, day will chase day! and will I collect this debt?
ere my dream comes! my path is hidden from my eyes.
as I turn this way and that--I turn: what is mine, who is mine?
and have I come to the border? or have I passed it already?
did my father lie to me, did he not guard what came from his mouth?
I am a bud of grain, and my father is my sun,
and he summoned for me the hot rains, and commanded the mountain mists.
Tschernikovsky love. They called him "The Greek," but he was a Russian.
All my classes are making me think a lot but not work too hard, which is, I think glorious. It leaves me time to be in love, which is a good thing to sandwich into a schedule. Love has crept up on me suddenly, not unpleasantly, as if I'd eased my body into cool water. Suddenly the whole flesh is engaged; every pore is present. It's a good thing to walk around in winter continually being surprised at your own joy.