The weather is grey now, strange evening ( Read more... )

"Walking Around"
by Pablo Neruda
transl. Robert Bly

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie
houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

( The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse )

ROAD

They are all asleep, below.
                                       Above, awake,
the helmsman and I.

He, watching the compass needle, lord
of the bodies, with their keys turned
in the locks. I, with my eyes
toward the infinite, guiding
the open treasures of the souls.

JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ

Translated by Robert Bly

( original Spanish )

Why Mira Can't Come Back to Her Old House ( Read more... )

Counting Small-Boned BodiesLet's count the bodies over again ( Read more... )

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the ( Read more... )

Letters to a Young Poet #4, Rainer Maria Rilke

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, ( Read more... )

Gacela of the Dark Death ( Read more... )

The wind, one brilliant day, called ( Read more... )

The one part of this otherwise wonderful poem that just will not sit right for me is the part in the third stanza where Bly translates, "In the far North where the day/ lives in a pit night and day." In the original Swedish, Tranströmer uses two words (both of which do, presumably, translate to "day"): dag and dagen, and the poem reads better for ( Read more... )