PGR’s blog

ROOM 301

Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994) is Norway’s first modern poet and is now recognized as one of the greatest Scandinavian poets of the twentieth century.

Garnering the highest praise of critics, Jacobsen won many of Norway’s and Sweden’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Swedish Academy’s Dobloug Prize and the Grand Nordic Prize, also known as the “Little Nobel.” But he also has earned a wide popular audience, because ordinary readers can understand and enjoy the way he explores the complex counterpoint of nature and technology, progress and self-destruction, daily life and cosmic wonder.

He explores life with a distinctive sensibility and voice. Most of his poems are unrhymed free verse and many treated subjects or images are drawn from modern industrial world. He found both beneficial and oppressive aspects in the modern scenes. His poems combine an ancient way of looking- a way that searches for connectedness- with an openness to the new. He is interested in people’s relations to the natural world, their relation to the man-made world, the ways in which these two relations affect each other.

He has a strong sense of world as a mystery and he approaches that mystery with reverence. He is concerned with the spirit of man and the preciousness of life. His writing evinces humility at every turn.

Henrik Ibsen has said, being a poet means being able to see. Jacobsen sees the secret connection between things. There is a sense of great depth in the intervening associations in his poems. Much like a fine composer, he incorporates silence into his works, lending a wonderful feeling of space to his poems. Most of his poems have a deep meditative quality, the sort of feeling that a Zen poem evokes.

The first two poems that I have posted below, “Sunflower” and “Just Delicate Needles”,  illustrate the radiant quality of his poetry. He says the “seeds of fire” in us must have been broadcast by some sower and these seeds will stay in the loam .There is a spiritual aura in this poem.

Sunflower

What sower walked over earth,
which hands sowed
our inward seeds of fire?
They went out from his fists like rainbow curves
to frozen earth, young loam, hot sand,
they will sleep there
greedily, and drink up our lives
and explode it into pieces
for the sake of a sunflower that you haven’t seen
or a thistle head or a chrysanthemum.

Let the young rain of tears come.
Let the calm hands of grief come.
It’s not as evil as you think.

(Translated by Robert Bly)

I wrote a mail to the distinguished translator Roger Greenwald whether the poem ‘Sunflower’ can be taken as  a metaphor of the dormant seeds in us that explodes one day as a creative force and   the poet  is consoling us that the agony of producing that fruit of labor is not all that bad.

 His answer is given below:

“Like many short poems, this poem seems unusually rich, this one seems to me to have an oracular quality about it. That is, it is an utterance that can support many interpretations.

I think your interpretation is certainly supported by the poem. I also think one could take the images even more generally. There are forces and impulses within us that we may not know about, that may remain dormant a long while and then come to life, that may seem to serve purposes of their own rather than our carefully laid plans. And what emerges from them may indeed be beautiful — or prickly (the thistle) — or both.

Certainly I think the ending implies that it isn’t so bad that everything in our lives isn’t under our control. Perhaps “agony” is too strong a word. We can bear some tears and some sorrow, the poem seems to say. The opening stanza of the poem, the question, can be taken as a genuine question or a rhetorical one. I think it points to a religious belief: at least that there is some force at work that is larger than us. And this may be why the end of the poem can say that we can bear to suffer some tears and sorrow. In other words, the poet may find some consolation in the thought of that larger force, and may find some humility (or even acceptance, equanimity) in the face of it.”

Regarding “Just Delicate Needles”,  I have never read a poem on ‘light’ as gossamer as this one. Every ray of light is to be cherished and treasured.

Just Delicate Needles

It’s so delicate, the light.
And there’s so little of it. The dark
is huge.
Just delicate needles, the light,
in an endless night.
And it has such a long way to go
through such desolate space.
So let’s be gentle with it.
Cherish it.
So it will come again in the morning.
We hope.

The next two poems were written in the last years of his life. I have selected these poems as I thought it forms an order. All the poems reflect the mood of the poet after the transition of his beloved wife.

The first poem, “Barbed-wire Winter” recalls his wedding day in 1940: it was minus twenty five degree  , the war was already there, the road to church was blocked by barbed wire, the minister told them, “Love is a path you must walk”.
 
 The very same event is poignantly invoked in the second stanza of the poem “Room 301”. This poem made me literally cry. The poet’s wife is dead and he enters the room. He softly reminisce the stroke of her hand on his face and that thought leads him to the wedding day and how her  small hand held the rose against her breast .The  last stanza movingly reiterate the brevity of life.

The second poem, “Problem II”, makes a precise statement of our condition of our age.

The translations of these poems by Roger Greenwald are as pellucid as the original, a literary marvel indeed. They deeply affect any sensitive reader.

Barbed-wire Winter

–Boy!
When we got married–now, that was cold weather.
At least twenty-five below,
winter solstice, nineteen forty,
war and rinderpest.
Road to the church was blocked with barbed wire.
I remember we clambered over the rail fence of the parsonage.
–Hey, your dress is caught
–no, not there–over there.
We tramped the furrows of an ice-crusted
potato field, up to the minister
who was in his surplice and had
the Scriptures ready.
–Love is a path you must walk, he ways, Yes, we said.
But my lord what muddy feet we had!
When we got in bed that night
we cried a dab–both of us.God
knows why.
And then the long life began

Room 301

— All right, you may come in now.
They had dressed you in white.
I held your hand for a time.
It didn’t respond. Never again.
The hand that so often stroked my hair
lately, since summer. All the way
from my forehead to my neck. As if you were looking
for something or knew something

 Did you know?
(Your hand , your small hand.)
The other one they’ve laid on your breast,
curved around a rose. Red on white. A bride
but not mine.

Then the time is up. Someone’s waiting.
(Face,forehead,hands)
I walk towards the door;
northern lights, swarm of stars–
be open.
Hand on the doorknob.
The final little click.
Steps in the corridor. Clip-clop
Clip-clop. That’s how
A life ends

Problem II

——-no matter what we do
The machines
Just move the hunger two flights higher,
Now it rests in the heart 

In non-industrial (agrarian societies -which is what Norway was until fairly recently), most people had to do physical work to satisfy their basic needs, such as food and shelter. The hunger they satisfy is physical hunger - for food. When industrialization came in - everything from factory jobs and manufactured goods to “labor-saving” home appliances and the latest generation of electronic gadgets and associated prosperity and affluence met the basic human needs. But modern society doesn’t necessarily satisfy emotional needs (which may or may not have been satisfied earlier; the poem doesn’t pronounce on that). So we are still hungry, but instead of having hungry stomachs, now we have hungry hearts.

In another poem “Suddenly. In December”, he poignantly recalls crucial moments in his life

“Companion beyond death. Take me down with you.
Side by side, let us see the unknown.
It’s so desolate here and the hour is getting dark.
The words are few now and no one’s listening anymore.
Dearest, you who are sleeping, Eurydice.
     -Under the snow. Under the wreath of cedar”

 I will conclude my blog by citing a beautiful verse that shows his gifted facet as a nature poet. The poet imagines night as a book and the moon as a reader thumbing through its pages drawing a silvery line on a lake, an empty page in the book

Look

The moon thumbs through the book of the night.
Finds a lake on which nothing’s printed.
Draws a straight line. That’s all it can do.
That’s enough.
A thick line. Right to you.
Look!

( translated by Olav Grinde. Book -”Night Open”)

 Rolf Jacobsen may be rightly described as a sower of inner seeds of fire. He writes for those who are still “half-awake”, for those who still have some curiosity left; for those who are able to pick up a book before they turn out the lights

Source : North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen translated by Roger Greenwald-University of Chicago Press. This book is  highly recommended.

Night Open: Poems of Rolf Jacobsen. Translated by Olav Grinde

“The Roads Have Come to an End Now”: Selected and Last Poems of Rolf Jacobsen translated by Robert Bly, Roger Greenwald and Robert Heidin

The poem posted below is a profound one , almost an ethical manifesto, by Zbigniew Herbert (Refer my earlier post 'The Pebble'), the greatest Polish poet of last century. Mr. Cogito is his ironic alter ego, an imaginary character that the poet employed to voice truths too painful or difficult to say aloud. There are circumstances in our life when others try to madden our senses, stifle our voice, cloth  truth with untruth and stamp us when we strive to soar high. The poem is addressed to those who dare to be different, for whom courage entailing defeat is not an act of cowardice.

Here, the poet appears to be looking back on his life in Poland during the long years of war and repression. Mr. Cogito is an envoy, a kind of messenger, and the poem is also an envoy , summarizing the poet's message in the closing lines. His tone is scathingly ironic and acerbic and yet simple and humorous. His message has stoic appeal and moral equilibrium.

Every exhortation of Mr.Cogito in this poem is immediately countered by a sharply contrasted, merciless warning; his conviction of the unconditional obligation to remain 'faithful' to the heritage of moral values and to retain an 'upright attitude' clashes constantly with his conviction of the equally unconditional inevitability of physical defeat ('company of cold skulls' and 'with murder on a garbage heap'). Thus the poem while emphasizing the ultimate futility of 'upright attitude', it paradoxically leaves intact the strength of the final call 'to be faithful' to the very same attitude.

From a point of rhetoric,  the poem may sound absurd as it encourages only to immediately discourage, points out an obligation only to warn that its fulfillment would mean ridicule, defeat and annihilation. If there is a key to this apparent contradiction, it is hidden in the sentence 'you were saved not in order to live'. Survival and salvation are by no means equal. Even though the latter is undoubtedly more important, this fact does not mean that the question of physical survival can be dismissed or forgotten: on the contrary, those who are aware of danger can be heroic. Thus Mr. Cogito is a solitary hero: the cost of his refusal  to surrender is that he must accept the prospect that his isolated attitudes and actions will meet inexorable defeat. Mr. Cogito somehow reminded me of Don Quixote.

The ending word 'Go' has the ring of a stern command of our valiant forefathers.

 The Envoy of Mr. Cogito

Go where those others went to the dark boundary 
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees 
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards–they will win 
they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power 
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride 
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called–weren’t there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring 
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendor of the sky 
they don’t need your warm breath 
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant–when the light on the mountains gives the sign–arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly 
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

(Translated by John Carpenter & Bogdana Carpenter )

Reference:

Report from the Besieged City: Zbigniew Herbert (Author), John Carpenter (Translator), Bogdana Carpenter (Translator); publisher: Ecco Pr; 1st edition (April 1985)

SPRING ESSENCE

Ho Xuan Huong (1772-1822) was a Vietnamese woman poet born at the end of the Later Le Dynasty (Period 1428'1788: the greatest and longest lasting dynasty of traditional Vietnam) who wrote poems with unusual irreverence and shockingly erotic undertones for her time. She is considered as one of Vietnam’s greatest poets, such that she is dubbed “the Queen of Nom Poetry" and has become a cultural symbol of Vietnam. I came across her name first in a travel guide where one her poems was listed. It led me to search more for her poems. It was a sheer delight to read her poems in the book titled "Spring Essence", which is what her name means in Vietnamese language.

The epoch she lived was marked by calamity and social disintegration. A concubine, although a high-ranking one, Ho Xuan followed Chinese classical styles in her poetry, but preferred to write poetry in an extinct ideographic script known as Nom, similar to Chinese but representing Vietnamese. And while her prosody followed traditional forms, her poems were anything but conventional: Whether mountain landscapes, or longings after love, or apparently about such common things as a fan, weaving, some fruit, or even a river snail, almost all her poems were double entendres with hidden sexual meaning.

She brought to life the battles of the sexes and the power of the female body vis-a-vis male authority, human weakness and desire, and boldly discussed various aspects of religious life, social justice, and equality including sexual freedom, as well as a range of other issues and experiences potentially detrimental to the status and aspirations of women. On close scrutiny, her lyrics offer surprising insight into a private Vietnamese past: the candid voice of a liberal female in a male-dominated society.

In a Confucian tradition that banished the nude from art, writing about sex was unheard of. And, if this were not enough to incur disfavor in a time when impropriety was punished by the sword, she wrote poems which ridiculed the authority of the decaying Buddhist church, the feudal state, and Confucian society. So, in a time when death and destruction lay about, when the powerful held sway and disrespect was punished by the sword, how did she get away with the irreverence, the scorn, and the habitual indecency of her poetry? The answer lies in her excellence as a poet and in the paramount cultural esteem that Vietnamese have always placed on poetry, whether in the high tradition of the literati or the oral folk poetry of the common people. Quite simply, she survived because of her exquisite cleverness at poetry.

Her poems were copied by hand for almost 100 years before they finally saw a woodblock printing in 1909.

Below are some samplers of her playful poetry. I am sure it will delight you as much as it did me. The reader will experience Ho Xuan Huong’s lonely, intelligent life, her exquisite poetry, her stubbornness, her sarcasm, her bravery, her irreverent humor and her bodhisattva’s compassion in these poems.

Swinging

Praise whoever raised these poles

for some to swing while others watch

A boy pumps, then arcs his back.

The shapely girl shoves up her hips,

Four pink trousers flapping hard,

Two pairs of legs stretched side by side.

Spring games. Who hasn't known them?

Swingingposts removed, the holes lie empty

Male Member

New born, it wasn't so vile. But, now, at night,

even blind it flares brighter than any lamp.

Soldierlike, it sports a reddish leather hat,

Musket balls sagging the bag down below

Jack Fruit

My body is like the jackfruit on the branch:

My skin coarse, my meat thick

Kind sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick

Caress me and sap will slicken your hands

Weaving at Night

Lampwick turned up, the room glows white.

The loom moves easily all night long

As feet work and push below.

Nimbly the shuttle flies in and out,

Wide or narrow, big or small, sliding in snug.

Long or short, it glides smoothly.

Girls who do it right, let it soak

Then wait a while for the blush to show

The man- and -wife mountain

A clever showpiece nature here displays

It shaped a man ,then shaped a woman, too

Above some snowflakes dot his silver head.

Below , some dewdrops wet her rosy cheeks.

He flaunts his manhood underneath the moon.

She rubs her sex in view of hills and streams.

Even those aged boulders will make love.

Don't blame us, human beings, if in youth .

(On a journey, the poetess saw two huge rocks, one poised on top of the other, resembling a couple engaged in sexual intercourse)

The Condition of Women

Sisters, do you know how it is? On one hand,

the bawling baby; on the other, your husband

sliding onto your stomach,

his little son still howling at your side.

Yet, everything must be put in order.

Rushing around all helter-skelter.

Husband and child, what obligations!

Sisters, do you know how it is?

(A very touching poem capturing the social issues of women)

On Sharing a Husband

Screw the fate that makes you share a man.

One cuddles under a cotton blanket, the other's cold

Every now and then, well maybe or maybe not.

Once or twice a month, oh, it's like nothing.

You try to stick to it like a fly on rice

but the rice is rotten. You slave like a maid,

but without pay. If I had known how it would go

I think I would have lived alone.

The Unwed Mother

Because I was too easy, this happened.
Can you guess the hollow in my heart?

Fate did not push out a bud
even though the willow grew.

( This poem is a classic gem of leaving unsaid everything but what is needed. A heart unfolding. In those times, for an upper class woman, pregnancy out of wedlock could be punished by being forced to lie down while an elephant trod on her stomach, killing both mother and unborn child. For peasants, socially far more free in sexual encounters, there’s a folk proverb:

“No husband, but pregnant, that’s skillful.
Husband and pregnant, that’s pretty ordinary.”)

Questions for the Moon

How many thousands of years have you been there?

Why sometimes slender, why sometimes full?

Why do you circle the purple loneliness of night

and seldom blush before the sun?

Weary, past midnight, who are you searching for?

Are you in love with these rivers and hills?

Autumn Landscape

Drop by drop the rain slaps the banana leaves.

Praise whoever's skill sketched this desolate scene:

The lush dark canopies of the gnarled trees;

The long river, sliding smooth and white.

Tilting my wine flask, I am drunk with rivers and hills.

My bag , filled with wind and moonlight, weighs on my back,

Sags with poems. Look and love even men

Whoever sees this landscape is stunned

(What an amazingly beautiful sketch it is! 'Look and love even men' has a subtle sarcasm.)

Spring 'Watching Pavilion

A gentle spring evening arrives

Airily, unclouded by worldly dust

Three times, the bell tolls echoes like a wave

We see heaven upside- down in sad puddles

Love's vast sea cannot be emptied.

And spring of grace flow easily everywhere.

Where is Nirvana?

Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten

(This is my favorite, a masterpiece indeed. Seeking solitude in nature, she realizes that it is nature itself, not any organized religion or other construct of the human world, which holds the key to the search for nirvana and sometimes can' see heaven upside- down in sad puddles ')

Ref: Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong translated by

John Balaban

 

Can You Sell?

Nicolas Guillen

'

Can you sell me the air that moves through your fingers,

and hits 'your face and undoes your hair?

Maybe you could sell me five penny worth of wind,

or more, perhaps sell me a cyclone?

Perhaps there's some clean air

That I could buy

air… that sweeps

into your garden blossom on blossom

into your garden for the birds

A ten-penny' measure of air.

'

'The air it turns and passes

with butterfly-like spins

No one owns it, no one.

'

Can you sell me sky?

the sky' at times blue,

the sky at times grey,

That portion of the sky

You think you bought with the trees

of your orchard, as one buys the roof of his house.

What about a dollar's worth

of sky, two miles

of sky, a fragment, whatever you can spare

of your sky?

The sky is in the clouds

The clouds pass distant overhead

No one owns them, no one

'

Can you sell me rain, the water

that gives you tears and wets your tongue?

What about a dollar's worth of spring water,

or droplets from a pregnant cloud,

full and fluffy as a small lamb?

May be mountain rain-water,

or even water from gutters

left to dogs.

What about a league of sea, a lake perhaps,

A hundred dollars'' worth of lake?'

'

Water' falls and bubbles,

Water bubbles and passes.

No one owns it, no one

'

Can you sell me earth, endless night

of origins, teeth

of dinosaurs, and the scattered lime

of distant 'skeletons?

Can you sell me long since buried jungles, birds now extinct,

fish fossilized, or the sulphur

of volcanoes, a billion years

rising in spiral? Can you

sell me earth? Can you

sell me earth? Can you'

'

Your earth is mine.

All feet tread it

No one owns it, no one.

'

The Caribbean poet Nicolas Guillen 'was regarded as the national poet of Cuba till his death in 1989. This poem is' a hymn to our environment and mocks' the perpetrators of it by asking a serious of elemental questions for which they have no answers.

The poet mocks at man's greed. It voices his 'personal conviction that the roles of artist and activist should never become separate. The poem's central message is given in the form of its title question, and is carried through a series of vivid images which lend to it an air of both saddened beauty and poignant sarcasm. This manner of delivery allows the question to stand as its own answer, effectively merging Guillen's cultural and socioeconomic concerns with aesthetic power.

The poem's first two lines exemplify this notion: “Can you sell me the air that passes through your fingers/ and hits your face and undoes your hair?” The question immediately establishes two things. The reader is likely to first recognize that there is some economic entity concerned with making a purchase. Secondly, the nature of the purchase is readily recognized to be impossible and even absurd. The simple beauty with which Guillen phrases this initial question, a pattern that will essentially repeats itself throughout the poem, emphasizes the very real desire of power driven entities to harness, possess, and regulate something that is impossible to grasp, something that passes through the fingers that would try to hold it. The effect is carried further when an attempt is made at quantifying and valuing the wind: “Maybe you could sell me five dollars' worth of wind,/ or more, perhaps sell me a cyclone?” Again, the absurdity of the question is accentuated when the nature of the wind is applied to apt imageries. The poet describes “air… that sweeps/ into your garden blossom on blossom/ into your garden for the birds.”

This first ten line stanza, utilized three more times in the poem's construction, is followed with a brief, three line stanza that seems to act as punctuation for the questions that precede it. It is a new voice separate from the questioner, and becomes the second role of the poet. These few lines are given special indentation to show that they will establish an answering statement that will pattern itself into the rest of the poem. The answer is as such: “The air it turns and passes/ with butterfly-like spins./ No one owns it, no one.”

This form of ten lines of questioning followed by three lines of answer is the same for the poem's remainder. The subject of the questions proceeds from air to sky, then to water, then to land, with the same answer essentially given every time. As for the clouds, “No one owns them, no one.” And the water, “No one owns it, no one.” And when it comes to the land, “All feet tread 'it./ No one owns it, no one.”

Also repeated is the attempt at quantifying theses various things. The amount differs with every question. Guillen ranges the amount from “Can you sell me a dollar's worth/ of sky” to “a hundred dollars' worth of lake”. The function of this is to relate the impossibility of giving any static “going-rate” to the elements that comprise a free and natural environment, thus they are arbitrary and without substance. The poet also gives further satire to the notion of purchasing these “possessions” by specifying certain quantities of them. He ponders the cost of “two miles/ of sky, a fragment of your sky”, or “one league of the sea, a lake perhaps”.

Guillen also accompanies each element with images that fortify their depth, successfully relating their aesthetic value over any possible monetary worth, each image becoming more poignant as the poem develops to give an increasing sense of his message. He speaks of water in the form of “a droplet from a pregnant cloud,/ full and fluffy as a small lamb'… or water from gutters/ left' to the dogs”, and land holding “the teeth/ of dinosaurs and the scattered lime/ of distant skeletons… long since buried jungles, birds now extinct,/ fish fossilized, the sulphur/ of volcanoes, a billion years/ rising in spiral”. Guillen is able to accomplish with this poem a very passive revolt against those governmental or perhaps corporate powers which afflict his culture and region.

Ref: Man-Making Words: Selected Poems of Nicolas Guillen (Paperback)

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ITHAKA

Constatine Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that one on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfumes of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean

(The Laistrygonians were half-men and halfgiants, who devoured many of Odysseus's crew. Cyclops  were giants with just one eye, placed in the middle of their foreheads. One of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, took Odysseus and his men prisoner and ate six of them before Odysseus escaped with the remaining six men. Poseidon was the Greek god of the sea. He is referred to as angry because in the Odyssey, Odysseus had blinded Polyphemus, who was Poseidon's son.)

Constatine Cavafy, the renowned Greek poet, was one of the finest European poets. Cavafy was noted for overtly homosexual themes and many of his poems extol the beauty of the male. However, the above poem is very different and is one of his best.

Cavafy wrote Ithaka, inspired by the Homeric return journey of Odysseus to his home island, Ithaka, as depicted in the Odyssey. It employs conversational, everyday language. The narrator, probably a man who has traveled a lot, addresses either Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, or an imaginary modern traveler .

Let us consider that this poetic speech takes place in a situation where the reader is about to set on a journey. The destination, as the poem's title designates is 'Ithaka', the city-state, the ancient hero Odysseus headed towards on his way back from Troy. In Homer's epic, however, Ithaka, the kingdom Odysseus will regain, embodies losses to be recovered. It also stands for the promise of a heroic return.

In Cavafy's poem, however, the ancient meaning of Ithaka is changed-It is no longer the destination of a legendary warrior whose return is sponsored by Gods and Goddesses; instead it has become an imagined end of a journey taken by a common man. Therefore, in this poem, Ithaka is a symbol of arrival not of return. It represents what can be gained , and not regained. The narrator tells the traveler that what is really important is not Ithaka, the island home that was the goal of Odysseus's years of wandering, but the journey itself. It is the journey that must be fully enjoyed at every moment, using all the resources of senses and intellect, because the goal itself is likely to be disappointing. The increasing maturity of the soul as that journey continues, is all the traveler can ask. Life should not be wasted in always contemplating the goal of one's endeavors or in building up hopes and schemes for the future. An obsession with the final goal can blind a person to the real business of living, which is to enjoy every minute that is available.

In an allegorical sense, everyone should have his own 'Ithakas' and travel with a 'rare excitement' and constant vision, as the poem assures us -"arriving there is what you are destined for" and once you have arrived 'you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean'. The plural form 'Ithakas' extenuates its epical association and multiplies the geographical image, which becomes relevant to everyone, just as 'you' in this poem refers to people in general, as well as the listener .

At the same time, the beauty and subtlety of the word Ithaka resides in its mythological resonance, which evokes something in the past in the traveler's origin-something that has shaped his imagined destination. Although he finally reaches his Ithaka, his arrival cannot be completely separated from his point of departure, because Odysseus's journey was effected by the visions of a legendary city whose historical and cultural significance contributes part of his heritage . Thus we may redefine a traveler's journey and say as TS Elliot said, 'In my end is my beginning' .

The long Odyssean voyage, full of monsters, frustrations and longings for home in the Homer's epic, becomes, in Cavafy's new world, "the marvelous journey", full of adventure and full of discovery, if only you can be made to realize its true possibilities by keeping your' thoughts raised high and your spirit open to excitement. In  ‘Ithaka’,  Cavafy endorses travel, journeying, as an entirely positive activity. It is also likely that the poet is talking here not just about the physical travel but about mental cruise and spiritual odyssey as well. For him, Odyssean journey is something to be savored-to be prolonged even!

Ithaka is a sanguine and inspiring poem and its spirit is one with which I find it very easy to identify. Finally, the home we seek, is ultimately within us ('have Ithaka always in your mind'), that it is the search for Ithaka that inspires our travel. Cavafy may even say that the real point of Odysseus’s journey was not to get home: instead having the goal of getting home created the possibility of the journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brothers

 

What regiment are you from

brothers?

 

Word trembling

in the night

 

Leaf barely born

 

In the racked air

involuntary revolt

of man face to face with his own

fragility

 

Brothers

 

 

 

This  poem was written by the great Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. It rivetingly portrays the angst that prevails in a tensed war terrain

 

The inspiration of this poem is the meeting between two patrol of soldiers, where a member of one patrol calls out to the other- "To What regiment do you belong to"  and the poem answers with reductive and emotionally charged metaphors. Ungaretti grasps the very core of humanity and communication in this poem. He transcends the horror of the trenches and reaches out, letting the spoken word carry his mixture of anxiety, isolation and hope, through darkness and hell, searching for signs of life, embodying to me at least, the very central theme, always present in the human consciousness. The address 'Brothers' makes brothers and readers of the poem participate at the same level of acute experience. Ungaretti's poems have an ascetic quality, moving from contingency (an unforeseen event) to its essence. It follows a minimalist pattern in its structure and is yet vibrant with compassion.

 

The word 'brothers' strikes the poet, may be because war can sometimes paradoxically unite people. But the poem then proceeds to pit this concept of solidarity and strength  of brothers against the precariousness of the soldiers' endangered lives. Also brotherhood itself is fragile(leaf barely born) and is only concept and is not a practical weapon to counteract the threat of death. The isolating and juxtaposing of the final words 'fragility' and 'brothers' clearly and prominently display the paradoxes on which this poem hinges.

 

His symbolism seems to me so genial, I cannot dissect it or describe further. It just grips me and I feel a tremor in my veins every time I read it.

 

(Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in 1888 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Italian parents.  He studied classics and from an early age loved poetry.  In 1912 it returned in Italy, and then moved to France to study in Paris. He became a friend of Apollinaire, and knew great painters like Picasso, Modigliani and Toulouse-Lautrec.  It was in this period that Ungaretti began to write poetry. In1914, on the outbreak of war, he returned in Italy. Ungaretti was one of the many enthusiastic young people, convinced that the war had to be fought against Austria, in order to reclaim lost Italian territory.  He enlisted as an ordinary soldier. In 1916, then was transferred to France with the Italian Army corps and fought in the Champagne.  The suffering of the trenches, the preciousness of life, and the barbarity of war, became the theme of his poetry in this period. )

 

 

My Mother

I long for my mother’s bread

My mother’s coffee

Her touch

Childhood memories grow up in me

Day after day

I must be worth my life

At the hour of my death

Worth the tears of my mother.

 And if I come back one day

Take me as a veil to your eyelashes

Cover my bones with the grass

Blessed by your footsteps

Bind us together

With a lock of your hair

With a thread that trails from the back of your dress

I might become immortal

Become a God

If I touch the depths of your heart.

 

If I come back

Use me as wood to feed your fire

As the clothesline on the roof of your house

Without your blessing

I am too weak to stand.

 I am old

Give me back the star maps of childhood

So that I

Along with the swallows

Can chart the path

Back to your waiting nest

 

After my earlier post titled "Letter of recommendation", a few of my friends enquired me whether I didn't love my mother enough. Well, the truth is that one can find pure unadulterated love only in the face of a mother. In Saudi, where I live, mother is almost venerated. It is relevant to cite here that one of the most loved quotes on mother can be found only in Holy Quran-"Heaven is at the feet of mother"

This utterly beautiful and heart wrenching  poem was written by the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who died last year. His transition was mourned widely in the Arab world.  I was visibly moved while reading this poem in a poetry collection I had with me.

Darwish was the first Palestinian to receive a state funeral since Yasser Arafat in 2004. “He was the master of the word and wisdom, the symbol who expressed our national feeling, our human constitution, our declaration of independence,” said President Mahmoud Abbas in a speech. His fellow Palestinians embraced his poetry as the voice of their suffering

Darwish famously penned Arafat’s speech to the United Nations in 1974 when the late Palestinian leader said, “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

In one of the last poems, “The Dice Thrower",  that prophesied his death, he says

“To Life I say: Go slow, wait for me until the drunkenness dries in my glass/ I have no role in what I was or who I will be/ It is chance and chance has no name/ I call the doctor 10 minutes before the death, 10 minutes are sufficient to live by chance".

This utterly moving poem requires no further introduction. It has been set to music by many singers and has almost become a national anthem of Palestine. In fact, I wanted to post it on Mother's day .

The last stanza conveys an intense yearning to return to mother's lap and childhood.

 This poem can  be interpreted as symbolic address to the homeland also, speaking to a woman but at the same time , in a symbolic subcontext, referring to Palestine, imagined not only as the beloved, but also as the mother to whom all Palestinians want to return.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Note

 

 Life is the only way
 to get covered in leaves,
 catch your breath on the sand,
 rise on wings;
 
 to be a dog,
 or stroke its warm fur;
 
 to tell pain
 from everything it’s not;
 
 to squeeze inside events,
 dawdle in views,
 to seek the least of all possible mistakes.
 
 An extraordinary chance
 to remember for a moment
 a conversation held
 with the lamp switched off;
 
 and if only once
 to stumble upon a stone,
 end up soaked in one downpour or another,
 
 mislay your keys in the grass;
 and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
 and to keep on not knowing
 something important.
 
~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

               (Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak  )

 

The author of this poem is the Nobel Prize winner -Wislawa Szymborska. She is that rarest of Phenomena- a serious poet who commanded amazing popularity in her native land as the most representative Polish poet of last century. She is one of the most accessible of all poets I have read and therefore one of my favorite poets.

It’s hard to follow a poetic explanation on Life . Every line in this poem draws a sigh out of the reader. If you take out each line by itself, they might seem quite…well…unpoetic. Or is it that the magic of the poem is in the opening line? It is only when dovetailed with this opening line that the rest of the poem’s lines acquire their magical qualities.

  

The above poem is a good note on life. There is a reward for being fully open to all of life's pain  and its promise.

 

Life is the only way…”

It wakes the reader up! We’re all ears now; what is this Life thing?  Oh let’s see what it’s all about. This is going to be deeply philosophical and wrenching. Intense. But then Szymborska follows it up with all these simple and yet wonderful, wonderful lines that defy any sort of intellectual analysis. It defies them. It denies them the opportunity to probe the poem for this or that with their rude speculative tools. Follows it up with lines that are almost Koan-esque in nature, accessible only to the intuition and leaves the reader with the sense that he/she now shares this secret knowledge of Life with the poet ' a knowing, and at the same time a Not Knowing that gives us joy, the joy

  “to keep on not knowing
  something important.”

How nice: The frustrations of not-knowing are an opportunity, one for which to be grateful. We can't have answers to our biggest questions - but in that piquancy somehow lies our big chance.

Life is the only chance'to mislay your keys in the grass'-that must be an intensely romantic  moment!..he..he .  'To tell pain from everything it's not'- I lifted up my eyes for a momentary flashback after reading that line.  'a conversation held with the lamp switched off', I  would love this.   'To squeeze inside events'- some of  you who have undergone turbulent times may already be doing that. But the gift of being fully present, 'to squeeze inside events', also brings responsibility: to bear witness (like after a holocaust).

 

There is a stamp of unmistakable originality, playfulness, delightful inventiveness, prodigality of imagination in most of her poems. I love her laconic style and precision. Her poetry is devoid of any affectation and is fresh and full of charm and wit.

 

Get her beautiful collection titled 'View with a Grain of Sand'. It’s an exciting experience to encounter poems like this. It riveted me when I read it the first time. Even shared it with some of my close friends.

 

Just thought you would love this poem . Otherwise, blame PGR- the pompous promoter of poetry.

 Reference: Monologue of a Dog: Wislawa Szymborska (Author), Stanislaw Baranczak (Translator), Clare Cavanagh (Translator), Billy Collins (Foreword). Publisher: harcourt. I recommend this book and “A View with a grain of Sand ” to all readers interested in her Poetry

No poet has left a 'Poetry like bread' legacy as Pablo Neruda, the  Chilean Poet and 1972 Nobel Laureate. Through his poetry, and also to a good extent through the packaging of his poetry, he promotes a vision of the communion, community, hope and wonder. A master of ex-pression of human emotions, Neruda brings to life the most mundanely inanimate things. Neruda's  poetry has a nourishing wholeness missing in many others.

 

The following poem may not be an arch poem of intellect . But it is a passionate believing poem that expresses his gratitude and wonder at a simple fruit like Tomato. Ode To Tomatoes expresses his simple sensual joy in the vegetable world. It has beauty, verbal panache and poetic power. For Neruda, Tomatoes are stars of earth with ’cool, profound and inexhaustible sun’ inside it.

 

The poem appears as an immersion in the present moment, a light hearted dialogue between what the poet sees and what he imagines. His imageries are exquisite in this poem. Reading it  is like biting into the fragrant, sweet, ripe tomatoes, the juice bursting out of its tight skin. The only seasoning required is right there in the poem, the filial essence of the olive Tree and salt .  There is even a bit of moral at the end and a sort of tongue-in-cheek piece enumeration about the practical advantages of Tomatoes (No pit, no husk). Tomatoes are indeed the true sovereign of all salads and this poem can be the best ad poetry for Tomatoes sellers.

 

Good poems like this great ode  capture elemental truth, or allow these qualities to refract through certain tropes of language. Such precise and playful language is like a prism emitting the light of observation over and over again even if all the images are celebrating something as ordinary as tomatoness of Tomatoes

 

Ode To Tomatoes

 

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it’s time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.