#clare cavanagh

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

phillip crymble :: @phillipcrymble

Can't stop thinking about this Adam Zagajewski poem

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Robert Petersen :: Running Gold

* * * *

Yes, she’d been everything, just like in the old Bible song. The whole house was in her keeping, she bore sons, she spun, she wove, she made the meals, she washed and sewed, she clothed them all and fed them. She endured betrayals and departures. And now she sits on the doorstep of an empty house. The song of praise was written long ago. And she thinks: —No, I won’t survive this. The burden had been her freedom. + The Bible is the origin, the source. But each beginning is also within us, each of us holds our own Bible, our own Ecclesiastes and Revelation. + A conversation in Powazki. The kingdom of God isn’t just another utopia, it’s a scattered reality. Wherever Truth and Goodness appear, the space of the heavenly kingdom opens too. Thy kingdom come. + Where does the soul go after death? Jacob Boehme said: “It doesn’t have to go anywhere.” + Saint Catherine’s memoirs (1922–23):

And I went up the hill and asked the Lord what to do. And the Lord answered me: Overflow like pure water, smooth and still, and reflect me in yourself.

[PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE: A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook :: Storks, study, and solitude in a fading life. :: BY ANNA KAMIENSKA ::TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH]

[quidnunc]

[nsantand]

Adam Zagajewski – O velho pintor em uma caminhada

Em seus bolsos, petiscos para os cães da vizinhançaAgora ele mal enxergaQuase não nota as árvores, as casas suburbanasEle conhece cada pedra deste lugarPintei tudo tentei pintar meus pensamentos E capturei tão poucoO mundo ainda cresce, cresce incessantementeE no entanto há sempre menos dele Trad.: Nelson Santander, a partir da versão em inglês vertida do Polonês por Clare Cavanagh Mais do que…

Adam Zagajewski – O velho pintor em uma caminhada

[nsantand]

Adam Zagajewski - Cidade submersa

Esta cidade deixará de existir, não haverá mais halosnas manhãs de primavera, quando as colinas verdejantestremeluzem no meio e se elevamcomo barreiras de dirigíveis — e maio não cruzará suas ruascom pássaros estridentes e promessas de verão.Fim dos momentos de tirar o fôlegoe dos gélidos êxtases das águas da nascente. Torres de igrejas repousam no fundo do oceano,e vistas perfeitas de avenidas…

Adam Zagajewski - Cidade submersa

[nsantand]

Adam Zagajewski - Improviso

Você deve carregar todo o peso do mundoe torná-lo mais suportável.Jogue-o como uma mochilasobre seus ombros e siga em frente.O melhor momento é à tardinha, na primavera, quandoas árvores respiram suavemente e a noite prometeser boa, os ramos dos olmos estalando no jardim.Todo o peso? Sangue e feiura? Impossível.Um traço de amargura permanecerá em seus lábios, assim como o desespero contagiante…

Adam Zagajewski - Improviso

[whisperthatruns]

It gives birth itself to the reasons / that give it life.

Wisława Szymborska, from "Hatred," tr. from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, Here (Ecco, 2012)

[whisperthatruns]

Reality Demands

Reality demands that we also mention this: Life goes on. It continues at Cannae and Borodino, at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There’s a gas station on a little square in Jericho, and wet paint on park benches in Bila Hora. Letters fly back and forth between Pearl Harbor and Hastings, a moving van passes beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea, and the blooming orchards near Verdun cannot escape the approaching atmospheric front.

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely. Music pours from the yachts moored at Actium and couples dance on the sunlit decks.

So much is always going on, that it must be going on all over. Where not a stone still stands, you see the Ice Cream Man besieged by children. Where Hiroshima had been Hiroshima is again, producing many products for everyday use. This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

The grass is green on Maciejowice’s fields, and it is studded with dew, as is normal grass.

Perhaps all fields are battlefields, those we remember and those that are forgotten: the birch forests and the cedar forests, the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps and the canyons of black defeat, where now, when the need strikes, you don’t cower under a bush but squat behind it.

What moral flows from this? Probably none. Only that blood flows, drying quickly, and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.

On tragic mountain passes the wind rips hats from unwitting heads and we can’t help laughing at that.

Wisława Szymborska, tr. from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (The New Yorker, 1993)

[whisperthatruns]

The Century's Decline

Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others. It will never prove it now, now that its years are numbered, its gait is shaky, its breath is short.

Too many things have happened that weren't supposed to happen, and what was supposed to come about has not.

Happiness and spring, among other things, were supposed to be getting closer.

Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys. Truth was supposed to hit home before a lie.

A couple of problems weren't going to come up anymore: hunger, for example, and war, and so forth. There was going to be respect for helpless people's helplessness, trust, that kind of stuff. Anyone who planned to enjoy the world is now faced with a hopeless task. Stupidity isn't funny. Wisdom isn't gay. Hope isn't that young girl anymore, et cetera, alas.

God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.

"How should we live?" someone asked me in a letter. I had meant to ask him the same question. Again, and as ever, as may be seen above, the most pressing questions are naive ones.

Wisława Szymborska, tr. from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, The People on the Bridge (1986), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (Harcourt, 1995)