THE HANDSTAND

june 2005

Some translations to remind us of those who would reveal the innermind of the world they lived in:
W.H.Auden wrote "The dead man's verse is modified in the guts of the living."JB.editor.


MY SISTER LIFE by Boris Pasternak
I will pulverise on the paving stones
Hourglass sands and sunlight
Until I expose the ceilings to the cold
And interpret the mould in damp corners.

I will bow to the rafters and my attic,
I will bawl out about winter;
New incidents, causes and disasters -
Our leap-frog life jumping in the roof

Snowstorms avoiding the moon
Will close in on the first and last lines;
It will be a memory of the sun,
You too will see the light has changed.

Christmas an atom in a jackdaw's eye
And the short bright hours of winter
Will elucidate for me and my beloved
Much that I could never predict.

Muffled, I'll hide my eyes with a hand,
Calling from the door lintel - Please,
Children, tell me the time,
The epoch, the year, in that yard.

Who cleared the path to my doorstep?
To the well, filled up with sleet.
Whilst I was smoking a pipe with Lord Byron
And drinking the wisdom of Edgar Allen Poe?

And while I was familiar with Darial
Hell, gun stores and armories
Drowned my life in a shudder of Lermantov's
As the bitter lips that tasted Vermouth.

HYMN TO BEAUTY by Baudelaire
Come out of the depths of the sky, or rise out of the abyss
O Beauty! your gaze hellish or divine,
Confusing good fortune and guilt -
And for this one is wise to compare you with wine.

Your eyes struggle, a lustre of gems at sunset; at dawn
You spill perfumes like a stormy night.
Your kisses are like drugs and your mouth an amphora ...
A gulp that makes heroes cowards and children bold.

Do you rise out of a black gulf or descend from the stars?
Destiny enchanted, sniffs at your hem like a dog.
You scatter to chance both joy and disaster.
You command everything and never reply.

You walk over the dead, whom you mock, Beauty,
And of your jewels, that of horror is no less charming.
Manslaughter, amid all your trinkets
Dances lovingly on your haughty belly.

The seductive moth flies toward you, my candle
Sputtering, a yellow iris flames "Greetings in a torch!"
The lover flung panting on your handsom form
With a dying breath carresses his tomb!

What does it matter if you come from sky or hell?
O Beauty, enormous beast, terrifying, ...freedom!
If your eye's lustre, your smile, your path,opens for me
The Door of an Infinity of Love I have never known?

What does it matter if you are of Satan or of God?
What does it matter - Angel or Syren?
It does not matter if you, my velvet eyed sprite,
Give me rhythm, scent, a glimmer - my unique queen -
Of a Universe less shocking and moments without burden.


LOVE CONSTANT BEYOND DEATH by Quevedo
Death may finally blind me;
As these shades extract me from the white day.
It may even unchain my spirit
At the moment anxiety surfeits desire.

But my spirit will never desert that shore
Of memory; nor fade, that ardent flame.
My intense love will melt cold arid wastes
And destroy the severe frozen law of sentences.

A Spirit in which God was entirely imprisoned,
Veins which nourished such burning love
And a brain that was suffused in that glory

May leave the body ,but not the living idea,
Departing perhaps as ash, tenderly airborne;
Becoming dust - but as pervasive as dust.

All translations by Jocelyn Braddell.
illustration : the magnetometre