[The next in my series of translations from Blaise Cendrars’ Deux-Neuf poèmes élastiques (19 Elastic Poems)]
My Dance
Plato doesn’t grant citizenship to the poet
Wandering Jew
Metaphysical Don Juan
Friends, kindred
You have no more customs and no habits yet
You have to escape the magazines’ tyranny
Literature
Impoverished life
Misplaced pride
Mask
Woman, the dance Nietzsche wished us to learn to dance
Woman
But irony?
Continual coming and going
Special vagrancy
All men, all lands
That’s how you’re no longer a burden
You no longer sense yourself
I’m a gentleman who crosses always the same Europes
in fabulous express trains and looks disheartened
out the window
The landscape doesn’t interest me
But the landscape’s dance
The landscape’s dance
Landscape-dance
Paritatitata
I’m all-turning
Blaise Cendrars
Translation Jack Hayes © 1990-present
Showing posts with label 19 Elastic Poems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 19 Elastic Poems. Show all posts
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
“Portrait”
[The next in my series of translations from Blaise Cendrars’ Deux-Neuf poèmes élastiques (19 Elastic Poems)]
Portrait
He’s sleeping
He’s awake
All of the sudden, he’s painting
He takes a church and he paints with a church
He takes a cow and he paints with a cow
With a sardine
With heads, hands, knives
He paints with a bull’s pizzle
He paints with all the filthy passions of a small Jewish village
With all the exacerbated sexuality of the Russian countryside
For France
Without sensuality
He paints with his thighs
He has eyes in his ass
And all of a sudden your portrait
It’s you reader
It’s me
It’s him
It’s his fiancee
It’s the corner grocer
The cowherd
The midwife
There are buckets of blood
The newborns are washed in them
Skies of madness
Mouths of modernity
The Tower as corkscrew
Hands
Christ
Christ that’s him
He spent his childhood on the Cross
He commits suicide every day
All of the sudden, he paints no more
He was awake
He’s sleeping now
He throttles himself with his tie
Chagall is astonished to live still
Blaise Cendrars
translation Jack Hayes
© 1990-present
Portrait
He’s sleeping
He’s awake
All of the sudden, he’s painting
He takes a church and he paints with a church
He takes a cow and he paints with a cow
With a sardine
With heads, hands, knives
He paints with a bull’s pizzle
He paints with all the filthy passions of a small Jewish village
With all the exacerbated sexuality of the Russian countryside
For France
Without sensuality
He paints with his thighs
He has eyes in his ass
And all of a sudden your portrait
It’s you reader
It’s me
It’s him
It’s his fiancee
It’s the corner grocer
The cowherd
The midwife
There are buckets of blood
The newborns are washed in them
Skies of madness
Mouths of modernity
The Tower as corkscrew
Hands
Christ
Christ that’s him
He spent his childhood on the Cross
He commits suicide every day
All of the sudden, he paints no more
He was awake
He’s sleeping now
He throttles himself with his tie
Chagall is astonished to live still
Blaise Cendrars
translation Jack Hayes
© 1990-present
Saturday, June 4, 2011
"Contrasts"
[The next in my series of translations from Blaise Cendrars’ Deux-Neuf poèmes élastiques (19 Elastic Poems)]
Contrasts
The windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in their display cases
Glitter
Gemstones of light
Listen to the limousines’ violins and the Linotypes xylophones
The scrub painter rubs his hands on the sky’s towel
Everything’s stained with color
And the hats of the women who pass by are comets in the evenings conflagration
Unity
There’s no more unity
All the clocks now point to midnight after having been set back ten minutes
There’s no more time.
There’s no more money.
In the Assembly
They’re watering down the raw materials’ marvelous elements
At the bar
The blue collar workmen are drinking red wine
Every Saturday gamehen
They’re playing
They’re betting
From time to time a gangster passes by in a car
Or a child plays with l’Arc de Triomphe…
I advise Mr Big to put his protegees up at the Eiffel Tower.
Today
Change of ownership
The Holy Spirit on sale in the smallest shops
I read with rapture swarms of calico
Of poppies
It’s only the pumice-stones of the Sorbonne which have never bloomed
The Samaritan sign plows through the Seine
And over by Saint-Séverin
I hear
The streetcars’ relentless bells
It’s raining electric light bulbs
Mountrouge East Station Metro North South water-buses world
All’s halo
Depth
Rue de Buci they’re hawking L’Intransigeant and Paris-Sport
The sky’s airdrome is now, ablaze, a Cimabue painting
When in the foreground
Men are
Long
Black
Sad
And are smoking, factory chimneys
Blaise Cendrars
translation Jack Hayes
© 1990-present
Contrasts
The windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in their display cases
Glitter
Gemstones of light
Listen to the limousines’ violins and the Linotypes xylophones
The scrub painter rubs his hands on the sky’s towel
Everything’s stained with color
And the hats of the women who pass by are comets in the evenings conflagration
Unity
There’s no more unity
All the clocks now point to midnight after having been set back ten minutes
There’s no more time.
There’s no more money.
In the Assembly
They’re watering down the raw materials’ marvelous elements
At the bar
The blue collar workmen are drinking red wine
Every Saturday gamehen
They’re playing
They’re betting
From time to time a gangster passes by in a car
Or a child plays with l’Arc de Triomphe…
I advise Mr Big to put his protegees up at the Eiffel Tower.
Today
Change of ownership
The Holy Spirit on sale in the smallest shops
I read with rapture swarms of calico
Of poppies
It’s only the pumice-stones of the Sorbonne which have never bloomed
The Samaritan sign plows through the Seine
And over by Saint-Séverin
I hear
The streetcars’ relentless bells
It’s raining electric light bulbs
Mountrouge East Station Metro North South water-buses world
All’s halo
Depth
Rue de Buci they’re hawking L’Intransigeant and Paris-Sport
The sky’s airdrome is now, ablaze, a Cimabue painting
When in the foreground
Men are
Long
Black
Sad
And are smoking, factory chimneys
Blaise Cendrars
translation Jack Hayes
© 1990-present
Saturday, May 21, 2011
"Tower"
[The next in my series of translations from Blaise Cendrars’ Deux-Neuf poèmes élastiques (19 Elastic Poems)]
Tower
1910
Castellamare
I was eating an orange in the shade of an orange tree
When, all of the sudden…
It wasn’t the eruption of Vesuvius
It wasn’t the cloud of locusts, one of Egypt’s ten plagues
Nor Pompeii
It wasn’t resuscitated shrieks of giant mastodons
It wasn’t the Last Trumpet
Nor Pierre Brisset’s frog
When, all of the sudden,
Flames
Shocks
Resurgence
Sparks of simultaneous horizons
My sex
O Eiffel Tower!
I haven’t shod you in gold
I haven’t made you dance across crystal flagstones
I haven’t pledged you to Python like a Cartheginian virgin
I haven’t clad you in Greek peplum
I’ve never had you straying into the circle of menhirs
I haven’t named you Staff of David or Wood of the True Cross
Lignum Crucis
O Eiffel Tower!
Giant fireworks of the World’s Fair!
On the Ganges
At Benares
Amongst the onanistic toy tops of Hindu temples
And the florid cries of the Orient’s masses
You’re leaning, graceful Palm tree!
It’s you who in the legendary epoch of the Hebrew people
Confounded the tongues of men
O Babel!
And several thousand years later, it’s you who descended in tongues of fire upon
the Apostles gathered in your church
In the open sea you’re a mast
And at the North Pole
You dazzle with the magnificenceof the aurora borealis from your wireless telegraph
Lianas entangle the eucalyptus
And you’re floating, old trunk, on the Mississippi
When
Your yap opens
And a cayman snatches a black man’s thigh
In Europe you’re like a gibbet
(I would like to be the tower, to hang from the Eiffel tower!)
And when the sun sets behind you
Bonnot’s head rolls under the guillotine
In Africa it’s you who are roaming
Giraffe
Ostrich
Boa
Equator
Monsoons
In Australia you’ve always been taboo
You’re the boat hook Captain Cook used to steer his boatload of adventurers
O celestial probe!
For the Simultaneist Delauney, to whom I dedicate this poem
You’re the brush he dips in light
Gong tom-tom Zanzibar jungle beast X-rays express lancet symphony
You are all
Tower
Ancient God
Modern Beast
Solar specter
Subject of my poem
Tower
Global tower
Tower in motion
Blaise Cendrars
translation by Jack Hayes © 1990-present
Tower
1910
Castellamare
I was eating an orange in the shade of an orange tree
When, all of the sudden…
It wasn’t the eruption of Vesuvius
It wasn’t the cloud of locusts, one of Egypt’s ten plagues
Nor Pompeii
It wasn’t resuscitated shrieks of giant mastodons
It wasn’t the Last Trumpet
Nor Pierre Brisset’s frog
When, all of the sudden,
Flames
Shocks
Resurgence
Sparks of simultaneous horizons
My sex
O Eiffel Tower!
I haven’t shod you in gold
I haven’t made you dance across crystal flagstones
I haven’t pledged you to Python like a Cartheginian virgin
I haven’t clad you in Greek peplum
I’ve never had you straying into the circle of menhirs
I haven’t named you Staff of David or Wood of the True Cross
Lignum Crucis
O Eiffel Tower!
Giant fireworks of the World’s Fair!
On the Ganges
At Benares
Amongst the onanistic toy tops of Hindu temples
And the florid cries of the Orient’s masses
You’re leaning, graceful Palm tree!
It’s you who in the legendary epoch of the Hebrew people
Confounded the tongues of men
O Babel!
And several thousand years later, it’s you who descended in tongues of fire upon
the Apostles gathered in your church
In the open sea you’re a mast
And at the North Pole
You dazzle with the magnificenceof the aurora borealis from your wireless telegraph
Lianas entangle the eucalyptus
And you’re floating, old trunk, on the Mississippi
When
Your yap opens
And a cayman snatches a black man’s thigh
In Europe you’re like a gibbet
(I would like to be the tower, to hang from the Eiffel tower!)
And when the sun sets behind you
Bonnot’s head rolls under the guillotine
In Africa it’s you who are roaming
Giraffe
Ostrich
Boa
Equator
Monsoons
In Australia you’ve always been taboo
You’re the boat hook Captain Cook used to steer his boatload of adventurers
O celestial probe!
For the Simultaneist Delauney, to whom I dedicate this poem
You’re the brush he dips in light
Gong tom-tom Zanzibar jungle beast X-rays express lancet symphony
You are all
Tower
Ancient God
Modern Beast
Solar specter
Subject of my poem
Tower
Global tower
Tower in motion
Blaise Cendrars
translation by Jack Hayes © 1990-present
Saturday, May 7, 2011
“Journal”
[A new series for your reading pleasure—every other Saturday I’ll be posting my translations of Blaise Cendrars’ Dix-Neuf poèmes élastiques (“Nineteen Elastic Poems”). Cendrars composed these between 1913 & 1919. You can read more about Cendrars' work & life here. In the meantime: enjoy!]
Journal
Christ
Here it's been more than a year and I haven't thought of You
Since I wrote my next-to-last poem Easter
My life has changed a lot since then
But I'm still the same
In fact I wanted to become a painter
Here are the paintings I've done they're hanging from the walls this evening
They opened me up to strange sights inside myself which made me think of You
Christ
Life
Look what I've scraped up
My paintings hurt me
I'm too passionate
Everything has turned orange
I spent a sad day thinking about my friends
And reading the daily
Christ
Life crucified in the wide-open daily I'm holding arms stretched
Wingspan
Rockets
Boiling
Howls.
They'll say it's an airplane falling
It's me.
Passion
Fire
Serial-novel
Journal
It's pointless not to want to talk about yourself
Sometimes you have to holler
I'm the other
Too sensitive
Blaise Cendrars
translation by Jack Hayes
© 1990-present
The image of Cendrars is a portrait by Amadeo Modigliani
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