Tag Archives: words by others

The Seventh, by József Attila

The Seventh
J. Attila

Pic from here

If you set out in this world,
better be born seven times.
Once, in a house on fire,
once, in a freezing flood,
once, in a wild madhouse,
once, in a field of ripe wheat,
once, in an empty cloister,
and once among pigs in sty.
Six babes crying, not enough:
you yourself must be the seventh.

When you must fight to survive,
let your enemy see seven.
One, away from work on Sunday,
one, starting his work on Monday,
one, who teaches without payment,
one, who learned to swim by drowning,
one, who is the seed of a forest,
and one, whom wild forefathers protect,
but all their tricks are not enough:
you yourself must be the seventh.

If you want to find a woman,
let seven men go for her.
One, who gives heart for words,
one, who takes care of himself,
one, who claims to be a dreamer,
one, who through her skirt can feel her,
one, who knows the hooks and snaps,
one, who steps upon her scarf:
let them buzz like flies around her.
You yourself must be the seventh.

If you write and can afford it,
let seven men write your poem.
One, who builds a marble village,
one, who was born in his sleep,
one, who charts the sky and knows it,
one, whom words call by his name,
one, who perfected his soul,
one, who dissects living rats.
Two are brave and four are wise;
You yourself must be the seventh.

And if all went as was written,
you will die for seven men.
One, who is rocked and suckled,
one, who grabs a hard young breast,
one, who throws down empty dishes,
one, who helps the poor win;
one, who worked till he goes to pieces,
one, who just stares at the moon.
The world will be your tombstone:
you yourself must be the seventh.

József Attila

Original version (Hungarian)

A hetedik

E világon ha ütsz tanyát,
hétszer szűljön meg az anyád!
Egyszer szűljön égő házban,
egyszer jeges áradásban,
egyszer bolondok házában,
egyszer hajló, szép búzában,
egyszer kongó kolostorban,
egyszer disznók közt az ólban.
Fölsír a hat, de mire mégy?
A hetedik te magad légy!

Ellenség ha elődbe áll,
hét legyen, kit előtalál.
Egy, ki kezdi szabad napját,
egy, ki végzi szolgálatját,
egy, ki népet ingyen oktat,
egy, kit úszni vízbe dobtak,
egy, ki magva erdőségnek,
egy, kit őse bőgve védett,
csellel, gánccsal mind nem elég, –
a hetedik te magad légy!

Szerető után ha járnál,
hét legyen, ki lány után jár.
Egy, ki szivet ad szaváért,
egy, ki megfizet magáért,
egy, ki a merengőt adja,
egy, ki a szoknyát kutatja,
egy, ki tudja, hol a kapocs,
egy, ki kendőcskére tapos, –
dongják körül, mint húst a légy!
A hetedik te magad légy.

Ha költenél s van rá költség,
azt a verset heten költsék.
Egy, ki márványból rak falut,
egy, ki mikor szűlték, aludt,
egy, ki eget mér és bólint,
egy, kit a szó nevén szólít,
egy, ki lelkét üti nyélbe,
egy, ki patkányt boncol élve.
Kettő vitéz és tudós négy, –
a hetedik te magad légy.

S ha mindez volt, ahogy írva,
hét emberként szállj a sírba.
Egy, kit tejes kebel ringat,
egy, ki kemény mell után kap,
egy, ki elvet üres edényt,
egy, ki győzni segít szegényt,
egy, ki dolgozik bomolva,
egy, aki csak néz a Holdra:
Világ sírköve alatt mégy!
A hetedik te magad légy.

My friend Sharrow told me that she sees relationships between my stuff “Wish” and this poem by J.Attila; she also proposed me a different translation of the last verse of each stanza: “You to be the seventh, yourself!”; really I like more her versione.

She also shared me a song using Attila’s poem as lyric, this one.

I think this interesting Hungarian poet should be better known!

Thank you Sharrow.

Goodbye, mom

Father
That’s a song by Claudio Chieffo, where God talks with a woman; I tried this traslation:

 

You didn’t know how I’d call you
the face that I gave you, the story that you lived
you did not know it yet, you did not know it yet …

When in your prime you did play to be a woman
near the door of your old house
I was preparing for your life so great things
that you didn’t know yet, that you didn’t know yet, that you didn’t know yet …

Then you could know the pain, that takes away things tastes,
but fills so much the words, colours the words with life,
at that time you lived it, at that time you lived it at that time you lived it …

Then I gave you that my real love so unpretentious and great,
so that your pain could became more bearable
and your love infinite, and your love infinite, and your love infinite…

Now I want you here with me: you haven’t to be afraid,
you have to let you go, each thing comes true just now,
each thing comes true just now, each thing comes true just …

… now here darkness no longer exists,
there’s the light in the eyes of God,
there’s the peace in the hands of God,
there’s the joy in the heart of God!

 

December, 19th 2021

 

Goodbye, mom! Please say hello to dad and to your brothers for me.

Italian version

Sudden Light, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Sudden Light
D.G.Rossetti

Rossetti in a photo by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), albumen print, 7 October 1863

Pic from here

I have been here before,
but when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
the sweet keen smell,
the sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,
how long ago I may not know:
but just when at that swallow’s soar
your neck turned so,
some veil did fall,
I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
still with our lives our love restore
in death’s despite,
and day and night yield one delight once more?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I always considered Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite authors something like too much sentimental, romantic like, decadent.

Some days ago a friend told me more about them and I needed to know more abou them.

Well, I like these words much more than his paintings.

That friend said me that she finds something similar in my words and in Pre-Raphaelite ones: I am so proud for that, even if I think I am really so far from any real poet… Indeed, the idea to put into poetic stuff spiritual contents is what I try when i describes what i see or what i feel.

And now I am looking for other Rossetti’s words.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by O.Wilde

from The Picture of Dorian Gray

O. Wilde

Pic from here

Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words I Mere words t How terrible they were I How clear, and vivid, and cruel 1 One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them I They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to form- less things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Oscar Wilde

Maybe it’s a book about sin, maybe it’s a book about our wish to be alive. In any case, in it there are a lot of deep and detailed description of our soul. Music and words: I do not comment what he says much better than what I could do.

That Hideous Strenght, by C.S.Lewis

C.S.Lewis and his Love, from here

 

 

from That Hideous Strenght

C.S.Lewis

 

The woman led her along a brick path beside a wall on which fruit trees were growing, and then to the left along a mossy path with gooseberry bushes on each side. Then came a little lawn with a see-saw in the middle of it, and beyond that a greenhouse. Here they found themselves in the sort of hamlet that sometimes occurs in the purlieus of a large garden–walking in fact down a little street which had a barn and a stable on one side and, on the other, a second greenhouse, and a potting shed and a pigstye–inhabited, as the grunts and the not wholly disagreeable smell informed her. After that were narrow paths across a vegetable garden that seemed to be on a fairly steep hillside and then rose bushes, all stiff and prickly in their winter garb. At one place they were going along a path made of single planks. This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like . . . like . . . yes, now she had it: it was like the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? No, not in the least like really. Or like Klingsor’s garden? Or the garden in Alice? Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way. A sentence rose to her memory. “The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god.” Where on earth had she read that? And, incidentally, what frightful nonsense she had been thinking for the last minute or so! She shook off all these ideas about gardens and determined to pull herself together. A curious feeling that she was now on hostile, or at least alien, ground warned her to keep all her wits about her. At that moment they suddenly emerged from between plantations of rhododendron and laurel and found themselves at a small side door, flanked by a water butt, in the long wall of a large house. Just as they did so a window clapped shut upstairs.
A minute or two later Jane was sitting waiting in a large sparely furnished room with a shut stove to warm it. Most of the floor was bare, and the walls, above the waist-high wainscotting, were of greyish-white plaster, so that the whole effect was faintly austere and conventual. The tall woman’s tread died away in the passages and the room became very quiet when it had done so. Occasionally the cawing of rooks could be heard. “I’ve let myself in for it now,” thought Jane, “I shall have to tell this woman that dream and she’ll ask all sorts of questions.” She considered herself, in general, a modern person who could talk without embarrassment of anything: but it began to look quite different as she sat in that room. All sorts of secret reservations in her programme of frankness–things which, she now realised, she had set apart as never to be told–came creeping back into consciousness. It was surprising that very few of them were connected with sex. “In dentists,” said Jane, “they at least leave illustrated papers in the waiting-room.” She got up and opened the one book that lay on the table in the middle of the room. Instantly her eyes lit on the following words: “The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the . . .”
At that moment the door was suddenly opened. Jane turned crimson as she shut the book and looked up. The same girl who had first let her in had apparently just opened the door and was still standing in the doorway. Jane now conceived for her that almost passionate admiration which women, more often than is supposed, feel for other women whose beauty is not of their own type. It would be nice, Jane thought, to be like that–so straight, so forthright, so valiant, so fit to be mounted on a horse, and so divinely tall.

 

Cleve Staples Lewis

 

I wondered to find in this book (it’s a novel about the final fight between good and evil, with a lot of religious – christian- connections) a so delicate and clever observation about love.

 

Oh, yes: I’m back!. Lol.

No Country for Old Men, by McCarthy

Pic from here

from No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy

 

It’s not about knowing who you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody’s. You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. You understand what I’m sayin?

(…)

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there?

Cormac McCarthy

When I read Sutree, by C.McCarty, I was really surprised. I liked so much that book. After it, I read also No country for old men, The road, The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark. I like all those books.

Nature rarer uses yellow, by E. Dickinson

Pic from here

Emily Dickinson (1830–86).  Complete Poems.  1924.

Part two: Nature

XXXI

 

Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,
Prodigal of blue,

Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.

 

Emily Dickinson

 

I like its colours, of course, yet also its music, made by a strange woman…

Inexpressible hope, by R.M.Rilke

pic from here

Duino Elegies

from The Second Elegy

 

(…)
Lovers, if they knew how, might utter
strange things in night air. Since it seems
everything hides us. Look, trees exist; houses,
we live in, still stand. Only we
pass everything by, like an exchange of air.
And all is at one, in keeping us secret, half out of
shame perhaps, half out of inexpressible hope.
(…)

Rainer Maria Rilke.

Original German text:

Duineser Elegien, Aus Die zweite Elegie

…
Liebende könnten, verstünden sie’s, in der Nachtluft
wunderlich reden. Denn es scheint, daß uns alles
verheimlicht. Siehe, die Bäume sind; die Häuser,
die wir bewohnen, bestehn noch. Wir nur
ziehen allem vorbei wie ein luftiger Austausch.
Und alles ist einig, uns zu verschweigen, halb als
Schande vielleicht und halb als unsägliche Hoffnung.

…

Rilke’s Elegies is one of my favourite books.

Half out of inexpressible hope … so much of my life, so much of my deepest wishes is like so…

Nox Nocti Indicat Scientiam, by W.Habington

Pic from here

 

Nox Nocti Indicat Scientiam

 

1 When I survey the bright
2 Celestial sphere,
3 So rich with jewels hung, that night
4 Doth like an Ethiop bride appear,

5 My soul her wings doth spread
6 And heavenward flies,
7 Th’ Almighty’s mysteries to read
8 In the large volumes of the skies.

9 For the bright firmament
10 Shoots forth no flame
11 So silent, but is eloquent
12 In speaking the Creator’s name.

13 No unregarded star
14 Contracts its light
15 Into so small a character,
16 Remov’d far from our human sight,

17 But if we steadfast look,
18 We shall discern
19 In it, as in some holy book,
20 How man may heavenly knowledge learn.

21 It tells the conqueror
22 That far-stretch’d power
23 Which his proud dangers traffic for,
24 Is but the triumph of an hour.

25 That from the farthest north,
26 Some nation may
27 Yet undiscovered, issue forth
28 And o’er his new-got conquest sway.

29 Some nation yet shut in
30 With hills of ice
31 May be let out to scourge his sin
32 Till they shall equal him in vice.

33 And then they likewise shall
34 Their ruin have;
35 For as yourselves, your empires fall,
36 And every kingdom hath a grave.

37 Thus those celestial fires,
38 Though seeming mute,
39 The fallacy of our desires
40 And all the pride of life confute.

41 For they have watch’d since first
42 The world had birth;
43 And found sin in itself accurst,
44 And nothing permanent on earth.

 

by William Habington

 

Notes

1] The title is from Psalms xix.2: “night unto night sheweth knowledge.”

4] Cf. Romeo and Juliet I.v.48-49.

25-32] Cf. Jeremiah i.15.

 

I studied at high school when a tv program about science showed this poem.

When I read these beautiful words I feel again that emotion I felt first time I read them.

I completely agree with Mr. Habigton.

It’s so moving, indeed!