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i’m obsessed. WHAT did y’all talk about dante

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Your oblique smile bowed my every hope. Subject to an examination of conscience my limbs splayed in joyous enjoyment of nothingness. Good had been left at a distance.

By way of its household reflexes my body surrounded itself with new things: lights & bankruptcies, vanishings & manors painted a difficult rose.

Morning's light the rose then tallied & vanished then the fog in a crossing of fables, the giant then gnawing upon its very own hands.

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Permit me my chains of indulgence; bail me from out of this ship that’s now sinking; calibre of thought, drive the argonauts out from this home of mine with its unknown dimensions; revivify my supplicant lips with a small charity; carry away to the ashes what’s left of my days, which are not so clear-cut as to be an unfit judge of what’s just, which is transparent when you move to verify it but is by no means                                                                       a serene exploration.

--Amelia Rosselli, from Cinque poesie per una poetica

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Can one’s life be a the mercy one’s characters? The possibility seems ludicrous, yet in my unraveling they were no longer my allies, confiscating from me the boundary I had so adamantly maintained between writing and the rest of living, which, I had believed until then, was to live minimally, to live on the surface, to not live. One cannot sustain that kind of in-between - living and yet not living - forever. For the first time I wanted my life to be as legitimate as my characters’, as solid, as habitable. Make me real, as you are to me - this cry could only be directed toward my characters. They were not meant to see me; why then let the novel live on? I had refused realness to the people in my life; why then let myself linger?

Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (via chthonic-cassandra)

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you, a 16th century Italian noblewoman: Non dee creder alcun, che sicur varca, / mentre al principio 'l fin non corrisponde

me, an intellectual: don't get it twisted

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Sonnet VI

How tranquil the sea! whose waves once fell untroubled against this freshly tarred vessel full with its cargo of fine wares and precious goods, while the air and its winds, hung still; the same Sky who now denies me his noble lights shone clear in those days with a brilliance unhampered by shade or fog. But no homebound sailor should think they are owed safe return for having set out on clear seas:                                                   The unruly stars and cruel fate have since bared their fury, turning against me with harsh glares and storms. Armed with gales, rains and thunder, the Sky looms monstrous above me and rapt to devour-- meanwhile my spirit looks on, ever North.

--Vittoria Colonna, trans. mine [x]

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Sonnet X

What sorry state has Love dispatched me to, that Sunlight now were blackness; that the dawn should reignite my longing to again behold my darling Light? That brilliant glare, though magnified between us, blights my eyes and with its radiance blinds. Sweet musics fall upon my ears so clearly, but my heart will only have the din of sighs and sobs. As even now I scour the meadows' green my soul despairing reels--and when I see the boundless flowers, desire again in me blooms for my fair Fruit, whom with but a breath Death rent from me and from that heavy flesh that binds the world and me with so much grief.

--Vittoria Colonna, [x] trad. mine 

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hey it's Really Long Posts on Homer time!

so. here is the painfully transcribed beginning of the Iliad, which will, i hope, go some way toward explaining the difficulty in translating it. 

We start with the first word. “Rage.” it’s a good way to start an epic that is about, in large part, Achilles’ rage and its effects. Unfortunately, it’s an accusative, and English is an uninflected subject verb object language, which means that, unless you want to mess around with inversions in your very first line, which I don’t think you do, @ Fagels, you can’t put it first. 

Keep reading

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In morte del fratello Giovanni

When that day comes--when I can no more bear to roam from shore to shore, you'll find me sat, o brother mine, beside your tomb, dismayed that blossomless your days have met their end. Alone now, how our mother wears her age, and talks of me to your unspeaking ash; while I, expectant, clasp at you in vain from rooftops not my own, where still I feel heaven conspiring with the opaque will that squallwise dealt its blow against your life. Now I take to your same untroubled tides to pray, clutching what little hope I've left: Strange folk, though I die, grant that my remains should find home in their mother's grieving arms.

--Ugo Foscolo [x]

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But today I want Rilke to speak—through me. In the vernacular, this is known as translation. (Germans put it so much better—nachdichten—to pave over the road, over instantaneously vanishing traces.) But translation has another meaning. To translate not just into (i.e., into the Russian language), but across (a river). I translate Rilke into Russian, as he will someday translate me to the other world. By hand—across the river.

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Dark Elderberry Branch (trans. by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine)

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Al padre

Dove sull’acque viola era Messina, tra fili spezzati e macerie tu vai lungo binari e scambi col tuo berretto di gallo isolano. Il terremoto ribolle da due giorni, è dicembre d’uragani e mare avvelenato. Le nostre notti cadono nei carri merci e noi bestiame infantile contiamo sogni polverosi con i morti sfondati dai ferri, mordendo mandorle e mele dissecate a ghirlanda. La scienza del dolore mise verità e lame nei giochi dei bassopiani di malaria gialla e terzana gonfia di fango.

There on the violet waters where Messina once stood, amid shredded wires and debris you walk long the railroad tracks with your red cap on, resembling an island crow. For two days now the tremors have left us to boil beneath a December of tempests and toxic seaswells. We watch night fall from inside boxcars like calves and count dreams of rubble along with those fallen and bashed in by the wreckage, chewing at strings of dried fruit and almonds. The science of our grief brought truth and knives to our field games of yellow fever, of tertian, of mud-bloated fever.

--Salvatore Quasimodo, “Al padre” [x]

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Beautiful are these sepulchers, The naked Latin and the fixed fatal dates, The conjuction of marble and flower And the lots with courtyard freshness And the many yesterdays of history Now still and single. We confuse that peace with death And we think we yearn our end And we yearn for sleep and indifference. Vibrant in swords and passion And asleep among the weeds, Only life exists.

—Jorge Luis Borges, Recoleta Cemetery

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O splendor of eternal, living light! who ever grew so pale beneath the shade of Mt. Parnassus, or drank from her springs

whose mind did not appear then overwhelmed for having tried to paint you as you seemed where heaven's harmonies make her your shade,

when in that open air you showed your face?

--Dante, Divina Commedia, Pur.XXXI.139-45 [x]

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The Parnassus, detail of Homer, Dante and Virgil, in the Stanze della Segnatura, 1510, Raphael

Medium: fresco

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Voce

Christmas is a fife of daybreak, frenzy of roots letting loose in your name its sharp ultrasounds. Even the stars hear, those not-quite-blue suns eternally drunk on their pure solitude. Because You are all this, little god who are born and die and again are reborn in a heaven of leaves: a voice who rouse and dissettle the glass and the sea, and the stone, and the unknowable void.

--Maria Luisa Spaziani

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Christmas is nothing more than that vast silence pouring over the streets, where sycamores chortle unseen in the snow,

nothing more than the slow fade of all our solitudes into the distance, the softness of gulfweed spanned by a gold bridge reaching into the night.

I am here, illumined by your gift as if by ten stars or moons, dreamily guiding myself by hand to where a faint glow is stirring with fires and lanterns (green and violet), with pinwheels and caffe signs.

Van Gogh, blue Paris… To the right, a pine tree where I’ll hang four nostalgias and my faith in you, white comet posed on top.

--Maria Luisa Spaziani, “Lettera di Natale” [x]

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iv.

She was running for shelter, shielding her head. Belonging to a tired image no different from any other woman the rain takes by surprise.

I didn't want to speak of war but of truce to meditate on space &therefore details the hand that surveys the wall, the candle momentarily lit &--outside--the radiant leaves. Another enclosure, of thorns scattered among other thorns, thorns of earth that scorch the heel.

What bridges the heft of the before and the headlong fall of the after: I call that truce a measure that makes of fear a measure a metric that offers no protection.

Near enough to truce is transit the going from one place to another place with no real aim with no part of motion that we might call travel diversion of faces while rain patters down.

Truces, like trains, need level fields dreams of horizons with trees lifted up toward the sky lonesome sentinels, the only spears.

--Antonella Anedda, Notti di pace occidentale [x]