#clare cavanagh

[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 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)

[again-for-the-first-time]

No Title Required by Wisława Szymborska

tr. by Stanisław Barańczak & Clare Cavanagh

[noleavestoblow]

"Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns."

― Adam Zagajewski (trasl. Clare Cavanagh)

[soundlessl-y]

[ID: IT WASN'T LIGHT. IT WAS BRIGHT DARKNESS. BRIGHT DARKNESS - IN ME. /end ID]

Anna Kamienska, translated by Clare Cavanagh, from A Nest of Quiet: Notebooks

[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…

[onenakedfarmer]

Reading

Adam Zagajewski A DEFENSE OF ARDOR - ESSAYS

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

[johnesimpson]

Squinting at What You Might or Might Not See

Charles Wright, Wislawa Szymborska, and Thomas Moore: 'Squinting at What You Might or Might Not See'

[Image: “5x5x2 (10 June, 2023, 06:15 AM; Northeast and Southeast),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)] From whiskey river (abbreviated there): Body and Soul II for Coleman Hawkins The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, Like the structure of music,                               …

[apoemaday]

A Note

by Wislawa Szymborksa tr. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on sand, rise on wings;

to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes;

An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off;

and if only once to stumble on a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing something important.

[letterful]

— WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak.

[asoftepiloguemylove]

"I BELIEVE THERE IS A GOD. BUT I'M NOT SURE HE STILL BELIEVES IN US." // MUSINGS ABOUT GOD

Vi Khi Nao Fish in Exile // pinterest // Ada Limón The Echo Sounder, from "Lucky Wreck" // Mitski Bug Like an Angel // Margaret Atwood Half Hanged Mary // Ethel Cain American Teenager // Supernatural (2005-2020) cr. Eric Kripke // Elle Emerson Regarding the Röttgen Pietà // Yves Olade Belovéd // Kim Addonizio Wild Nights from "Tell Me" // Jensen McRae Machines // Supernatural (2005-2020) cr. Eric Kripke // Anna Kamienska A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook (tr. Clare Cavanagh) // Tom Waits Day After Tomorrow // pinterest // Lauren Camp Upon Taking the Universe One Thing at a Time

[inthatgreatsupernatural]

I want to be earth. Be earth. To hold you closely in my embrace. Always.

"In That Great River: A Notebook" - Anna Kamienska (tr. Clare Cavanagh)

[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)

[soracities]

Wisława Szymborska, “Children of Our Age”, View with a Grain of Sand (trans. Stanisław Barańczak & Clare Cavanagh)  

[mournfulroses]

Anna Kamienska, translated by Clare Cavanagh, from A Nest of Quiet: Notebooks

[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…

[petaltexturedskies]

Adam Zagajewski, tr. by Clare Cavanagh, from "Try to Praise the Mutilated World”