Under One Small Star
by Wisława Szymborska
translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each
        second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is 
        the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minutes to those who cry from
        the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being
        asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a
        spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the 
        same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the 
        occasional thread from your train. 
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere
        at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and
        each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

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From View with a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska. Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.

The Word for Desire
by Alejandra Pizarnik
translated by Yvette Siegert

       This spectral texture of darkness, this melody in my bones, this
breath from various silences, this going deeper and deeper, this dark,
dark gallery, this sinking without sinking.

       What am I saying? It's dark now and I want to go inside. I don't 
know what else to say. (And I don't want to say anything, I just want
to go inside.) The ache in my bones. The language broken by spades
—now reconstructing, bit by bit, a diagram of the unreal.

        I have no possessions. (This is certain; at last, something certain.)
Then a melody. It's a plaintive melody, a lilac light—imminence 
without a recipient. I see the melody. The presence of an orange light.
Without your eyes, I won't know how to live—this is also certain. 
I give you life, I revive you. And I was told to step out into the wind
and knock on doors in search of them.

        I walk past, naked, holding a taper. A cold castle, the garden of 
earthly delights. Solitude doesn't mean standing on a pier early in 
the morning, eagerly looking out over the water. Solitude is not being
able to articulate the solitude, being unable to circumvent it, unable
to give it a face, unable to make it a synonym for any landscape. Sol-
itude would be this torn melody of my phrases.

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From Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert (New Directions, 2016).

Philosophers
by Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh

Stop deceiving us philosophers
work is not a joy man is not the highest goal
work is deadly sweat Lord when I get home
I'd like to sleep but sleep's just a driving belt
transporting me to the next day and the sun's a fake
coin morning rips my eyelids sealed as before
birth my hands are two Gastarbeiter and even
my tears don't belong to me they participate in public life
like speakers with chapped lips and a heart that's 
grown into the brain
Work is not a joy but incurable pain
like a disease of the open conscience like new housing projects
through which the citizen wind passes
in his high leather boots

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From Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

Agitated Meditation
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Patty Crane

A storm whips the wings of the mill around
in the darkness of night, grinding nothing.—You
            are kept awake by the very same laws.
The gray shark's belly is your faint lamp.

Hazy memories sink toward the ocean depths
and solidify into strange statues.—Green
            with algae is your crutch. The one who
goes out to sea comes back hardened.

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From The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane (Copper Canyon Press, 2023).

Time
by Luís de Camões
translated by William Baer

Time changes, and our desires change. What we
believe—even what we are—is ever-
changing. The world is change, which forever
takes on new qualities. And constantly,
we see the new and the novel overturning
the past, unexpectedly, while we retain
from evil, nothing but its terrible pain,
from good (if there's been any), only the yearning.
Time covers the ground with her cloak of green
where, once, there was freezing snow—and rearranges
my sweetest songs to sad laments. Yet even more
astonishing is yet another unseen
change within all these endless changes:
that for me, nothing ever changes anymore.

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From Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition by Luís de Camões, translated by William Baer (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Museum
by Wisława Szymborska
translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

Here are plates but no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.

Here's a fan—where is the maiden's blush?
Here are swords—where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on Exhibit Number...

Eight. Metals, clay and feathers celebrate 
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper's silly hairpin giggles.

The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot. 

As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on. 
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I'm gone!

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First published in View with a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska. Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Franz Schubert: A Press Conference
by Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh

Yes, my life was short, yes, I loved,
felt a light growing, yes, under
my fingers sparks were born.
Yes, I had little time, I didn't know
how much, I pitied Gretchen,
dead youth, the unrequited.
No, the flame wasn't mute, yes,
I ran through icy forests,
chased by snow, yellow stars,
and by the strangeness of style itself; no, not the police,
I don't know if it was a devil. There was no epoch, only
green grass, ash trees, becalmed
objects, dragonflies over ponds,
but no epoch, a wooden floor,
reticent chairs, yes, Vienna,
the taste of coffee, same as now,
pigeons on the windowsills. No, I didn't
foresee the Spring Tide of Nations,
I don't know, don't remember, this question
is too personal. No, I'm not
familiar with Wagner's music. Can we
communicate? Regret, even envy, 
I don't know whether it's fate, a glove,
such delicate snowflakes, if only
they don't turn into a blizzard.
The green eyes of that girl.
My destiny was too big, like a tent,
my heart throbbed so clumsily 
in those huge rooms, yes, talent,
teeth crushing bitter coffee beans.
No, I was afraid, I was surrounded on all sides,
the armies of mercenaries charged, straight at me, 
ah, gentlemen, how could you
compare me to Admiral Nelson,
no, shadows bellowed, whispers
pealed like cathedral bells, appearances
barked, yes, I admit I was wrong
sometimes, how could I know
that I was Schubert? I was in the state
of becoming, looked for a way, a color, 
you can't know me; only an echo.
Yes, I was in that strait where
suffering changes into song,
yes, evergreen forests and unrequited love,
the joy of being indifferent, precisely 
I wanted to say, the happiness
of expression, halfway
between life and death,
exactly halfway, yes, even here
the cheers of dancing people reach us,
but they clot in the gelatin of memory.
Don't turn back, don't take the wrong direction,
but of course you can't transform life
into a Lied, it's only a very small Noah's Ark,
you know, gentlemen, not people but 
species, not flowers but specimens,
not fragrances but descriptions. While we ran
wild in the meadow's luxury,
in weeds and in wind, in dandelions and anemones,
in the huge plural of sounds and colors,
passionate and speechless, submissive to the demands
of breathless messengers, in jubilation,
in sin, in prayer, morning
and evening, in boredom and laughter,
that eternal dance lasted, May, June,
so many things were happening, fear and games,
cut fingers, gaping mouth,
real kisses and kisses only
in daydreams, braids, ears of wheat,
your glances, a veranda, silence,
and nothing, the crimson of the fall, yes, I remember
everything, larks on long threads,
poppies, a hazel grove, the warm brick of the city,
the voices fading in the dusk, and night—
a box in which children hide
their treasures, the sleep and the vigil, Venus
in the pale sky shivering from cold. 
Yes, it is even better now, only two lips
talk to themselves in the singing,
a piano nearby in its gleaming tuxedo.
Yes, I am tired now, and no, it's not 
a complaint.

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First published in Without End by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003). Translated by Clare Cavanagh.

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
 
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
 
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
 
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

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First published in Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Random House, 1982). Translated by Stephen Mitchell.

A Pious Woman
by Gabriela Mistral
translated by Randall Couch

I want to see the man of the lighthouse,
I want to go to the rocky point,
taste the wave in his mouth,
see the abyss in his eyes.
I want to reach him, if he's living,
old man of salt and brine.

They say he looks only eastward
—walled up while still alive—
I want to cut him off from his waves
so in place of the abyss he'll see me.

He knows all about the night
that's now my bed and my road:
knows undertows, octopus, sponges,
knows a cry that ends all knowing. 

His faithful, battered chest
is spat on by the tides,
he's whistled at by gulls
and white as any wound,
and so still, so mute and absent,
he seems as yet unborn. 

But I go to the lighthouse tower,
climbing the knife-edged track,
for the man who's going to tell me
the earthly and the divine. 
One in each arm, I bring him
a jug of milk, a sip of wine...

And he keeps listening to seas
that love nothing but themselves.
But maybe now he listens to nothing,
stalled in forgetfulness and salt. 

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First published in Madwomen by Gabriela Mistral, translated by Randall Couch.

Context
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Patty Crane

Look at the gray tree. The sky has flowed 
through its fibers down into the ground—
just a shrunken cloud remains after 
the earth took a drink. Stolen space
is entwined with the braidwork of roots, twisting
into greenery.—The brief moments 
of freedom rise out from us, swirling
through the Fates' blood and beyond.

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First published in The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane.

What Is Good And What Is Bad
by Vladimir Mayakovsky
translated by Dorian Rottenberg

One fine day
                    a tiny laddie
came
          and asked his dad:
“Could you tell me,
                               Daddy,
what is good
                     and what is bad?”
All his daddy said
                             I heard.
Children,
               gather near.
Daddy’s answer,
                           word for word,
I shall tell you
                       here.

If the wind
                 behaves like mad,
bringing hail
                    and sleet,
anybody knows
                         it’s bad —
no walking in the street.

After rainfall
                    comes the sun,
driving off the cold.
That is good
                    for everyone,
whether young
                        or old.

When
          a tiny little lad has
dirty cheeks
                    and chin,
this is clearly
                     very bad
for the youngster’s skin.

If a boy
             keeps clean and neat,
washes
             twice a day,
he’s a darling,
                       simply sweet,
a good lad,
                   anyway.

When a bully,
                      Tom or Billy,
thrashes
               weaker mates,
his behaviour’s bad and silly —
which everybody
                           hates.

This one shouts:
                          “You mustn’t touch
smaller boys
                     than you!”
I admire him
                     very much,
and so,
             I’m sure,
                            do you.

If you spoil
                  a book and toy
in
    a single day,
“That’s a baddish little boy!”
everyone will say.

This one loves
                        to work and read,
likes drawing
                      in his pad.
He’s a good one,
                            yes, indeed,
the proper kind
                         of lad!

 

This baby’s scared
                              to see a crow.
Shame
            upon the lad!
Cowardice,
                   you ought to know,
is very,
            very bad.

This one
               shoos the bird away
from a hen and chicks.
Good!
           A brave boy,
                               we can say,
though he’s hardly six.

This one
               wallows in the dirt,
giggling with joy,
soils his trousers
                           and his shirt,
bad,
        untidy boy!

This one
               cleans his shoes himself,
though
            just four years old,
puts his things
                        upon a shelf.
He’s
        as good as gold!

Remember, all who aren’t yet big:
if you’re now
                     a piggy,
you’ll become
                      a downright pig
when you grow up
                              bigger.

Sonny beamed —
                          he’d understood
and he told his dad:
“Dad,
          I’ll always
                          do what’s good
and never do
                     what’s bad!”

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First published in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Translated by Dorian Rottenberg.

So Many Constellations
by Paul Celan

So many constellations, dis-
played to us. I was,
when I looked at you—when?—
outside with
the other worlds.

O, these paths, galactic,
O this hour that billowed
the nights over to us into
the burden of our names. It is,
I know, not true,
that we lived, a mere
breath blindly moved between
there and not-there and sometimes,
comet-like an eye whizzed
toward extinguished matter, in the canyons,
there where it burned out, stood
tit-gorgeous time, along
which grew up and down
& away what
is or was or will be—,

I know,
I know and you know, we knew,
we didn’t know, for we
were there and not there,
and sometimes, when
only Nothingness stood between us, we
found truly together.

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From Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry, 2020. Translated by Pierre Joris

MY MOTHER BAKED THE WHOLE WORLD FOR ME
by Yehuda Amichai 

My mother baked the whole world for me
In little sweet cakes.
My love filled my window
With raisins of stars.
I enclose longings within me like air
Pockets in a loaf of bread.
Outside I am smooth and quiet and brown.
The world loves me.
But my hair is sad like the reeds in a drying marsh –
All birds of rare and beautiful plumage
Fly from me.

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Previously Published in Modern Poetry in Translation. Translated by Margalit Benaya.

Song at half past three
by Wojciech Bonowicz

Poets are cows that in full moon would graze on complex
flyovers with hardly any traffic. Poets are great architects
of the city endlessly perfected their projects
no longer attract investors. Poets are a nuisance
really that can’t be fixed by war progress nationalisms
stock exchange or other catchy metaphors.
When poets are given prizes they can’t be trusted they may
shout say nothing or merely shrug. Poets have pale bellies
heavy abdomens at times tree-bark on their backs. Poets are strangers
that’s why they welcome others as theirs and do not recognize friends.
Poets are five fingers of the right hand and five of the left. Poets pick up
abandoned instruments and start to juggle them. Once again
poets were seen prowling about the city in shoes with thick leather soles
and lighting cigarettes in front of every house. So what is it with poets?
Raise your hands and try to walk like this for a while until you see
how awkward it is. Climb the stairs like this or better still:
get onto a tram and when it departs with a jolt
imagine poets who must act like this every day.

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First Published in Modern Poetry in Translation. Translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

Men
by Valzhyna Mort

Men arrive like a date on a calendar
they keep visiting once a month
men who’ve seen the bottom
of the deepest bottles
kings of both earth and heaven
and like the pearls from a torn necklace
trembling I scatter at their touch
their heartbeats open doors
vessels respond to their voice commands
and wind licks their faces like a crazy dog
and gallops after their train and roams
they undress me as if undressing themselves
and hold me in their arms like a saxophone
and oh this music these endless blues
like milk from breasts
those notes too high for human ears
those notes too low for gods
men who teach children to laugh
men who teach time how to run
men who love other men in club toilets
men who’ve kissed the hand of death herself
men who’ve never listened to my threats nightmares
which bound me to a chair
mama their lips fall on me
like burning planes
they are powerful patient
and when the world crashes
everyone runs for the shelters
they pause to pluck one of my lashes
mama not even mine
just anyone’s mama
come back
rescue me find me
in this plane wreck

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First Published in A Freckle on the Nose: Poetry Over Prose. Translated by Franz Wright.

good morning bandung (an exercise in deepchandi)
by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh 

the natives
are winning but

 

the war has
ruined all the

 

factories they
cannot rebuild

 

them the work
ers in cities

 

are starving
half-starving in

 

order to
rebuild all the

 

factories the
peasants must first

 

start growing
more food they can

 

do this by
mechanizing

 

all their farms
only, they cannot

 

mechanize
the farms the war

 

has ruined
all the factories

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Previously published in Modern Poetry in Translation. Translated by Aditya Bahl.

Atmosphere
by Subhro Bandopadhyay 

Repeatedly October descends
On villages     deep rivers     jungles
Waiting and silence
Asphyxia and union
Repeatedly the sky’s autumn turns its head
Towards the meat of greed

Village roots     bodies     songs
Roads     festivals     waterlessness
Have unfurled before them existence
And into their mouths descends
The shadowfree meat of October

This is our Bangla, woken up again
By the unaccustomed sound of other languages
Though even now the meat of a few old phrases still clings

The uprooting of a multitude of villages can clearly be heard
Day of incredible sun, phrases worn out by disuse
Goodbye messages in an unaccustomed language
Pages of grammar spiked on nails
Rising in grotesque metallic sound

The uprooting of years and days can be heard
Catatonia comes and touches wholeness
Meat-eating birds can be seen
Tearing hunks from the flesh of massive villages
The bodies of massive rivers

Village and town      practise and partition     could clearly be heard
Prepared reading lists and repudiation
Boycotted words and my own-ness
Uprooting of that fixed gazing towards the stars

Thousands of meat-eating birds were heard
Who in truth are carrying away crematoria and carrion-dumps
from chockful skies
Carrying away the mounds of our neglect

Have they taken me too? The entire sky is the belly
Of a snake swollen with villages swallowed whole
Leaving behind
The sloughed-off skin of my language    unlettered

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Previously published in Modern Poetry in Translation. Translated by Sampurna Chattarji.

From 'After Nature'
by WG Sebald

When morning sets in,
the coolness of the night
moves out into the plumage
of fishes, when once more
the air’s circumference
grows visible, then at times
I trust the quiet, resolve
to make a new start, an excursion
perhaps to a region of
camouflaged ornithologists.
Come, my daughter, come on, give
me your hand, we’re leaving
the town, I’ll show you the mill
twice each day set in motion by current,
a groaning miraculous construct
of wheels and belts
that carries water’s power
right into stone,
right into trickling dust
and into the bodies of spiders.
The miller is friendly,
has clean white paws,
tells us all kinds of lore
to do with the story of flour.
A century ago here Edward Fitzgerald,
the translator of Omar Khayyam,
vanished. At an advanced age
one day he boarded his boat,
sailed off with his top hat
tied on, into the North Sea
and was never seen again.
A great enigma, my child, look,
here are eleven barrows
for the dead and in the sixth
the impress of a ship long gone
with forty oars, the grave of
Raedwald of Sutton Hoo.
Merovingian coins, Swedish
weaponry, Byzantine silver
the king took on his voyage
and his warriors even now
on this sandy strip keep their weapons
hidden in grassy bunkers
behind earthworks, barbed wire
and pine plantations, one great
arsenal as far as your eye can see,
and nothing else but this sky,
the gorse scrub now and then,
a capacious old people’s home,
a prison or mental hospital,
an institution for juvenile delinquents.
In orange jackets you see
the inmates labour
lined up across the moor.
Behind that the end of the world,
the five cold houses of the place called Shingle Street.
Inconsolable a woman
stands at the window, a children’s swing
rusts in the wind, a lonely
spy sits in his dormobile
in the dunes, his radio’s earphones
clipped on. No, here we can
write no postcards, can’t even get out
of the car. Tell me, child,
is your heart heavy as
mine is, year after year
a pebble bank raised
by the waves of the sea
all the way to the North,
every stone a dead soul
and this sky so grey.
So unremittingly grey
and low
as no sky I have seen
anywhere else.
Along the horizon
freighters cross over
into another age
measured by the ticking
of geigers in the power station
at Sizewell, where slowly
they destroy the nucleus
of the metal. Whispering
madness on the heathland
of Suffolk. Is this
the promis’d end? Oh,
you are men of stones.
What’s dead remains
dead. From loving
comes life. I don’t know
who’s telling me what, how,
where or when? Is love
nothing, then, now, or all?
Water? Fire? Good?
Evil? Life? Death?

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Previously Published by Modern Poetry in Translation. Translated by Michael Hamburger.

by Mahmoud Darwish

The difference between narcissus

and sunflower

is a point of view: the first

stares at his image in water

and says, there is no I but I

and the second looks

at the sun and says I am

what I worship.

And at night, difference shrinks

and interpretation widens.

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Published in The New York Review of Books, 2008. Translated by Fady Joudah.

by Octavio Paz

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

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First Published in Octavio Paz: Collected Poems, 1987. Translated by Eliot Weinberger.