Death Poem
by Hanabusa Ikkei
translated by Yoel Hoffmann

I thought to live 
two centuries, or three—
yet here comes death
to me, a child
just eighty-five years old.

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From Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death, compiled and translated by Yoel Hoffmann (Tuttle Publishing, 1998).

The Emptiness of Man
by João Cabral de Melo Neto
translated by Galway Kinnell

I.
The emptiness of man is not like
any other: not like an empty coat
or empty sack (things which do not stand up
when empty, such as an empty man),
the emptiness of man is more like fullness
in swollen things which keep on swelling,
the way a sack must feel
that is being filled, or any sack at all.
The emptiness of man, this full emptiness,
is not like a sack of bricks' emptiness,
or a sack of rivets', it does not have the pulse
that beats in a seed bag or bag of eggs.

2.
The emptiness of man, though it resembles
fullness, and seems all of a piece, actually
is made of nothings, bits of emptiness,
like the sponge, empty when filled,
swollen like the sponge, with air, with empty air;
it has copied its very structure from the sponge,
it is made up in clusters, of bubbles, of non-grapes.
Man's empty fullness is like a sack
filled with sponges, is filled with emptiness:
man's emptiness, or swollen emptiness,
or the emptiness that swells by being empty.

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From “The Poetry of Our World” (HarperCollins, 2000) translated by Galway Kinnell.

I thought of eagles for a long time...
by Daniil Kharms
translated by Alex Cigale

I thought of eagles for a long time
and understood such a whole lot:
the eagles soar above the clouds,
they fly and fly and touch no one.
They live on cliffs and on mountains
and are intimate with water sprites,
I thought a long time about eagles
but confused them, I think, with flies.

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Translated by Alex Cigale.

The Flowers
by Stéphane Mallarmé
translated by Henry Weinfield

From golden showers of the ancient skies,
On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars,
You once unfastened giant calyxes
For the young earth still innocent of scars:
 
Young gladioli with the necks of swans,
Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream,
Vermilion as the modesty of dawns
Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;
 
The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright,
And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose,
Hérodiade blooming in the garden light,
She that from wild and radiant blood arose!
 
And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily
That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends
Through the blue incense of horizons, palely
Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends!
 
Hosanna on the lute and in the censers,
Lady, and of our purgatorial groves!
Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer,
Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love!
 
Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom,
Formed calyxes balancing the future flask,
Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam
For the weary poet withering on the husk.

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From Collected Poems (The University of California Press, 1994), translated by Henry Weinfield.

Letter To Stalingrad
by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
translated by Mariza Góes

Stalingrad...

After Madrid and London, there are still great cities.
The world hasn't ended, for amidst the ruins
other men appear, the faces darkened by dust and gun powder
and the wild breath of freedom
opens their chests, Stalingrad,
their chests that burst and fall
while others, avengers, rise.
The poetry escaped from the books, they are now in newspapers.
The telegrams from Moscow repeat Homer.
But Homer is old. The telegrams sing a new world
which we, in the darkness, ignored.

We found it in you, destroyed city,
in the peace of your dead but not conformed streets.
In your breath, heavier than the explosion of bombs,
in your cold wish to resist.
To know you resist.
That while we sleep, eat and work, you resist.
That when we open the morning paper your name (in hidden
gold) will be firm on the headlines.
At cost of thousands of men, tanks and planes, but was worth it.
To know that you wake, Stalingrad,
upon our heads, our preventions and our confusing
and distant thoughts
give an immense comfort to a desperate soul
and doubtful heart.
Stalingrad, miserable pile of ruin, yet radiant!
The beautiful cities of the world stare at you in surprise and
silence.
Weak, in front of your dreadful power;
greedy, in your splendour of rescued marbles and rivers not
profaned,
the poor and careful cities, once glorious, defeated
without fight,
learn with you the movement of fire.
Also they can wait.
Stalingrad, so many hopes!
What flowers, crystals and songs your name pour over us!
What happiness blooms of your houses!
In one of them, only a stair full of corpses remains;
in others the gas pipe, the faucet, a child's bath.

There are no books to read, nor theatres open
not work in the factories,
everyone died, mutilated, the last defended black
pieces of wall,
but the life in you is stunning and hops like insects in the sun,
o my crazy Stalingrad!
The long distance I seek, smell the bloody
ruins,
touch the dismembered forms of your body,
walk alone in your streets where there are loose hands
and broken watches,
I feel you like a human creature, and what are you, Stalingrad,
but that?
A creature that will not die, that will fight
against the sky, the water, the metal; the creature fights,
against millions of arms and engines, the creature fights,
against the cold, the hunger, the night, against the death
the creature fights
and wins.
The cities may win, Stalingrad!
I think of the victory of the cities, that for now is only
smoke rising from the Volga.
I think of the healing of the cities, that will love and defend themselves
against everything.
On the ashy soil where cadavers decay
the great City of tomorrow will restore its Order.

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From A Rosa do Povo by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, translated by Mariza Góes.

Prison
by Luís de Camões
translated by William Baer

Restrained in many prisons, I've had to pay,
shamefully, for all that I've done wrong;
and even now, I seem to drag along
my chains, though Fate has taken them away.
I sacrificed my life to satiate
my selfish whims, but Love was never content
with such a sacrifice, so banishment 
and misery became my natural fate.
I've satisfied myself with little overall,
seeking shameless love, irresponsibly 
seeking lust and satiation without measure.
But now, my fateful star has shown me all
the blindnesses of life and death, and made of me:
a man who shudders at the thought of pleasure.

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First published in Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition translated by William Baer (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Love
by Fitzgerald Kusz 
translated by Shon Arieh-Lerer

a yellow telephone booth
in the middle of a green meadow
if you weren’t here now
I’d call you

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Published in Modern Poetry in Translation. Translated by Shon Arieh-Lerer.

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.