The Soul of Wine - Baudelaire transversion

                                                                         The Soul of Wine ^[1]

           After Baudelaire

 

 

One night, the soul of a wine sang in its bottle :

“ Towards you, Man, my dear disinherited,

From inside this glass prison, I reach out to you,

With a song full of warmth and brotherhood.

 

For I know how much pain, under the burning sun

Out on the hills aflame, it takes to engender me,

And give me a soul. So, I will not be ungrateful,

Or troublesome.

 

As, I get an immense satisfaction plunging down

Into the throat’s of men who are tired from work;

Their soft bellies, after all, are a much gentler abode

Then the cold wine cellars, where I am typically stored.

 

Do you hear the sound of the Sunday hymns

And the hope which babbles in my palpitating breast?

Sleeves rolled up, both elbows on the table,

You glorify me while satiating your thirst.

 

As I help to light up the eyes of your woman;

And to your son give back to him his force and colour,

And to the frail athletes in life,

I will be the oil that strengthens the muscles of the fighters.

 

In you I will fall, vegetative ambrosia,

Precious seed of the eternal planter,

 So that our Love will bring real poetry

Gushing towards God like a rare flower.

---

[1] This translation was made to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Baudelaire and which was celebrated by me with the following poets and translators on the 8^th April, 2021: R J Dent, Yan Kouton, Daniel Wade, Marc Di Saverio, Edith De Belleville, Hélène Cardona, Linda Morales Caballero, Nina Kossman, Fred Johnston and Kevin Kiley in association with the Alliance Francaise, Dublin. 

 

BAUDELAIRE TOUJOURS

 

                                                                                 

 

Spleen LXVIII

 

After Baudelaire 

 

 

When the sky weighs heavy and worn like a lid 

On the oppressed spirit prey to depression, 

And when the horizon too embraces its circumference 

It will then grant us a day as dark as any night. 

 

When the earth is transformed into a humid cell 

Where hope, like some scattered bat, departs 

Ricocheting off the walls with timid wings 

And dashes its head against the rotting ceiling. 

 

When the rain spreads its immense jurisdiction 

Like some vast liquid prison with fluid bars, 

And whole clusters of mute arachnid 

Come to lay their eggs in the deepest recesses of your heart. 

 

Bells suddenly will peal out in a fury 

And throw into the sky their atrocious tolling, 

Just as the spirits of the damned, without any culture, 

Start to opine on social media.  

Testimonials - Latest News etc.

 

After putting together a collection of almost 100 poems to choose from, I asked some fellow writers if they would be kind enough to write a few words for blurbs. These are my 3 favourite:

                                                            Michael J. Whelan " Transformative"

                                                             Chris Murray " Formidable"

                                                             Lois P. Jones " Profound"

This is what it is all about for me, to have the respect of one's peers. My thanks to all 3.

So, I am now in the process of putting together a proper book proposal. Okay, fingers crossed everyone! 

 

Transversion of The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud, read aloud at Boetry Fest

                                          At the Boetry Festival organized and hosted by Dr. Peter

                                            Sheekey to raise awareness of the current immigration crisis.

                                                 ( Photo curtesy of the Russian poet Polina Cosgrave )

                                                                                

 

 

 

 

The Drunken Boat

After Arthur Rimbaud : 1854-1891

 

 

How I descended the impassive rivers

No longer guided by the haulers;

Red skins had taken them as targets

Nailing their colours naked to the masts.

Incoherent to the crews,

The importers of Flemish wheat and English cotton,

When the boatmen had finished unloading

The rivers let me go as I pleased.

Into the furious awakening of the tides,

I, the winter previous, deafer than the brain of a child,

I ran! And the peninsulas departed,

Without sounding out triumphant.

The tempest blessed my maritime bath,

Lighter than a cork I danced upon the waves,

What are known as rollers, vice drowned,

For ten nights spun, not missing the silly winks from the bouys.

Softer than the skin of children, the peal of flesh,

The Irish sea inundated my craft of pine,

And the stains of Moorish wine, and vomit,

Bathed me, having dispersed with all rudders and hooks.

And lo’ and behold, I came to bathe in the Poem

Of the Sea, infused in its milk of stars,

Devouring the azure plains- where float

The pale, bloated corpses of the drowned;

Who, holding the brining blue trumpet’s delirious

Rhythm, slowly throughout the rupture of the days,

Stronger than any alcohol, or infinite guitar,

Fermenting all the bitter tattoos of love!

I know the climes die in a flash, and the spouts,

Waves and current: I have known the evening,

And dawn exulted to be only peopled by crows.

And, at times, I have even seen what most men can only dream.

I have seen the ancient disc, stained in Aeschylean horror,

Descend, illuminating the congealed violets

Resembling those ancient satyrs

Whose watery robes tremble with the vicious spray.

And I have dreamed the night green into a dazzling snow,

With kisses merging slowly through the eye of the seas,

Tasted the sap circulating whose whereabouts is still unknown,

And in the aurora of the stupor, perceived a hymn in phosphorous.

I have followed, myself alone, like the herd

Of hysterics, the ripples of the cyclone on the assault of the reefs,

Without dreaming that the soles of the illuminating tides

Could muffle the full force of the oceans.

I have scaled, be it known to you, incredible Floridas,

Mixing the flower of panthers in the eyes of men!

Whole rainbows, extended like the snippets of brides,

Beneath the horizon of seas, and the awful troops.

I have witnessed the distillation of enormous tides, nets

Where lie rotting the corrupted Jonahs of the leviathan.

The systematic collapse of water handed over by the meek,

And the abyss keeps widening its jaws a cataract!

Glaciers, silver suns, floating pearls, and steaming embers!

Hideous groundings at the bottom of shitty gulfs

Where giant worms devour golden bugs,

And tortured elms emit dark Virgilian perfumes.

I should have liked to show children Eldorados,

The great Blue, Neptune, and his singing fish.

However, whole continents of plastic engulfed me,

Pushed onward by the turbulence of wind farms.

Sometimes, martyrized by poles and zones,

The sea, taken in spasms, revealed to me its

Plankton, and further subterranean depths,

And I dived with her, like with a woman kneeling...

Presque isle, tossing about overboard with the struggles

And the droppings of the marauding terns.

And I drifted, and between my fragile links

The drowned plunged sleeping, further retreating!

Now me, a lost boat on the hair of the bays,

Blown by the cyclone, birdless into the ether,

I with whom the monitors and the ships of industry

Could not have replenished the drunk carcass of still water.

Free, smoking, mounting in violet plumes,

I who pierced a hole in the sky glowing like a wall

Bringing with him the exquisite preserve of good poets,

The lichens of the sun, and the snot of azure,

Who ran, charged with electric visions,

Escorted by black seahorses on crazed gang planks,

When all of the 4th of Julys collapsed little by little

The ultramarine climes and ardent funnels;

I who trembled, feeling the moans at fifty leagues

The rutting of the behemoths and the expansive maelstroms,

An eternal spinner in the motionless blue,

Who regrets Europe with her ancient ramparts!

I have seen sidereal archipelagos, and the islands

Where delirium climates abound are sailing:

Is it in those endless nights that you sleep in exile,

A million golden birds, o future vigour?

But, its true, I have cried too much! The dawns have become mediocre.

Every moon now is atrocious, and each sun is bitter.

Acrid love pumps me full of an unnerving apathy.

Christ, if I could get a rest! I need to see the sea.

If I were to envisage a sea for Europe, it would be a puddle

Black and cold, where the dusk is embalmed

And where a child huddled up in sadness, sails

A frail boat like a mayfly.

I can no longer, bathed in these waters, o tears,

Trail in the wake of the cotton porters,

Nor traverse the abomination of flags and flames,

Nor swim below the horrible glare of the pontoons.

    

This transversion was first published on the online journal Deepwater, and subsequently reappeared in my collection Sker published by Lapwing, Belfast, ( 2017).

THE MISSING QUARTER

 

                                                                                       

The Missing Quarter

 

 

Standing, overlooking the Formal Gardens of

The Royal Hospital in Kilmainham,

I explained to the students how the maze

Of Hedges was representative of the human mind

 

With the four Muses, each one enclosed in one

Of the four cardinal points, representing

The different parts of the brain and separate discipline.

Then inviting them in, I showed them first

 

The Muse holding the laurel wreath and I explained

How she was the Muse of literature and letters in general,

While her polar twin, carrying a severed human head,

 

Was representative of both war and medicine.

The third then, holding a palette, was the visual arts,

And finally the missing fourth represented the empty chamber.   

LE RENIEMENT DE SAINT PIERRE - THE DENIAL OF SAINT PETER - BAUDELAIRE

 

                                                                                        

CXVIII

 

LE RENIEMENT DE SAINT PIERRE

 

Qu’est-ce que Dieu fait donc de ce flot d’anathèmes

Qui monte tous les jours vers ces chers Séraphins?

Comme un tyran gorge de viande et de vins,

Il s’endort au doux bruit de nos affreux blasphemes.

 

Les sanglots des martyrs et des suppliciés

Sont une symphonie enivrante sans doute,

Puisque, malgré le sang que leur volupté coûte,

Les cieux ne s’en point encore rassasiés!

 

-          Ah! Jésus, souviens- toi du Jardin des Olives !

Dans ta simplicité tu priais à genoux

Celui qui dans son ciel riait au bruit des clous

Que d’ignobles bourreaux plantaient dans ta chairs vives.

 

Lorsque tu vis cracher sur ta divinité

La crapule du corps de garde et des cuisines,

Et lorsque tu sentis s’enforcer les épines

Dans ton crane où vivait l’immense Humanité;

 

Quand de ton corps brisé la pesanteur horrible

Allongeait tes deux bras distendus, que ton sang

Et ta sueur coulaient de ton front pâlaissant,

Quand tu fus devant tous pose comme un cible,

 

Rêvais-tu de ces jours si brillants et si beaux

Où tu vins pour remplir l’éternelle promesse,

Oú tu foulais, monté sur une douce ânesse,

Des chemins tout jonchés de fleurs et de rameaux,

 

Oú, le cœur tout gonflé et de vaillance,

Tu fouettais tous ces vils mrachands à tour de bras,

Où tu fus maître enfin? Le remords n’a-t-il pas

Pénétré dans ton flanc plus avant que la lance?

 

-          Certes, je sortirai, quant à moi, satisfait

D’un monde où l’action n’est pas la sœur du rêve;

Puissé-je user du glaive et périr par le glaive!

Saint Pierre a renié Jésus…il a bien fait !

 

 

 

 

 

 The Denial of Saint Peter

 

 

What does God do with those tides of anathema

Which climb every day towards the seraphim?

Like a Tyrant gorging on meat and wine,

Gently he sleeps on the gentle sounds of our atrocious blasphemes.

 

The tears of the martyrs and the tortures

Are a drunken symphony without a doubt,

As, despite the blood which their voluptuousness costs,

The climes are not, as of yet, satisfactory.

 

-          Ah! Jesus, remember being in the Olive Garden!

In your simplicity praying upon your knees

To him who laughed to the sound of the nails

Which the ignoble torturer planted in your living flesh?

 

When you saw the toad, the bodyguards and all and sundry

Spitting on your divinity,

And when you felt the thorns digging into your

Skull where dwells the immensity of Humanity;

 

When your broken body was taken by horrible gravity

And finally your two extended arms reposed, and the blood

And your sweat rolled down your pale forehead,

When you were positioned before all like a target,

 

Did you dream of those days so beautiful and brilliant

Where like wine you poured the eternal promise,

When you sat, upon the flank of some donkey,

And the paths before you were all carpeted in roses,

 

Or, the heart still bloated on hope and courage,

You whipped all of those old merchants before you,

When you were Master again? Remorse has it not

Penetrated your side like a lance?

 

-          Certainly, I will evade, trust me, satisfied

That the world of action is not the sister of dreams;

For I have used the sword, so I will perish by it!

And, so, Saint Peter denied Jesus… he did well to.

  

 

 

 

 

 

SOUZI ALI - THE FOXE'S FUR - TRANSLATION OSAMA ESBER

                                                         The Syrian poet Souzi Ali, 2022. 

I first became aware of the poet Souzi Ali two years ago when I was co-editing the April edition of Live Encounters with Mark Ulyseas. As a co-editor,  I wanted to ensure that the edition was not just Eurocentric. The war in Syria was still ongoing and with increased barbarity with the intervention of the Russian army. Osama Esber, the Syrian poet and translator, had already sent me on some wonderful poems about his experience as a poet in exile and who was recounting his experiences from the perspective of California where he had had the good fortune to be now living. So, I was really interested to know if Osama knew of any Syrian poets who happened to be writing poetry in Syria, as I was very interested in including more work from this war- torn land, and that is when Osama sent me on a couple of poems by Souzi and I was immediately hooked.

The following poem, translated wonderfully by Osama, is but one from Souzi's latest collection which still remains unpublished ( The Sixty Year Old Narcissus, 2022) and which Souzi, in a sign of her constant generosity, has allowed me to publish here. I will be publishing more of Souzi's poems over the coming months and weeks as to my mind she is one of the most authentic voices in contemporary poetry. The reason why I say this is because her poetry tackles such difficult subjects such as incest and patriarchy, war and abuse of all kinds. Yet, and here is the ( yes) Miracle, her poetry remains extremely innocent, and for this recent I simply marvel at Souzi's  consummate Art. I am deeply grateful that she has allowed me to publish her work here on my blog, and I also wish to thank Osama for his translations and for introducing me to Souzi's work.  

The Fox’s Fur

Translated by Osama Esber

 

Time, isolation and the sidewalk will be yours.

You will pave the way for the words: “Good Morning!”

Imagine a train under snow

that takes the pelicans of the frozen lake to the north.

You will claim that your wrinkles

 resulted from laughter and inattention,

forgetting great things

the house in the house

and the star in another star.

At 3 o’clock every night

you put your hand under the pillow

and sleep naked.

You dream that you are a painter

that only paints the flowers of cherry trees.

Those who loved you enter your dream

 to make sure that their gardens are intact.

On the shoulder of one of them a blue parrot repeats without end,

“A little Bitch!”

Your blood is as blue as an execution yard.

Everybody waved at you while you crossed the market.

A man was hanging on your back

and a child clung to your shoes and cried.

 

Yours are the brothel, exile, and the bitter beginnings that fascinate you and the spider.

Yours is your mother’s wedding ring.

You will look at your skinny legs while clinging to the legs of a woman

obsessed with tattoos.

You will suck your lazy hands while squeezing the breasts of a woman who has not grow since she was created.

You will smell my dried blood in the corner of your house

while ejaculating your semen in the air.

I will be your insult, which I like,

And your disappointment that stamps my burgundy carpet as ephemeral as snow- flakes.

I will pull down for you from the curtain a turtle that you like.

I will secretly stumble while boiling tea for you.

I will shake my smoking hair on the threshold and listen to your eyes

And you will be calmed again,

after everything returns to its place.

Your only skinny legs

Your only lonely hands

The lonely pain

The storm.

You will be as you are.

You will not do anything more than being you,

lonely as a dim cottage

as a tumor that stabs the leg of an old tree.