Posted on by Gail White

The stricken queens

GAIL WHITE has been writing poetry since she learned to print. She currently serves as a consulting editor to Light Poetry Magazine. Her latest chapbook, Paper Cuts, is available on Amazon, along with  books Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in the Louisiana bayou country with her husband and cats. 

The Stricken Queens

Taking refuge from the rain

in the Museum of Scotland,

I found them unexpectedly:

the Isle of Lewis Chessmen.

Kings and bishops, knights,

a berserker biting his shield,

dignified, large-eyed, calm,

and then – the masterpiece –

two dismayed ivory queens.

Each holds a hand to her cheek

under a heavy crown

and gazes, pale and aghast,

into her private abyss.

I think of Aud the Deep-Minded,

building a ship in a forest.

Grown rich in thinly-settled Iceland,

She will leave a wedding feast

to lie down and die.

I think of strong Gudrun,

four times married, a woman

powerful in revenge.

And what can a woman do –

after husbands, children, flight,

ambition, revenge –

but gaze dismayed at the past,

appalled at the future,

into her private abyss?

Posted on by Thomas Dupre

Three poems by Thomas Dupre

THOMAS DUPRE, 29, is originally from Kent, and lives and works in Paris. He has previously published poems or essays (on Ezra Pound and the Troubadours) in Valet and Azure Bell (an online journal), and has recently finished a manuscript recreating Ezra Pound’s 1912 walking tour in Provence and his lost book Gironde

1

A pretty affectation, picked up
Half by accident – follow
The next pen stroke, look-around
See where its leading,

IT is not futile to put a thing in order
Find the right position, nudge
To left, to right, then flicker on
The next correction

To begin a striking image – not
By being struck, but striking well
And never stricken; lucid, calm
All quite yourself, whoever’s writing.

And all entirely private: Wrapped away
Avoiding adulation and contempt, 
Forgetting worldly things, and staring always
Out into at least the middle distance. 

All this proceeds, until at last there is
No crowd, no choruses or seas
Approve or disapprove, or can consider
Worth considering. There is, still, the ticking
Of a broken clock, a budget pen
And sense of moving.

The two poems that follow are loose versions of Provençal models, taking as point of departure poems by Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, Peire Vidal, and Bertran de Born. A sirventes is an Occitan/Provençal satire in verse, often political or moral

2

Out there on the stone porches the eyes fade,
As the wind picks up pace he blows warm,
Routed are the forces of the jealous horde,
Made a detour through to the high walls, brayed
Torn by the harsh scrub through whence I flee dawn,
Floored at the sight of the first light and the watch-call. 

Out there on the stone porches my head bowed,
And the last joy-song of the south-bird
Flitted away on the hot air of the first hour.
Crossed a new path through to the tower-shade, loud
Soothed by the soft words of the dumb girl, heard
It all echoed in the opening of the night flower. 

Out there on the stone porches the gang wait,
And the last white swan on the Lee-main,
Shimmers through the rutted banks and the dull reeds,
Made a sign at the far-light as the night, late
Folds around the flat pan of the dark plain,
Into the smoke-quiet of a new world where the light leads.

And I shall no longer cobble out sirventes,
Because here the law will not allow them.
And I shall no longer sing beside the locked gate,
Before the sudden dawn-glow comes to rend us.
And all the amorous plaints you’ll just reject them,
And wonder that the dawn should start so late.

3

Draw me towards
East-breath of the old land
                        Teeming
            With well-thoughts
I, Begging
            One hundred in the place
Of each word…

Purification of the mind
In her breath,
                        Breath bears slight – 
            Note of sulphur
Dead shore, Rose bound…

Ripe cherry laid on the side-stall,
            Cheap abundant
                        Fly pecked – 
Charged by season
All shout! Demanding water
            End of the water
Night comes,
On will-flats.

No more sweet
                        Encased
            By odd streams,
Find joy
Piled in abundance
Till the grieved laugh.

Trapped by deceitful senses,

No other strength holds
                        In memory
            Lark’s birth
Whelps, sings praises

All
            To be better content
            In a feigned world.

Coo, malignant dove
Awaiting crow’s peck
Lamb soars above pastures,
Better than I remember

…

No matter how soon the night falls
All found arrayed in the same way
Heads down, chained
Each manacle forged with expectation
The gravest loop; steel,
Pointed and neck-bound
Looks to the here-after
In ‘joyful hope’ which binds
Eternally – 

Posted on by Isabel Chenot

Spectred land and dawn, the coast, mid-September

ISABEL CHENOT has loved, memorised, and practised poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood

spectred land

A single star – a pentacle
cut from the moon’s frill, or some future dawn –
flew near our car. The sky was simple
on one drowsing hill. Beyond,

grazed mountains – ghosts of mastodon.

dawn, the coast, mid-September

Far out, the seabirds

in the silver braids

wink like white ash. The ocean swerves

dawn-slung and early.

How slight, their mirrored legs – and how kaleidoscoped,

reflected curves of wading curlews,

closer, over tide-roped

shore. Each wave re-centers and re-blurs dilating curlews.

The middle distance spins and shimmers like a dime.

A seagull skims the fallow instant before shock:

the crack in time, when a wave crams its hollow

on a rock.

And closer by, prone shadows etch down-sill

of casements flushed with sand. Touch the bright rush –

reality. The night still drags its fingernails

along the rim. We are its tapering hand.

We and the brightness brush.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Six go in search of a bride

This translation by LIAM GUILAR is from the medieval Welsh prose tale, Culhwch ac Olwen. Having enlisted the help of his cousin, King Arthur, Culhwch and his companions set out from Arthur’s court to find Olwen, the daughter of Ysbaddaden Pencawr (Ysbaddaden Chief Giant)

Six go in search of a bride

And so they travel ‘til they come to a vast plain,

and they see the biggest fort they’d ever seen.

All that day they struggled towards it,

but ‘though they thought they were advancing,

they were no nearer than when they started.

And the second and third day they travelled,

and with difficulty approached the fort.

As they closed the distance, they saw a flock of sheep,

so vast they couldn’t see the ends of it. 

On the top of a mound, a shepherd, dressed in skins,

was guarding it and by his side a shaggy dog

bigger than a horse nine winters old.

He had never lost a lamb much less a full grown sheep.

No troop had ever gone past

without him doing it hurt or harm.

His breath would burn to the ground,

any dead bush or tree on the plain.

Kei said to Gwrhyr Interpreter of Tongues:

‘Go talk to that man.’

‘Me? I promised to go as far as you did,

I didn’t say I’d go any further.

We’ll go together.’

Menw mab Tiergywaed said:

‘Don’t worry about the hound,

I’ll glamour it and you’ll be safe.’

‘It is fine you are, shepherd.’[i]

‘May things be no better for you than they are for me.’

‘God’s truth, you are the chief.’

‘No one can harm me except my wife.’

‘Whose sheep do you guard and whose is that fort?’

‘Stupid men. Everybody knows

that fort belongs to Ysbaddaden Pencawr.’

‘And you, who are you?’

‘Custenhin Amhynwyedic and on account of my wife,

my brother Ysbaddaden Pencawr has ruined me.

And you, who are you?’

‘We are Arthur’s messengers,

come to ask for Olwen.’

‘Oh men, may God protect you.

For all the world don’t do that.

No one ever came on that errand

and left with his life.’

The shepherd arose from the mound.

As he arose, Culhwch gave him a golden ring.

He tried to put it on, but it wouldn’t fit.

He put it in the finger of his glove, went home,

and gave the glove to his wife. 

‘Where did you find this ring

It’s not your usual scavenging.’

‘As I was walking down by the sea side.’

‘A long way from your sheep?’

‘I was looking for seafood.

I saw a fine corpse tossed up by the tide

and found this gold ring on his finger.’

‘Take me there, husband,’ the wife replied.

‘If the sea won’t swallow a dead man’s treasure, 

show me his fine looking corpse.’

‘The dead man will soon be washed to our gates

so be patient a little and linger.’

‘His name, husband, tell me his name?’

‘Culhwch, your nephew, your sister’s son.

He’s come here looking for Olwen.’

‘Bittersweet is your news, husband,

I’ll see my nephew at last:

but that’s a quest no one’s survived.’

Hearing the noise of their approach

she rushed out to greet them.

As she opened her arms to embrace him,

Kei snatched a log from the woodpile

and placed the stake between her hands.

She squeezed it until it was a twisted withy.

‘Ha woman,’ he said, ‘that was an evil loving.

If you’d hugged me like that, no one

would ever make love to me again.’

They were welcomed into the house.

After a while, when all were busy,

she opened a chest beside the hearth,

releasing a youth with curly, golden hair.

‘It‘s a shame to conceal such a lad,’ said Gwrhyr.

‘I know it’s not his crime that’s being punished.’

‘He’s all that I’ve got left,’ she said.

‘I had 23 sons and Ysbaddaden Pencawr

has killed them all.

I’ve no more hope for this one

than I had for his dead brothers.’

‘Be my companion,’ said Kei, 

‘and no one will kill either of us,

unless they kill us both.’

As they continued eating,

the woman asked:

‘What errand brought you here?’

‘We have come to seek Olwen.’

‘For God’s sake, turn back;

before you’re seen

by someone in the fort.’

‘God’s truth, we will not,

until we’ve seen the maiden.

Does she come to a place

where we could see her?’

‘Every Saturday she comes here to wash her hair

and every Saturday she leaves her rings in the bowl.

Neither she nor her servants come back for them.’

‘Will she come if she is sent for?’

‘God knows I will not harm my friend.

I will not betray one who trusts me. 

But if you give me your word

she won’t be harmed, I’ll send for her.’

‘We give it.’

And so they sent for her.

[i] Throughout the story, there are conversations like the one which follows, which sound as though the participants are in a scene from a Beckett play. 

Posted on by Sean Thompson

Three Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin

Translated by SEAN THOMPSON, who writes and translates from German and French in Ireland

To the Fates

Oh grant me just one summer, destiny,

And then one autumn for my ripened song

So that my heart can die more willingly,

Being sated with sweet sounds, and slumber long.

The soul which does not claim its sacred right

In life will not rest peacefully below

But if I once attain that glory bright,

The poem, heart, the holiest thing you know,

Then welcome, silence of the world of shade!

I am content, though at that nether shore

The bronze notes of my lyre can lend no aid.

I lived once like the gods, I need no more.

The Neckar

My heart awoke to life within your valleys,

Your waves played round me, none of all those hills

Which know you, wanderer, are strange to me.

The breath of heaven often, on their summits,

Lightened the pains of bondage, while below

The blue-tinged flood of silver gleamed, like life

Poured from joy’s beaker. All the mountain streams

Rushed down to you, and with them went my heart,

You bore us to the hushed and noble Rhine,

Down to his cities and his isles of pleasure.

It seems the world has beauty in it yet.

Yearning for earthly charms, my eye escapes

To golden Pactolus, to Smyrna’s shore,

And to the woods of Ilion. I long to land

At Sunium, to ask for the silent path

To your high pillars, O Olympia,

Before the stormwind and the passing ages

Have buried you in wrecked Athenian temples

With all their sacred statues, for it is long

That you have stood alone, O pride of a world

That is no more. And O, Ionian islands!

There, where the salt air cools the panting shore

And whispers through the laurel, when the sun

Keeps warm the grapevines and a golden autumn

Transmutes the sighs of the people into song,

When pomegranate ripens, when the orange

Gleams through green night, when mastic resin drips

And kettledrum and cymbal-clash set up

The labyrinthine dance. To you, O islands!

Someday, perhaps, my guardian God will bring me,

But even then my Neckar will be dear,

With all its pastured shores, its gentle meadows.

Curriculum Vitae

I strove for height. To thwart my strife

Love weighed me down, then roughly pain

Dragged me. I trace the arc of life

And end up at the start again.

Posted on by Claudia Gary

Six poems by Claudia Gary

CLAUDIA GARY teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, composer of tonal songs and chamber music, and an advisory editor for New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See also pw.org/content/claudia_gary

What My Heart Is Saying    

A while ago it spoke up

complaining there’s enough

to process here without 

waves scattering new nacre 

on briny sand

or dredging up seaweed 

to glisten then decay

or sending driftwood planks

to scrape at its incline 

or drawing out its words

with undertow

reminding me a harbor

is subject to erosion

susceptible to tides

but also now and then 

to a starfish.

My Story Has No Villain 

Even the stag that stood before your door

and looked me in the eye—making me stop

and wonder, “Should I be elsewhere?”— was not

a villain, may have been my guardian.

And only when I called out, “Let me through!” 

did he stand down. Does our present create 

the future, or does some idea about

our future block a pathway and create

the present, antlers shuffling warm air?

Legato Notes   

1.

Even a flock

of soot-colored grackles

landing on wires

returning to gray clouds

today even this 

is a moment of peace

2.

Let me dissolve

out of the narrative

into the moment

Delicate and strong

my soul is not leaving

but sheltering in a corner

3.

From unmade bed and plenitude of sighs

to turmeric and lack of peppercorns

melisma to staccato

staccato to melisma

a peppercorn for your thoughts

a murmur for your kiss

Song for Today          

With no time for melisma,

a clear syllabic song

becomes the quiet engine

to move this day along

although the singer slumbers.

Today his peaceful heart

rouses within its rhythmic space

to reason and to start

elaborating newly

a song launched years before

and bring it to fruition

despite a time of war.

Una Corda     

To pull away from sound

precipitates a longing

for greater sound.

I build a house of music.

Its cornerstone is silence.

This soft pedal 

divides each tone’s foundation

in half and lets it settle 

into desire.

Setting 

The room is quiet, warm,

soft voices speaking, sighing,

creating poems and later

music spilling over 

into a performance

that intrigues, overwhelms.

But how to return 

to that quiet room? 

With these words I knock

gently at the door.

Posted on by Alistair Noon

Treecreepers

ALISTAIR NOON’s recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023) and two further volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he’s published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.

Treecreepers

Grubbing for information,

I quiz these insect-eaters:

“Are you short-toed or Eurasian?”

Both 12.5 centimetres,

each wields a well-hooked bill

that picks away down low,

and then ascends the trunk until

there’s no trunk left to go.

Each has the woodpecker’s tail

to balance its battle charge,

a breast that’s mottled and pale

or else in total camouflage.

They share their creepy name,

each a keen treebug killer.

Side-on, they look the same:

though Certhia brachydactyla

and Certhia familiaris

are non-identical twins,

the difference from afar is

that of two beetles on pins,

or a pair of red-vested leapers

the crowd can’t tell apart.

With short-toed treecreepers,

one bad place to start,

counter-intuitively,

bunkered under their feathers,

is the toe that none of us see.

Frequenting identical weathers,

these rock pictograms differ

just in their thirteenth stroke:

one likes its trunk far stiffer

and shuns the beech for the oak.

The birdbook’s tint of bark

reveals their distribution

overlaps right here. Remark

the gap in their elocution,

but the ear’s as bad as the eye

and gets it just as wrong –

they warble or chirp at the sky,

but some can sing both songs,

and note the short-toed ’creeper

has a Maghreb population

whose tune’s a whole tone deeper.

Why do the taxonomization?

One puts on a great sleep-in,

one only sleeps alone.

One sleeps in its species’ safekeeping,

one would not share a bone.

Posted on by A Z Foreman

Sleeping Baal

A. Z. FOREMAN is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, Old Irish, Italian, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Welsh have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. These poems were written during an archaeological survey for Old Arabic inscriptions in the Jordanian Harrah

The rain-torrents have turned old ruins up

like writings re-incised by their old pens…

…I stopped to question them. But how to question

immutably mute stones that speak no sense?

وجلا السيول عن الطلول كانها    زبر تجد متونها اقلامها

فوقفت اسألها وكيف سؤالنا     صما خوالد ما يبين كلامها

               — from a Jāhilī  poem attributed to Labīd bin Rabī’ah

            1. Arriving in Amman

With speakers’ call to prayer, a minaret

hails me synthetic welcome. Radios.

Shawarma. Shisha. Soon the body glows

with a heat dryer than the brow is wet.

Twelve greetings later, on a car-loud street

pink with the ancient sun about to set,

the mind is red for something waiting yet

out there, where time still goes on deathless feet

in sand, on black torched rocks no hand has scratched

since Rome made war, where other Arabs spread

tears for a drought, a beast, a man outmatched,

or scraped song shards:

                                    Mot feasts. Brute death eats yet.       

The interchange of night and day is set.                               

Baal sleeps. He only sleeps. He is not dead[1].                        

            2. Into the Harrah

We wake into black morning, race the dawn

down Baghdad highway with the Bedouin,

riding no camels now but a Nissan,

to meet the leavings of their ancient kin

wheeling through stonelands down a knotting route

whose winds like secrets only one man tells

blow ears hot, till dark rocks force us on foot

to enter the most beautiful of hells

where, hard up a stone-scaled, day-blasted hill

I climb and clasp my way in sweat until

we reach the written vestige of a man

that has outfaced the centuries’ churning reigns

before my feet:           “by Māsek ben Sahrān,         

The year he rose and shattered Caesar’s chains”     

            3. Desert Remembrance at Noon

Stop and let us weep in memory

— from a Jāhilī poem attributed to Imru’-l-Qays

This is where brutal things are beautiful.

Almighty silence, stone and sun command

everything. Nothing living here can stand

alone. Alone is slow death as a fool.

You must foot up these rocks where visions bend

in air throbbed like a feverish head, and jewel

yourself with grit-toned sweat to comprehend

water’s real taste.

                                    This earth was great and cruel

to men who wrought and died and somehow thrived

at dice with Shahs and Caesars. The austere

received them like a palace. Their inscribed

names still immune to deadly heavens out here

on letter-chumbled stone call back in me:

Stop here and weep with us in memory…

            4. The Last Ride of Ghayyār-el

By Ghayyār-el ben Ghawth of the line of Hathāy when he rode from his folk

      He camps for war

            So be his final campment here today

      Fame for him is first

            So be his final campment here today

      He suffers who returns

            So be his final campment here today

He has gone to the outlands to stay in the heath and watch for his uncle Sakrān..

               — inscription from Marabb al-Shurafā’

            Too long he’s waited for Sakrān out here

with the clan’s camp. The raid should have been done

before that barrow’s shadow was even near

darkening up his tent. But now the sun

            unslowable by gods or jinns or men

reddens down till the desert seems to burn

cold at his prayer: Allāt let him return.

So, saddling up, he camels out again

for outlands. The carved words he leaves behind

shrill on a stone that heavied a god’s mind

survive the night and more. He camps for war.

So be his final campment here today.

He suffers who returns.

                                                An arrow tore

the kid’s skull. Old Sakrān was on his way.

            5. Sā’ed Avenged

By Sā’ed son of Mar’ son of Nūr. He grieved for his brother Nūr whom the Nabataeans killed when he was pasturing the livestock of the tribes of Awīdh and Thlayp, so O Allāt of Oman and goddess of Dathan and Gadd of Awīdh and Gadd of Thlayp, let him have revenge against him that did this.

               — Inscription C 2445

            The night went long on Sā’ed down the plain,

eyes pricked by ceaseless stars. Cuff eyes that weep

at rock and tentmark. Time had come to keep

the vow. Make Raqmo bleed. Nūr had been slain

               by the town-squatters cowering again

behind their king and walls. So charged the owl

loud on the cairn with carnage in its howl:

Your arrows on Nabato for your pain!

He and the heart were up. Thlayp and Awīdh

were at his back as day began to breathe,

like a hot godhead ready to speak flame

inhaling brief cool. The damned convoy came

from Raqmo’s gate. Bows ended five. Eight others

bleeding alive.

                        And all thirteen had brothers.

            6. Return to Amman, feeling ill from a burger

Considering how natural men survive

with man and nature both as enemies

when honor is the balm to keep alive

with violence pandemic like disease,

where empire is an organ of the fates

that shape your tribe as surely as the sun

kills and revives land,             I, a child of states,

recall, tonight in New Rabbath Ammon[2],

the stones man-worked and heaved for a dead woman

beside a wadi. There no practical

mind-skidding struggle could repress the human

rite of a megalithic funeral

against a godless world their gods redeem.

Baal sleeps. I am awake to hear him dream.

بلينا وما تبلى النجوم الطوالع        وتبقى الجبال بعدنا والمصانع

                                             We perish and rot 　

                                             　　but the rising stars do not.

                                             　When we are gone,

                                             　　　the hills and stoneworks stay.

                                                            —  Labīd bin Rabī’a

[1]                  A paraphrase of North Arabian inscription KRS 2453, a good candidate for the earliest recorded piece of Arabic poetry. Based on decipherment by Al-Jallad.

[2]                  “Rabbath Ammon”, the Biblical name for the Ammonite capital located on the same site as the modern city of Amman

Posted on by Victoria Moul

Verses and translations by Victoria Moul

VICTORIA MOUL is a critic, poet and translator living in Paris. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PNReview, bad lilies, Black Iris, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse and Ancient Exchanges. She reviews regularly for The Friday Poem and the TLS. She writes a weekly substack on poetry and translation, Horace & friends (https://vamoul.substack.com/)

Seta and Sporophyte

If this were Ovid, Seta would have been

A slim bright girl, whose bead of blood

One day ran down her inner thigh, a seed

Threaded across the warp of veins

Vermilion on cream and blue. He took

Such pleasure in the colour that he slew

Her just to satisfy himself and draw the skein

Of red from her rotting body; a damp, fine

And part translucent sort of stem, though not

To bear a flower, but his tensed pouch, the Sporophyte.

(Seta and sporophyte are terms referring to parts of moss. I had in mind particularly a common moss in which the sporophyte – spore-bearing structure – is formed of a stem-like seta, bright red and standing straight up from the main body of the moss, bearing dark red capsules. None of the transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses refer to moss, but I was struck by the coincidence of the technical term Seta and the Sita of Indian mythology.)

Three poems from The Sanskrit

The Subhasitaratnakosha is a huge 11th century anthology of Sanskrit verse and verse quotations. It was compiled by a Buddhist monk but most of the contents are not (or not obviously) Buddhist, and date from several centuries earlier. It includes some poetry attributed to women.

Subhasitaratnakosha no. 999

As the grime and caustic iron

Of North Sea water, somehow laid

Precisely in the spotless scoop

Of shell is filtered by a cloud

And turns to pearl as sweet and clear

As April rain: so can you raise

The warm and grubby coins of envy

To the gold of praise.

no. 998

Your glory in this world and the next, it is

The ribcage of that royal bird, the soul:

The waters of the seven seas

Fill, like a skull, his little drinking bowl.

Lokāloka is the name of a mountain which is both in and out of the world (loka and aloka), marking the boundary between death and life. The Raghuvamsha by Kālidāsa is a long Sanskrit poem about the lineage of Raghu, and at this point in the poem it is concerned with a difficulty in conceiving a child. Kālidāsa is often considered to have been the greatest poet and playwright of ancient India.

Lokāloka (Raghuvamsha 1.68)

The clouds in Calvi steam on the mountain top:

From the pool we watch them teeter, stir, disperse.

My father has just died

But unbeknownst to me somewhere inside

Dividing cells will in a few months reassemble

His closed eyes.

Two versions of Horace

After Horace, Odes 1.30 O Venus, regina Cnidi Paphique

Mary, queen of Walsingham, forget

Your darling Norfolk; turn to hear

In Lowestoft and Dartmouth Park, the thrum

            Of womens’ prayer.

Come with a child, the blazing boy, and bring

The Muses, skirts up to dance; allow

Also the elderly to attend your train;

            And Christ your son.

After Horace, Odes 3.22

The only baby in all of Horace (Odes 3.22)

Lady of the hills and woods

Hear me when my time is come

Preserve me from all dangers and

            Heed too your son.

Above my house a pine-tree looms

And every day that passes I

Pray that one day my baby shall

            Stand as high.

Spare me then the staggered blows

Of a slow labour, or

A dead child. Bring us torn but

            Safe to shore.

Two Translations of Casimir Sarbiewski

Casimir Sarbiewski (1595-1640) was a Polish Jesuit poet who wrote in Latin. His poetry was an enormous success across Europe in the seventeenth century, with a particularly enthusiastic readership in England.

After Sarbiewski – ‘De divino amore’

Last week I watched Love mending his nets

 (Very dextrous he is too)

His gear was all gold: hooks and line

            The bait, the flies, even the worm.

He was golden himself: but for all his gleam he could find

            No waters to fish in. He asked

“Where then can I cast?”

Pass your nets, boy, to the fisher of men:

In his sea

Packed and wriggling you’ll catch

Men and women like me.

De puero Iesu nato

— Is anything more precious than this child of mine?

Whose mouth with running honey wells and fills again,

As balsam flows unstained in streams that do not fail,

And nectar runs in rivers, free and unconstrained.

In his still curls the stars themselves are bound and borne

And on his nape the locks of heaven turn in light.

Could any mother comb such dazzling weight by hand,

Of he who has been born from shiver of starlight?

— His birth is of the royal line, but royalty is obsolete;

And soonest born he’s lain in filth of foreign town,

His right hand grasps at straw, and clings to scraps of hay,

A baby swaddled only by the chill of snow.

Is anything worth less to us than such a child today?

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Three translations from Culhwch ac Owen

LIAM GUILAR is the poetry editor of The Brazen Head. These are three of his translations from the medieval Welsh prose tale, Culhwch ac Olwen (i.m. Michael Alexander)

Translating Culhwch ac Olwen

In popular films the sexy treasure hunter/archaeologist

(they conflate the two, much to my trowel wielding friends’ dismay)

who’s fluent in every lost forgotten ancient language,

confronting the inscription on the recently uncovered wall,

or gazing at the long lost rediscovered legendary text,

looks, then translates, without a pause, the symbols

into fluent, idiomatic, contemporary American.

The reality goes more like this:

Kilyd son of Kledon Wledic

Wanted a wife as noble as himself.

Here is the woman he wanted.

Goleudyt daughter of Anlawd Wledic.

So far so good.

After they stayed together What? Gwest Ah, see note.

They spent the night together. Is that too direct?

The verb’s related to the one for copulation.

They came together. After they were married

….bland. After they slept together,

no, the story teller could have used kysgu gan.

The cruder options? No. Not here. What follows?

The country went to pray they ?might have? offspring

And they got a child/boy through the prayers of the country.

And from the hour she captured, caught?

The next word’s definitely ‘pregnant’. Another note.

‘Became pregnant’ though literally ‘caught pregnancy’.

As though it were an illness, perhaps better than ‘fell pregnant’

which evokes abrupt decline, or woman, falling?

Then she went wild/feral. Another note.

‘She went mad’. Mad or wild is somewhere you go to

in this case beyond the civilised boundaries.

She’s gone mad and won’t go near a building.

Wouldn’t enter a building?

And from the time that she was pregnant,

She went wild and wouldn’t enter any building.

And when her time came, she came to her good sense.

You go mad but come to your senses. The payoff’s here, 

the sudden twist estranging your own language.

You go out of your mind as though it were a car,

and you could leave in the car park to return to

when finished being mad and needed it again. Anyway,

what’s next? Pigs!? What? We’re up to line 7, only

one thousand two hundred and thirty eight to go.

May I marry your daughter?

(The giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr knows he will die when Olwen, his beautiful daughter, marries. Understandably, he doesn’t welcome her suitors. But Culhwch has been told that if he doesn’t marry Olwen, he will never marry anyone. He and his six companions set out to ask the giant for her hand in marriage. What isn’t stated but becomes obvious is that the giant can’t be killed until his daughter is married.)

They killed the nine gatekeepers,

and not a man cried out.

They killed their nine huge mastiffs;

not one so much as squealed.

And so they came into the hall.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr! Greetings

in the name of God and man!’

‘You, where are you going?’

‘We seek your daughter, Olwen,

for Culhwch son of Kilyd.’

‘Where are those rascal servants?

Where are those ruffians of mine?

Raise up the forks under my eyelids

so I can see my future son in law.’

This they did. ‘Come back tomorrow

I’ll have an answer for you then.’

He had three stone spears beside him,

each tipped with poison.

As they turned to go he seized one

and flung it after them.

Bedwyr caught it and hurled it back,

piercing the giant through his knee cap.

‘Cursed savage son in law!

It will be worse for me when I go downhill.

Like the sting of a gadfly,

the poisoned iron has hurt me.

Cursed be the smith who made it

and the anvil on which it was forged.‘              

They stayed that night at Custennin’s house.

And on the second day, they set out to the hall,

in majesty, with fine combs in their hair.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr,

give us your daughter.

In return for her dowry and marriage fee

to you and her two kinswomen.

And if we don’t get her from you;

you’ll get your death from us.’

‘Her four great-grandmothers

and her four great-grandfathers

are still alive. I must consult them.’

‘You do that. We’ll go eat.’

He took the second spear

and hurled it after them.

Menw mab Teirgwaedd

caught it and threw it back.

It pierced the centre of his chest

and sprung out the small of his back.

‘Cursed savage son in law.

The pain of this hard iron

is like the sting of a horse-leech.

Cursed be the forge wherein it was heated.

Now, when I go uphill,

there will be a tightness in my chest,

stomach aches and frequent nausea.’ 

They went to their food.

On the third day they came to the court.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr,

stop throwing spears at us.

Do not wish hurt and harm

and death upon yourself.’

‘My eyelids have fallen over my eyeballs –

Where are my servants, raise up the forks

so I may look on my future son in law.’

They arose, and as they rose,

he took the third spear

and hurled it at them. This time,

Culhwch caught it and threw it back,

and as he wished, it pierced the eyeball

went through and out the back of his neck.

‘Cursed savage son in law.

As long as I live the sight in one eye

will be worse than the other.

Whenever I walk in the wind it will water.

I’ll have headaches and giddiness

at the start of each moon.

Cursed be the forge that heated it.

Worse than the bite of a mad dog

is the sting of its poisoned iron.’

Next day they came to the court.

‘Don’t attack us anymore.

You’ll bring hurt and harm

and martyrdom to yourself.

Give us your daughter.’

‘Which one of you was told to seek her?’

‘Me, Culhwch, son of Kilyd.’

‘Come here so I can see you.’

A chair was placed under him,

so they could be face to face.

‘Is it you who seeks my daughter?’

‘I do.’ ‘Give me your word

that you’ll be just?’ ‘I give it.’

‘When you give me what I name,

then you will have my daughter.’

‘Name what you want.’

The Lame Ant

(Ysbaddaden gives Culhwch forty impossible tasks. This poem tells how one of them is achieved. Gwythyr is one of Culhwch’s companions.)

As Gwythyr mab Greidawl

was crossing a mountain,

he heard lamentations:

a most bitter wailing.

Dreadful this noise.

He rushed towards it

drawing his sword,

cutting the anthill

off at the ground

saving the ants from

the blistering flames.

‘God’s blessing and ours upon you,’

they said to him.

‘And that which no man can recover

we will recover for thee.’

These were the ants

who collected the flax,

all the nine hestors

Ysbaddaden demanded.

But one seed was missing.

Until just before sunset.

it was finally brought in

by the last, limping ant.