POSTS

Juliana (A mistranslation)

                                          from the Old English

Hear we           of these heroes

who love who             spread selves

on the grass     spread their

selves wide       and split

wide     their grinning

spin and             split

their duties       across my split

slit my                cross

August that hoarded               that honored   

his housegods             guardians

of my cities                   consumed by she

who was Juliana.         I who ghostbore

highest truth                kept clean

that maidenhood         married myself

off so eagerly                to Christ’s care.

O Father unwitting                 could not sense

my virginal scheming             and fathers make such promises

Firmly fixed

against the lusts of August                 this hardlocked

abundance and endless           earthen gems              

I despised all               and spoke

before father               and this son of summer:

“If I may speak            your honored selves

need not be vexed.                  But know the true

Godlove and open,       throats thrumming

hymns to permit          Him to penetrate.

May I prick                  this lock

picked or even             slicked

with jam a boyish                    prank

you may open             may soak in

this truth and trust                the conditions will be met.”

August’s ire                 sinstained before        

my virgin words        barbaric and mindblind          

fetched fleet                my father.       

Warcrying cocked                  their spears     

combined as one                     and sick with their crimes      

one fatherson  August, son                

of my lands                  you swordclinging     

boy of such brutal                   mind such

tender selfdom            my words such a rigid            

spear in rib                   and Father, oh            

how you offer me up.

“Daughter mined                     for sweetness

dearest heartsafe                     she, sweetest

anguish amid               the light of my eyes,

 you grasp at folly                     own vanity     

malevolence                 you refuse      

your interest:               he is better than you.”

Fast and firm my                       fermented desire

a friend meant                            for no man

unwilling to yield                      unreachable, even

                  with such rewards.

“I give no consent to man                   who cannot grant       

the same to our origin             shared waves

the whirling track                     of all the world’s expanse

all which encloses                      you, bound

to my rightness,                         a righteous grinding

of zealous touch                        starved teeth,

things that linger on the tongue                      speckled with fever.

Your quiver is emptied                       you cannot be reached.”

Daddy would              gift me            

with glittering            minimum

payments         of his seething:

“If I survive                 and you sustain          

this supple                   dodging of the dearly

disdained        your own

you face           a death by beast

such things as you                   would crawl into

my bed to seek                           my reassurance

 that dreams had passed         and shriveled

a trace of cortisol        left in the blood.”

“My bliss is blunted                 honesty clubbed

my fear of you,           I lack the capacity

to conceive                  of this conviction.

Your juries will find me           unfitted to

these fixtures               attempting small adjustments

new dressings for the rack                  all unconvincing

splintered symptoms               of your idolismic delusions.

I would burn                these heathen holyfields

before accepting          this bargain.”

Father marked his fury           uncontained, so common

in purplespecked memories                 of fathers        

and daughters              swinging

from his arms               swinging his

fists and finding           in frozen

breaths before contact             a calmness.

These torments allow him                   access.

Sacred cargo dragged              before this dawn tribunal,

watchers gather           wonder aloud

at what crimes could commit              one so fuckable.

August was first                       to address the accused:

“My sweetest sun                     shining schemer,

Juliana!            Ho, what a gleam

gifted with grace                     a budding blossom!

Stupidity does not suit           the pluckable,

so simple         to pretend

to swallow this            succor and sacrifice

to our needs.               Our gods ask so little

yet your refusal remains.                     What awaits

now is agony               you cannot comprehend.”

My smile stretched                 edgedragged

to corners cracked                   and chapped, dripping

 down upon my           best-loved bra

while onlookers assess            the repetition

of rackwhipped           response.

“This is our nation,                  victory taken

over such stubborn                  rejection.

Let go of your strife                 and end this unrest,

hatred brought home              with your blasphemy.”

This blame could be borne                  a weight

awaiting me all            nights and lightened

with slattedsun            patterns on pillow

cases we would            cram with our miserable

memorabilia, you may            have believed once

that I could recant.

Bind fast to me            satisfied with such

a fate as I know           I would warrant

warring with such                   horrors that waited

scraped            into my stone

Hung by my hair         from a gym

class pull up bar          one hour for each

boy left            unfucked

when only my headhair          returned shorn I rode

forth from my town                on projectile waves

of their bile                  til I came

to rest—these sandstone hills,                        ice cream

dollops eastward,                    house the horny toads

and locusts                  of my memory.

I watch the passing                 headlights from this perch

on coals prepared                    so lovingly

for my soles and cheeks,                     and down

across the plain           the island

of streetlight marks     the boundaries of mutual rejection.

A martyr sans mercy               her moral

superiority is simply                a bitter young cunt

I

would have crushed them all.

Translation Note

This project, a partial translation of The Exeter Book’s Juliana (itself an Old English translation of a Latin saint narrative), began as part of my MFA thesis at Boise State University. Initially, it found inspiration in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, as one of my aims was a ghostly inhabitation and voicing of a legendary female figure—in this case, St. Juliana of Nicomedia. My translation of Cynewulf’s Juliana seeks to complicate a portrait of a Christian martyr through the excavation of the psychosexual nature of Juliana’s saintliness, her relationship with her father and her betrothed, and her intimate conflict with the devil.  One of my primary goals in translating Anglo-Saxon poetry is to preserve a sonic sense of the original language even as my translations seek to speak to contemporary conflicts, frameworks, and concepts.

Woven throughout the translated passages are the more experimental intrusions, functioning as commentary on or response to the Anglo-Saxon. The intrusions also use memories of my queer, rural childhood and adolescence to reframe the narrative. In the early drafting stage, these intrusions were marked by formal distinctions from the direct translations; they featured extremely brief, sometimes single-word, left-justified lines with none of the caesuras that mark the Anglo-Saxon lines. However, as I continued in my translation work, I found that the distinction detracted from the poem’s continuity.  Considering the violent nature of the poem, I thought it would be interesting to experiment with some formal “dismemberment” of the text; there are many lines from the original that are left out, altered, or replaced with my own intrusions. While violence is taking place at the level of content, there is also something about the deceptive nature of weaving in the replacement verses without signaling the shift that performs this dismemberment in a more subtle way.  What you see here is the first section of a three-part (mis)translation of the entire saint narrative, covering Juliana’s betrothal, via her father, to Eleusias¹, her refusal unless Eleusias converts to Christianity, and her subsequent trial and torture. The overall goal of this project is twofold. I wanted to presents readers with a lesser-known Anglo-Saxon poem in such a way that it might appeal to modern poetic tastes while still encouraging the curious to seek out the source text. Secondly, as an intensely personal piece of writing, the act of creating such an experimental translation was a therapeutic exercise in reframing trauma, through which I was able to both laugh at my own exaggerated sense of martyrdom and honor the very real pain and isolation felt by my adolescent self.

¹ Eleusias is rendered as “August” in this translation. This is primarily because Eleusias as a name means nothing to most contemporary readers. August is still rooted in the original Latin and more clearly evokes the grandeur of a wealthy, powerful senator. August carries more significance within the context of my thesis as a whole, where the transition from summer into autumn in the month of August, and the subsequent start of a new school year, mark a return to the adolescent social order and the traumas of homophobic bullying and compulsory heterosexuality.

     

Cynewulf was a 9th-century English poet. Little to nothing is known of him outside of his poems, preserved in the Vercelli and Exeter Books: The Fates of the Apostles, Elene, The Ascension, and Juliana.

Lindsey Appell (she/they) is a poet, fiction writer, and writing instructor currently living in Boise, Idaho. They hold an MA in English from the University of Utah and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boise State University. Raised Catholic in Montana, her poetry explores intersections of landscape, religion, mental illness, and rural queerness.

 

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Yuletide Fable #1

A certain classical rodent distinguished by compulsive nosiness was once snooping around in the cellar, collapsed into the amphora with wine and quickly drowned. On the ensuing day the amphora was dispatched to the seaport where it was loaded onto a vessel. Thunderbolts fulminated into the vessel during a tempest, conflagration erupted and the argosy sank midway between Jaffa and Piraeus. In 3694 the amphora with mummified vitrified mass was salvaged from the seabed and the fossilized rat was hewn from it. The layout of the specimen’s volatile memory was successfully reproduced by applying the methodology of algebraic scanning, and through the instrumentality of the 16-dimensional super-computer, emulating lower mammals’ sensory perception, the relevant video footage was displayed. It transpired that the rat which so (in)felicitously floundered into the amphora, six hours earlier had witnessed the interrogation of Christ by Pontius Pilate.

Clandestine information on that matter was serendipitously unearthed by the computerized archeological mission in 5118. Regretfully, the then retrieved informational chip of the notorious NN-4 grid was almost utterly vandalized, and, in the ultimate reckoning, fragments from the index of contents, exiguous desultory dialogues and two video snapshots (from amongst the total of two millions) were displayable. A sessile man robed in the vestments of the Roman Martial Governor was visible on the former, the least mutilated snapshot. The perspective is grossly misaligned – ventral and lateral views. A hulking Romanesque-sandaled foot is visible, a disproportionately dwarfish head with a comparatively hypertrophied mandible, a wrist with a finger-ring is on the lap. Opposite stands Christ – an approximately quadragenarian, swarthy-complexioned Semite, luxuriously gowned, aquiline hooked nose, wispy beard, bloated cheeks. The focus of the snapshot (a splash of color) is the finger-ring, an ostentatiously flamboyant one, supposedly, the artifact riveting the gnawer’s attention this particular second. The latter snapshot is severely blurred. Pilate is scarcely discernible thereon. Christ is expostulating on something, gesticulating with his hand directly at the rat. A hexapod (hypothetically, Blatta orientalis) is zigzagging across the foreground. The snapshot is semantically decentralized. Evidently, the instant of refocusing attention from the insect to the background is recorded. Ostensibly, the rat lusted to ingurgitate the Blattoptera but was diverted by an exclamation.

Extant gleanings of the dialogue were exportable solely into the plain textual file format. Consequently, unambiguous authentication of address proved to be unidentifiable. The colloquy was being pursued in the Latin bureaucratese of the 1^st century AD, and corresponding locutions were, with a certain dosage of conventionality, rendered into icon-based Vision English. Altogether, nineteen isolated snippets were decrypted:

1. Now then, we shall be fixing the pecuniary issue.
2. Let us conventionalize things thusly.
3. It is opined that thy folks ought to be disposed of.
4. Where is thy support team?
5. Thou wilt become shorter by the head.
6. Where is the baksheesh?
7. Now, let us tackle HR-related matters.
8. We shall clap hands (*).
9. To vilipend and denigrate.
10. To tweak the issue.
11. Troubleshooting and incentivizing the process.
12. To the Grassroots Committee? The sun is likelier to collapse down on the earth!
13. Through the skewed lens.
14. We shall scrutinize this proposal as well in due course.
15. From the proper perspective, delight of my eyes.
16. Secretarial Rat-Snout.
17. Chine the edacious urban rat.
18. Asphyxiate the sycophant with a noose wetted in asinine urine.

The lattermost nineteenth fragment was identified as authentically attributable to Christ:

19. I beseech you never to terrorize me any more. Altogether, I am clueless as to what Your Sublime Lordship is speaking about. I shall resurrect and persist everlastingly. My father, Lord, my God hath enjoined thus!

*) Hereunder is obfuscated whether figuratively or in the truest sense of the word.

 

Translator’s Note:

Dmitriy Galkovskiy is reputedly the most thought-provoking author in modern-day Russia. However, disconcertingly, his oeuvre has not yet been rendered into English. Galkovskiy is a continuer of the Rozanovian line of Russian philosophy and belles-lettres. Vasiliy Rozanov was an idiosyncratic philosopher of the late nineteenth – early twentieth century whose creativity resists any categorization. This translation is one of Galkovskiy’s short stories.

 

Dmitriy Galkovskiy is a Russian philosopher and man of letters. He matriculated from Moscow State University with a degree in Classical Philosophy. Galkovskiy was awarded the Anti-Booker Literary Prize in 1997 and Live Journal Prize in 2006.

Alexander Sharov matriculated from Dnieper National University (Ukraine) with degrees in English and Psychology. He translates contemporary fiction from Russian and Ukrainian into English.

 

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Four Selections from Queer Esperanto Poetry

To My Crocodile, by Benoît Philippe

Where,
my chatty little crocodile,
have you disappeared to?
How empty
our home will be
without your feigned curiosity,
without your mangled mispronunciation!
Who is going to yawn now
when I drone on about the accusative case?
And who is going to complain
at least once a day
about the absurdity of the Sixteen Rules of Esperanto Grammar?
No more will you wipe your crocodile tears
on my green-starred chest,
and no more will there be someone
to indulge me 
when I say that I only feel at home
in this language.
Eloquent crocodile of mine, 
out there freezing on this cold winter night,
oh where could you be?
Where?

 

Two functions, by Benoît Philippe

Let me explain it to you:
To piss, just unzip
and pull it out 
It will obey lazily,
a humble gargoyle

But to do something more
coquettish (and so forth)
then hoist it up
It will bounce 
to and fro
reckless, pompous
and elegant

 

The Gaylord’s Prayer, by Benoît Philippe

Our Daddy, 
who art fabulous in heaven,
Hallowed be thy shaft
Thy King Dom cum
Thy thirst be quenched,
as in Paradise above,
so be it in our beds.

Give us this day our daily lust,
And forgive us our spunk stained sheets,
as we forgive our Oppressors;
Lead us not to the altar
and deliver us from marriage
For thine is the kinkdom,
and the power(bottoms), 
and the glory(holes),
Forever in pleasure.
Amen!

 

Love Lost, by Pieter de Graaff

Your shoulders
in the caves of my knees
The lustful suspense
as your cock bores
into my flesh

Delirious and searing,
desire overruns
my breathless body
And slowly
I open my eyes
to meet yours

But it’s not a lover’s gaze I see
It’s the content smirk 
of the carnivore,
who has found in me
the bloodthirsty fulfillment 
of his instinct:
your prey.

 

Translator’s Note:

Queer Esperanto poetry! The term may surprise you, but as these translations show this unknown literary tradition, born of a constructed language invented only 134 years old, deserves to be rediscovered by new readers.

These translations first appeared in book form in Bluish Light: An Anthology of Gay Poetry, 1978-1993 (Glaŭka lum’: geja antologio, Pro Esperanto, Vienna 1994), a ground-breaking collection of verse that brought together two rich yet essentially unknown traditions in the Esperanto world: erotic poetry and queer activism. The first three selections translated here are by the collection’s editor, Benoît Philippe. In these playful poems, “Benito” (as he is sometimes known in Esperanto), displays his characteristic wit, crisp language, and rich imagery. In my translation of his last poem here, entitled “The Gaylord’s Prayer,” I have taken a freer approach to the text, incorporating more contemporary queer slang into the poem to bring out the poem’s full satiric force to the English reader. The final poem presented, entitled “Love lost” was written by a Dutch Esperanto activist Pieter de Graaff. This poem burns through the pages of Bluish Light, standing out among the volume’s more subdued and chaste poems with a graphic critique of the violent potential of male desire, no matter its object.

Erotica was a genre adopted early on in Esperanto’s literary history as its writers sought to prove their “artificial” language’s suitability to all situations, including life’s most intimate moments. Unsurprisingly, these texts have been dominated, with a few important exceptions, by the tropes of cismale heterosexual desire. Queer activism in the Esperanto world, while much more diverse and visible today, was for many years represented by and large by a single organization, la Ligo de samseksamaj geesperantistoj (LSG; roughly, the League of Gay & Lesbian Esperantists). While the organization did engage in important cultural work, LSG was primarily concerned with its community’s immediate needs, advocating for inclusion and equality, and often serving as the only outlet for many Esperantists who lived in closed and homophobic societies to live their truth safely. Bluish Light broke barriers in both these areas, adding other (albeit still cismale) voices to Esperanto’s erotic and poetic canons and opening up a space for creative expression in the gay Esperanto community beyond its usual practical concerns. Although poems with similar themes had been published in journals within the queer Esperanto community before, this collection reached far beyond a niche readership and received positive reviews in the mainstream Esperanto press.

 

Benoît Philippe is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar in Esperanto and German. His many publications include Glaŭka lum’: geja antologio (as editor; Bluish Light: An Anthology of Gay Poetry, Pro Esperanto, 1994), and the single author poetry collections Verse reversi (To reverse in verse, Mondial, 2008) and Kvazaŭ varfo (A kind of harbour, Mondial, 2016). He teaches French and German at institutions in Dresden and Prague, and serves as the curator of the Esperanto Library of Saxony.

Little is known about Pieter de Graaff, a Dutch activist for queer rights in the Esperanto community. He was a member of la Ligo de samseksamaj geesperantistoj (roughly, the League of Gay & Lesbian Esperantists) and spoke out against discrimination against LGBTQ+ people at the 1980 World Congress of Esperanto in Stockholm, Sweden. This is his only known poem in print; he was 91 years old when it was published.

Sebastian Schulman (@sebschulman) is a literary translator from Yiddish and Esperanto, and the Executive Director of KlezKanada, a leading organization in Yiddish arts and culture. His writing and translations from Yiddish and Esperanto have appeared in Words Without Borders, Electric Literature, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. His translation of Spomenka Stimec’s Esperanto-language novel Croatian War Nocturnal was published by Phoneme Media in 2017. He lives in Montréal, Québec (Tiohtiá:ke, Unceded Kanien’kehá:ka Territory).

 

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from Hecatombe à Diane

                            61

If those are damned who, in their hopelessness, 
Fall conquered on their own bloody daggers, 
If you can be damned by your own despair, 
The overindulgence of suicide – 

Am I, then, not damned against my conscience
By thirsting for poison, founding my hopes 
On quicksand? Ha! How could there be any 
Worse damnation or harsher sentence than this? 

Why should a despised man fear his last day? 
Who fears Minos as judge after unjust Love? 
Hated, scorned as I am, why should I fear

A boulder, a mountain, a cruel vulture
After Love’s torment? I die to be soothed – 
I choose the lesser of two afflictions.

 

                            67

Imposters who preach that our souls, when placed 
In bodies by our father’s hand, received
The choice to do good and turn from evil, 
And that Heaven granted our souls free will – 

If you hypocrites tested this fire 
Which divorces my will and my pleasure, 
Makes me hate my good and adore my ill, 
And will what I must, unable to will – 

You’d know that the soul follows its senses.
I became the proof, when Diana’s eyes
Changed my will so that it wills only love. 

My will does not deserve to be called “will” – 
I don’t want to love, but I love the day 
When I lost my choice, my soul, my free will. 

 

                            74

Those who mortify their innocent backs, 
Brave to a fault, self-destructively bold, 
Tormented by sin and the vicious blows 
Which return to gnaw at their harsh resolve – 

Their passion is like the madness of Love.
No less than they do, I punish myself;
They hope to earn righteousness with their blows, 
I seek to buy happiness with my pain. 

Their pity is lost to hypocrite zeal, 
And I’m pitiless in my pointless love.
They lament their ills, I sing my sorrows –

But they repent enormous misdeeds.
In this respect alone, our ills differ:
I’m martyred for doing nothing at all.

 

Translator’s Note:

Exiled from his homeland, the poet Agrippa d’Aubigné fled to Geneva, the birthplace of Calvinism. There, he completed Les Tragiques, a verse epic cataloguing, in a dizzying sequence of allegories, historical accounts, and apocalyptic predictions, the horrors of the French Wars of Religion. His public face was that of a staunch Protestant, a man who gave everything and lost much in a lifetime spent trying to break the grip of the Catholic Church. In private, however, the soldier-poet was revisiting manuscripts he wrote decades prior, in a genre abhorred by Calvinist thinkers: love lyric. 

In the collection called Les Printemps, never published during his lifetime, d’Aubigné relates, in vivid and frequently gruesome terms, his ill-fated but passionate love for Diana Salviati, a Catholic woman. According to d’Aubignê’s own account of their relationship, which appears in his memoir, Sa Vie à Ses Enfants, this unlikely couple became engaged during a brief detente in the religious tensions which had divided France since 1562. In 1572, however, all hope of reuniting a fractured people vanished: after Catholics and Protestants alike flocked to Paris to attend the wedding of the Catholic Margaret of Valois to the Protestant Henri of Navarre, an attempt to assassinate Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny sparked horrific mass violence throughout Paris and the surrounding provinces, lasting several weeks and costing thousands of lives. After this, it seems, the marriage of an Italian Catholic to a Calvinist militant became unthinkable. 

Devastated by the broken engagement, d’Aubigné fell into a period of illness and despair, during which Les Printemps was composed. The collection has three parts: Stances, Odes, and the Hécatombe à Diane, a sonnet sequence. Although these poems do not allude explicitly to the historical circumstances surrounding their composition, they are saturated with imagery of civil war, captivity, torture, exile, execution, and mob violence. In sonnet 8, for example, D’Aubigné imagines the anguish of love as a civil war between Love and Fortune, in which he is both trophy and battlefield. 

The three poems presented here are particularly interesting examples of religious conflict translated into love lyric. In each of these sonnets, d’Aubigné takes up a point of Catholic doctrine and offers a scathing rebuttal. These refutations base themselves on the poet’s experience of romantic torment rather than the theological reasoning of Calvinist doctrine. Sonnet 61, for example, takes up the traditional notion that those who die by suicide are condemned after death, pointing out that the poet’s self-destructive love amounts to a kind of living hell to which damnation would be preferable. In sonnet 67, d’Aubigné offers his own uncontrollable desire as evidence to contradict an argument for free will. His assertion that “the soul follows its senses,” is a fascinatingly unorthodox echo of the Calvinist notion of predestination: it is not God who renders the human will powerless, but Diana. 

Sonnet 74, perhaps my favorite of the three, compares the poet’s self-destructive passion to the Catholic practice of self-flagellation. It ends with a brilliantly ironic innuendo: while the Catholic penitents actually have committed the sins they punish themselves for, d’Aubigné, unable to consummate his love, is “martyred for doing nothing.” 

In my translations, I have aimed to be faithful to the vigor of the poems above all, the sense of explosive intensity created when powerful emotion is condensed into the tight container of the sonnet form. To that end, I have prioritized the rhythm and structure of the sonnet rather than word-for-word or line-for-line equivalence, understanding that to neglect the formal coherence of these poems would be to sacrifice their hurtling momentum, the palpable sense of uncontrollable, paradoxical, self-destructive passion which makes them intensely alive for our place, our time, and our language. 

 

Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552-1630) dedicated his life to advancing the Protestant cause in war-torn Reformation Europe, enlisting in de Condé’s Huguenot army as a teenager. He is the author of numerous works of anti-Catholic polemic in an impressive variety of genres, including Les Tragiques, a seven-part verse epic cataloguing the horrors of the French Religious Wars. D’Aubigné was exiled from France in 1610 and died in Geneva at the age of 81. Les Printemps, the collection of love lyric containing the Hécatombe à Diane, was not published during d’Aubigné’s lifetime, although the manuscripts show that he continued to revise those poems until his death. 

Jacob Romm is a writer and translator living in the Hudson Valley. Romm graduated from Yale with a BA in Comparative Literature in 2018, and will begin doctoral studies at the same institution beginning in the fall of 2021. They translate from French, Yiddish, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, and their work, both translations and original poetry, has appeared in Phoebe, Inventory, the Yale Lit, the Journal of Literary Translation, and Br!nk. Romm is also the author and designer of a limited edition artist’s book, Entries on Eden, created in collaboration with the photographer Tanya Marcuse.

 

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End times

Seventeen years ago,
I was twenty-one,
Christ did not come,
cellphones got smaller,
I was saying yes to a boy
I never loved,
and I learned a third language
that came easier to me
than my mother tongue.
Why didn’t Christ come?
He would have loved
my spaghettis.

Los últimos tiempos

Hace diecisiete años, 
yo tenía veintiuno,
Cristo no vino,
encogieron los celulares,
yo le daba el sí a un novio
que nunca quise,
y aprendí un tercer idioma
más fácil de hablar
que mi lengua materna.
¿Por qué Cristo no vino?
Le hubiesen encantado
mis espaguetis. 

 

 Trees

On this breezeless morning
from the passenger seat
I wanted to cover myself in 
the shade of trees but the sun was merciless
there were no leaves on branches
not even sneakers hanging from the wires.

Árboles

Quise cubrirme
con la sombra de los árboles
desde el asiento del pasajero
esta mañana sin viento
pero el sol no era piadoso
no había hojas en las ramas
ni siquiera tenis en los postes.  

 

Urn

Every time I board a plane
I think I’m going to die.
So I call my husband—
who is all the family
I have left—
ask him to have me cremated,
my ashes put in an urn
and buried in my mother’s grave.
She could never stand
a dirty house.

Urna

Cada vez que abordo un avión
creo que voy a morirme. 
Por eso llamo a mi marido
—quien es la única familia
que me queda—
le pido que me creme
y entierre mis cenizas
dentro de una urna
en la tumba de mi madre.
A ella nunca le gustó
tener la casa sucia. 

 

On the other side of the window

The leaves falling to the ground
pushed by tropical storm winds
waited three seasons
to become nourishment for ants.
Soon the flock will come,
that bridal flight
in which winged ants take part
when they abandon their colonies in mass.

Al otro lado de la ventana

Las hojas que caen a la tierra
impulsadas por los vientos
de tormenta tropical
esperaron tres estaciones
para ser el alimento de las hormigas.
Pronto llegará la revoada,
ese vuelo nupcial en el que participan
las hormigas con alas
cuando abandonan sus colonias en masa.

 

Use

Take on an empty stomach.
Repeat until hunger
does not matter,
nor horror nor misery.

Uso

Tómese en ayuno.
Repetir hasta que
ya no importe el hambre,
el horror o la miseria.

 

Translator’s Note:

In a brief introduction to a small sample of her poetry for children published in Revista Cruce a few years ago, Cindy Jiménez-Vera writes: “Now that I think about it, to write poems for the sons and daughters of my poet friends is a way to tell the story of a generation of poets who wrote and lived together. A generation that struggled to sustain a country, that sowed hope for this country in the form of poems and children.” In my reading, her poems teach our youngest—and our oldest—readers about dignity in the face of precarity, injustice, colonialism. Though these words do not appear in most of her poems, I submit to you, dear reader, that these three words together create the context for Cindy’s work, and in which Cindy—as a poet, editor, librarian and educator—works. For these words have come to define our present moment in Puerto Rico with brute, unrelenting force. Thus, in translating the present selection I was mostly concerned with signaling toward the bustle of dignity just below the surface of her seemingly cool, and graceful poetics. Hers, I think, is a poetics of restraint. Of showing restraint. But just barely, as it all gets to be a little too much at times. In her poems, Cindy at once chronicles these ‘hard times’ and offers us brief, heartening glimpses of a time to come.

 

Cindy Jiménez-Vera (San Sebastian del Pepino, 1978) is a poet, editor and librarian from Puerto Rico. She is the author of four full length poetry collections (all in Spanish), as well as a children’s book entitled El gran cheeseburger y otros poemas con dientes. Her poetry has been featured in periodicals and anthologies in the Caribbean and Latin America. As an editor, she curated the small independent press Ediciones Aguadulce. A bilingual chapbook of her selected poems, translated by Guillermo Rebollo Gil, was published by Aguadulce in 2018, under the title I’ll trade you this island/te cambio esta isla.

Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a poet, sociologist and translator. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fence, Feed, Mandorla, Spry, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Trampset, FreezeRay, Trampoline and Anti-Heroin Chic. His book-length essay Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018), a careful consideration of the potentialities of radical thought and action in contemporary Puerto Rico, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in their New Caribbean Studies Series. He has translated the poetry of Cindy Jimenez Vera and Alex Maldonado Lizardi. He belongs to/with Lucas Imar and Ariadna Michelle. Happily so.

 

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If He Were Not a Star

ولو لَمْ يكن نجماً لما كانَ باظري       وقد غبتُ عنهُ مُظلماً بعد نورِهِ
سـلامٌ على تلك المحاسنِ من شَجٍ       تناءت بنعماه وطيبِ سرورِهِ

If he were not a star
             I’d be unaware,
                          now he’s gone,
             that I’m here floating in the black.

Do we wish peace
             upon the lights
                          who leave us,
             longing for the warmth of illumination?

 

Beggar

سار شعري لك عنّى زائراَ     فأَعرْ سَمْعَ المعالى شِنْفَهُ
وكذاك الروضُ إذْ لم يَسْتطعْ    زَورةً أَرْسَلَ عنه عَرْفَهُ

I sent my poem to visit you,
              a beggar before majesty—
like scents affected from a garden:
              Reaching, yet touchless.

 

Jamil & Buthaina

أزوركَ أم تزورُ فإنَّ قلبي        إلى ما تشتهي أبداً يميلُ
فثَغري موردٌ عذبٌ زلالٌ         وفَرْعُ ذُؤَابتي ظِلٌ ظَليلُ
وقد أَمَّلتُ أن تظما وتَضْحَى      إذا وافى إليك بيَ المقِيلُ
فَعَجل بالجوابِ فما جميلٌ         أنَاتُك عن بُثينةَ يا جميلُ

Come for me
             or shall I come to you
for my inclination curls
             toward whatever you prefer

So let me
             be the recess to restore you
and my embrace be the branches
             that melt you into shadow 

I wish only
             that my sacrifice stirs in you
a sough satisfying enough 
             to stifle any slander

Now give me
             a lovely mouthed reply so I may elude
being the latest adulterous iteration
             of Buthaina beholden to her Jamil

 

Again

ثنائي على تلكَ الثّنايا لأنّني     أقول على علم وأنطق عن خُبْرِ
وأُنصفها لا أكذبُ الله إنّني     رشفتُ بها ريقاً أرقَّ مِنَ الخمرِ

You come to come
             again.
I know you know
             these folds.

Tell me true, tell me
             something.
I love sipping your words,
             thinner than wine.

 

Undeserving

سـلامٌ يفتحُ في زهرةِ ال            كمامَ ويُنْطِقُ وُرقَ الغصونْ
على بازح قد ثَوَى في الحَشا       وإن كان تحرم منهُ الجفونْ
فـلا تحسبوا البُعدَ يُنسيكمُ            فذلكَ والله ما لا يَكونْ

your peace opens me to phosphor,
              to unmuzzle as yet unpronounced blooms
even in eyelids deprived of vision
              or the dispossessed sheltering in the soil
forget distance, my ardor’s as undiminishing 
              as God’s to we, the undeserving

 

Translator’s Note:

Ḥafṣa bint al-Ḥājj ar-Rukūniyya was born around the year 530 AH (1135 CE) to a wealthy family in the city of Granada, which underwent substantive sociopolitical changes during her lifetime after the Almohad invasion that occurred when she was still a child. She famously initiated an affair with Abū Ja’far, a court poet also serving as secretary to the Almohad governor who unfortunately also fell in love with Ḥafṣa. According to legend, court politics and jealousies led Abū Ja’far to side with a rebellion that ended with his capture and execution. Before his death, he often sent Ḥafṣa customary love poems, to which she responded in varied tones (sometimes coy, sometimes passionate, sometimes cerebral), showcasing her famed range as a poet. She spent her last years, after leaving her homeland, in Marrakesh where she tutored young noblewomen. Although only around 60 lines of her poetry have survived to the present, Ḥafṣa (along with Wallāda bint al-Mustakfī and Nuzhawn bint al-Qilāʿī al-Ghirnātiyya) has long been acclaimed as one of the three greatest of women poets in the Andalusian tradition. Ḥafṣa’s remarkably enigmatic style not only has drawn scores of readers to her work but also has allowed for vastly different translating interpretations of her work over the centuries.

 

Ḥafṣa bint al-Ḥājj ar-Rukūniyya was a noblewoman from Granada known for her legendary love affair with a vizier that ended tragically when an envious ruled killed him. She later became a royal tutor in Marrakech for daughters of the Almohad dynasty. Only about 60 lines of her poetry have survived to the present.

Translator Will Pewitt teaches global literature at the University of North Florida and publishes in a variety of genres, from poetry and fiction to history and philosophy. More of his work can be found at WPewitt.com.

 

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Limits

So many times I think again
to my school bookstrap,
gray, stained 
that kept all of me, my books
tightened in a single knot —
Nor was there then
this breathless transcendence
this trespass without a trace 
this getting lost
that is not yet dying —
Many times I cry, thinking
of my school bookstrap —

Milan, 16 April 1932

Limiti

Tante volte ripenso
alla mia cinghia di scuola
grigia, imbratta,
che tutta me coi miei libri serrava
in un unico nodo
sicuro –
Né c’era allora
questo trascendere ansante
questo sconfinamento senza traccia
questo perdersi
che non è ancora morire –
Tante volte piango, pensando
alla mia cinghia di scuola –

Milano, 16 aprile 1932

 

Noon

In this golden sunlight
I am 
a fuzzy flower bud
cruelly tied with a piece of twine
so I can’t open

to bathe in light.
Next to me you are
a calming freshness of grass
in which I‘d like to sink madly
and dissolve myself 
in an intoxicating tangle of green—
to cast into subtle roots
my sharpest pangs
and become a part of the earth.

Milan, 19 April 1929

Meriggio

In questa doratura di sole
io sono 
una gemma pelosa
legata crudelmente con un filo di refe
perchè non possa sbocciare
a bagnarsi di luce.
Acconto di me tu sei
una freschezza riposante d’erba
in cui vorrei affondare
perdutamente
per sfrangiarmi anch’io
in un ebbro ciuffo di verde—
per gettare in radici sottli
il mio più accuto spasimo
ed immedesimarmi con la terra.

Milano, 19 aprile 1929

 

Colloquy

Do you remember, my sweet love
(one day I thought
to call you Tristan:
for triste, your sad remote soul.
But that first capital letter
seemed too heavy
for my tenderness
so now I try this other name,
more subdued, more light:
sweet love)

tell me, do you remember,
my sweet love,
the last winter sunset,
our last conversation
on the pink stone bench
in front of the red walls of the Castle?
So many doves! And you whispered to me
that their gray-blue wings
looked a little bit like my eyes.
On the grassy bank 
the marguerite daisies
held the last
tired brightness of the sun.
And you wanted
to pluck them all for me,
your masculine fingers
between the stems, uncertain
as the fingers of a child:
and you filled my hands with grass and flowers,
telling me that my soul’s flower
had opened
for all the meadows
of all the countries,
telling me that the whole soul
of the spring yet to come
trembled in my breath.
Sweet love, sweet love, do you remember?
We used to watch the big bright clouds
slip silently
behind the bare branches of the horse chestnuts.
We said: tomorrow will be windy.
You told me, quietly,
in the tone of a fairy tale,
of your last night
spent in your sister’s house,
by the shore of the lake.
I woke up. It was so quiet.
The children were sleeping
in the next room.
And I thought, I thought: I told myself
that beside you I am a child too,
a sweet blossom with the scent of you.
Sweet love, sweet love, do you remember?
The blazing sun was dying
beyond the trees
in a great arc of gold
in a great white arc
over our heads.
And my sadness grew pale,
your anxiety faded
in the simplicity
of pure words.
Everything that was a lie,
everything that was doubt and pain
fell away 
and there remained only 
a tremor of little things
on top of the purest soul:
wings of a bird, scent of wind,
names of flowers, children’s sleep…
Just as it dissolves, 
as the shadows descend,
the deceptive light of day
and the splendor of the sky
sharpens
into a tremor of small things
called stars.

Pasturo, 2 April 1931

Colloquio

Ti ricordi, mio piccolo amore
(un giorno avevo pensato
di chiamarti Tristano:
così triste la tua anima remota.
Ma poi quella maiuscola iniziale
mi parve troppo pesante
per la mia tenerezza
ed ora tento quest’altro nome,
più dimesso, più lieve:
piccolo amore)
di’, ti rammenti,
mio piccolo amore,
l’ultimo tramonto dell’inverno,
l’ultimo nostro colloquio
sul sedile di pietra rosa
di fronte ai muri rossi del Castello?
Quanti colombi! E tu mi sussurravi
che le ali loro grigioazzurre
somigliavano ai miei occhi
un poco.
Sul fondo erboso del fossato
le margheritine
trattenevano l’ultima
chiarità stanca del sole.
E tu volevi
coglierle tutte per me,
con le tue dita d’uomo
incerte fra gli steli
come dita di bimbo:
e m’empivi d’erba e di corolle le mani,
dicendomi che l’anima mia di fiore
era fiorita
per tutti i prati
di tutti i paesi,
dicendomi che tutta l’anima
della primavera non giunta
tremava nel mio respiro.
Piccolo amore, piccolo amore, ti rammenti?
Guardavamo le grandi nuvole accese
scivolare mute
dietro i rami nudi degli ippocastani.
Dicevamo: domani sarà vento.
Tu mi narravi, sommessamente,
in tono di una fiaba,
dell’ultima tua notte
passata nella casa della sorella,
in riva al lago.
“Mi destai. C’era tanto silenzio.
I bambini dormivano
nella stanza vicina.
Ed io pensavo, pensavo: mi dicevo
che accanto a te sono un bambino anch’io,
un bocciolo profumato di te.”
Piccolo amore, piccolo amore, ti rammenti?
Moriva il bruciore del sole
di là dagli alberi
in un grande arco d’oro,
in un grande arco bianco
sul nostro capo.
E impallidiva la mia tristezza,
si spegneva il tuo affanno
nella semplicità
delle parole candide.
Tutto che fu menzogna,
tutto che fu dubbio e dolore
si sfaceva
e rimaneva solo
in cima alla più pura anima
un tremore di piccole cose:
ali d’uccello, sentore di vento,
nomi di fiori, sonno di bambini…
Così come dilegua,
al calare dell’ombra,
l’ingannevole luce del giorno
e lo splendore del cielo
si acuisce
in un tremore di piccole cose
che si chiamano stelle.

Pasturo, 2 aprile 1931

 

The New Face

That one day in spring
I laughed – that’s true;
and not only did you see it, you mirrored it
in your joy;
Without seeing it,
I also felt my laugh
like a warm light
on my face. 

Then it was night
and I had to be outside
in the storm:
the light of my laughter
died.

Dawn found me
like a spent lamp:
astonished things
discovering in their midst
my cold face.

They wanted to give me
a new face.

Just like an old woman 
who no longer wants to kneel and pray 
in front of a church painting
that’s been replaced
because she doesn’t recognize
the beloved face of the Madonna, 
and this one seems to her
almost a lost woman – 

so today is my heart,
faced with my unfamiliar mask.

20 August 1933

Il volto nuovo

Che un giorno io avessi
un riso
di primavera – è certo;
e non soltanto lo vedevi tu, lo specchiavi
nella tua gioia:
anch’io, senza vederlo, sentivo
quel riso mio
come un lume caldo
sul volto.

Poi fu la notte
e mi toccò esser fuori
nella bufera:
il lume del mio riso
morì.

Mi trovò l’alba
come una lampada spenta:
stupirono le cose
scoprendo
in mezzo a loro
il mio volto freddato.

Mi vollero donare
un volto nuovo.

Come davanti a un quadro di chiesa
che è stato mutato
nessuna vecchia più vuole
inginocchiarsi a pregare
perché non ravvisa le care
sembianze della Madonna
e questa le pare
quasi una donna
perduta –

così oggi il mio cuore
davanti alla mia maschera
sconosciuta.

20 agosto 1933

 

Translator’s Note:

When Antonia Pozzi died she left behind notebooks containing over 300 poems. Pozzi’s father Roberto published 91 of her poems in a private edition (Mondadori, 1939), but these poems were his revised versions, which altered her work significantly. For example, in “Odore di Fieno,” he removed the word “impura” from her phrase “impure soul,” so that she would, in her poem and perhaps in her life and reputation, be understood to have had a pure soul. In another poem, “L’allodola,” he removes the opening phrase “Dopo il bacio,” to delete the kiss. In fact, Roberto Pozzi’s revisions removed all evidence of his daughter’s relationship with Antonio Maria Cervi, the important figure in her life whom she met at 15 when he was her Greek and Latin tutor.  In time their friendship would develop into love. Although they wished to marry, her father would not allow it, and ultimately forced her to renounce the relationship.   

Some of the most egregious revisions made by Roberto Pozzi are his changes to “Saresti Stato,” a 10-poem sequence about her relationship with Cervi. In addition to removing the second stanza entirely, Roberto Pozzi changed the first line of the poem from “Annunzio” (the given name) to “Annuncio” (“Announcement,” or “Herald”). Why did Roberto Pozzi make such an alteration? The letters Antonia Pozzi wrote to Cervi refer to a child they hoped to have; they were planning to name him “Annunzio,” after Cervi’s brother Annunzio who had died in the war.¹

In 1955, Nora Wydenbruck’s translations of these posthumously revised poems—translated with the help and under the close surveillance of Roberto Pozzi—reproduce a “bowdlerized” and “sanitized” edition of the original work for English readers. It would not be until 1989 that editors Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino restored the poems to their original form in Parole, an authoritative text of Pozzi’s poetry. 

For a translator there is still the matter of understanding the context of the work and of —not as simple as it sounds—choosing the right words. Especially as her work has been altered without her consent, I struggle between the theories of translation, trying to present the work in what I perceive as Pozzi’s true voice. In some ways a translator desires the absolute reproduction of the original in another language. As if that were possible. Then there is the “sacrifice” (to quote William Gass speaking of translating Hölderlin) one must make in moving from one language to another and from one time to another, in order to make the translation real, authentic for our time. “[T]he right sorts of sacrifice are essential,” observes Gass. “We had better lose the poem’s German sounds and German order, because we are trying to achieve the poem Hölderlin would have written had he been English.”² Working between these two poles of theory, every word can offer unique challenges, but that is also what is exciting about translation. 

 Among the vexing lines in “Meriggio” are those which essentially open and close the poem: “una gemma pelosa”and “ed immedesimarmi con la terra.” Gemma translates to “gem; jewel” as well as a “bud, of branch, or flower.” In the context of the poem it’s easy to see the speaker is less gem than flower bud, and contextually, I felt that the tenderness of the flower bud is important. Yet the adjective pelosa (“hairy, hirsute; shaggy; rough-haired”) complicates this idea of tenderness. In tone, hairy bud doesn’t convey the vulnerability I see in the poem, and borders on unappealing. Since the nascent flower is also under duress (“cruelly tied with a piece of twine/so I can’t open”) the adjective “hairy” threatened to make the image sound like something closer to a plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Of the possibilities, which word would come closest to offering the image of the bud that I believe Pozzi’s seeing? I considered shaggy, and also tufted, wooly, furry, even pubescent, downy, silky. “Fuzzy” offered me the tenderness and brought with it less potential symbolism that might complicate this introduction to the bud at the start of the poem.

 The last line of the poem brought me immedesimarmi, from immedesimare, “to combine, to unite, to make into one”—in the reflexive that Pozzi uses, “to identify (oneself) with.” Though the sense is clear, I didn’t like the sound of it: and identify myself with the earth. There is also the possibility of saying: and become one with the earth, which gets the sense of it as well, but which I felt was neither poetic enough nor singular enough. Both are such familiar phrases in our language that I felt either was in danger of rendering the final line of the poem—which carries so much weight, such importance, in any poem—into a cliché. In typical Pozzi fashion she has given the reader a burgeoning, delicate object that is confined, under duress, and unable to become itself. Whoever or whatever is “next to me” (“Acconto di me tu sei / una freschezza riposante d’erba”) is calm, fresh, a place of freedom in which she wants to plant herself, to find freedom for her roots, and in taking the earth’s qualities of growth into herself, begin to grow, to “become.”

This final line of the poem, expressing a craving and ambition to free herself from constraints, is meaningful for me, having come to love the art of translation after writing poetry for so many years. This is how she inspires me as well. I come to translations for many challenges, and I have found considerable rewards. Perhaps most significant for me has been what I am learning from Pozzi’s work: her a subtle use of of language, a dazzling ability to bring to the page the immediacy of her images., and perhaps most moving, her intense investment, belief in, and devotion to, her art.

---

¹ From Antonia Pozzi: Tutte le opera, edited by Alessandra Cenni, p. 609: “Avrebbe desiderato dare un bambino ad Antonio Maria Cervi per compensarlo dell’inconsolabile lutto per la morte dell fratello Annunzio, poeta, caduto giovanissimo in guerra. Il bambino avrebbe infatti dovuto chiamarsi Annunzio.” ([Antonia Pozzi] would have liked to give a child to Antonio Maria Cervi to make up for the inconsolable loss of the death of Cervi’s brother Annunzio, a poet who died very young during the war. In fact, the child would have been called Annunzio.”

² William Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Knopf, 1999, p. 52.

The copyright for the poems of Antonia Pozzi belongs to the Carlo Cattaneo and Giulio Preti International Insubric Center for Philosophy, Epistemology, Cognitive Sciences and the History of Science and Technology of the University of Insubria, depositary and owner of the whole Archive and Library of Antonia Pozzi.

 

Antonia Pozzi lived a brief life, dying by suicide in 1938. She was born 13 February, 1912 in Milan, and studied at the University of Milan with philosopher Antonio Banfi, receiving the degree of D.Litt., having written her thesis on Flaubert. She was a gifted photographer and an avid mountain climber who enjoyed exploring the terrain of the Dolomite Alps, skiing, tennis, and riding horses. In December of 1938, increasingly in despair about the world, she set out for Chiaravalle, where she took poison and fell into unconsciousness in the snow. Her body was discovered the next day, and she died shortly thereafter on 3 December. None of Pozzi’s poetry was published during her lifetime.

Amy Newman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently On This Day in Poetry History (Persea Books). Her translations of the poems and letters of Antonia Pozzi appear or are forthcoming in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Delos, Blackbird, Bennington Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She  is the recipient of the The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation fro Poetry, and teaches in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University.

 

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The Dragonslayer

It was a beautiful and fruitful land with forests, fields, rivers, streets and cities. A king was placed over it by God. He was a hoary man, older and prouder than all kings about whom anything to be believed has been heard. This king’s only child was a girl of great youth, full of desire and beauty. The king was related to all of the neighboring thrones, but his daughter was a child and alone, as if without all relation. It is certain that her soft temper and her mildness and the power of her unawakened, silent presence were the unintentional cause of the dragon. For the more she grew and bloomed, the nearer it crept forward and finally alighted, like terror itself, in the forest of the most beautiful city in the land; for there exist secret relationships between the beautiful and the terrible – at a certain point they complete each other like laughing life and near daily death.

That is not to say that the dragon was hostile to the young lady, just as no one can say truthfully and in good conscience whether death is the adversary of life. Perhaps the great, seething animal would have lain down like a dog beside the beautiful girl and only for the repugnance of its tongue would have refrained from caressing those loveliest of hands in animal humility. But, of course, this was never put to the test, all the more so since the dragon was merciless toward all those who happened into the circle of its strength and, like visible death, grasped and held everything, herds and children not excluded.

The king at first remarked with great satisfaction, that the need and danger made many of the boys of his land into men. These young people of every station, nobles, seminary students and servants, who marched out as if into a strange and distant land, had the heroism of a single hot, breathless hour, in which they had life and death and hope and fear and everything – like in a dream. After a few years, it no longer occurred to anyone to count these brave sons and write their names down somewhere. For in such fearful times, the people grow accustomed even to heroes; they are no longer unheard of then. The feeling, the fear, the hunger of thousands scream out to them and they are there like a necessity, like bread, conditioned by those last laws which even in troubled times do not cease to function.

But as the number of those who martyred themselves after mounting hopeless defenses grew larger, as the last son in almost every family of the land — often still in boyish youth — had fallen, then the king began to rightly fear that all the firstlings of his land would perish, and that too many young girls would have to take upon themselves a virginal widowhood for the long years of the life of a childless woman. And he denied his subjects the struggle. But to the strange merchants, who fled the blighted land in nameless repulsion, he gave tidings that kings in similar situations have let circulate since days of yore. Whosoever should succeed in liberating the poor land from its great death shall win the hand of the king’s daughter, whether he be of noble birth or a hangman’s last son.

And it happened that strange lands were full of heroes too, and that the high reward did not fail to have its desired effect. But these sojourners were no luckier than the land’s inhabitants: they came only to die.

In those days there was a change in the daughter of the king; if till now her heart, oppressed by the sorrow and calamity of the land, prayed for the beast’s demise, since she had been promised to a strong, unfamiliar man, her naive feelings began to be bound up with the oppressor, with the dragon, to the extent that she discovered prayers for the dragon’s sake in the candor of her dreaming and requested that holy women take the monstrosity under their protection.

One morning, waking full of shame from such dreams, a rumor came to her that terrified and confused her. There was tell of a young man, who had come – God knows from where – to fight, and who did not succeed in killing the dragon after all, instead only tore himself, wounded and bleeding, from the claws of that horrible foe, and crawled his way into the thickest forest. There they found the unconscious man, cold in his cold, iron shell, and brought him into a house, where he now lay in a deep fever with hot blood behind the burning bandages. When the young girl received this news, she would have liked to run through the streets as she was, in a blouse of white silk, to be at the side of the deathly ill man. But once the chambermaids had clothed her and she saw her magnificent raiment and her sorrowful visage come and go in the many mirrors of the castle, the courage to do something so unusual left her. She could not even bring herself to send some reticent servant girl to the house where the sick man lay to give him some relief, fine linen or a mild salve.

But there was a disquiet in her that almost made her sick. At the incursion of night she sat for a long while at her window and sought to determine the house in which the strange man was dying. Since his death seemed self-evident to her. Only she could perhaps have saved him, but she was far too cowardly to search for him. This thought, that the life of the wounded had been placed in her hands, did not leave her. Finally, after the third day that she spent in torture and self-hatred, this thought pushed her out into the night, into the black, frightening, rainy spring night, in which she wandered around as if in a dark room. She did not know by what token she would discern the house that she sought. But without much delay she discerned it by a window that stood wide open, by a light that burned inside the room, a long, strange light, by which no one could read or sleep. And slowly she went past the house, helpless, poor, sunken in the first sadness of her life. She went further and further. The rain had stopped; over loose strips of cloud stood a few large stars and somewhere in a garden a nightingale sang the beginning of a strophe that she still could not finish. Again and again she began, questioningly, and her voice grew, large and forceful, from out of the silence, like the voice of some colossal bird whose nest rested upon the tops of new oaks.

When, finally, the princess raised her teary gaze from her long way, she saw a wood and a streak of morning behind it. And something black contrasted with the streak that seemed to draw nearer. It was a rider. Involuntarily she pressed herself into the dark, wet bushes. He rode slowly past her and his horse, black from sweat, shook. And he too seemed to shake: all the rings of his armor rang softly upon each other. His head was without a helmet, his hands were naked. His sword hung down, heavy and tired. She saw his face in profile; it was warm, with wind-blown hair.

She looked at him for a long time. She knew: he had killed the dragon. And her sorrow fell from her. She was not a confused, lost thing in this night. She belonged to him, to this strange, trembling hero, she was his possession, as if she were the sister of his sword.

And she rushed home to await him there. She entered her apartments unnoticed and as soon as it was possible she awoke her chambermaids and ordered her most beautiful clothes be brought. While she was being dressed the city awoke to great joy. The people celebrated and the bells nearly rang out of the towers. And the princess, who heard this clamor, knew suddenly that he would not come. She tried to imagine him immersed in the gratitude of the crowd: she was unable to do so. Almost fearfully did she seek to obtain the image of the lonely hero, the trembling one, as she had seen him. As if it were vitally important that she not forget. And with that her mood became so festive that, although she knew that no one would come, she did not interrupt the chamber maids who ornamented her. She ordered emeralds and pearls woven into her hair, which, to the great surprise of the serving girls, felt damp to the touch. The princess was done. She smiled at the chambermaids and went, somewhat pale, past the mirrors, with the rustling of her white trail following far behind her.

But the hoary king sat, worthy and earnest, in the high throne hall. The old paladins of the realm stood around him and shone. He waited for the strange hero, for the liberator.

But he was already riding far from the city, and the sky above him was full of larks. Had someone reminded him of the reward for his deed, perhaps, laughing, he would have turned around; he had forgotten it completely.

 Translator’s Note:

This is Rilke’s last prose work before the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Though someone has likely translated it into English, I have not been able to find it published anywhere. In spite of its great beauty and surprisingly mature Rilkean thematic, it seems to have largely been forgotten.

Written in the style of a fairytale, this is a story of a dragon that descends upon a kingdom, a king who promises his daughter to whomsoever should slay it, and two would-be heroes. Folk- and fairytales are often conceived of as the collective fantasy of a people – it is this aspect that makes them so fundamental to national ideologies. They are a receptacle and conduit for the pure will of a people, and thus, for nationalists, clear indicators not only of what that people is, but what that people should be. Rilke’s The Dragonslayer resembles a fairytale, but its narrative is centered around the incommensurability of fantasies. If a normal fairytale proceeds according to the logic of a dream, Rilke’s story proceeds according to the logic of dreams, numerous and discrete, which like parallel lines never meet. In this world, consummation is utterly impossible, even when all of its requirements are met.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke needs little introduction. He is probably the best-known German poet of the 20^th century. Besides his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, his prose work is rarely studied but deserves increased attention.

     

I am a writer, translator, and student of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. I am particularly interested in the relationship between Yiddish and German literature. I previously translated Rilke (The Solution to the Jewish Question) for New Voices. My translation of the German Expressionist novel Spook by Klabund will be published by Snuggly Books in the spring of 2022.

 

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