The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations
Robert Bly
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0060575867
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The astonishing collection of the translations Robert Bly has been producing for more than fifty years, introducing foreign poets to American readers for the first time.
Robert Bly has always been amazingly prescient in his choice of poets to translate. The poetry he selected supplied qualities that seemed lacking from the literary culture of this country. At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Bly introduced Neruda, Vallejo, Trakl, Jiménez, Traströmer, and Rumi. His most recent translations include Rolf Jacobsen, Francis Ponge, and the nineteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib. Here, in The Winged Energy of Delight, the poems of twenty-two renowned and lesser-known poets from around the world are brought together. As Kenneth Rexroth has said, Robert Bly "is one of the leaders of a poetic revival that has returned American literature to the world community."
room. Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm, feeble and cold on the horizon. The train is entirely motionless. 2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars. ALLEGRO After a black day, I play Haydn, and feel a little warmth in my hands. The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall. The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence. The sound says that freedom exists and someone pays no taxes to Caesar. I
cannot accept, and who can never forget you. OLD AGE I put a lot of stock in the old. They sit looking at us and don’t see us, and have plenty with their own, like fishermen along big rivers, motionless as a stone in the summer night. I put a lot of stock in fishermen along rivers and old people and those who appear after a long illness. They have something in their eyes that you don’t see much anymore the old, like convalescents whose feet are not very sturdy under them
is! What a brave horse I have! Death is looking for me before I get to Córdoba! Córdoba. Distant and alone. MALAGUENA Death is entering and leaving the tavern. Black horses and sinister people are riding over the deep roads of the guitar. There is an odor of salt and the blood of women in the feverish spice-plants by the sea. Death is entering and leaving the tavern, death leaving and entering. THE QUARREL For Rafael Méndez The
family, he received virtually no land. The older brother gets the main farm, and Olav lived all his life on what he could produce from three acres of ground. During his late twenties, he spent some time in a mental institution. He married for the first time at sixty-five, to the Norwegian artist Bodil Cappelen, who had met him at one of his rare poetry readings. He settled into married life very well, and his house became considerably cheerier. He died in the old way; no real evidence of disease
well-known stanza of Hafez went: For the Hindu mole of that Shirazy Turk who attracts Our hearts, I would give all of Samarkand and Bokhara. Tamburlane called for Hafez and said something like: “Do you realize how much wealth and effort I have spent in order to make Bokhara and Samarkand magnificent cities, and you’re going to give all that away for a mole?” Hafez was clearly in danger. He said, “Well, it’s by generosity of that sort that I’ve been reduced to the state that you see me in