Aubade

Kevin Graham

You never expect it, summer on your doorstep.
You become so accustomed to the train
that drives your thoughts from one job
to another, that time begins to conceal the pain.

There are too many things to do in a day,
too many unrun errands: a house that needs
fixing, a life that needs changing. Say
or write down what you mean and it disappears.

You couldn’t fit the forgotten in a hangar:
it’s as big as the summer sky at twilight
and blank as peace. Try to remember the air
and it disappears in a trail of mist.

Birds call to each other in the whispering trees
before their voices get carried away on the breeze.

 

The Envoy of Mr. Cogito

BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT TRANSLATED BY BOGDANA CARPENTER

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards—they will win
they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

A Curious Story of Two Banned Soviet Jewish Poems

 Laura Auketayeva

Benjamin Waife, better-known under his pen name B.Z. (Ben Zion) Goldberg, was an American Yiddish journalist, writer, historian, and son-in-law of Sholom Aleichem, who made a significant contribution to recording and interpreting the history of Soviet Jews. In one of his notes about his visit to the Soviet Union, Goldberg writes about his frequent encounter to two poems: one posing “the Jewish question” and the other giving the answer to it. Soviet Jews recited these banned poems from memory and secretly passed them on from one person to another. He heard them from a physician in Leningrad, a teacher in Odessa, and a writer in Tashkent. Goldberg concludes that these poems “became folk literature expressing the assimilated new generation of Soviet Jews” (B.Z. Goldberg papers, [in process Box 70, Folder 2]). Goldberg wrote them down in Russian and then typed up the translations in English.

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NOCTURN

Kathleen Raine

An Observation

by May Sarton

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

from Stone: 103 The Twilight of Freedom

BY OSIP MANDELSTAM TRANSLATED BY CLARENCE BROWN AND W. S. MERWIN

Let us praise the twilight of freedom, brothers,
the great year of twilight!
A thick forest of nets has been let down
into the seething waters of night.
O sun, judge, people, desolate
are the years into which you are rising!

Let us praise the momentous burden
that the people’s leader assumes, in tears.
Let us praise the twilight burden of power,
its weight too great to be borne.
Time, whoever has a heart
will hear your ship going down.

We have roped swallows together
into legions.
Now we can’t see the sun.
Everywhere nature twitters as it moves.
In the deepening twilight the earth swims into the nets
and the sun can’t be seen.

But what can we lose if we try one
groaning, wide, ungainly sweep of the rudder?
The earth swims. Courage,
brothers, as the cleft sea falls back from our plow.
Even as we freeze in Lethe we’ll remember
the ten heavens the earth cost us.

After a Greek Proverb

BY A.E. STALLINGS

From:

Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—
Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.
We’ve taped the broken window pane. tv’s still out of whack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,
Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary:
We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.
We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,
But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Bringing Keats Back to Life

To celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death, a foundation created a C.G.I. rendering that looked and spoke like he did.

Anna Russell

When a C.G.I. rendering of John Keats spoke at a recent commemoration, his voice was full of longing.
Photograph courtesy Oxford’s Institute for Digital Archeology

If the poet John Keats—fresh, fainting, convulsed by illness for much of his short life—could speak to us from beyond the grave, what would he say? More to the point, how would he say it? Keats didn’t speak like his fancier contemporaries, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He spoke like the son of an innkeeper, and like a man who had trained as a surgeon and an apothecary, which is what he was. Speech patterns, like shoddy shoes and buckteeth, are classic fodder for schoolyard bullies, and Keats was not spared. In 1818, after the publication of his poem “Endymion” (“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”), he was derided as a low-class poet who expressed “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language.” He was criticized for his background and his education, and also for his perceived vulgarity and his “Cockney rhymes.” One critic, writing in the influential magazine Blackwood’s, was famously harsh: “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to the ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.’ ” He added, “But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.” Zing!

No one likes a bad review, but these attacks felt personal. “Cockney” was a moral judgment as well as a literary one, as Keats’s biographer Andrew Motion has pointed out. Keats did his best to pretend that he didn’t care, writing, in a letter to a friend, “Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own Works.” (One to add to your morning affirmations.) But much of literary society didn’t believe him. After his early death, at twenty-five, many in his circle pointed to the Blackwood’s review as a turning point in his deteriorating health. After the article, “Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state,” Shelley wrote. “The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs.” Byron wove Keats’s death into his epic, Don Juan. “John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique,” he wrote. “Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate / ’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.”

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The predigital dream of the audiobook

Matthew Rubery

“New Jersey.—Professor Edison exhibiting the phonograph to visitors, at his laboratory, Menlo Park.” From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 30 March 1878

Everybody seems to listen to audiobooks these days. As a recent marketing campaign put it, “Listening is the new reading.” What was once a niche entertainment has grown into a billion-dollar industry thanks to the emergence of digital media, smartphones, and an online marketplace that makes it simple to download just about any title you want. Listening to a book is not the hassle it once was. (Take it from someone who remembers fumbling with cassette tapes while trying to steer a car.) The mainstreaming of audiobooks has been one of the twenty-first-century publishing industry’s greatest success stories.

That success would have come as no surprise to the audiobook’s pioneers, who had always imagined a future in which audiences would read books with their ears instead of their eyes. Fans have been predicting the audiobook’s ascendance ever since it became possible to record books. But when exactly was that? The audiobook’s origins can be traced back further than most people realize. Some historians credit Books on Tape, Recorded Books, and other mail-order libraries that arose in the 1970s to entertain commuters stuck in traffic. Others point toward the 1950s, when Caedmon Records released an album featuring the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas reading his beloved tale “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Still others link the audiobook’s origins to discs made by the Library of Congress in 1934 for people who were blind and partially sighted. But the audiobook’s origins predate the twentieth century. In fact, the audiobook turns out to be as old as sound-recording technology itself.

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Siren Song

BY MARGARET ATWOOD

From:

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.