am growing, as I get older,to hate metaphors – their exactness
and their inadequacy.)
Sometimes these thoughts are
a moistness, hardly falling, than which
nothing is more gentle:
sometimes, a rattling shower, a
bustling Spring-cleaning of the mind:
sometimes, a drowning downpour.
I am growing, as I get older,
to hate metaphor,
to love gentleness,
to fear downpours.
SIN OPCIONES
Pienso en ti
de tantas maneras como llega la lluvia.
(Estoy llegando, a medida que envejezco,
a odiar las metáforas: su precisión
y su insuficiencia).
A veces estos pensamientos son
una humedad que apenas cae, no hay
nada más suave:
a veces un chubasco que tamborilea, una
agitada limpieza profunda de la mente:
a veces, un aguacero que inunda.
Estoy llegando, a medida que envejezco,
a odiar la metáfora,
a amar la suavidad,
a temer los aguaceros.
Trad. Mónica Mansour
SUMMER FARM
Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass
The water in the horse-trough shines.
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.
A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.
I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me – as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.
Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.
GRANJA DE VERANO
Briznas de paja —relámpagos mansos— están tiradas en la hierba
y cuelgan en zigzag de los setos. Como vidrio verde,
brilla el agua en el abrevadero de los caballos.
Bamboleándose en dos hileras pasan nueve patos.
Una gallina observa nada especial con un ojo,
luego lo recoge. Desde un vacío cielo
una golondrina cae y, revoloteando en el granero,
vuelve a alzarse al azul vertiginoso.
Estoy recostado, sin pensar, en el prado suave y fresco,
temeroso de dónde me pueda llevar el pensamiento,
así como este grillo de rostro chapado
desdobla las patas y se descubre en el espacio.
Yo bajo yo, una pila de yos, estoy ensartado
en el tiempo, y con metafísica mano
levanto la granja como una tapa y veo
granja dentro de granja, y yo en el centro.
Trad. Mónica Mansour
CELTIC CROSS
The implicated generations made
This symbol of their lives, a stone made light
By what is carved on it. The plaiting masks,
But not with involutions of shade,
What a stone says and what a stone cross asks.
Something that is not mirrored by nor trapped
In webs of water or bag-nets of cloud;
The tangled mesh of weed lets it go by.
Only men’s minds could ever have unmapped
Into abstraction such territory.
No green bay going yellow over sand
In written on by winds to tell a tale
Of death-dishevelled gull or heron, stiff
As a cruel clerk with gaunt writs in his hand
–Or even of light, that makes its depths a cliff.
Singing responses order otherwise.
The tangled generations ravelled out
In links of song whose sweet strong choruses
Are these stone involutions to the eyes
Given to the ear in abstract vocables.
The stone remains, and the cross, to let us know
Their unjust, hard demands, as symbols do.
But on them twine and grow beneath the dove
Serpents of wisdom whose cool statements show
Such understanding that it seems like love.
CRUZ CELTA
Las
