/Lit/ranslates verse

[Anonymous No.10240103]

ITT: We post our own translations of poetry.
There are too many great poets whose work is hard to find in English, and there's even more whose work has never been translated.

Here's the chance to bring your favorite poems to a new audience, to study your own and the English language as a translator, and to scratch the surface of largely unknown literature as a reader.


>translated poetry is shit
A bad translation is better than no translation. It is better to read Homer in English than to not read him at all.

Let's make this a thing to keep the illusion of literary discussion.

[Anonymous No.10240110]

I'll start with an earlier free-verse poem of Miklós Radnóti, early modernist poet from Hungary.


Variation for sadness

Look, I come from the garden of pain
Through teary rivers, shedding parks
And quivering-crying meadows
I come from the garden of pain
Where sobbing comes from
The wind the sun the rain
The fog the moon the snow
The sky, the sky, the sky, also!

And I cried when I saw scenes of waking dawn
When a ripe apple fell from a branch and wearily rang
Or when the flying curve of a bird
Blended over the earth and vanished
Somewhere behind the rocking green.

I just walked through teary rivers
Shedding parks and quivering-crying
Meadows as a mute only my
Crying rattled on my virgin face
That's already as dim as the
Dead mood at dawn that is
A shame in the sky at dawn, at dawn!

[Anonymous No.10240151]

From Chantal Maillard, "escribir".

to write

to heal
in the open the wound
in the pain of the world
in that death that surges
in me and it belongs to the world

to write

to drive away the anguish that describes
condor circles
over the prey

even if not in the soul

in the soul
the estimation of time that concludes
and is upwards
something more than a silence
with almost open eyes

to write

as condescension and rebellion
without choice
without stopping
because the light goes away, strength
fades away
and being goes on a flight
on the preying bird’s claws

to write

to say the scream
to tear it
to convert it
to transform it
to make it into pieces
to eliminate it
to write the pain
to proyecto it
to act upon it with the word

to write

to rest
(to write that the sun, in winter, is beautiful)

so as not to cry so inside
so in hiding

to write

until exhaustion
so that the pain withheld may spill
contained since the beginning of the world

to write
to rebel
with no profit

even if failure is already foreseen

for there is no rebellion that is not justified
and no violence that isn’t, in the end,
innocent

[…]

to write
because someone forgot to scream
and there’s a blank space
now, that inhabits it

to write
because it’s the fastest way
i have of moving

to write

and not make literature?
…
and who cares!

there is too much pain
in this pit of a body
for such a question
to be important
I write

so that the poisoned water
may become drinkable.

[Anonymous No.10240276]

Attila József: A bánat

The sorrow

Sorrow is a gray, mute mailman,
His face thin, his eyes blue
Narrow shoulders hold his bag,
His robe is junk, and dark too.

In his chest cheap tic-tac beats,
Through the streets he shyly glides,
Snuggled up to the walls,
He disappears with the gate nearby.

Then he knocks. A letter came.