Best Translated Poems
Giant poet gem, Tagore’s story-poem: NISKRITI,
Is a piazza perched paved and perfectly paced beauty;
Scale model of a castle of vast poetic kingdom,
That has spread into an empire of Indian wisdom!
Manjulika is a dew-drop in the mighty ocean,
Of the land of Bay of Bengal where feminine gender;
Fulfills wants of men as mother, wife, daughter and labors,
Less fulfilled of subtle cravings, in her heart she harbors!
Nucleus firm; Malabika has solemnly sung it,
Narration, like roots, stems, leafs, flowers, fruits of plants well-knit!
Images complex extract emotions, expose like day light,
Questions of destiny hang, like stars in dense dark sky, bright!
Figures of speech, like hand-picked coffee-seeds, well chosen,
And like gems and pearls in an ornament, fairly woven;
With stones of words and verses flat, oval, blunt, round, pear, square,
The edifice erected here is stern, solemn and somber!
05 December 2021
Inspired By A Translation Poetry Contest
Sponsored by: Malabika Ray Choudhury
Viva la Cordillera de los Andes by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T. Wignesan
Long Live! The Andes Mountain Range!
I’m seized with a mad rage to yell
long live the Andes Mountain Range
may the Costa Mountain Range lie low slain
The reason I can hardly divine
but I can’t hold myself back:
Long Live! The Andes Mountain Range!
May the Costa Mountain Range lie low slain!
For forty full years now
I’ve wanted to step over the horizon,
go far beyond the limitations of my myopia,
but I just didn’t dare.
Now, by no means, Gentlemen
is there an end to my ratiocinations:
Long Live! The Andes Mountain Range!
May the Costa Mountain Range lie low slain!
Have they heard what I said?
There’s an end to my ratiocinations!
Long Live! The Andes Mountain Range!
May the Costa Mountain Range lie low slain!
Doubt there’s none over my lack of response
if they sever my vocal chords
(in such a case as this
it’s almost certain they will)
well, if they do stifle my voice
I would like to say I have no choice
but to accept the dashing of my very last hope.
I am a merchant
indifferent to the positions of the sun
a professor clad in green-coloured trousers
who comes apart drop by drop as dew
an insignificant bourgeois is what I am
in what way do red clouds matter to me?
Nevertheless I appear on balconies
in order to shout out what I offer:
Long Live! The Andes Mountain Range!
May the Costa Mountain Range lie low slain!
Pardon me if I’m going out of my mind
while in the garden made by Nature
but I have to keep shouting till death:
Long Live! The Andes Mountain Range!
May the Costa Mountain Range lie low slain!
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016
The Test by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T. Wignesan
What’s an antipoet:
a trader in urns and coffins?
a priest who does not believe in anything?
a general who entertains doubts about himself?
a vagabond who laughs at every thing
until old age overtakes him unto death?
an interlocuter of bad faith in a dialogue?
a woman who dances at the brink of an abyss?
a narcissist who loves everybody?
a bloody humourist
deliberately miserable?
a poet who dozes off in a chair?
a modern-day alchemist?
a pocket revolutionary?
a small-time bourgeois?
a charlatan?
a god?
an innocent?
a peasant of Santiago de Chile?
Underline the sentence you consider correct.
What is antipoetry:
a storm in a tea cup?
a sleeve of snow robed round a rock?
a shallow tray full of human excreta
as Father Save-the-Earth believes?
a mirror that tells the truth?
a big slap on the face
of the President of the Society of Authors?
( May God preserve him in his holy kingdom)
a warning to younger poets?
a coffin in river rapids?
a coffin of centrifugal force?
a coffin of paraffin gas?
a burning chapel without a corpse?
Mark with a cross
the definition you consider correct.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016
The Imaginary Man by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T. Wignesan
The imaginary man
lived in an imaginary house
in the midst of imaginary trees
on the bank of an imaginary river
From walls which are imaginary
hang ancient imaginary framed paintings
irreparable imaginary fissures
which recall imaginary events
which took place in imaginary worlds
in imaginary places and times
Every imaginary afternoon
he goes up imaginary staircases
and leans over the imaginary balcony
to survey the imaginary landscape
which is made up of an imaginary valley
surrounded by imaginary hills
Imaginary shadows
approach from an imaginary path
singing imaginary songs
to the demise of the imaginary sun
And during imaginary moonlit nights
dreams with an imaginary woman
who offered to him (toasting) her imaginary love
once again he felt this same pain
the very same imaginary pleasure
and once again began to palpitate
the heart of the imaginary man
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016
Die Lorelei by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)- Translated by T. Wignesan
For Regina von Degenfeld at Waibstadt
-in respect and unending sufferance-
(Heine, a German Jewish lyrical and satiric poet, journalist and critic,
settled in Paris from 1831 where he married Eugénie Mirat, an unsophisticated shop-assistant which earned him ostracism and dispossession from his family and fellows, but he made her his only heir on the condition that she re-married so that at least one person would regret his passing. In 1858, he was hobbled for life by spinal paralysis.)
Ich weiss nicht , was soll es bedeuten,
Nonplussed am I, what could it signify
Dass ich so traurig bin;
Plunged as I am in such a dejected mood
Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten,
A fairy tale from times gone by,
Dass kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
In thraldom wrapped forever to brood
Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt,
Soft the cool wind buffets as the day beds down
Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein;
And ripple free courses the Rhein
Der Gïpfel des Berges funkelt
Mountain summit lights scintillate crown
Im Abendsonnenschein.
Divine in sunset shine
Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet
Exquisite maiden perched is she
Dort oben wunderbar,
On high there resplendent
Ihr goldnes Geschmeide blitzet,
Her golden accoutrements sparkle free
Sie kämmt ihr goldnes Haar.
As golden tresses combs she concupiscente
Sie kämmt es mit goldnem Kamme,
Flaxen tresses combs she with a golden comb
Und singt ein Lied dabei;
While luring strains her lips release in lyrical glee
Das hat eine wundersame,
Tinged in a soothing tuneful hum
Gewaltige Melodie.
Mighty stirring melody
Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe
The rower in his narrow boat
Ergreift es mit wildem Weh;
Seized is he with bewildering pain
Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,
Oblivious is he of the Rock’s craggy grotte
Erschaut nur hinauf in die Höh’.
His eyes remain fixed high above the narrow main
Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen
I believe the waves did submerge
Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn;
In the end both boatman and rowing boat
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
And the deed did with her singing merge
Die Lorelei getan.
That Lorelei had wrought.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, January 23, 2021
Madrigal
(Although the poem’s title takes on a well-known 16th Century form of Italian origin, made famous in Spain by Gutierre de Cetina, 1520-1554, here, Parra only manages to keep to a seven-syllable line at best, the rhyme scheme being quite wayward: abc/ddd/efeg/dhi/jkl. I have therefore not followed his wilfull versification.)
I’ll become a millionaire in one night
thanks to a trick which will permit me to fix images
in a concave mirror. Or convex.
It seems to me my success will be complete
the moment I invent a coffin with a false bottom
which will permit the corpse to slip into the other world.
Indeed I have burned enough of the midnight oil
in this absurd horse race
in which the jockeys are kept from riding the wild beasts
and they’re going to tumble into the throng of spectators.
It follows therefore that I should create something
which would permit me to live comfortably
or at the least permit me to expire.
I’m certain that my legs tremble
I dream that my teeth are falling out
and that I arrive too late to attend some funerals.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016
Haikus by René Etiemble, with commentaries, Translated by T. Wignesan
(Taken from Etiemble’s only collection of poems (out of thousands which he burned in a fit of rage against the university in 1983): le Coeur et la cendre: soixante ans de poésie (the heart and the ash: sixty years of poetry). Paris: Les deux animaux, 1984, 158p. He had also published a critical work on the haiku.)
1. Epigraph strictly intended “for the heart and the ash”:
For fear of dying
of leaving dear ones behind
he did die of fear
(As the above seventeen syllables, which forced themselves upon me in October 1983, do not contain any latent kigo nor patent kiregi, I can hardly claim they make for a (proper) haiku. Let’s simply pretend that they are made up of seventeen obsessive syllables. Page 15.) Pages 92-97:
2. Haikus for Konrad CZYNSKI, Columbia University in the City of New York:
Millions of diamonds:
sun shines on this freezing rain.
Thousands of dead trees.
“The length of the haiku which does not permit itself to be laid out with blank spaces within its three metrical units, (yet) here in France and elsewhere is presented as a tercet; I insist on preserving its original form and thus have let it run over two pages (in one line).” P. 94.
3. Not a cloud in sky.
pond pitter patters: downpour?
burnt grass scent fills air.
4. May winter be late
on these white flakes of April!
Petals of flowers.
5.
(a) Milling sea anemones
carnivorous under sea:
my field frozen under.
(b) Milling sea anemones
carnivorous under sea:
field of frozen white.
(c ) Milling sea anemones
carnivorous sea flowers:
my field frozen under.
(Etiemble says even Basho didn’t always respect the 17-syllable count. And adds: “Basho may never be able to say that in this page he didn’t recognise and approve (at least) ONE haiku!” Page 96-97.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014
Love has no border.
A poem of love
for to embellish
a soul accomplished.
They are songs
that exist
between two persons
who love each other.
A world done
with love and tenderness.
Proyecto de tren instantaneo entre Santiago y Puerto Montt by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T. Wignesan
Soliloquio del Individuo by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T Wignesan
(Homage to Nicanor PARRA, 1914-2018, the Chilean ANTI-POET, winner of the "Cervantes Prize" (the highest literary honour for writers in Spanish), four times nominated for the Nobel Prize, studied Physics (Brown University), Cosmology (Oxford University) and taught maths and physics for some 40 years, but styles himself as the Poet who writes "Anti-Poems" - a fresh
chastising wind to debunk self-styled poets hardly born to the métier but drunk with their own effete and ephemeral voices. T. Wignesan, Paris, 2016.)
The Anatomy of the Instantaneous Train (plying) between Santiago and Puerto Montt
The engine of the instantaneous train
occupies the place of the destination (Pto Montt)
while the last coach
straddles the station of departure (Stgo)
This type of train affords the passenger
the advantage of arriving instantaneously at Puerto Montt
at the very moment he boards the last coach
in Santiago
The rub is in order to continue voyaging
the traveller has to keep moving with his luggage
through the train
until he gains the first coach
Once the passage has been realized
the passenger may proceed to exit
the instantaneous train
which has remained stationary
during the entire voyage.
• Observation: This type of (direct) train serves only the uni-directional journey.
Source: Poem read by Nicanor Parra as invitee to the International Poetry Festival in the Netherands in 1989 (?)
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016
I see people. They walk like trees.
As if everyone was in himself and for himself.
A kind of a human forest.
I may be a tree too, although without roots or fruit
but for the others I am nothing and no one.
Each tree`s eyes fall down.
To see clearly and vividly in everyone
how you grow like love within,
flourish like life
give birth to fruit of humanity.
Give me such eyes that could see You in the other world,
where there are not so much
eyes that have vision
and are not only open.
We grow from one land,
go to another
but on Earth we can be
the basis to the Sky.
I want to see a human being
In me and someone else.
I have no roots but I stretch my branches for us to become roots for each other.
Letters to an Unknown Woman by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T. Wignesan
When years go by, when years
go by and the air having excavated a ditch
between your soul and mine, when years hurry past
and I be the only man to entertain feelings of love,
a being who hovered an instant in front of your lips,
a poor fella dejected from walking through gardens,
where will you be? Where
will you, O! child/daughter of my kisses!
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016
Poetry has washed its hands off me by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T. Wignesan
I don’t say I'm done with everything
I don’t feel deluded in this respect
I would have liked continuing to poetise
but the course of inspiration has run out.
Poetry has continued to behave well
it is I who is guilty of horribly bad behaviour.
What do I gain from saying
that I (too) have behaved well
that poetry has not been of good behaviour
when everybody knows I’m the guilty one.
Serves me right that I made myself out to be an imbecile!
Poetry has continued to behave well
my behaviour has been despicably horrible
Poetry has washed its hands off me.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016
Translation of Eric Mottram’s The Cat Sat on the Mat, La chatte s’est assise sur la natte by T. Wignesan
(Unless I’m sorely mistaken, this’s EM’s first published poem: Poetry Magazine/Poetry Foundation, Chicago, February 1959, pp. 306-307.)
La chatte s’est assise sur la natte
Assise sur ses hanches de la souche de vin elle
Evoque la loi de trépied
Et elle lance son quatrième jambe
En la direction des parasites
La partie supérieur de son cou blanc: un habile
Petit coup obsessionnel de ses muscles fins
Le soleil se palisse. Des plats nuages font tourner
La voile brumeuse sous le ciel.
A la limite maniaque du pivot
De sa vibrante crise sans fin
De son grattement elle s’arrête et fixe son regarde
De ses paires d’étangs du sens aux teints vertes
Elle s’est enfermée en rejetant
Mon sens d’empathie pour son état de dépression.
Des marées précoces de la panique
Ravagent mes pores et secouent
Ma langue fatale pendant qu’elle
Reste tout bien protégée. Etendue à l’extrême
Dans des toiles tropiques hautaines de nerfs
Des grosses images se sont assises les jambes croisées
A l’intérieur de son crâne outré et absurde .
Une rose blanche ne peut pas croire
Que, moi, je l’ai vu désintégrer.
Des lianes s’adhèrent dans son coeur,
L’impulsion se montre sans même une parole.
Sa jambe obsessionnelle s’est sauté dès son coeur
Et le mythe silencieux en forme de bec
De son amour s’apparaît en se remontrant
Prenant entièrement pour proie le nez et l’aine
L’isotype* de Venus dans son sang.
(Note: * probably an error for “isotope”. )
(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 2017
Attention! Sit squarely listen keenly, clear your ears
Face on the sun your ears, to melt the tar
Having melted it, to make lighter your ears
Listen now, listen again
I keep begging you, I kneel I kneel
We don’t lack back home, we have them
For your facial beauty, glitters and smiles
You made my heart melt
As I met you, fetching firewood
Your gap alone to show, I sweat cold
You alone mother’s daughter, the way I greeted?
Guys how are you? You laughed me I turned lighter
As you bounced your neck rhythmically, my heart followed rhythmically
As you answered the school teacher, I thought was me
As you accepted my handshake, to me just dreams
Just my thoughts
When inside your dress, the red one with a heart
That your father brought from Uganda, I hang around your home
Even though you remain indoors
You are watched carefully, so don’t you come out
Attention! Sister heart kills me, what is there in you?
Refuse me not lest I crush, my heart you punish
As you bounce like a peacock, bouncing your neck
What do you expect, me to do?
Lusabeti listen sister, listen I beg you
Chief’s daughter not my remedy, whatever is in you
Even if you lack, don’t discover in her
Don’t tense sister, run come to sooth you I long
On shores I land Lusabeti, our kraal is full
I will follow your father’s demand, to receive his beauty
My peacock to give, with a surprising gap
This smoking heart, you will have sprinkled cool!
In shadows deep, where truth resides,
Do you dance with lies, where darkness hides?
Oh, you, the keeper of deceit,
Does my honesty make your heart beat?
Do you clutch the shroud of ignorance tight,
As my words pierce through the endless night?
In the mirror of denial, do you stare,
When my truths ignite the fiery flare?
You neglect the whispers of reality,
Yet, my words roar with brutal vitality.
Does the sting of truth sear your skin,
As my sentences unravel, letting truth begin?
Oh, you, who turns a deaf ear,
Can you drown my words in your own fear?
In the echoes of silence, do you find solace,
While my phrases burn, a relentless malice?
Does the bitterness of my tongue taste bitter,
As it lashes out like a venomous critter?
In the theatre of denial, do you take a seat,
Witnessing the unraveling of the truth, complete?
I will bite my tongue, yet the words will seep,
Through the crevices where your denials sleep.
Does the echo of my silence leave you blind,
To the storm within, the tempest I unwind?
My words may wound, my truths may scar,
Yet, in the gallery of lies, who you are?
Do you tremble when my tongue is held,
For the stories untold, the truths withheld?
In the tapestry of deceit, will you find reprieve,
As my words, like arrows, pierce and cleave?
Oh, you, who embraces the comfort of lies,
Do my truths haunt you as the darkness vies?
I will bite my tongue, but the silence will scream,
A symphony of truths, a relentless dream.
In the sanctuary of denial, do you reside,
As my words echo on, an unstoppable tide?