Nobel poets

[quasimodo1]

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Dark August by Derek Walcott
So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.

Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.
.........

Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in1992(poet of the Carribean)

[quasimodo1]

Seven Strophes

I was but what you'd brush
with your palm, what your leaning
brow would hunch to in evening's
raven-black hush.

I was but what your gaze
in that dark could distinguish:
a dim shape to begin with,
later - features, a face.
............

1981, translated by Paul Graves.

Original Russian version / Won Nobel for Literature 1987: Joseph Brodsky

[quasimodo1]

Thinking Of A Friend At Night by Hermann Hesse
In this evil year, autumn comes early...
I walk by night in the field, alone, the rain clatters,
The wind on my hat...And you? And you, my friend?

You are standing--maybe--and seeing the sickle moon
Move in a small arc over the forests
And bivouac fire, red in the black valley.
You are lying--maybe--in a straw field and sleeping
And dew falls cold on your forehead and battle jacket.

It's possible tonight you're on horseback,
The farthest outpost, peering along, with a gun in your fist,
Smiling, whispering, to your exhausted horse.
Maybe--I keep imagining--you are spending the night
As a guest in a strange castle with a park
And writing a letter by candlelight, and tapping
On the piano keys by the window,
Groping for a sound...

--And maybe
You are already silent, already dead, and the day
Will shine no longer into your beloved
Serious eyes, and your beloved brown hand hangs wilted,
And your white forehead split open--Oh, if only,
If only, just once, that last day, I had shown you, told you
Something of my love, that was too timid to speak!

But you know me, you know...and, smiling, you nod
Tonight in front of your strange castle,
And you nod to your horse in the drenched forest,
And you nod to your sleep to your harsh clutter of straw,
And think about me, and smile.
And maybe,
Maybe some day you will come back from the war,
and take a walk with me some evening,
And somebody will talk about Longwy, Luttich, Dammerkirch,
And smile gravely, and everything will be as before,
And no one will speak a word of his worry,
Of his worry and tenderness by night in the field,
Of his love. And with a single joke
You will frighten away the worry, the war, the uneasy nights,
The summer lightning of shy human friendship,
Into the cool past that will never come back.

[stlukesguild]

In Limine

Rejoice when the breeze that enters the orchard
brings you back the tidal rush of life
here, where dead memories
mesh and founder,
was no garden, but a reliquary

That surge you hear is no whir of wings'
but the stirring of the eternal womb.
Look how this strip of lonely coast
has been transformed: a crucible.

............

Eugenio Montale-Nobel Laureate 1975
tr. William Arrowsmith


The Lemon Trees

Listen: the laureled poets
stroll only among shrubs
with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box.
What I like are streets that end in grassy
ditches where boys snatch
a few famished eels from drying puddles:
paths that struggle among the banks,
then dip among the tufted canes,
into the orchards, among the lemon trees.

Better if the gay palaver of the birds
is stilled, swallowed by the blue:
more clearly now, you hear the whisper
of genial branches in that air, barely astir,
the sense of that smell,
inseparable from earth,
that rains its restless sweetness in the heart.
Here, by some miracle, the war
of conflicted passions is stilled;
here even we the poor share the riches of the world-
the smell of the lemon trees.

..........

Eugenio Montale
tr. William Arrowsmith

[stlukesguild]

The Song of the Nightingale

I am a hunter of sounds and a collector
of tape recordings.
I listen to huntsmen sounding the mort
on very short waves.
Let me show you my collection.

The Nightingale's song. It's fairly well known,
but this nightingale
is a kinsmen to those whom Neruda was listening
when he turned the heads of Prague's young beauties.
Added to the recording is the amplified sound
of a bursting bud
as the rose petals begin to unfold.

........

Jaroslav Seifert Nobel Laureate 1984
tr. Ewald Osers


And Now Goodbye

To all those million poems in the world
I've added just a few.
They were probably no wiser than a cricket's chirrup.
I know. Forgive me.
I'm coming to the end.

They weren't even the first footprints
in the lunar dust.
If at times they sparkled at all
it was not their light.
I loved this language.

.........

Jaroslav Seifert
tr. Ewald Osers

[Virgil]

Great idea for a thread and fine poems. I have to say that this one posted by St Lukes particularly captured me. What a fine poem. Probably sounds even better in the Italian.

[quasimodo1]

(Many thanks to Virgil for his kind notice and appreciation; thread had serendipidous beginning:) Wislawa Szymborska
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1996
Poetry

The Joy of Writing
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.
..................

[quasimodo1]

From The Frontier Of Writing by Seamus Heaney
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

.............

[Logos]

General Mod Note to All:

Please bear this in mind when posting poems:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showpost.php?p=423882&postcount=3
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[quasimodo1]

http://nobelprize.org/award_ceremonies/banquet/eyewitness/henschen/index.html This first Nobel was for poetry...French Poet...Sully Prudhomme 1901

[quasimodo1]

Further on, just before we reached the frontier which was to divide me from my native land for many years, we came at night to the last pass between the mountains. Suddenly we saw the glow of a fire as a sure sign of a human presence, and when we came nearer we found some half-ruined buildings, poor hovels which seemed to have been abandoned. We went into one of them and saw the glow of fire from tree trunks burning in the middle of the floor, carcasses of huge trees, which burnt there day and night and from which came smoke that made its way up through the cracks in the roof and rose up like a deep-blue veil in the midst of the darkness. We saw mountains of stacked cheeses, which are made by the people in these high regions. Near the fire lay a number of men grouped like sacks. In the silence we could distinguish the notes of a guitar and words in a song which was born of the embers and the darkness, and which carried with it the first human voice we had encountered during our journey. It was a song of love and distance, a cry of love and longing for the distant spring, from the towns we were coming away from, for life in its limitless extent. These men did not know who we were, they knew nothing about our flight, they had never heard either my name or my poetry; or perhaps they did, perhaps they knew us? What actually happened was that at this fire we sang and we ate, and then in the darkness we went into some primitive rooms. Through them flowed a warm stream, volcanic water in which we bathed, warmth which welled out from the mountain chain and received us in its bosom.

[uranderson]

Here is an excerpt from Octavio Paz's Sunstone:

(...)I travel your body, like the world,
your belly is a plaza full of sun,
your breasts two churches where blood
performs its own, parallel rites,
my glances cover you like ivy,
you are a city the sea assaults,
a stretch of ramparts split by the light
in two halves the color of peaches,
a domain of salt, rocks and birds,
under the rule of oblivious noon,

dressed in the color of my desires,
you go your way naked as my thoughts,
I travel your eyes, like the sea,
tigers drink their dreams in those eyes,
the hummingbird burns in those flames,
I travel your forehead, like the moon,
like the cloud that passes through your thoughts,
I travel your belly, like your dreams,

your skirt of corn ripples and sings,
your skirt of crystal, your skirt of water,
your lips, your hair, your glances rain
all through the night, and all day long
you open my chest with your fingers of water,
you close my eyes with your mouth of water,
you rain on my bones, a tree of liquid
sending roots of water into my chest,

I travel your length, like a river,
I travel your body, like a forest,
like a mountain path that ends at a cliff
I travel along the edge of your thoughts,
and my shadow falls from your white forehead,
my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces
and go with no body, groping my way, (...)

****

Excerpt was found here (http://www.geocities.com/poesiamsigloxx/paz/paz2.html).

In my opinion one of the most evocative erotic passages in all literature. The poem in its entirety is an epic, discurssive beauty.

****

Another of his, found here (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-poetry.html) (to see the original formatting you must follow the link, I don't know how to replicate it here):

Motion

If you are the amber mare
I am the road of blood
If you are the first snow
I am he who lights the hearth of dawn
If you are the tower of night
I am the spike burning in your mind
If you are the morning tide
I am the first bird's cry
If you are the basket of oranges
I am the knife of the sun
If you are the stone altar
I am the sacrilegious hand
If you are the sleeping land
I am the green cane
If you are the wind's leap
I am the buried fire
If you are the water's mouth
I am the mouth of moss
If you are the forest of the clouds
I am the axe that parts it
If you are the profaned city
I am the rain of consecration
If you are the yellow mountain
I am the red arms of lichen
If you are the rising sun
I am the road of blood

*****

Both translations are by Eliot Weinberger working in collaboration with Paz, whose English was quite good.

Octavio Paz is from Mexico and won the Nobel Prize in 1990.

[quasimodo1]

Edain came out of Midhir's hill, and lay..........The Harp of Aengus
Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,
Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds
And Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,
And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made
Of opal and ruhy and pale chrysolite
Awake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,
Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,
Because her hands had been made wild by love.
When Midhir's wife had changed her to a fly,
He made a harp with Druid apple-wood
That she among her winds might know he wept;
And from that hour he has watched over none
But faithful lovers.
Yeats won the the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. The funding for this prize is derived from the discovery and use of dynomite. Interesting that in 1899 the government police of Ireland (mostly English leaning) considered him active in the rebel movement.

[Literary_Cat]

Lovely poems, all. I particularly liked Octavio Paz, whose work I had never read before. Thank you for sharing.

[quasimodo1]

I've lost my faith in all that colours life,
I've lost my trust to serve my fellow-men,
And stand a wreck – I think you know me now,
And if you don't the riddle can't be solved.
(by Alfred Nobel)

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/27/specials/heaney.html Seamus Heaney reciting poems, 2002

[quasimodo1]

"Like Sebald later on, Canetti might have found Britain a suitable context for pulling off the trick of becoming a famous name without very many people knowing precisely who he was. Canetti even got the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, and people still didn't know who he was. He was a Spanish Jewish Viennese Swiss Bulgarian refugee with an impressively virile mustache; he was Iris Murdoch's lover; he was a mystery. Apart from a sociological treatise called "Crowds and Power," which advanced a thesis no more gripping than its title, his solitary prewar novel, "Die Blendung," known in English as "Auto-da-Fé," was the only book by Canetti that anybody had ever heard of. Almost no one had read it, but everybody meant to. Those who had read it said it was about a mysterious man in a house full of books, and that the house, in a symbolic enactment of the collapse of a civilization, fell down, or almost did, or creaked a lot, or something". ...from Party in the Blitz (a review in the NYtimes) by Elias Canetti
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1981/press.html

[quasimodo1]

Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.
There is none to count thy minutes.
Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. Thou knowest how to wait.
Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.
We have no time to lose, and having no time, we must scramble for our chances. We are too poor to be late.
And thus it is that time goes try, while I give it to every querulous man who claims it, and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.
At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut; but if I find that yet there is time.

(Gitanjali, 82.) Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1913. This work added to the end of the presentation.

[quasimodo1]

Clenched Soul


We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?


Pablo Neruda (excerpt from Clenched Soul)

[quasimodo1]

With a common and blue collar beginning taking jobs like stonecutter and ticket taker, in his younger life he founded (during a strike) a literary magazine called "Our Present Day" and subsequently joined a society of future writers called "The Green Ones", he kept hard working jobs while he kept writing. After many years, writing all along, and getting published now and then, he started writing what would be his master works. In 1974, he shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with Eyvind Johnson. This sample, the last stanza of"The Inner Light", clearly shows his genious...

...........THE INNER LIGHT

It was like a play of fans
in keeping with the same law that holds for rainbows,
but with spread and folded fans
alternating with one another
in keeping with the law of light inscribed in them.
It was the light when it dances enclosed
when it is not traveling abroad and seen.
It belongs to the nature of light
that it can be shut in
and still not die out in its movement
that it preserves itself thus in the darkness
as thought, intent and aptitude,
that it remembers its changes
and performs its dance, its interplay.
With this art the light keeps together
the innumerable swarms of matter
and sings with light's spectral wings
the endless song in honor of the fullness of the world.

by Harry Martinson

[quasimodo1]

Won the Nobel in 1996....excerpt translated from Polish...... THE JOY OF WRITING
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

[quasimodo1]

"The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe."

- Romain Rolland From: Life of Vivekananda






"The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain - but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest."

-Romain Rolland (1866-1944) ...Although he is listed as a poet of the 19th century, it must be his prose which is the poetry. He won the Nobel in 1915.

[quasimodo1]

When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted

When Earth's last picture is painted
And the tubes are twisted and dried
When the oldest colors have faded
And the youngest critic has died
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it
Lie down for an aeon or two
'Till the Master of all good workmen
Shall put us to work anew
And those that were good shall be happy
They'll sit in a golden chair
They'll splash at a ten league canvas
With brushes of comet's hair
They'll find real saints to draw from
Magdalene, Peter, and Paul
They'll work for an age at a sitting
And never be tired at all.
And only the Master shall praise us.
And only the Master shall blame.
And no one will work for the money.
No one will work for the fame.
But each for the joy of the working,
And each, in his separate star,
Will draw the thing as he sees it.
For the God of things as they are!





By: Rudyard Kipling (won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907)

[quasimodo1]

"Gabriela's poetry possesses the merit of consummate originality, of a voice of its own, authentic and consciously realized. The affirmation within this poetry of the intimate "I" removed from everything foreign to it, makes it profoundly human, and it is this human quality that gives it its universal value."

- Margot Arce de Vazquez

THE SHINING HOST


In vain you try

To smother my song:

A million children

In chorus sing it

Beneath the sun!


(first stanza)




- Gabriela Mistral (Nobel, 1945)

[quasimodo1]

GROWLTIGER'S LAST STAND
GROWLTIGER was a Bravo Cat, who lived upon a barge;
In fact he was the roughest cat that ever roamed at large.
From Gravesend up to Oxford he pursued his evil aims,
Rejoicing in his title of "The Terror of the Thames."

His manners and appearance did not calculate to please;
His coat was torn and seedy, he was baggy at the knees;
One ear was somewhat missing, no need to tell you why,
And he scowled upon a hostile world from one forbidding eye.

The cottagers of Rotherhithe knew something of his fame,
At Hammersmith and Putney people shuddered at his name.
They would fortify the hen-house, lock up the silly goose,
When the rumour ran along the shore: GROWLTIGER'S ON THE LOOSE!

.......
(first stanzas) by T.S.Eliot ...won Nobel in 1948

[quasimodo1]

The Academy's Description {Nobel Prize Academy}


In its announcement, the academy described the poet in these terms:



- Mr. Seifert has never become a writer with a Party program. The state is there for the people and not vice versa. There is an element of anarchy in his philosophy of life - a protest against everything that cuts down life's possibilities and reduces human beings to cogs in some ideological machine or yokes them to the harness of some dogma.



- His method is to depict and praise those aspects of life and the world that are not governed by dogmas and dictates, political or otherwise. He paints in words a world other than the one various authorities and their associates threaten to squeeze dry and leave destitute.



- He praises a Prague that is blossoming and a spring that lives in the memory, in the hopes of the defiant spirit of people who refuse to conform.



- He conjures up another world than that of tyranny and desolation - a world that exists both here and now, although it may be hidden from our view and bound in chains, and one that exists in our dreams and our will and our art and our indomitable spirit. His poetry is a kind of maieutics - an act of deliverance.

{see next post for example of Seifert's poetry}

STRUGGLE WITH THE ANGEL

God knows who first thought up
that gloomy image
and spoke of the dead
as living shades
straying about amongst us.

And yet those shades are really here --
you can’t miss them.
Over the years I’ve gathered around me
a numerous cluster.
But it is I amidst them all
who is straying.

.......................

{first stanzas of "Stuggle With the Angel"}

JAROSLAV SEIFERT
tr. from the Czech by
EWALD OSERS

Translation © 1998 Ewald Osers, Original © 1921-1983 Jaroslav Seifert.

[quasimodo1]

Juan Ramon Jimenez sought the ideal, the secrets of the spirit and the universe. Again from To Burn Completely:

The true man, the authentic man, the inherent cultivated aristocrat, who unites the greatest sensitivity in daily life to the greatest richness of a greater life, is he who most desires the happiness of the world, he who seeks his own happiness in the universal happiness, he who succeeds by means of a clear concept of the whole life of the world, in best occupying, using, and enjoying his space and time.

Or from Poetry and Literature:

In reality the poet, when mute or when writing, is an abstract dancer, and if he writes, it is out of everyday weakness, for to be truly consistent he ought not write.
{from the Pemmican Press describing nobel poet Juan Ramon Jimenez; the Russell Edson statement about prose vs. poetry is interesting and maybe argueable. This article to be followed by a sample of his work}

http://www.pemmicanpress.com/articles/jimenez.html

[quasimodo1]

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GWmpEcL4jxwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=Collected+Poems+of+Juan+Ramon+Jimenez&ots=vV8TY6gzTp&sig=njjqh4Y0ndHCP4dAGq183F0oyww#PPA15,M1 ...........The poems of Jimenez are well protected unless you read spanish. This link will allow reading of several of his poems in both Spanish and English.

[quasimodo1]

CITIES AND THRONES AND POWERS

(Prelude to "Puck of Pook's Hill")

CITIES and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

This season's Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year's;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o'er-kind
To all that be,
Ordains us e'en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
"See how our works endure!"

{Nobel Prize Winner, 1907}

[Naya Cos]

Thanks for refreshing our memory, of the wonderful poems read so long ago and forgotten in the course of living the 'real life'. It is all too easy to overlook the fabulous diversity of expressions and compositons, and simply get hung up on a single track!!