Nobel poets

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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)

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

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.

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

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

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.

(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.
..................

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

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

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http://nobelprize.org/award_ceremoni...hen/index.html This first Nobel was for poetry...French Poet...Sully Prudhomme 1901

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.

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, (...)

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Excerpt was found here.

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

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Another of his, found here (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.

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.

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

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)