If a Clown, by Stephen Dunn

If a clown came out of the woods,
a standard-looking clown with oversized
polka-dot clothes, floppy shoes,
a red, bulbous nose, and you saw him
on the edge of your property,
there’d be nothing funny about that,
would there? A bear might be preferable,
especially if black and berry-driven.

And if this clown began waving his hands
with those big white gloves
that clowns wear, and you realized
he wanted your attention, had something
apparently urgent to tell you,
would you pivot and run from him,
or stay put, as my friend did, who seemed
to understand here was a clown
who didn’t know where he was,
a clown without a context?
What could be sadder, my friend thought,
than a clown in need of a context?
If then the clown said to you
that he was on his way to a kid’s
birthday party, his car had broken down,
and he needed a ride, would you give
him one? Or would the connection
between the comic and the appalling,
as it pertained to clowns, be suddenly so clear
that you’d be paralyzed by it?

And if you were the clown, and my friend
hesitated, as he did, would you make
a sad face, and with an enormous finger
wipe away an imaginary tear? How far
would you trust your art? I can tell you
it worked. Most of the guests had gone
when my friend and the clown drove up,
and the family was angry. But the clown
twisted a balloon into the shape of a bird
and gave it to the kid, who smiled,
let it rise to the ceiling. If you were the kid,
the birthday boy, what from then on
would be your relationship with disappointment?
With joy? Whom would you blame or extol?

Nancy Cunard: Mediterranean—from the Var

More Nancy Cunard. This one, from 1921, shows the engagement with the landscape of Provence that we also see in the later Parallax (1925 – see post below).

Mediterranean—from the Var

1
Red earth, pale olive, fragmentary vine
Mellow with sun's decline.
In aftermath of harvest all the days
Are flushed with stillness, lit with almond greys,
And this November afternoon I see
Cypress against the sky so very still.
Upon a narrow strand
Full surges moving to the barren land
Towered with rocks, and on this sudden hill
I pause before the sunset that shall be
In its last hour a psalm
Sped to the journeying heart that seeketh balm.

2
Pale moon, slip of malachite
Above the smoke of the clouds poising
In a green moment that will not last—
And you there, far beyond the farthest roads and sea-paths,
Distiller of the heavens,
One drop of blood in the sky suffusing it:
Sunset, advancing
From this grey weather suddenly.

English versions of two French poems by T. S. Eliot

These two poems, "Lune de Miel" and "Dans le Restaurant", are anything but rare in themselves: they form part of the same collection as "Gerontion", and can be found in the Collected T. S. Eliot. However, they are not often seen translated into English. The version of "Lune de Miel" here is my own, mostly literal, translation; for "Dans le Restaurant" I have used the unpublished version by Ezra Pound, a free, playful interpretation of the original.

Lune de Miel
(Honeymoon)

They have seen the Low Countries, they are going back to
.................................................................Terre Haute;
But one summer night finding them in Ravenna, at ease
Between two sheets in the home of two hundred bugs,
The sweat of summer, and the smell of a bitch in heat,
They lie on their backs and spread apart the knees
Of four sticky legs all swollen with bites.
They raise the sheet so that they can scratch better.
Less than a mile from here is Saint Apollinare in Classe,
The basilica known to enthusiasts
For its acanthus columns which the wind batters.

At eight o’clock they will catch the train
To prolong their miseries from Padua to Milan
Where they will find The Last Supper, and an inexpensive
Restaurant. He will calculate the tip with a pencil.
They will have seen Switzerland and crossed France.
And Saint Apollinare, straight and ascetic,
Old, disaffected mill of God, still keeps
In its worn stones the precise form of Byzantium.


Dans le Restaurant

The waiter idle and dilapidated
With nothing to do but scratch and lean over my shoulder
Says:
"In my country the rain is colder
And the sun hotter and the ground more desiccated
and desecrated".
Voluminous and spuminous with a leguminous
and cannimaculated vest-front and pantfront
and a graveyperpulchafied yesterdays napkin in a loop
over his elbow
(I hope he will not sputter into the soup)
"Down in a ditch under the willow trees
Where you go to get out of the rain
I tried in vain,
I mean I was interrupted
She was all wet with the deluge and her calico skirt
stuck to her buttocks and belly,
I put my hand up and she giggled",
You old cut-up,
"At the age of eight what can one do, sir,
she was younger
Besides I'd no sooner got started than a big poodle
Came sniffing about and scared me pealess",
Your head is not flealess
now at any rate, go scrape the cheese off your pate
and dig the slush out of your crowsfeet,
take sixpence and get washed, God damn
what a fate
You crapulous vapulous relic, you ambulating offence
To have had an experience
so nearly parallel, with, . . . .
Go away,
I was about to say mine,
I shall dine
elsewhere in future,
to cleanse this suture.
Phlebas the Phenicien, fairest of men,
Straight and tall, having been born in a caul
Lost luck at forty, and lay drowned
Two long weeks in sea water, tossed of the
streams under sea, carried of currents
Forgetful of the gains
forgetful of the long days of sea fare
Forgetful of mew's crying and the foam swept coast
of Cornwall,
Born back at last, after days
to the ports and stays of his young life,
A fair man, ports of his former seafare thither at last


The final part of Dans le Restaurant is particularly interesting for Eliot fans, because it is recognisably an early version of "Death by Water", the fourth part of The Waste Land. The French goes thus:

Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,
Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d’étain:
Un courant de sous-mer l’emporta très loin,
Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.
Figurez-vous donc, c’était un sort pénible;
Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.

In more literal English than that of Pound, the connection with The Waste Land becomes even more apparent:

Phlebas the Phoenician, drowned a fortnight since,
Forgot the cries of gulls and the Cornish sea-swell,
And the profits and the losses, and the cargo of tin;
A current under sea took him very far away,
Took him back through the stages of his former life.
You can imagine, it was a painful fate;
Even so, he was once a handsome man, and tall.

Parallax, by Nancy Cunard

Cunard's Parallax is the poem that inspired this blog. I sought it after seeing a casual reference in Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, and after being unable to find it either in the library or on the internet, I ordered Poems of Nancy Cunard from the Internet. It arrived today, and sadly only contains two short sections from Parallax, but as they were previously unavailable on the Internet, I will reproduce them here. Some day soon I hope to go to the British Library, where I will be able to read the whole thing.
Parallax

* * * * *

Dry moss, grey stone, hill ruins, grass in ruins
Without water, and multitudinous
Tintinnabulations in the poplar leaves;
A spendrift dust from desiccated pools,
Spider in draughty husk, snail on the leaf—
Provence, the solstice.
And the days after
By the showman's travelling houses, the land caravels
Under a poplar; the proud grapes and the burst grape-skins.
Arles in the plain, Miramas after sunset-time
In a ring of lights,
And a pale sky with a sickle moon.
Thin winds undress the branch, it is October.
And in Les Baux, an old life slips out, patriarch of eleven inhabitants:
"Fatigué" she said, a terse beldam by the latch,
"Il est fatigué, depuis douze ans toujours dans le même coin."

In Aix what's remembered of Cezanne?
A house to let (with studio) in a garden.
Meanwhile "help yourself to these ripe figs,
And if it doesn't suit, we, Agence Sextus, will find you another just as good."
The years are sown together with thread of the same story:
Beauty picked in a field, shaped, recreated,
Sold and dispatched to distant municipality—
But in the master's town merely an old waiter, crossly:
"Of course I knew him, he was a dull silent fellow,
Dead now."
And beauty walked alone here,
Unpraised, unhindered,
Defiant, of single mind,
And took no rest, and has no epitaph.

* * * * *

"—Then I was in a train in pale clear country
By Genoa at night where the old palatial banks
Rise out of vanquished swamps,
Redundant—
And in San Gimignano's towers where Dante once ..
And in the plains with the mountains' veil
Before me and the waterless rivers of stones—
Siena-brown with Christ's head on gold,
Pinturicchio's trees on the hill
In the nostalgic damps, when the maremma's underworld
Creeps through at evening.
Defunct Arezzo, Pisa the forgotten—
And in Florence, Banozzo
With his embroidered princely cavalcades,
And Signorelli, the austere passion.
Look: Christ hangs on a sombre mound, Magdalen dramatic
Proclaims the tortured god. The rest have gone
To a far hill. Very dark it is, soon it will thunder
From that last rim of amaranthine sky.
Life broods at the cross's foot,
Lizard and campion, star-weeds like Parnassus grass,
And plaited strawberry leaves;
The lizard inspects a skull,
You can foretell the worm between the bones.

(I am alone. Read from this letter
That I have left you and do not intend to return.)

Then I was walking in the mountains,
And drunk in Cortona, furiously,
With the black wine rough and sour from a Tuscan hill,
Drunk and silent between the dwarves and the cripples
And the military in their intricate capes
Signed with the Italian star.
Eleven shuddered in a fly-blown clock—
Oh frustrations, discrepancies,
I had you to myself then ....."

* * * * *
I'll be posting more of Nancy Cunard's poems in the future.

I am lucky enough to have access to a pair of libraries which between them contain over two million books. Yet frequently I look for something and find it unavailable. This happens either because the library does not have a copy among those two million books, which is after all only a drop in the ocean of all the books ever published, or because what I desire (a free-verse translation of a foreign work, for example) does not happen to exist.

I have set up this blog in order to create a place on the internet for poems that I could not find either in the library or on the internet: poems, in other words, that were hard for me to get, and that I wish to make more easily available for others. I will be typing up poems from books, and also perhaps including some translations of my own from French poetry, where there is a gap to be filled in the range of existing translations.