This Week

• French C25
• SS D2
• Persian :105
• Inferno: FIN
• Cantos EP:I-X

Epiphany #45

Last night buying a used copy of Rimbaud's poetry in French and showing The Crows to someone all while not awake ... talking to fmjtf.

L'étranger - pg. 13

Maman, sans être athée, n'avait jamais pensé de son vivant à la religion.

L'étranger - Ouverture

I

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile :: <<>> Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier.

COLLECTIONS FOLIO

Éditions Gallimard, 1957

Jeremiah 5:6

"Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of
the evenings shall spoil them, and a leopard shall watch over the
cities."

Inferno - Canto I

As when Divine Love set those beautiful
Lights into motion at creation's dawn,
And the time of day and season combined to fill


My heart with hope of that beast with festive skin --
But not so much that the next sight wasn't fearful:
A lion came at me, his head high as he ran,


Roaring with hunger so the air appeared to tremble.
Then, a grim she-wolf -- whose leanness seemed to compress
All the world's cravings, that had made miserable


Such multitudes; she put such heaviness
Into my spirit, I lost hope of the crest.
Like someone eager to win, who tested by loss


Surrenders to gloom and weeps, so did that beast
Make me feel, as harrying toward me at a lope
She forced me back toward where the sun is lost.

Israel Potter - pg. 31

Continuing in the service of the king's gardener at Kew, until a season came when the work of the garden required a less number of laborers; Israel, with several others, was discharged; and the day after, engaged himself for a few months to a farmer in the neighborhood where he had been last employed. But hardly a week had gone by, when the old story of his being a rebel, or a runaway prisoner, or a Yankee! or a spy, began to be revived with added malignity. Like bloodhounds, the soldiers were once more on the track. The houses where he harbored were many times searched; but thanks to the fidelity of a few earnest well-wishers, and to his own unsleeping vigilance and activity, the hunted fox still continued to elude apprehension. To such extremities of harassment, however, did this incessant pursuit subject him, that in a fit of despair he was about to surrender himself, and submit to his fate, when Providence seasonably interposed in his favor.

Israel Potter - pg. 29

Unauthorized and abhorrent thoughts will sometimes invade the best human heart. Seeing the monarch unguarded before him; remembering that the war was imputed more to the self-will of the King than to the willingness of parliament or the nation; and calling to mind all his own sufferings growing out of that war, with all the calamities of his country; dim impulses, such as those to which the regicide Ravaillac yielded, would shoot balefully across the soul of the exile. But thrusting Satan behind him, Israel vanquished all such temptations. Nor did these ever more disturb him, after his one chance conversation with the monarch.

Israel Potter - pg. 10

Chapter 3

ISRAEL GOES TO THE WARS; AND REACHING BUNKER HILL IN TIME TO BE OF SERVICE THERE, SOON AFTER IS FORCED TO EXTEND HIS TRAVELS ACROSS THE SEA INTO THE ENEMY'S LAND

LEFT TO idle lamentations, Israel might now have planted deep furrows in his brow. But stifling his pain, he chose rather to plough, than be ploughed. Farming weans man from his sorrows. That tranquil meditations. There, too, in mother earth, you may plant and reap; not, as in other things, plant and see the planting torn up by the roots. But if wandering in the wilderness; and wandering upon the waters; if felling trees; and hunting, and shipwreck; and fighting with whales, and all his other strange adventures, had not as yet cured poor Israel of his now hopeless passion; events were at hand for ever to drown it.

Inferno - Opening

... when I came to stop
Below a hill that marked one end of the valley
That had pierced my heart with terror, I looked up

Toward the crest and saw its shoulders already
Mantled in rays of that bright planet that shows
The road to everyone, whatever our journey.

CANTO I

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard -- so tangled and rough


And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well


I'll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunder

For Frank Bidart

Copyright 1994 by Farrar, Straus and Grioux
English translation copyright 1994 by Robert Pinsky
Italian text copyright 1991 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano
Illustrations 1994 by Michael Mazur
Foreword copyright 1994 by John Freccero
Notes copyright 1994 by Nicole Pinsky
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada by Harper Collins Canada Ltd
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 1994

This Week

• French C19
• Persian Lesson 100
• Descartes: Exercise 2 in Latex
  
• SS: D2
• Cantos: X
• Inferno: Canto XX
  

Distant Star - Opening

I

I saw Carlos Wieder for the first time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when Salvador Allende was President of Chile.

At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto Ruiz-Tagle and occasionally attended Juan Stein's poetry workshop in Concepcion, the so-called capital of the South.

"What star falls unseen?"
WILLIAM FAULKNER

For Victoria Avalos and Lautaro Bolaño

Copyright 1996 by Roberto Bolaño and Editorial Anagrama
Translation copyright 2004 by Chris Andrews

Published by arrangement with the Harvill Press, Random House UK, London.

This edition has been translated with the financial assistance of the Spanish Direccion General del Libro y Bibliotecas, Ministerio de Cultura.

Originally published by Edditorial Anagrama as Estrella distante in 1996

Manufactured in the United States of America.
New Directions books are printed on acid-free paper.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP993) in 2004.



New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

باد ما را خود خواھد برد

در شب کوچک من افسوس

باد با برگ درختان میعادی دارد

در شب کوچک من دلھرہ ویر انیست

گوش کن

وزش ظلمت را میشنوی؟

من غربیانہ بہ این خوشبختی می

نگرم

من بہ نو میدی خود معتادم

گوش کن

و زش ظلمت را میثنوی

در شب اکنون چیزیمی گزرد

ماہ سر خست و مشوش

و بر این بام کہ ھر لحظہ در او بیم فرو ریختن است

ابر ھا ھمچون امبوہ عزاداران

لحظہ باریدن را گویی منتظرند

لحظہ ای

و پس از آن ہیچ

پشت این

پنجرہ شب دارد می لرزد

و زمین دارد

باز میمانداز چرخش

پشت این پنجرہ یک نامعلوم

نگران من و توست

ای سراپایت سبز

دستاھیت را چون خاطرہ ای سوزان در دستان عاشق من بگزار

و لبانت را چون حسی گرم از ہستی

بہ نوازش ھائی لبھای عاشق من بپسار

باد ما را خود خواھد برد

باد ما را خود خواھد برد

This Week

• French C10-14
• Israel Potter - Fin
• Genji: 200
• Descartes
• Afsana: D2
  

ھدیہ

Thanks to Hassan via

طویل مدتی منصوبی

• فارسی کا ایک ناول
• البرٹ کامیو کا ناول فرانسیسی مین
• چار افسانی
• MIT کا کورس : بعد اطبیعاتی اور منطق اوْل
  

Five Bells

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels Is not my time, the flood that does not flow. Between the double and the single bell Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells From the dark warship riding there below, I have lived many lives, and this one life Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells. Deep and dissolving verticals of light Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water. Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth, Gone even from the meaning of a name; Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips And hits and cries against the ports of space, Beating their sides to make its fury heard. Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face In agonies of speech on speechless panes? Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name! But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells, Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time. Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life, There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait - Nothing except the memory of some bones Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud; And unimportant things you might have done, Or once I thought you did; but you forgot, And all have now forgotten - looks and words And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off, Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales Of Irish kings and English perfidy, And dirtier perfidy of publicans Groaning to God from Darlinghurst. Five bells. Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark, So dark you bore no body, had no face, But a sheer voice that rattled out of air (As now you'd cry if I could break the glass), A voice that spoke beside me in the bush, Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind, Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man, And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found. But all I heard was words that didn't join So Milton became melons, melons girls, And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night, And in each tree an Ear was bending down, Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass, When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought, The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky, Knifing the dark with deathly photographs. There's not so many with so poor a purse Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that, Five miles in darkness on a country track, But when you do, that's what you think. Five bells. In Melbourne, your appetite had gone, Your angers too; they had been leeched away By the soft archery of summer rains And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind, And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage, The sodden ectasies of rectitude. I thought of what you'd written in faint ink, Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind With other things you left, all without use, All without meaning now, except a sign That someone had been living who now was dead: "At Labassa. Room 6 x 8 On top of the tower; because of this, very dark And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed Into this room - 500 books all shapes And colours, dealt across the floor And over sills and on the laps of chairs; Guns, photoes of many differant things And differant curioes that I obtained..." In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper, We argued about blowing up the world, But you were living backward, so each night You crept a moment closer to the breast, And they were living, all of them, those frames And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth, And most your father, the old man gone blind, With fingers always round a fiddle's neck, That graveyard mason whose fair monuments And tablets cut with dreams of piety Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment At cargoes they had never thought to bear, These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone. Where have you gone? The tide is over you, The turn of midnight water's over you, As Time is over you, and mystery, And memory, the flood that does not flow. You have no suburb, like those easier dead In private berths of dissolution laid - The tide goes over, the waves ride over you And let their shadows down like shining hair, But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed; And you are only part of an Idea. I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, And the short agony, the longer dream, The Nothing that was neither long nor short; But I was bound, and could not go that way, But I was blind, and could not feel your hand. If I could find an answer, could only find Your meaning, or could say why you were here Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice? I looked out my window in the dark At waves with diamond quills and combs of light That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze, And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each, And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells, Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out. Five bells.

Israel Potter - Opening

TO

His Highness

THE

Bunker-Hill Monument

BIOGRAPHY, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue -- one given and received in entire disinterestedness -- since neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, nor the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.

This Week

• Second Draft
• French: C6-9
• Persian: Lessons80-95
• Tale of Genji: pg. 300
• Descartes Paper: First Draft