[As a
follow-up to Pierre Joris’s recent posting on Jacket2 of a translation from Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan, “a poem addressed to the greatness
of the Persian poet Hafiz,” I’m resuscitating here a number of my own translations
from Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams, an
early series of erotic & sexually explicit poems that illuminate the further range
of Goethe’s work & bring him even closer to some of the workings &
concerns we share at present. They are
in that sense an extension of the rethinking of Goethe’s total œuvre that
Jeffrey Robinson & I proposed in Poems
for the Millennium, volume 3, as the model of a poet who works up to &
including his (& our) limits. (J.R.)]
Urns and sarcophagi
pagans paint into life,
dancing fauns,
dancing bands of bacchantes,
bright lines of them,
goatfooted, fatcheeked,
squeeze sounds
hot & wild
through brass
horns,
percussions & cymbals
blare out,:
we see & hear
on the
marble
birds
beating wings,
sweet taste of the fruit
on your
beaks,
no noise to frighten you.off
still
less to drive Eros away
who joins the bright crowds
rejoicing,
hoisting
his torch.
So bounty overcomes death
& the
ashes within
in the house made of silence
still find
pleasure in life.
Some day
may the
tomb of the poet
be
graced
with this scroll
he has
richly bejewelled
with
life.
*
Tight little alleyway – no room
to squeeze between its walls –
a young girl blocks my way,
my rambles around Venice
knocks me off my feet,
the place, the come-on
to a stranger’s eye,
a wide canal my drifting
takes me to. If you
had girls like your canals,
o Venice ,
cunts
like little alleyways, you’d be
the greatest city in the world.
*
what bothers me is this:
the way
Bettina gets to be so skillful
every limb in her body
grows looser & looser
till she can stick her own little tongue
up her own
little cunt
a charmer who tastes her own charms
will soon
lose all interest in men.
*
Is it so big a mystery
what god
and man and world are?
No! but nobody knows how to solve it
so the
mystery hangs on.
*
Lots of things I can stomach. Most of what irks me
I take in my stride, as a god might command me.
But four things I hate more than poisons & vipers:
tobacco smoke, garlic, bedbugs, and Christ.
*
Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord
preferred
to live with whores
& sinners, seeing
I go in for
that myself.
*
I could have made it just as well with boys
although my
thing has always been with girls.
And once I get my satisfaction with a girl
I can turn
her around & have her as a boy.
*
Not schwanz
meaning “tail”
but some fancier word
o Priapus
me being a poet
in German
that word grinds
me down.
In Greek I can call you
a phallos a marvelous
sound
to my ears
and in Latin mentula
from mens meaning “mind”
another
good word.
But schwanz is something
that sticks
out from behind
&
back there isn’t where
I find the most pleasure.
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