Arthur Boyars
Poeta británico. Nacido en 1925 es poeta y musicólogo, traductor y crítico y editor. Es el editor de la importante guía The International Annual. Su poesía, así como su trabajo crítico fue publicado en numerosos diarios y revistas. Ha sido considerado en la significativa antología londinense The New Poetry (1962).
OBRAS:
(ed. with Barry Hamer ), Oxford Poetry 1948, Oxford: Blackwell, 1948
(trans. with David Burg) Yuli Daniel, Prison poems, 1971
(trans. with Simon Franklin) Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Face behind the Face, 1979
FLORENCIA: EL DÍA DE GARIBALDI 1949
Ninguna calle que lo diga.
Ningún amante
en la Via dell'Amorino,
ninguna belleza
en la Via delle Belle Donne.
Tan sólo
las lindas mujeres
entre sus estantes silenciosos,
tras las flores
puestas por amantes de los santos.
Y ninguna abundancia—
las manos
estirándose por unos cuantos reales,
los muchachos
con los pájaros presos.
mientras que los enamorados
se tocan a través
de las ranuras ciegas.
El puente:
y las joyas
una decepción.
Las manos
todavía agarradas
hasta que los dedos
alcancen esas nubes
y caigan
hacia el anochecer.
Muerte de un día,
el río desaparece
y el último pájaro
se retira a su casa
entre su jaula hambrienta.
Este 5 de junio.
No hay bandera
que por éstos se interese.
Ni días
(como los llaman ellos).
Poesía inglesa contemporánea (Barral Editores, Barcelona, 1975, versión de Antonio Cisneros).
FLORENCE: GARIBALDI DAY 1949
No streets what they say.
No lovers
In the Via dell'Amorino,
No beauties
In the Via delle Belle Donne.
Only
The lovely women
Silent on their shelves,
Flowers before them
Fixed by the lovers of Saints.
And no plenty—
The bands
Stretched out for farthings,
The boys
With imprisoned birds,
While the amorous
Touch
Through blind chinks.
The bridge:
And the jewels
A deception.
Still
Hands grasping
Till the fingers
Reach to the clouds
And pull down
Nightfall.
Death of a day,
The river fades
And the last bird
Moved homeward
In his hungry cage;
This
Fifth of June;
No flag
Concerned with these.
No days
As they call them.
Lycidas
Wherever he may walk on the silent plain
There are the berries haunting him, the weeds
Lacquered with water tiding towards the cave
Of no return, - or drifting where his blade in vain
Besieged by river-mirth becomes a pattern of refraction,
He notes the cold unsmiling steeds, their gills
In tumult vaunting the liquid fall, the well-worn destiny
Of streams and time of day, these he regards in isolation,
For, tumbling past the dream, they are his moon and stars,
Inverted catkins fallen through the oiled glass,
Berries that had swept his face dry of the earth
And all its wish, - had passed the fringe of hands far
On the bank, and now were treading on the spiral
Of his death: the sea turned river, and he might not think
That as they rode the stairs theirs was a dead ascent,
Or that his breath was now become a pearl beyond inquiry
Draped in a prison, void of fire; and where they passed, the
Fallen
Berries, was his sky, split and miraculously circled through
The green gem, passaged with rain and all the water-burden
Of his song, waking with movement the dead lips, and he, the
pearl wall,
Tender and white against the flash of his massed
Fortune, learning from the sepulture of words where
They grew from him living, and of trees also,
And how each falling leaf must finally be lost.
On the Birth of a Child
What daybreak of your body's shade has passed
into this crystallizing of a tear,
this clutching at the moulded air
with new inverted hands of animal?
Or did they sleep, who thought themselves
to be your father, fashioning another
love than night, and seek a mother
not your own, but with her crescent smile
around the wasted cycle of the year
and test with words the words they heard her speak
strange with rebellion, and suddenly in meek
submission turned to weaker will?
Where had the voice departed, where
the shadows that had formed her skin, and now
had left their fruit no courage to enow
the day with argument, or prove the night;
the half moon falling on her face till you
were born, and all like dead memory cut free
lay in her hands like some old ivory
and fell to life, a gift beyond refusing.
From some unthought-of hand strange
music lifts, strained life awakes
from struggle into noise, this change it makes,
and, like the sound, bears generations in it:
and now the leaves displace their heaviness
and leave her throat to words she would
not say, and with this being in her eyes should
not remember at the drowning of her ship of speech, -
and this is all the end or some beginning
unwritten in her hand, which joins her voices
into unison and overrules the choices
which, in your body's daybreak had existed never.
On the Decent from the Cross
First they had lifted him,
Tired with the falling of sky,
To where the earth
Unmentioned in his dreams
Moved stars at him, flowering
Beneath the Winter's crust.
And he, seeing the while ;
The image motionless pressed
On his clay-sight, seems
To be carved from rivers, - but sound
Of the nails had flowed
The liquid flesh in pattern,
And had turned to man, backed by
The breakwater of his
Dying wood: then
To his mouth, soured by the
Acid kiss, they lifted petals
Uncorrupted through dead Autumn
And touched their murmur
To his tongue, while he
The ' Wherefore ' still on his lips,
Grooved his dead spirit to
Their core, and sprung their
Summer-tint upon his blood.
But others had smoothed clear
His wounds, and remedied with magic
Art his hands impaled
For wonders ; and soon they lay
Unmarked, as though the barbs
Had been of nettle-fabric, and
Had faded from the painted part
And pointed then no longer
To the strangers of his death
And sharers of his mortal day : and so
They helped him anoint with fingers
Shuddering with thought of how the Sun
Was sifted through them, -
They touched his head and through
Its maze, confused, plucked thorns
Now gilded in his agony
Till at his side a golden mountain lay
And lifted quietly his crown from him.
Lovers in a Park
The claw protective flung
About her shoulders? haven,
Decrees nor you nor I shall touch
His starveling heaven;
Her stars low sockets hold,
Thin lips her hollow,
Pale tongue through banks of teeth winds where
His love must follow.
Compulsion rears no voice;
In this safe posture
She and her jig-saw man make one
No green imposture;
Love?s animals, though light
Against their barest tender
Mouths show indifferent flint set to
Indifferent tinder.
And yet no haloes of
Good-byes are spread like dawn
Above her known metropolis,
No moon falls down -
Their paper fingers scorch
Then crinkle, it is still
The same excuse of fire which tempts
Ashes to steal
Their winking heat again:
This is his own version
Of how his others love; a mouse
She smiles, and proves herself his vision.
Funeral
Friend, you were my child
My mother also
Ages long past:
The worm is dead in the shell
The spark lit its ruin;
Saw my reflection
Stretching in crannies of earth
To hoard the last part of you:
In clay the earth gleams
How shall it hide its gold
Till you are lost out of story:
Uneven the falling of rain -
The yellow light unexpected
Dazzles the salvager
In a year without myths.
Final Day
A DOZEN years of days and nights these loved,
Days they were separate, and most nights alone,
Only the evenings made their common home
Where intimacy grew, but this was gloved ;
Mouth touching mouth in kiss,
Loins touching loins, but doomed to miss.
They ate the ordinary food, and none complained,
But spoke extraordinary words whose meaning raced
Beyond the language which had not encased
Such thoughts till then. Words die, but these remained ;
Instead of children, better,
Grew up, and were not flesh to fetter.
Only in loneliness; for when food was short
Their private language would unlearn its grace,
And world rushed in with stricken daily face
And made her mouth each pious mundane thought
Which all their life had banished
To beyond, where such thoughts vanished.
Not vanished quite, the ordinary never;
Like fire in flint, its being lay concealed
Till friction for its flame to be revealed,
And famine was the end of this endeavour.
Famine and drought on two mouths lay,
Which, rubbing, set alight their final day.
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