EDGAR BOWERS [18.910]

Edgar Bowers

Poeta

Fecha de nacimiento: 2 de marzo de 1924, Rome, Georgia, Estados Unidos

Fecha de la muerte: 4 de febrero de 2000, San Francisco, California, Estados Unidos

Educación: Universidad Stanford (1953)

Premios: Beca Guggenheim en Humanidades, Estados Unidos y Canadá

Nominaciones: Premio Nacional del Libro por Poesía

Publicaciones:

The Form of Loss (Alan Swallow, 1956)

The Astronomers (Alan Swallow, 1965)

Living Together (David R. Godine, 1973)

For Louis Pasteur (Princeton University Press, 1989)

Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)

Amor Vincit Omnia

El amor ya no es.

Murió como la mente muere: el deseo puro

que renuncia a la forma dichosa que usó,

el gozo y la claridad abundantes expiran.

El arrepentimiento es inútil.

Entonces no sufras por lo que pudiste borrar,

la falla repentina del pasado, el dolor

de su cambio reticente, y la desgracia.

Abandona la inocencia,

y cambia tu naturaleza por el duelo

que plantea indiferencia a la voluntad

que ningún deseo es permanente para el sentido.

Despídete de mí

¿Qué recompensa, o piedad, o engaño

puede curar, o qué serenidad supuesta

disimula la pérdida mortal que repetimos?

La mente se transformará, y la transformación será el consuelo.

Traducción de Cristian M. Torres

Amor Vincit Omnia

Love is no more. 

It died as the mind dies: the pure desire 

Relinquishing the blissful form it wore, 

The ample joy and clarity expire.

Regret is vain. 

Then do not grieve for what you would efface, 

The sudden failure of the past, the pain 

Of its unwilling change, and the disgrace.

Leave innocence, 

And modify your nature by the grief 

Which poses to the will indifference 

That no desire is permanent in sense.

Take leave of me. 

What recompense, or pity, or deceit 

Can cure, or what assumed serenity 

Conceal the mortal loss which we repeat?

The mind will change, and change shall be relief.

http://www.periodicodepoesia.unam.mx/

An Afternoon at the Beach

I’ll go among the dead to see my friend. 

The place I leave is beautiful: the sea 

Repeats the winds’ far swell in its long sound, 

And, there beside it, houses solemnly 

Shine with the modest courage of the land, 

While swimmers try the verge of what they see. 

I cannot go, although I should pretend 

Some final self whose phantom eye could see 

Him who because he is not cannot change. 

And yet the thought of going makes the sea, 

The land, the swimmers, and myself seem strange, 

Almost as strange as they will someday be.

The Mountain Cemetery

With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill 

The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.

The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,

While in the burning air the pines rise still,

Commemorating long forgotten biers.

Their roots replace the semblance of these bones.

The weight of cool, of imperceptible dust

That came from nothing and to nothing came

Is light within the earth and on the air.

The change that so renews itself is just.

The enormous, sundry platitude of death

Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same.

And splayed upon the ground and through the trees

The mountains’ shadow fills and cools the air,

Smoothing the shape of headstones to the earth.

The rhododendrons suffer with the bees

Whose struggles loose ripe petals to the earth,

The heaviest burden it shall ever bear.

Our hard earned knowledge fits us for such sleep.

Although the spring must come, it passes too

To form the burden suffered for what comes.

Whatever we would give our souls to keep

Is merely part of what we call the soul;

What we of time would threaten to undo

All time in its slow scrutiny has done.

For on the grass that starts about the feet

The body’s shadow turns, to shape in time,

Soon grown preponderant with creeping shade,

The final shadow that is turn of earth;

And what seems won paid for as in defeat.

John

Before he wrote a poem, he learned the measure

That living in the future gives a farm--

Propinquity of mules and cows, the charmed

Insouciance of hens, the fellowship,

At dawn, of seed-time and of harvest-time.

But when high noon gave way to evening, and

The fences lay, bent shadows, on the crops

And pastures to the yellowing trees, he felt

The presences he felt when, over rocks,

Through pools and where it wears the bank, the stream

Ran bright and dark at once, itself its shadow;

And suffered, in all he knew, the antagonists

Related in the Bible, in himself

And every new condition from the beginning,

As in the autumn leaf and summer prime.

Therefore he chose to live the only game

Worthy of repetition, in the likeness

Of someone like himself, a race of which

He was the changing distances and ground,

The runners, and the goal that runs away

Forever into time; or like two players

At odds in white and black, their dignities

Triumphs refused or losses unredeemed.

For the one, that it be ever of the pure

Intention that he witnessed in the high

Stained windows of King’s Chapel--ancestral stories,

The old above the new, like pages shining

From an essential book--he taught his mind

To imitate the meditation, sovereign

In verse and prose, of those who shared with him

Intelligence of beauty, good, and truth

As one, unchanging and unchangeable,

Disinterested excitement through a sentence

Their joy and passion. For the other, as

A venturer asleep, he went among

The voiceless and unvisionary many--

Like one who offers blood to know his fate

Or hold his twin again--deep in the midnight

Baths of New Orleans, on its plural beds

And on the secret banks beside its river,

The many who, anonymous as he was,

Uncannily resembled him, appearing

Immortal in a finitude of mirrors.

But when the sudden force of the disease

Tossed him, in a new garment, on the bed

Where he had wakened, mornings, as a child--

Despised by all the neighbors, helpless, blind

And vulnerable to every life, he listened

Intensely to the roosters, mules and cows

As well as to the voices of the desk,

The chair, the books and pictures, pastures and fields,

The tree of every season, the age of seas

And, on its surge, the age of galaxies,

The bells within the spires of Cambridge, bodies

And faces revealed or hidden in the flow,

All that we knew or could imagine joined

Together in the sound the stream flows through

As witness of itself in every change,

Each trusting in its continuities,

All turning in a final radiant shell.

Then, on his darkened eye, he saw himself

A compact disk awhirl, played by the light

He came from and was ready to reenter,

But not before he chose the way to go.

And so it was, before his death, he spoke

The poem that is his best, the final letter

To take to that old country as a passport.

For Louis Pasteur

“Who is Apollo?” College student

How shall a generation know its story

If it will know no other? When, among

The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur

Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever,

Indignantly he drew upon the blackboard,

For all to see, the Streptococcus chain.

His mind was like Odysseus and Plato

Exploring a new cosmos in the old

As if he wrote a poem--his enemy

Suffering, disease, and death, the battleground

His introspection. “Science and peace," he said,

“Will win out over ignorance and war,"

But then, the virus mutant in his vein,

“Death to the Prussian!” and “revenge, revenge!”

How shall my generation tell its story?

Their fathers jobless, boys for the CCC

And NYA, the future like a stairwell

To floors without a window or a door,

And then the army: bayonet drill and foxhole;

Bombing to rubble cities with textbook names

Later to bulldoze streets for; their green bodies

Drowned in the greener surfs of rumored France.

My childhood friend, George Humphreys, whom I still see

Still ten years old, his uncombed hair and grin

Moment by moment in the Hürtgen dark

Until the one step full in the sniper’s sight,

His pastor father emptied by the grief.

Clark Harrison, at nineteen a survivor,

Never to walk or have a child or be

A senator or governor. Herr Wegner,

Who led his little troop, their standards high

And sabers drawn, against a panzer corps,

Emerging from among the shades at Dachau

Stacked like firewood for someone else to burn;

And Gerd Radomski, listening to broadcasts

Of names, a yearlong babel of the missing,

To find his wife and children. Then they came home,

Near middle age at twenty-two, to find

A new reunion of the church and state,

Cynical Constantines who need no name,

Domestic tranquility beaten to a sword,

Sons wasted by another lie in Asia,

Or Strangeloves they had feared that August day;

And they like runners, stung, behind a flag,

Running within a circle, bereft of joy.

Hearing of the disaster at Sedan

And the retreat worse than the one from Moscow,

Their son among the missing or the dead,

Pasteur and his wife Mary hired a carriage

And, traveling to the east where he might try

His way to Paris, stopping to ask each youth

And comfort every orphan of the state’s

Irascibility, found him at last

And, unsurprised, embraced and took him in.

Two wars later, the Prussian, once again

The son of Mars, in Paris, Joseph Meister--

The first boy cured of rabies, now the keeper

Of Pasteur’s mausoleum--when commanded

To open it for them, though over seventy,

Lest he betray the master, took his life.

I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium

Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence

Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies,

Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight,

Teaching his daughter to use a microscope

And musing through a wonder--sacred passion,

Practice and metaphysic all the same.

And, each year, honor three births: Valéry,

Humbling his pride by trying to write well,

Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention

Repeatedly outside the reach of pride,

And him whose mark I witness as a trust.

Others he saves but could not save himself--

Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates--the spirit

Fastened by love upon the human cross.

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