Federico García Lorca / City That Does Not Sleep

City That Does Not Sleep

By Federico García Lorca

Translated and edited by Robert Bly

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.

..

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

..

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

..

One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows.

..

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

..

Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.

..

No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

Robert Bly / Waiting for night to come

Waiting for night to come

by Robert Bly

Robert Bly / Esperando a noite chegar

I.
How much I long for the night to come
Again — I am restless all afternoon —
And the huge stars to appear
All over the heavens!… The black spaces between stars…
And the blue to fade away.

II.
I worked on poems with my back to the window,
Waiting for the darkness that I remember
Noticing from my cradle.
When I step over and open the door, I am
A salmon slipping over the gravel into the ocean.

III.
One star stands alone in the western darkness:
Arcturus. Caught in their love, the Arabs called it
The Keeper of Heaven. I think
It was in the womb that I received
The thirst for the dark heavens.

Robert Bly / When my dead father called

When my dead father called

by Robert Bly

Robert Bly / Quando meu falecido pai telefonou (Pessoa)

Last night I dreamt my father called to us.
He was stuck somewhere. It took us
A long time to dress, I don’t know why.
The night was snowy; there were long black roads.

Finally, we reached the little town, Bellingham.
There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,
Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed
The uneven sort of shoes that men wore

In the early Forties. And overalls. He was smoking.
Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps
He left us somewhere once, or did I simply
Forget he was alone in winter in some town?

Tomas Traströmer / After a Death

AFTER A DEATH

By Tomas Tranströmer
BIOGRAPHY

Translated by Robert Bly

Tomas Tranströmer / Tras la muerte

Once there was a shock

that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.

It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.

It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun

through brush where a few leaves hang on.

They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.

Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat

but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

The samurai looks insignificant

beside his armor of black dragon scales.



Six Winters by Tomas Tranströmer
The Tree and the Sky by Tomas Tranströmer

Robert Bly
Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Robert Bly: By the Book

Published: May 2, 2013

The poet and critic, whose correspondence with the poet Tomas Transtromer, “Airmail,” has just been published, was influenced by Kierkegaard: “He predicts the rise of savagery.”

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

Coleman Barks’s translations of Rumi are always wonderful, especially “A Year With Rumi: Daily Readings.” The poem for Jan. 10 for instance, “A Piece of Wood”: 

I reach for a piece of wood. It turns into a lute.
I do some meanness. It turns out helpful.
I say one must not travel during the holy month.
Then I start out, and wonderful things happen.

Oh, and here’s an even better one. Sept. 20:

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer
and find myself chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.

When and where do you like to read?

All the time, and in my red chair with my feet stretched out the length of it. Of course I like to read in bed. Then I can sink back into the words.

Are you a rereader?

Of poetry. I’ve read all of Yeats 1,400 times. “The Winding Stair” confronts the desire to destroy the noble or excellent, and it tells us to “cast out remorse,” tells us how necessary that is:

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

And I always reread James Wright, and R. H. Blyth’s haiku books, as well as Hafez and Ghalib. All my favorites I read again and again.

Who are your favorite poets of all time?

W. B. Yeats, Rumi, Kabir, Robert Frost, Mirabai, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Antonio Machado, James Wright, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pablo Neruda, Tomas Tran-strömer, William Stafford, and then there’s Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke and Tu Fu. I’m also fond of Coleman Barks’s poems and some of Li-Young Lee’s books. Wallace Stevens should be among the first on the list. I’ve said somewhere about “Harmonium”: 

I’ve loved this blue book of poems for
forty years.
A man wrote it, but his mother is in
it. She’s
Present in that wisp of feeling that
rises, all at once —
Those frail instants that hard-pressed
men ignore.

What’s your favorite literary genre?

Poetry. Always has been.

Some poems do give plebeian sweets
Tastier than the chocolates French diners
Eat at evening, and old pleasures abundant
As Turkish pears picked in the garden in August. 

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

Leonard Lewisohn’s “Beyond Faith and Infidelity: The Sufi Poetry and Teachings of Mahmud Shabistari” and Haki Madhubuti’s “HeartLove: Wedding and Love Poems.” I’m liking to read Peter Hessler’s “River Town” in small bits. And I very much enjoyed Louis Begley’s “About Schmidt.”

Where do you get books? Do you have a favorite bookstore?

The best is Birchbark Books, owned by Louise Erdrich, and run by a great staff that sometimes includes her family members. The store is near us, and we can walk there. There is always something excellent to take home. Just down the street we have some good used-book stores. Magers & Quinn is one. They have had a fine reading series off and on.

Which books have had the most impact on you as a writer?

One was “The Present Age,” by Kierke-gaard. He predicts the rise of savagery. It is all around us now as we’re becoming more and more a sibling society.

What are the particular books that made you want to write?

“Gitanjali,” by Rabindranath Tagore. Those God poems are so fresh, different from John Donne’s, who is a favorite too. He says, “Oh, make thyself with holy mourning black, / And red with blushing, as thou art with sin.” Where Tagore says: “Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call you friend who are my lord.” A friend of Yeats’s said of Tagore that he was a saint who didn’t refuse to live. That’s right. 

And of course I love William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” the stormy, excessive, tiger-like energy: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, / Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” That made me realize how boring it is to have poems without opinions. And early on there was William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, Hart Crane and old T. S. Eliot too.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

“News of the Universe,” a collection I edited in 1980. The poems, written by poets from around the world, try to reopen the channels between human beings and nature, to see her without fear, hatred or distance. Right now we can see what happens when those channels are closed.

What are the best books about -Minnesota?

Vilhelm Moberg’s “The Emigrants” is one. James Wright’s Minnesota poems, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” And Louis Jenkins up by Duluth is a master of the prose poem. We published “An Almost Human Gesture” in Sixties Press. He and Mark Rylance have a play made up of his poems. It’s just coming out at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Fred Manfred’s “Lord Grizzly” is a good one too. He actually crawled over a large stretch of southern Minnesota landscape to give authenticity to the ordeal it describes.

What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character from those books?

“Treasure Island,” by Robert Louis Stevenson, was one. I loved Howard Pyle’s Arthurian books, Shakespeare and translations of “Beowulf.” Favorite characters: Grendel from “Beowulf,” Charlemagne and everything around him. King Lear.

What’s your favorite myth or fairy tale, and why?

I can’t have one favorite fairy tale. There are so many good ones. I love fairy tales about bears, especially “The White Bear King Valemon.” I’ve written some commentary about that one. And about “Iron John.” All of the wild-man stories.

What does your personal book collection look like?

Every book by Yeats. Dozens by my contemporaries: Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, C. K. Williams, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford.

What books about manhood would you recommend to parents of a young boy?

“The Flying Boy,” by John Lee, about the so-called “ungrounded” young man, of which we have so many. “Society Without the Father,” by Alexander Mitscherlich. He wrote that the son used to see the father both by day and night, but now when the father is working away from home, as so many do, the son might imagine that the remote father is the evil father.  

And then there is the “Odyssey,” the son, Telemachus, waiting for his father to return and to deal with the suitors courting his mother. It is terrible. And they are eating up his inheritance. But Odysseus is away. The boy has to find his way to becoming a young man. He has to have mentors. The myth gives us an awareness of all that.

What books did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

“Paradise Lost.” Milton is a big stone that teachers put around a student’s neck. I can’t remember what else I don’t like.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be?

Chekhov.

What would you want to know?

“Have a seat. What would you like to drink?”

(Chekhov says, “Fine red wine. … ”)

If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be?

Hamlet on one of his good days. Or Hermes.

What do you plan to read next?

The next book of Chekhov.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Robert Bly / Three Poems

Robert Bly

THREE POEMS

by Robert Bly

Watering the Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

For Donald Hall

Have you heard about the boy who walked by
The black water? I won't say much more.
Let's wait a few years. It wanted to be entered.
Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand
Reaches out and pulls him in.

There was no
Intention, exactly. The pond was lonely, or needed
Calcium, bones would do. What happened then?

It was a little like the night wind, which is soft,
And moves slowly, sighing like an old woman
In her kitchen late at night, moving pans
About, lighting a fire, making some food for the cat.

Living at the End of Time

There is so much sweetness in children’s voices,
And so much discontent at the end of day,
And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.

I don’t know why the rooster keeps crying,
Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,
Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.

A handsome child is a gift from God,
And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,
And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.

Some say we are living at the end of time,
But I believe a thousand pagan ministers
Will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.

There’s nothing we need to do about John. The Baptist
Has been laying his hands on earth for so long
That the well water is sweet for a hundred miles.

It’s all right if we don’t know what the rooster
Is saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feel
So much satisfaction when a train goes by.