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Thơ Mỗi Ngày

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SN/GCC

Văn Hải ngoại sau 1975 (kỳ 66): Nguyễn Quốc Trụ

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AA Complete Poems

Dante

II mio bel San Giovanni.
Dante *

Even after his death he did not return
To his ancient Florence.
To the one who, leaving, did not look back,
To him I sing this song.
A torch, the night, the last embrace,
Beyond the threshold, the wild wail of fate.
From hell he sent her curses
And in paradise he could not forget her-
But barefoot, in a hairshirt,
With a lighted candle he did not walk
Through his Florence-his beloved,
Perfidious, base, longed for. ..
August 17, 1936

* My beautiful San Giovanni

VIẾT MỖI NGÀY / APRIL 19, 2018 : MỘT LỜI VỀ DANTE

Chàng đếch thèm trở lại
Ngay cả sau khi mất
Thành phố Hà Lội - Florence - của chàng
Rời bỏ, chàng đi thẳng một mách
Vì chàng mà tôi hát bài hát này
Đêm. Một bó đuốc. Nụ hôn sau cùng.
Bên ngoài, âm thanh số mệnh – Như gió hú
Từ Địa Ngục, chàng gửi cho nàng một lời trù ẻo.
Ở Thiên Đàng, nàng vẫn giữ chàng ở trong đầu
Chàng không bước chân trần, muộn trong đêm
Bị quyến rũ, như 1 tên tội đồ
Qua Hà Lội - Florence - phản bội, đầy hờn oán
Thành phố chàng chân thành ao ước

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ANNA AKHMATOVA BELONGS TO the magnificent quartet of Russian poets whose fellow members are Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva. Like her fellow poets, Akhmatova suffered a bitter fate. Mandelstam died en route to a labor camp (1938); Tsvetaeva hanged herself (1941); Pasternak, ostensibly the "luckiest" of the four, fell victim to a vicious campaign after the publication of Doctor Zhivago, followed by the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in the midst of unbearable pressures died at home in 1960. After the brilliant success of her first books, Akhmatova was forcibly silenced in the mid-1920s and was unable to publish any verse until 1940. But the rehabilitation was short-lived. In August 1946, the Central Committee passed a resolution (rescinded only in 1988) that condemned the "half-nun, half-harlot" Akhmatova, along with Mikhail Zoshchenko, one of the most remarkable satirists of the time. It was only in the 1960s that Akhmatova began to receive the homage due her.

AA thuộc bộ tứ thần sầu những nhà thơ Nga, và số phận, cũng bi thảm như họ. Mandelstam chết trên đường tới trại lao động khổ sai. Tsvetaeva treo cổ tự tử. Pat, may mắn nhất, nhưng cũng bị chửi rủa thê thảm nhất, sau khi được Nobel, và chết tại gia. Sau khi nổi tiếng với tập thơ đầu, Bà bị bắt buộc phải im tiếng, giữa thập niên 1920, tới 1940 mới lại được in thơ, nhưng chẳng được lâu. Bà được nhà nước Xô Viết ra hẳn 1 nghị quyết, cấm tiệt in ấn mọi cái viết, sự xuất hiện của con mụ “nửa nữ tu, nửa gái điếm”, và phải đến thập niên 1960 Bà mới được thanh thản.

I WAS BORN IN THE same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, the Eiffel Tower, and, it seems, T. S. Eliot.' That summer Paris celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Bastille-1889. The ancient festival of St. John's Eve (Midsummer Night) was-and is still-celebrated on the night of my birth, June 23rd. I was named Anna in honor of my grandmother, Anna Yegorovna Motovilova.? Her mother, a descendant of Genghis Khan, was the Tatar princess Akhmatova, whose name I took for my literary name, not realizing that I was about to become a Russian poet. I was born in Sara kina's dacha (Bolshoi Fontan, the 11th railroad stop) near Odessa. This little dacha (more like a hut) was situated at the bottom of a very narrow and steep tract of land next to the post office. The seashore there is steep and the railroad tracks went along the very brink. When I was fifteen years old and we were living in the dacha at Lustdorf, we were traveling through this area for some reason, and my mother suggested that we go and see Sarakina's dacha, which I had never seen. At the hut's entrance I said, "Some day they'll put up a memorial plaque here." I wasn't being vain. It was just a silly joke. My mother was distressed. "My God," she said, "how badly I've brought you up."

1957
Tôi sinh cùng năm với hề Charlot, “Kreutzer Sonata” của Tolstoy, Tháp Eiffel, và có thể, T.S. Eliot.
Mùa Hè năm đó Paris kỷ niệm lần thứ 100 phá ngục Bastille – 1889.
Lễ hội cổ xưa St. John’s Eve thì vào đêm tôi sinh ra đời, và vẫn là như thế, 23 Tháng Sáu.
Tên tôi, là để vinh danh bà ngoại tôi, Anna Yegorovna Motovilova. Mẹ của bà, dòng dõi Hốt Tất Liệt, công chúa Hung Nô, Akhmatova. Tên của bà, tôi lấy làm bút hiệu, không biết rằng thì là mình sẽ trở thành thi sĩ Nga [bà  khiêm tốn, đúng ra, trở thành nữ thần thi ca Nga, một nữ thần sầu muộn, như Brodsky vinh danh bà.]
Tôi sinh ra tại dacha Sarakina, gần Odessa. Cái dacha này thì cũng chẳng khác chi một túp lều ở cuối 1 dải đất hẹp chạm biển. Bãi biển có bực đi xuống. 
Khi tôi 15 tuổi, có lần dạo chơi, tới túp lều. Tới lối vô, tôi nói bâng quơ, sau này người ta sẽ khắc 1 tấm biển, ghi lại cái ngày mà tôi tới đây.
Mẹ tôi, nhìn tôi, lắc đầu, không biết tao nuôi nấng mi tệ hại ra sao, mà nên nông nỗi này!

http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/tag/anna-akhmatova/




All literature of quality provides the reader with patterns and insights that enable him or her—perhaps not systematically, but frequently enough—to resist false doctrines. Poetry, in particular, is somewhat mysteriously linked to ethics; and poetic discipline to the fortitude of the spirit. Many poets, including Zbigniew Herbert and Akhmatova—and her protégé, Joseph Brodsky—insisted that refusal to succumb to evil is primarily a matter of taste. I was of the same mind. …


Mọi văn chương, thứ hảo hạng, cung cấp - có lẽ không hệ thống, nhưng thường xuyên, đủ - cho độc giả những mẫu mã và đốn ngộ khiến anh ta hay chị ả - chống/cưỡng lại những học thuyết dởm.

Thơ, đặc biệt, có cái chi bí mật, khiến nó mắc mớ tới đạo hạnh, tới kỷ luật nghiêm ngặt - người xưa thường tắm gội, ăn chay, đếch thèm gần...  đờn bà cả tháng, trước khi ngồi vào bàn, làm 1 bài thơ, là do thế, chăng:
Rất nhiều nhà thơ, trong có Zbigniew Herbert và Akhmatova – và nhà thơ đàn em của bà, Joseph Brodsky, hằng tâm niệm, rằng, cái sự nói “không” với ma quỉ, với cái ác Bắc Kít – hà, hà, THNM nặng – chủ yếu, là vấn đề của khẩu vị… “insisted that refusal to succumb to evil is primarily a matter of taste.”.

Gấu cũng nghĩ như thế!
Ui chao, mi nhảm quá!

Mĩ là Mẹ của Đạo Hạnh.
Brodsky
Đẩy  lên 1 chút nữa, cái cưỡng lại Cái Ác Bắc Kít, chủ yếu là vấn đề “Khẩu Vị”
Thảo nào!
Đọc thơ Mít lưu vong cứ ngửi thấy gì không hạp mũi!

Note: Cần gì viện dẫn Brodsky.

Nguyễn Chí Thiện cũng phán đúng như thế!

Short measure get all sentiments in jail,
where friendship weighs less than a cigarette,
where loyalty, like a report card, spreads thin,
where self-respect a spoon of rice knocks down.

“Hụt hẫng” - tạm dịch từ ‘short measure’ - có tất cả những tình cảm ở trong tù
Nơi tình bạn nhẹ hơn điếu thuốc,
Trung thành thì mỏng như tờ tự kiểm, hoặc, báo cáo cán bộ quản giáo
Tự trọng thì chỉ cần 1 thìa cháo, là trôi tuột vô họng!

Thơ Mỗi Ngày
Open up your hives,  o bees, cyphers on the fringes
of childhood, honeyed inheritance of self
among others.
My grandfather and godfather carved
their pockets of solitude
by donning white suits. Meticulous, industrious natures,
each quietly worshipped a queen,

each quietly stoked my inheritance. How could I
have known the vastness
being stored up for me, how it would remain
long after the bees had flown.
The moment I was handed the comb
dripping, the stickiness, the wax
in my teeth, the overwhelming sweetness.

It's over now. The bees, long gone, belong
to barefoot gardens, deserted.
Summer no longer sleeps
one foot swollen in her ice bucket. Jars of
honey no longer arrive
from Lyon, broken in the mail.
-Maya Ribault

NY Sept 3, 2018

28. Minamata no Muneyuki

In my mountain abode
it is winter
that feels loneliest
both grasses and visitors
dry up.

29· Oshikachi no Mitsune

To pluck a stem
I shall have to guess,
for I cannot tell apart
white chrysanthemums
from the first frost.

Commentary
28

Poem 28 beautifully conflates natural and human imagery. The word karu (in the form karenu, 'dried up', in the poem) acts as a pun (kakekotoba) meaning both 'to wither' and '[visitors] grow infrequent' that serves to connect the season (winter) to the poet's sense of isolation. The word yamazato, translated here as 'mountain abode', can also mean 'mountain hamlet', conveying more of a sense of community and therefore not quite so isolated. The poem is a variation on one by Fujiwara no Okikaze (fl. early tenth century):

When autumn comes
I join the crickets
in their plaintive cry,
for I know grasses and visitors
will both dry up.

(Aki kureba /musbi to tomo ni / nakarenuru /
hito mo kusaba mo / karenu to omoeba)

In poem 28, the season has changed to winter, which further deepens the sense of physical and emotional withering. In Teika's time, it was the forlorn scenery of both autumn and winter that poets found most affecting, so it is not difficult to see what Teika liked about this poem. He himself composed a variation, which he included in his private collection, Shuiguso (The Dull Musings of a Chamberlain; 1216):

Even on the path of dreams
visitors have withered
and frost settles
on the meadow grasses
as I pass the night in sleepless wait.

(Yumeji made / hitome wa karenu / kusa no hara /
oki akasu shimo ni / musubiiretsutsu )

Minamoto no Muneyuki (d. 939) was a grandson of Emperor Koko (poem 15). After being reduced to commoner status in 894, he held a number of nominal provincial governorships. He was appointed a magistrate in 939, but died shortly afterwards. Muneyuki has fifteen poems in the imperial waka anthologies, six of them in the Kokinshit, as well as a private collection. He is one of Kinto's Thirty-Six Poetic Geniuses.

29

Teika seems to have had a special fondness for white (see the Introduction, p. xxii), so it is not difficult to see what must have impressed him about poem 29. To the poet's eyes, the early-morning frost makes the pure white chrysanthemums all but indistinguishable from the frost itself. The poet's professed inability to tell apart the white chrysanthemums from the whiteness of the frost was something that Heian audiences, following in the footsteps of their Six-Dynasty Chinese predecessors, found irresistibly elegant. Indeed, the poem is a good example of the poetic device of 'elegant confusion' (mitate). Teika considered this one of his favourite poems and included it in virtually all of the numerous selections of poetry that he compiled. Common in Chinese poetry (kanshi), the chrysanthemum only began to be used in waka around the time of the Kokinshit (tenth century).

The Meiji poet Masaoka Shiki (I867-I902) rejected this poem, asserting that it was a fabrication based on a lie (uso no shiko), but Heian courtiers loved the stylized and unlikely conflation of the first frost and chrysanthemums and praised the image as being of the most refined beauty.

Oshikochi no Mitsune (d. C.925). Although he had only a modest career in the imperial bureaucracy, Mitsune was one of the leading poets of his time, and his services were sought by friends and emperors alike. He was one of the compilers of the Kokinsbu, and with Tsurayuki (poem 35), the best-represented poet in that collection; 196 of his poems were collected in the imperial waka anthologies after the Kokinshit, including a large number of byobu-uta (poems on screens) and poems from uta-auiase poem contests. He is one of Kinto's Thirty-Six Poetic Geniuses.

Alexander Blok, ca. 1906