Wednesday 3 December 2014

In hours like these...


Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night. 
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you. 
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind. 
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts. 
Behold what quiet settles on the world. 
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address 
The ages, history, and all creation.

-Vladimir Mayakovsky

Yours, 
SiBot

Tuesday 7 October 2014

Carousel

Scale continuous

rolls 
 the staff 
  cylindrical; 

never             flat.
          falling 
                 

















Painting ~ Konstantin Yuon, 1913.

Yours,
SiBot

Wednesday 16 July 2014

Today's Nonsense

"—You think I'll weep;
Lynd Ward
No, I'll not weep: I have full cause of weeping,
But this heart shall break into a hundred
thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep; O Fool, I shall go mad."
"Gradually there settles down a dreadful, eternal silence of the cemetery. All go mad, without words, they realise what is happening within them, and make up their minds for the last shift: to hide their grief for ever from men, and to speak in commonplace, trivial words which will be accepted as sensible, serious, and even lofty expressions. No longer will anyone cry: "Life is a waste," and intrude his feelings on his neighbours. Everybody knows that it is shameful for one's life to be a waste, and that this shame should be hidden from every eye. The last law on earth is—loneliness..." 


Résigne-toi, mon coeur, dors ton sommeil de brute!

(Resign yourself, my heart, sleep your brutish sleep) 

-Lev Shestov: Apotheosis of Groundlessness



Regards,
SiBot

Tuesday 20 May 2014

Phoneticism / Maya-krazy

Willow,
   though phonetically unsound...
Kruchenykh would be proud; 
such sonorousness!
whistled in wind. 

Such words, phrases.
Mean everything,
To no-one;

But you, Life.
plangent with me,
you are, indeed.                                                                                                
-Regards, SiBot


(instead of a letter)
              
Tobacco smoke has consumed the air.
The room
is a chapter in Kruchenykh's inferno.
Remember -
beyond that window
in a frenzy
I first stroked your hands.
You sit here today
with an iron-clad heart.
One more day
you'll toss me out,
perhaps, cursing.
In the dim front hall my arm,
broken by trembling won't fit right away in my sleeve.
I'll run out,
throw my body into the street.
I'll rave,
wild,
lashed by despair.
Don't let it happen
my dear,
my darling,
let us part now.
After all
my love
is a heavy weight
hanging on you
no matter where you go.
Let me bellow a final cry
of bitter, wounded grievance.
If you drive a bull to exhaustion
he will run away,
lay himself down in the cold waters.
Besides your love
I have
no ocean
and your love won't grant even a tearful plea for rest.
When a tired elephant wants peace
he lies down regally in the firebound sand.
Besides your love
I have
no sun,
but I don't even know where you are and with whom.
If you tortured a poet like this,
he
would berate his beloved for money and fame,
but for me
no sound is joyous
but the sound of your beloved name.
I won't throw myself downstairs
or drink poison
nor can I put a gun to my head.
No blade
holds me transfixed
but your glance.
Tomorrow you'll forget
that I have crowned you,
that I burned my flowering soul with love,
and the whirling carnival of trivial days
will ruffle the pages of my books...
Would the dry leaves of my words
force you to a stop
gasping for air?

At least let me
pave with a parting endearment
your retreating path.

Lilichka, Vladimir Mayakovsky, 
Petrograd, 1916

http://themattgonzalezreader.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/lets-bellyache/

Friday 2 May 2014

Neo-Futurist






Futurist made his stand
earning the wrath of hipsters;
more modern than they.

turning back in time
outdid their modernity;
Forever avant-garde.

SiBot.











Monday 24 March 2014

Dear Friends!

 

Dear Friends, 


I live without hope of ever communicating my gratitude to you, to any extent I might consider satisfactory.

But please do not think of me as a pessimist! Anguish might well interrupt me on most days I wake, including those meant to be celebrated, but without your support and kind wishes, I couldn't live in the hope of otherwise making myself understood... 

And so as lousy as things have been, it just so happens the date of my birth coincides with the beginning of Spring...


Last of the tempest-scattered clouds!
You alone charge upon the azure;
You alone cast a shadow, sad;
You alone temper the brightness of day.

Over time just passed, you covered the sky,
With lightning wound around you;
You thundered into the earth;
Pouring rain upon its perpetual thirst,

Enough! Disappear, that time has passed,
The earth is refreshed; the tempest flown away,
As gentle wind, caressing the leaves of trees,
Brings forth a heavenly repose. 

*Alexandr Pushkin, 1835
Isaac Levitan: Above Eternal Peace (1894)


 "De los seres que amamos su existencia nos basta."
 — 
Of the beings we love, their existence is enough for us.
— 
Yours,
SiBot






*I wasn't satisfied with the English versions already available, so I attempted to indirectly translate it myself. You may be surprised to know its a fairly common practice in the literary world for writers with very little knowledge of the original language to do this. The two versions I'd seen both tried to match the rhyming scheme (not strictly necessary considering the rhyming pairs in the original Russian alternated between genders) - obviously not possible to replicate in English. I also didn't pay too much attention to amphibrachic tetrameter, in favour of more closely replicating what the original actually said. E.g. the first of the below translations isn't sound English, and the second ignores the repetition of 'Одна ты'. 


http://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/pushkin/cloud.html

http://www.russianlegacy.com/en/go_to/culture/poetry/pushkin/storm_cloud.htm



Monday 10 March 2014

On Waking at Noon Without a Voice...


Called out to the world,
                                      
and heard by no one,

Became a thinking thing.

Eyes began to see themselves;
Cognition could be scrutinized,
                                            turning,
in on itself.

Swallowed tongue
spoke to heart,
to cease its agitation!

And no protest was heard,
                                       nor seen,
let alone,
              misunderstood.



SiBot

Monday 20 January 2014

Blue Monday


Dear Friends,

"You see, the trouble is that no devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life. It never was like a morning which gradually fills with light and colour and then turns, like other people's, into a blazing, hot day, when everything seethes and shimmers in the bright noonday sun, and then gradually grows paler and more subdued, fading naturally into the evening twilight. No! My life began by flickering out. It may sound strange but it is so. From the very first moment I became conscious of myself, I felt that I was already flickering out. I began to flicker out over the writing of official papers at the office; I went on flickering out when I read truths in books which I did not know how to apply in life, when I sat with friends listening to rumours, gossip, jeering, spiteful, cold, and empty chatter, and watching friendships kept up by meetings that were without aim or affection; I was flickering out and wasting my energies on those I imagined I loved; I was flickering out when I walked idly and dejectedly along Nevsky Avenue among people in raccoon coats and beaver collars - at parties on reception days, where I was welcomed with open arms as a fairly eligible young man; I was flickering out and wasting my life and mind on trifles moving from town to some country house, and from the country house to Gorokhovaya, fixing the arrival of spring by the fact that lobsters and oysters had appeared in the shops, of autumn and winter by the special visiting days, of summer by the fêtes, and in life in general by lazy and comfortable somnolence like the rest. ...Even ambition - what was it wasted on? To order clothes at a famous tailor's? To get an invitation to a famous house? To shake hands with Prince P.? And ambition is the salt of life! Where has it gone to? Either I have not understood this sort of life or it is utterly worthless; but I did not know of a better one. No one showed it to me. You appeared and disappeared like a bright and swiftly moving comet, and I forgot it all and went on flickering out. ...'
   You said just now that my face had lost its freshness and was flabby. Yes, I am an old shabby, worn-out coat, but not because of the climate or hard work, but because for years the light has been shut up within me and, unable to find an outlet, it merely consumed itself inside its prison house and was extinguished without breaking out into the open. And so years have passed. 
My dear friends: I do not want to wake up any more."

(Ilya Ilyich Oblomov).