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Three Women

A Poem for Three Voices
Setting: A Maternity Ward and round about

By: Sylvia Plath

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world. I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office. They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed: 'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.' And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it. Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples
. I am dying as I sit. I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs. I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death. Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I suck up? Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then? This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers: doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready. The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that. It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now. I am not at home.
How white these sheets are. The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me: they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life. They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances. I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare organ,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look. But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces. The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat! They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors. It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten. Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown. I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distnace and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids. It lies like sleep, 
Like a big sea. Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind. They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks. It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons. They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last. I last it out. I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence kill and kill? It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street. The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors, 
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good: O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world. There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness. I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick. It is thick with this working.
I am used. I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint. It is red.
I lose life after life. The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all. So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind. Her mouth is red.
I know her. I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly. She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down. I die. I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales. He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him. May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window. It is over.
How winter fills my soul! And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches. O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation. This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth. Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images. They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched. They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry. It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly. I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that. I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic. Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth. 
The red mouth I put by with my identity 
A day ago, two days, three days ago. It was a Friday. 
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today. 
I can love my husband, who will understand. 
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity 
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless. So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs. And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting: Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing. It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind. I leave someone
Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages: I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again. There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I. It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands 
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open: it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a litle funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back. They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours 
Widen and die in the hedgerows. I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured. I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again. I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine. They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. He does not speak a word.
He is still swaddled in white bands.
But he is pink and perfect. He smiles so frequently.
I have papered his room with big roses,
I have painted little hearts on everything.

I do not will him to be exceptional.
It is the exception that interests the devil.
It is the exception that climbs the sorrowful hill
Or sits in the desert and hurts his mother's heart.
I will him to be common, 
To love me as I love him,
And to marry what he wants and where he will.

THIRD VOICE:
Hot noon in the meadows. The buttercups
Swelter and melt, and the lovers
Pass by, pass by.
They are black and flat as shadows.
It is so beautiful to have no attachments!
I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? 
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

The swans are gone. Still the river
Remembers how white they were.
It strives after them with its lights.
It finds their shapes in a cloud.
What is that bird that cries
With such sorrow in its voice?
I am young as ever, it says. What is it I miss?

SECOND VOICE:
I am at home in the lamplight. The evenings are lengthening.
I am mending a silk slip: my husband is reading.
How beautifully the light includes these things.
There is a kind of smoke in the spring air,
A smoke that takes the parks, the little statues
With pinkness, as if a tenderness awoke,
A tenderness that did not tire, something healing.

I wait and ache. I think I have been healing.
There is a great deal else to do. My hands
Can stitch lace neatly on to this material. My husband
Can turn and turn the pages of a book.
And so we are at home together, after hours.
It is only time that weighs upon our hands.
It is only time, and that is not material.

The streets may turn to paper suddenly, but I recover
From the long fall, and find myself in bed,
Safe on the mattress, hands braced, as for a fall.
I find myself again. I am no shadow
Though there is a shadow starting from my feet. I am a wife.
The city waits and aches. The little grasses
Crack through stone, and they are green with life.

سیلویا پلات در ۲۷ اکتبر ۱۹۳۲ در بیمارستان رابینسون مموریال شهر بوستون ایالت ماساچوست به دنیا آمد. او اولین فرزند اوتو پلات و ارلیا پلات بود. پدرش در پانزده سالگی از قسمت شرقی آلمان که به راهروی لهستانی مشهور بود به آمریکا آمده بود و کرسی استادی زیست‌شناسی را در دانشگاه بوستون در اختیار داشت. مادرش از پدر و مادری اتریشی در بوستون زاده شد و هنگامی که دانشجوی فوق لیسانس ادبیات انگلیسی و آلمانی بود با اتو پلات آشنا شد و باهم ازدواج کردند. سیلویا پلات هشت ساله بود که پدرش - که بسیار ستایش‌اش می‌کرد - را از دست داد. او در کالج اسمیت به تحصیل پرداخت و با نمراتی درخشان از آنجا فارغ‌التحصیل شد.

او در سال (۱۹۵۳) وقتی مادرش به او اطلاع داد که در کلاس نویسندگی فرانک اوکانر پذیرفته نشده به شدت افسرده شد. در ماه اوت همان سال با بلعیدن ۵۰ قرص خواب برای اولین بار اقدام به خودکشی می‌کند ولی برادرش از آن اطلاع پیدا می‌کند و او را به بیمارستان منتقل می‌کند. در آن‌جا چند ماه تحت درمان و روان‌کاوی قرار داشت و تحت مداوا با شوک الکتریکی قرار گرفت. شرح وقایع این روزهای او بعدها دست مایهٔ تنها رمان او یعنی حباب شیشه قرار گرفتند.

در سال‌های بعد، او با استفاده از یک بورس تحصیلی به بریتانیا رفت. در دانشگاه کمبریج با تد هیوز شاعر بلندپایهٔ انگلیسی آشنا شد. ایشان در ژوئن سال (۱۹۵۶) ازدواج کردند.

اولین فرزند این زوج "فریدا"، در آوریل (۱۹۶۰) و دومین فرزندشان "نیکلاس"، در ژانویه (۱۹۶۲) به دنیا آمدند. در این دوران پلات تفاوت میان روشنفکر بودن، همسر بودن، و مادر بودن را درک می‌کند. وی در پاییز ۱۹۶۲ از تد هیوز جدا می‌شود.

 

سیلویا پلات سرانجام در فوریه ۱۹۶۳ با گاز خودکشی کرد. بسیاری از علاقه‌مندان سیلویا پلات، بی‌بندوباری تد هیوز را عامل از هم پاشیدگی روانی وی و خودکشی او می‌دانند و بارها عنوان هیوز را از روی سنگ قبر او کنده‌اند. ارلیا پلات می‌نویسد که او در ژوئن ۱۹۶۲ به دیدار سیلویا رفته است اما دریافته که کشمکش شدیدی میان دخترش و تد هیوز وجود دارد. او و دیگران این را به رابطه تد هیوز با زنی دیگر و ناتوانی سیلویا در خو گرفتن به این وضع نسبت می‌دادند.

The Apologizer by MILAN KUNDERA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALAIN MEDITATES ON THE NAVEL

It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls: every one of them showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated, captivated and even disturbed: it was as if their seductive power resided no longer in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts but in that small round hole at the center of the body.

This provoked him to reflect: if a man (or an era) sees the thighs as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: the length of the thighs is the metaphoric image of the long, fascinating road (which is why the thighs must be long) that leads to erotic achievement. Indeed, Alain said to himself, even in mid-coitus the length of the thighs endows woman with the romantic magic of the inaccessible.

 

If a man (or an era) sees the buttocks as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: brutality, high spirits, the shortest road to the goal, a goal that is all the more exciting for being double.

If a man (or an era) sees the breasts as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: sanctification of woman, the Virgin Mary suckling Jesus, the male sex on its knees before the noble mission of the female sex.

But how does one define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel?

So: ambling along the streets, he would often think about the navel, untroubled at repeating himself, and even strangely obstinate about doing so, for the navel woke in him a distant memory: the memory of his last encounter with his mother.

He was ten at the time. He and his father were alone on vacation, in a rented villa with a garden and a swimming pool. It was the first time that she had come to see them after an absence of several years. They closed themselves into the villa, she and her former husband. For miles around, the atmosphere was stifling from it. How long did she stay? Probably not more than an hour or two, during which time Alain tried to entertain himself in the pool. He had just climbed out when she paused there to say her goodbyes. She was alone. What did they say to each other? He doesn’t know. He remembers only that she was sitting on a garden chair and that he, in his still-wet bathing trunks, stood facing her. What they said is forgotten, but one moment is fixed in his memory, a concrete moment, sharply etched: from her chair, she gazed intently at her son’s navel. He still feels that gaze on his belly. A gaze that was difficult to understand: it seemed to him to express an inexplicable mix of compassion and contempt; the mother’s lips had taken the shape of a smile (a smile of compassion and contempt together); then, without rising from the chair, she leaned toward him and, with her index finger, touched his navel. Immediately afterward, she stood up, kissed him (did she really kiss him? probably, but he is not sure), and was gone. He never saw her again.

 

 

A WOMAN STEPS OUT OF HER CAR

A small car moves along the road beside a river. The chilly morning air makes even more forlorn the charmless terrain, somewhere between the end of a suburb and open country, where houses grow scarce and no pedestrians are to be seen. The car stops at the side of the road; a woman gets out—young, quite beautiful. A strange thing: she pushes the door shut so negligently that the car must not be locked. What is the meaning of that negligence, so improbable these days with thieves about? Is the woman so distracted?

No, she doesn’t seem distracted; on the contrary, determination is visible on her face. This woman knows what she wants. This woman is pure will. She walks some hundred yards along the road, toward a bridge over the river, a rather high, narrow bridge, forbidden to vehicles. She steps onto it and heads toward the far bank. Several times she looks around, not like a woman expected by someone but to be sure that there is no one expecting her. Midway across the bridge, she stops. At first glance she appears to be hesitating, but, no, it’s not hesitation or a sudden flagging of determination; on the contrary, it’s a pause to sharpen her concentration, to make her will steelier yet. Her will? To be more precise: her hatred. Yes, the pause that looked like hesitation is actually an appeal to her hatred to stand by her, to support her, not to desert her for an instant.

 

She lifts a leg over the railing and flings herself into the void. At the end of her fall, she slams brutally against the hardness of the water’s surface and is paralyzed by the cold, but after a few long seconds she lifts her face, and since she is a good swimmer all her automatic responses surge forward against her will to die. She plunges her head under again, forces herself to inhale water, to block her breathing. Suddenly, she hears a shout. A shout from the far bank. Someone has seen her. She understands that dying will not be easy, and that her greatest enemy will be not her good swimmer’s irrepressible reflex but a person she had not figured on. She will have to fight. Fight to rescue her death.

 

 

SHE KILLS

She looks over toward the shout. Someone has leaped into the river. She considers: who will be quicker, she, in her resolve to stay underwater, to take in water, to drown herself, or he, the oncoming figure? When she is half-drowned, with water in her lungs and thus weakened, won’t she be all the easier prey for her savior? He will pull her toward the bank, lay her out on the ground, force the water out of her lungs, apply mouth-to-mouth, call the rescue squad, the police, and she will be saved and ridiculed forevermore.

“Stop! Stop!” the man shouts.

Everything has changed. Instead of diving down beneath the water, she raises her head and breathes deeply to collect her strength. He is already in front of her. It’s a young fellow, a teenager, who hopes to be famous, to have his picture in the papers. He just keeps repeating, “Stop! Stop!” He’s already reaching a hand toward her, and she, rather than evading it, grasps it, grips it tight, and pulls it (and him) down toward the depths of the river. Again he cries, “Stop!” as if it were the only word he can speak. But he will not speak it again. She holds on to his arm, draws him toward the bottom, then stretches the whole length of her body along the boy’s back to keep his head underwater. He fights back, he thrashes, he has already inhaled water, he tries to strike the woman, but she stays lying firmly on top of him; he cannot lift his head to get air, and after several long, very long, seconds he ceases to move. She holds him like that for a while; it is as if, exhausted and trembling, she were resting, laid out along him. Then, convinced that the man beneath her will not stir again, she lets go of him and turns away, toward the riverbank she came from, so as not to preserve within her even the shadow of what has just occurred.

But what’s going on? Has she forgotten her resolve? Why does she not drown herself, since the person who tried to rob her of her death is no longer alive? Why, now that she is free, does she no longer seek to die?

BUY THE PRINT »

Life unexpectedly recovered has been a kind of shock that broke her determination; she has lost the strength to concentrate her energy on dying. She is shaking, suddenly stripped of any will, any vigor; mechanically, she swims toward the place where she abandoned the car.

 

 

SHE RETURNS TO THE HOUSE

Little by little, she feels the water grow less deep, she touches her feet to the riverbed, she stands; she loses her shoes in the mud and hasn’t the strength to search for them; she leaves the water barefoot and climbs the bank to the road.

The rediscovered world has an inhospitable appearance, and suddenly anxiety seizes her: she hasn’t got the car key! Where is it? Her skirt has no pockets.

Heading for your death, you don’t worry about what you’ve dropped along the way. When she left the car, the future did not exist. She had nothing to hide. Whereas now, suddenly, she has to hide everything. Leave no trace. Her anxiety grows stronger and stronger: Where is the key? How to get home?

She reaches the car, she pulls at the door, and, to her astonishment, it opens. The key awaits her, abandoned on the dashboard. She sits at the wheel and sets her naked feet on the pedals. She is still shaking. Now she is shaking with cold as well. Her shirt, her skirt, are drenched, with dirty river water running everywhere. She turns the key and drives off.

 

The person who tried to impose life on her has died from drowning, and the person she was trying to kill in her belly is still alive. The idea of suicide is ruled out forever. No repeats. The young man is dead, the fetus is alive, and she will do all she can to keep anyone from discovering what has happened. She is shaking, and her will revives; she thinks of nothing but her immediate future: How to get out of the car without being seen? How to slip, unnoticed, in her dripping clothes, past the concierge’s window?

Alain felt a violent blow on his shoulder. “Watch out, you idiot!”

He turned and saw a girl passing him on the sidewalk with a rapid, energetic stride.

“Sorry!” he cried after her (in his frail voice).

“Asshole!” she answered (in her strong voice) without turning around.

 

 

THE APOLOGIZERS

Alone in his studio apartment two days later, Alain noticed that he was still feeling pain in his shoulder, and he decided that the young woman who had jostled him in the street so effectively must have done it on purpose. He could not forget her strident voice calling him “idiot,” and he heard again his own supplicating “Sorry,” followed by the answering “Asshole!” Once again, he had apologized over nothing! Why always this stupid reflex of begging pardon? The memory would not leave him, and he felt he had to talk to someone. He called his girlfriend, Madeleine. She wasn’t in Paris, and her cell phone was off. So he punched in Charles’s number, and no sooner did he hear his friend’s voice than he apologized. “Don’t be angry. I’m in a very bad mood. I need to talk.”

 

“It’s a good moment. I’m in a foul mood, too. But why are you?”

“Because I’m angry with myself. Why is it that I find every opportunity to feel guilty?”

“That’s not so awful.”

“Feeling guilty or not feeling guilty—I think that’s the whole issue. Life is a struggle of all against all. It’s a known fact. But how does that struggle work in a society that’s more or less civilized? People can’t just attack each other on sight. So instead they try to cast the shame of culpability on each other. The person who manages to make the other one guilty will win. The one who confesses his crime will lose. You’re walking along the street, lost in thought. Along comes a girl, walking straight ahead, as if she were the only person in the world, looking neither left nor right. You jostle each other. And there it is, the moment of truth: Who’s going to bawl out the other person, and who’s going to apologize? It’s a classic situation: actually, each of them is both the jostled and the jostler. And yet some people always—immediately, spontaneously—consider themselves the jostlers, and thus in the wrong. And others always—immediately, spontaneously—consider themselves the jostled, and therefore in the right, quick to accuse the other and get him punished. What about you—in that situation, would you apologize or accuse?”

“Me, I’d certainly apologize.”

“Ah, my poor friend, so you, too, belong to the army of apologizers. You expect to mollify the other person with your apologies.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re wrong. The person who apologizes is declaring himself guilty. And if you declare yourself guilty you encourage the other to go on insulting you, blaming you, publicly, unto death. Such are the inevitable consequences of the first apology.”

“That’s true. One should not apologize. And yet I prefer a world where everyone would apologize, with no exception, pointlessly, excessively, for nothing at all, where they’d load themselves down with apologies.”

Alain picked up his cell phone to call Madeleine again. But hers rang and rang in vain. As he often did at similar moments, he turned his attention to a photograph hanging on his wall. There was no photograph in his studio but that one: the face of a young woman—his mother.

A few months after Alain’s birth, she had left her husband, who, given his discreet ways, had never spoken ill of her. He was a subtle, gentle man. The child did not understand how a woman could have abandoned a man so subtle and gentle, and understood even less how she could have abandoned her son, who was also (as he was aware) since childhood (if not since his conception) a subtle, gentle person.

“Where does she live?” he had asked his father.

“Probably in America.”

“What do you mean, ‘probably’?”

“I don’t know her address.”

“But it’s her duty to give it to you.”

“She has no duty to me.”

“But to me? She doesn’t want to hear news of me? She doesn’t want to know what I’m doing? She doesn’t want to know that I think about her?”

One day, the father lost control.

“Since you insist, I’ll tell you: your mother never wanted you to be born. She never wanted you to be around here, to be burying yourself in that easy chair where you’re so comfortable. She wanted nothing to do with you. So now do you understand?”

The father was not an aggressive man. But, despite his great reserve, he had not managed to hide his profound disagreement with a woman who had tried to keep a human being from coming into the world.

I have already described Alain’s last encounter with his mother, beside the swimming pool of a rented vacation house. He was ten at the time. He was sixteen when his father died. A few days after the funeral, he tore a photograph of his mother out of a family album, had it framed, and hung it on his wall. Why was there no picture of his father in his apartment? I don’t know. Is that illogical? Certainly. Unfair? Without a doubt. But that’s how it is. On the walls of his studio, there hung only a single photograph: the one of his mother. With which, from time to time, he would talk.

 

 

HOW TO GIVE BIRTH TO AN APOLOGIZER

“Why didn’t you have an abortion? Did he stop you?”

A voice came to him from the photograph: “You’ll never know that. Everything you imagine about me is just fairy tales. But I love your fairy tales. Even when you made me out to be a murderer who drowned a young man in the river. I liked it all. Keep it up, Alain. Tell me a story! Go on, imagine! I’m listening.”

“We must root out corruption at the highest levels of government and make it look like it’s happening at the lowest levels of government.”BUY THE PRINT »

And Alain imagined. He imagined the father on his mother’s body. Before their coitus, she’d warned him: “I didn’t take the pill, be careful!” He reassured her. So she makes love without mistrust, then, when she sees the signs of climax appear on the man’s face and grow, she cries, “Watch out!” then “No! No! I don’t want to! I don’t want to!” But the man’s face is redder and redder, red and repugnant; she pushes at the heavier weight of this body clamping her against it, she fights, but he wraps her still tighter, and she suddenly understands that for him this is not the blindness of passion but will—cold, premeditated will—while for her it is more than will, it is hatred, a hatred all the more ferocious because the battle is lost.

This was not the first time Alain had imagined their coitus; this coitus hypnotized him and caused him to suppose that every human being was the exact replica of the instant of its conception. He stood at his mirror and examined his face for traces of the double, simultaneous hatreds that had led to his birth: the man’s hatred and the woman’s hatred at the moment of the man’s orgasm, the hatred of the gentle and physically strong coupled with the hatred of the courageous and physically weak.

And he reflects that the fruit of that double hatred could only be an apologizer. He was gentle and intelligent like his father; and he would always be an intruder, as his mother had viewed him. A person who is both an intruder and gentle is condemned, by an implacable logic, to apologize throughout his whole life. He looked at the face hanging on the wall and once again he saw the woman who, defeated, in her dripping dress, gets into the car, slips unnoticed past the concierge’s window, climbs the staircase, and, barefoot, returns to the apartment where she will stay until the intruder leaves her body. And where, a few months later, she will abandon the two of them.

 

 

EVE’S TREE

Alain was sitting on the floor of his studio, leaning against the wall, his head bent low: Perhaps he had dozed off? A female voice woke him.

“I like everything you’ve said to me so far, I like everything you’re inventing, and I have nothing to add. Except, maybe, about the navel. To your mind, the model of a navel-less woman is an angel. For me, it’s Eve, the first woman. She was born not out of a belly but out of a whim, the Creator’s whim. It was from her vulva, the vulva of a navel-less woman, that the first umbilical cord emerged. If I’m to believe the Bible, other cords, too: with a little man or a little woman attached to each of them. Men’s bodies were left with no continuation, completely useless, whereas from out of the sexual organ of every woman there came another cord, with another woman or man at the end of each one, and all of that, millions and millions of times over, turned into an enormous tree, a tree formed from the infinity of bodies, a tree whose branches reached to the sky. Imagine! That gigantic tree is rooted in the vulva of one little woman, the first woman, poor navel-less Eve.

 

“When I got pregnant, I saw myself as a part of that tree, dangling from one of its cords, and you, not yet born—I imagined you floating in the void, hooked to the cord coming out of my body, and from then on I dreamed of an assassin way down below, slashing the throat of the navel-less woman. I imagined her body in death throes, decomposing, until that whole enormous tree that grew out of her—now suddenly without roots, without a base—started to fall. I saw the infinite spread of its branches come down like a gigantic cloudburst, and—understand me—what I was dreaming of wasn’t the end of human history, the abolition of any future; no, no, what I wanted was the total disappearance of mankind, together with its future and its past, with its beginning and its end, along with the whole span of its existence, with all its memory, with Nero and Napoleon, with Buddha and Jesus. I wanted the total annihilation of the tree that was rooted in the little navel-less belly of some stupid first woman who didn’t know what she was doing or what horrors we’d pay for her miserable coitus, which had certainly not given her the slightest pleasure.”

The mother’s voice went silent, and Alain, leaning against the wall, dozed off again.

 

 

DIALOGUE ON THE MOTORBIKE

The next morning, at about eleven, Alain was to meet with his friends Ramon and Caliban in front of the museum near the Luxembourg Gardens. Before he left his studio, he turned back to say goodbye to his mother in the photograph. Then he went down to the street and walked toward his motorbike, which was parked not far from his apartment.

As he straddled the bike, he had the vague sensation of a body leaning against his back. As if Madeleine were with him and touching him lightly. The illusion moved him; it seemed to express the love he felt for his girl. He started the engine.

Then he heard a voice behind him: “I wanted to talk some more.”

No, it wasn’t Madeleine; he recognized his mother’s voice.

Traffic was slow, and he heard: “I want to be sure that there’s no confusion between you and me, that we understand each other completely—”

He had to brake. A pedestrian had slipped between cars to cross the street and turned toward Alain with a threatening gesture.

“I’ll be frank. I’ve always felt that it’s horrible to send a person into the world who didn’t ask to be there.”

“I know,” Alain said.

“Look around you. Of all the people you see, no one is here by his own wish. Of course, what I just said is the most banal truth there is. So banal, and so basic, that we’ve stopped seeing it and hearing it.”

For several minutes he kept to a lane between a truck and a car that were pressing him from either side.

“Everyone jabbers about human rights. What a joke! Your existence isn’t founded on any right. They don’t even allow you to end your life by your own choice, these defenders of human rights.”

The light at the intersection went red. He stopped. Pedestrians from both sides of the street set out toward the opposite sidewalk.

And the mother went on: “Look at them all! Look! At least half the people you’re seeing are ugly. Being ugly—is that one of the human rights, too? And do you know what it is to carry your ugliness with you through your whole life? With not a moment of relief? Or your sex? You never chose that. Or the color of your eyes? Or your era on earth? Or your country? Or your mother? None of the things that matter. The rights a person can have involve only pointless things, for which there is no reason to fight or to write great declarations!”

He was driving again now, and his mother’s voice grew gentler. “You’re here as you are because I was weak. That was my fault. Forgive me.”

 

 

 

Alain was silent; then he said, in a quiet voice: “What is it that you feel guilty for? For not having had the strength to prevent my birth? Or for not reconciling yourself to my life, which, as it happens, is actually not so bad?”

After a silence, she answered, “Maybe you’re right. Then I’m doubly guilty.”

“I’m the one who should apologize,” Alain said. “I dropped into your life like a cow turd. I chased you away to America.”

“Quit your apologies! What do you know about my life, my little idiot! Can I call you idiot? Yes, don’t be angry; in my own opinion, you are an idiot! And you know where your idiocy comes from? From your goodness! Your ridiculous goodness!”

He reached the Luxembourg Gardens. He parked the bike.

“Don’t protest, and let me apologize,” he said. “I’m an apologizer. That’s the way you made me, you and he. And, as such, as an apologizer, I’m happy. I feel good when we apologize to each other, you and I. Isn’t it lovely, apologizing to each other?”

Then they walked toward the museum. ♦

 

 

Source:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-apologizer

(Translated, from the French, by Linda Asher.)

A Poem by Robert Frost

شعری از رابرت فراست

فکر می کنم می دانم اینجا جنگلِ چه کسی ست
اگر چه خانه اش در روستاست
مرا نمی بیند که اینجا ایستاده ام
و جنگلش را که از برف لبریز می شود نگاه می کنم

 

برای اسب کوچکم شاید عجیب باشد:
توقف در در جایی که مزرعه ای نیست
بین یک جنگل و یک برکه ی یخ زده
در تاریک ترین غروب سال

زنگوله ی افسارش را تکان می دهد
تا بپرسد آیا اشتباهی پیش آمده؟
تنها صدای دیگری که به گوش می رسد
صدای جاروی باد است و پولک های برف

جنگل، تاریک و عمیق و دوست داشتنی است
اما من قولی داده ام که باید عمل کنم:
قبل از خوابیدن فرسنگ ها راه راطی کنم

قبل از خوابیدن فرسنگ ها راه را طی کنم

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

 

 

 

با ترجمه ی بهنود فرازمند

http://ghaf.ir/%D9%84%D8%AD%D9%86-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%B4%D8%B…/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frost

http://fa.wikipedia.org/…/%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%AA_%D…
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9966830
http://www.vazna.ir/?p=920

http://alhamra9617.blogfa.com/post-31.aspx

A Poem by T. S. Eliot

LET us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats        5

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question….        10

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

 

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,        15

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,        20

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

 

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window panes;        25

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;        30

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

 

In the room the women come and go        35

Talking of Michelangelo.

 

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—        40

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare        45

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

 

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,        50

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

  So how should I presume?

 

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—        55

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?        60

  And how should I presume?

 

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress        65

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

  And should I then presume?

  And how should I begin?

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets        70

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!        75

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?        80

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,        85

And in short, I was afraid.

 

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,        90

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—        95

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

  Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

  That is not it, at all.”

 

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,        100

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:        105

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

  “That is not it at all,

  That is not what I meant, at all.”

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .

        110

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,        115

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

 

I grow old … I grow old …        120

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

 

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

 

I do not think that they will sing to me.        125

 

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

 

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown        130

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

 

شعری از تی. اس . الیوت

 

 

پس بیا برویم، تو و من

وقتی غروب افتاده در افق

بی‌هوش چون بیماری روی تخت

بیا برویم، از این خیابان‌های تاریک و پرت

از کنج بگو مگویِِ شب‌های بی‌خوابی

در هتل‌های ارزانِ یک شبه

،و رستوران‌هایی که زمین‌اش

پوشیده از خاک‌اره و پوست صدف‌هاست:

از خیابان‌هایی که کشدارند مثل بحث‌های ملال‌آور

که با لحنی موذیانه

...تو را به سوی پرسشی عظیم می‌برند

نه، نپرس، که چیست؟

بیا به قرارمان برسیم

زنان می‌آیند و می‌روند در اتاق

حرف می‌زنند در باره‌ی میکل‌آنژ

این زردْ مه که پشت به شیشه‌های پنجره می‌مالد

این زردْ دود که پوزه به شیشه‌های پنجره می‌مالد

گوش و کنار شب را لیسید

بر چاله‌های آب درنگید

تا دوده‌ی دودکش‌های فضا را بر پشت گرفت

لغزید به مهتابی و ناگهان شتاب گرفت

اما شبِ آرام اکتبر را که دید

گشتی به دور خانه زد و خوابید

وقت هست ٱری وقت هست

تا زردْ دود در خیابان پایین و بالا رود

و پشت به شیشه‌های پنجره بمالد؛

وقت هست، آری وقت هست

تا چهره‌ای بسازی برای دیدن چهره‌هایی که خواهی دید

،وقت هست برای کشتن و آفریدن

برای همه‌ی کارها و برای روزها، دست‌ها

تا بالا روند و پرسشی دربشقاب تو بگذارند؛

،وقت برای تو و وقت برای من

وقت برای صدها طرح و صدها تجدید‌نظر در طرح

پیش از صرفِ چای و نان

زنان می‌آیند و می‌روند در اتاق

حرف می‌زنند در باره‌ی میکل‌آنژ

وقت هست آری هست

تا بپرسم، جرئت می‌کنم؟ و جرئت می‌کنم؟

،وقت هست که برگردم و از پله‌ها پایین بروم

با لکه‌ی روشن بر فرقِ سرم

(می‌گویند: چه ریخته موهایش!)

،کتِ صبح‌هایم

،یقه‌ی سفیدِ بالا‌زده تا چانه‌ام

،کراوات گران بهای ِ مُد ِ روزم با سنجاق ساده‌اش

(!می‌گویند: چه لاغرند پاها و بازو‌هایش)

جرئت می‌کنم

جهان بیاشوبم؟

.در یک دقیقه وقت زیادی هست

وقت برای رفتن و برگشتن تصمیم‌ها و تجدیدنظرها

-زیرا همه را می‌شناسم من، از پیش می‌شناسم

همه‌ی شب‌ها، صبح‌ها، غروب‌ها

من با قاشق‌های قهوه، زندگی‌ام را پیمانه‌ کرده‌ام

می‌شناسم من صدای محتضران را که به مرگ می‌افتند

در پس زمینه‌ی آهنگی که از اتاق‌های دور می‌آید

چگونه شروع کنم؟

-و می‌شناسم من همه‌ی نگاه‌ها را، از پیش می‌شناسم

نگاهی که در عبارتی می‌پردازدت

و ٱن‌گاه که پرداخته به سنجاق ٱویخته بر دیوار دست و پا می‌زنم

چگونه شروع کنم

خاکستر ِ روزها را بالا بیاورم

و چگونه شروع کنم؟

-و می‌شناسم من همه‌ی دست‌ها را، از پیش می‌شناسم

دست‌ها با دست‌بندها، سفید و برهنه

(که درنور چراغ، کُرک‌ها ‌بورند)

عطر لباس است این

که پرت‌کرده حواسم را؟

بازوها آرمیده روی میز، یا پنهان زیرِ شال

و باید شروع کنم؟

و چگونه شروع کنم؟

. . . . . .

بگویم، در غروب از کوچه‌های تنگ گذر کرده‌ام

و مردانِ تنهایی را دیده‌ام با پیراهن‌های آستین بلندشان

خم‌شده از پنجره، در دودِ آبی پیپ‌هایشان؟

شاید می‌بایست چنگکی عظیم می‌بودم

خراشنده بر زمین دریای ِ خاموش

. . . . . .

!غروب و شب چه به ناز خوابیده‌اند

انگار، زیرِ نوازش انگشت‌های ظریف

خوابیده... خسته...یا شاید چشم‌ها را بسته

.به بازی خوابند بر کف اتاق، کنارِ تو و من

خیال می‌کنی که من بعد از صرفِ چای و کیک و بستنی

توانش را دارم لحظه را به لحظه‌ی بحرانش بکشانم؟

گرچه روزه‌دار بوده‌ام، زار زده‌ام و دعا کرده‌ام

گرچه دیده‌ام سرم را- کم‌ پشت - آورده‌اند بر سینی

اما پیامبر نیستم--- و مهم هم نیست؛

من لحظه‌ی دودشدنِ بزرگی‌ام را دیده‌ام

و پادویِ ابدی که کُتم را با پوزخند می‌آورد

سخن کوتاه، ترسیده بودم

نه، واقعا فکر می‌کنی ارزشش را داشت

که بعد از فنجان‌ها و بعد از چای و مزه‌ی مرباها

و میان بشقاب‌ها و در لا به لای حرف‌های پرتی که در باره‌ی

تو و من می‌زنند

ارزشش را داشت

که با تلخ‌خندی بر لب

گوی ِجهان را گوی ِکوچکی کنی

و بغلتانیش به سوی پرسشی عظیم

:و بگویی

" من العاذرم، از گور برخاسته‌ام و ٱمده‌ام با تو

سخن بگویم همه چیز را بگویم--

شاید وقتی کسی کنار زنی بالشی را مرتب کرد

.باید بگوید:" نه، چنین قصدی نداشتم

"نه، اصلا قصدی چنین نداشتم. 

واقعا ارزشش را داشت

ارزشش را داشت

بعد ازغروب‌ها، آستانه‌ی درها، خیابان‌های باران‌خورده

بعد از رمان‌ها، فنجان‌های چای

--دامن‌های غبار روبِ مجلس‌ها

این‌ها و خیلی چیزهای دیگر؟

!نمی‌توانم بگویم آن‌چه را که قصد گفتن‌اش را دارم

اما انگار فانوسِ خیال نقش عصب‌هایم را انداخت

:بر پرده

ارزشش را داشت

که کسی، بعد از مرتب‌کردن بالشی، شالی بر شانه‌ای

به سوی پنجره بچرخد

،و بگوید:"اصلاً این‌طوری نبود

"من چنین قصدی نداشتم، اصلاً 

. . . . . .

.نه، من شاهزاده هاملت نیستم، چنین بودنی در کار هم نبود

من سیاهی لشکرم، آماده در رکاب، یکی دو صحنه‌ی کوتاه

وقتی نمایش پیش نمی‌رود، وارد می‌شوم تا رایزن شاهزاده باشم

واسطه باشم، بی‌هیچ اراده‌ای، شاد، که محرم راز باشم

سیاَس و با احتیاط ، پُروسواس

سخن‌پرداز اما ابله

پُر از شکلک، گاهی دلقک

پیر می‌شوم... پیر می‌شوم

.می‌خواهم پایینِ شلوارم را تا بزنم

جرئت‌اش را دارم هلویی بخورم؟

طاسی‌ام را مثل دیگران بپوشانم؟

.می‌خواهم با شلوارِ سفید کتانی، تنها در ساحل قدم بزنم

شنیدم که دخترانِ دریا، برای هم آواز می‌خوانند

.گمان نمی‌کنم برای من دیگر آواز بخوانند

دیدم سوار بر موج‌ها رو به دریا می‌تازند

موی سفیدِ موج‌ها را به وقت برگشتن شانه می‌کردند

وقتی که آب‌های سیاه و سفید را باد می‌برد

بیتوته کردیم در تالارهای آب

در حلقه‌ی تاج‌های خزه‌یِ دختران دریا

سرخ و قهوه‌ای

تا صدای آدمی بیدارمان کند و غرق شویم

:با صدای شاعر بشنوید

 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

برگرفته از: کتاب« سرزمینِ ویران»، ترجمه‌ی محمود داوودی و خلیل پاک‌نیا

 

https://lyrik1.wordpress.com/…/%D8%AA%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3-%…/

https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_25117_3022.html

http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/226100

 

 

 

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When Light is put away-
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye-


A Moment - We uncertain step
For newness of the night-
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -


And so of larger - Darknesses-
Those Evenings of the Brain-
When not a Moon disclose a sign-
Or Star -come out- within-


The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead-
But as they learn to see-


Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight-
And Life steps almost straight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​A Poem By Emily Dickinson

(F428)

امیلی دیکنسون در طول مدت زندگی خود مخالف چاپ شدن اشعارش بود. اشعار او توسط خواهرش بعد از مرگ امیلی کشف و پس از آن توسط اعضای خانواده وی چاپ شدند

از خصوصیات اکثر شعرهای امیلی دیکنسون، طرز استفاده ی عجیب وی از خط فاصله هایی ست که مشخص نیستند هایفون، ان دش یا ام دش هستند .

 

 

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2116/when-should-i-use-an-em-dash-an-en-dash-and-a-hyphen

 

  بعد از خواندن این شعر، خوب است درباره این شاعر سرچ کنید و همچنین به این سوال فکر کنید که استفاده این شاعر از خط فاصله و نوشتن کلمات با حرف آغازین بزرگ  در جمله ، چه تاثیری در خوانش شعرهای امیلی دارد؟ 

جهت کسب اطلاعات بیشتر درباره امیلی و اشعارش همچنین می توانید به لینک زیر مراجعه کنید:

https://courses.edx.org/courses/HarvardX/AmPoX.4/1T2015/info

 

 

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