Never
I do not know now, nor shall I ever know
if there were some small hand measuring the hours
in a paralyzed time. A half an hour to never.
And upon opening my eyes, lost in the realms
between being and sleep, just a voice
saying “I have added time to your clock,
Madame – alas, life has a price,
and a certain capacity the space that hosts us.”
So, I shall never know which moment
erased fire, water, earth, air. *
A half an hour to nowhere, and I feel like a tenant
of a small dwelling that does not belong to me
but I go on, inch by inch, recognizing…
Body of my body, that attracts me sweetly.
* Fire, water, earth, air (l. 10) are the four primordial elements of the world, first proposed by Empedokles of Arkagas (Sicily) in his verse thesis on nature in approximately B.C. 450, which, correlated to sensory perceptions, types of personality (or “humours”), and astrological signs, remained influential amongst European intellectuals and artists beyond the mediaeval period.
Mai
Ara ja no ho sabré, no sabré mai
si hi havia cap busca marcant hores
en el temps aturat. Dos quarts de mai.
I en obrir els ulls, perduda en uns afores
entre l’ésser i el son, sols una veu
dient “he donat hora al seu rellotge,
senyora, ai!, que la vida té un preu,
i una cabuda l’espai que ens allotja”.
Així, ja no sabré mai quin instant
va esborrar el foc, l’aigua, la terra, l’aire.
Dos quarts d’enlloc, i sentir-me estadant
d’un habitacle que no em pertany gaire
però vaig, pam a pam, reconeixent...
Cos del meu cos, que m’atreu dolçament.
Demon
Who is this who opens so many archives
in a chamber of dimmed
light, while asking “What do you say
about such and such an entry so tired of life?”
And he continues turning the pages in which are written
the sighs of all time, the calligraphy
of a hand unknown to my senses…
How is it that he returns me home at daybreak,
flying over strata and folds,
epochs, eras, millennia, unlimited
moments, but without permanence;
forcing me to land suddenly?
Uncertain return to a temporal place
where he abandons me…. And so, who is this?
Dèmon
¿Qui és aquest que m’obre tants arxius
en una cambra d’una esmorteïda
claror, mentre em pregunta “Què me’n dius
d’un tal registre fatigat de vida"?
I va girant-me fulls en què hi ha inscrits
tots els sospirs del temps, cal·ligrafia
d’un traç incomprensible als meus sentits...
¿Com és que em torna a casa a trenc de dia,
sobrevolant estrats i plegaments,
èpoques, eres, mil·lennis, moments
il·limitats, però sense durada;
i fent-me prendre terra de sobtada?
Incert retorn al temporal indret
on m’abandona... I doncs, ¿qui és aquest?
Nigredo *
Stone beneath stones slumbering,
desires that in the grey of foundations
are not yet desire…Antecedents
of construction not yet sensed.
A pause along the road of becoming
-- in the purest sense, perhaps a
midday and wooded wound (summer
savory embalming the sleep of winds,
the napping of wilderness and grotto…)
And in the mind’s path, a seed
nourished from among others to transform
from patient caterpillar to one taking flight…
Who would speak of a journey without pain,
oh stone that feels pain in the grey stillness?
* The title Nigredo (or blackness) conveys at least two meanings. On the one hand, it means decomposition or putrefaction in alchemy as the first step towards the so-called “philosopher’s stone” first mentioned by the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis in southern Egypt in approximately 300 A.D., this legendary substance being capable of transforming common metals into precious ones such as silver and gold. Less materially, it was the first step towards attaining the so-called “elixir of life” resulting in a state of perfection or immortality. On the other hand, according to the psycho-alchemical hypothesis associated with Carl Jung in his 1944 volume Psycholgie und Alchemie, nigredo is linked to the deep despair of the developing individual on first confronting psychic conflict, metaphorically termed the “dark night of the soul”—poetically captured in part by the Spanish Carmelite friar John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) in En una noche oscura (circa 1578/1579).
Nigredo
Pedra sota les pedres adormida,
desigs que en la grisor dels fonaments
no sou desig encara... Antecedents
d’una construcció no pressentida.
Repòs en el camí dels moviments
-en el dels sentits purs, potser ferida
migdial i boscana (sajolida
d’estiu, embalsamant el son dels vents,
el sestejar de l’erm i de la balma...).
I en la sendera de la ment, llavor
nodrida entre llavors per transformar-se
d’eruga pacient a l’envolar-se...
¿qui diria d’un vol sense dolor,
pedra que sents dolor en la grisa calma?
Opposites
for Miquel Desclot, upon his translations of Petrarch *
Among birds there might be one
who, like the doctor
removing uncertainty for the patient
to make the illness more bearable, would explain to you why
the summer chilled your heart, the winter
made your blood red hot, the nights last all day…
Perhaps he would also tell you who collected
the dew at dawn that now waits in a
sealed container…
Birds, do you know?
When you are quiet during a solar eclipse
it seems that you have gone away never to return;
and that the sweetest and most chilling verse of
centuries need never wake us again:
“If not Love, then what…?”
* Miquel Desclot (né Miquel Creus i Muñoz in Barcelona 1952), to whom this poem is dedicated, switched, after seventeen years of academia, to writing full-time. Willing to engage both adult and child audiences, he sees the poet as a “word sculptor who works in fields that are not strictly rational” (cited in https://www.escriptors.cat/autors/desclotm/ ). His award-winning Catalan translations cover not only twentieth-century writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Roald Dahl, but also Dante Aligheri, William Blake, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and, of course, Francesco Petrarca (including, in 2016, the latter’s seminal collection of 366 love poems completed about 1368, Il Canzoniere).
Opòsit
A Miquel Desclot, pel seu Petrarca
Entre els ocells potser un ocell hi hauria
que, com el diagnòstic al malalt
llevant-li la incertesa li fa el mal
més sofridor, per què -t'explicaria-
l'estiu et glaçà el cor, l'hivern la sang
t'arroentà, les nits duren de dia...
Potser, també et diria qui collia
a punta d'alba el rou que ara en estanc
recipient estotja…
Ocells sabeu?
quan en l'eclipsi de Sol tots calleu
sembla que us absenteu per no tornar;
que ja no ens hagi de despertar més
el vers més dolç i més pervers de fa
centúries: "Si no Amor, què és...?"
Twelfth Sonnet
How cruel to awaken, how cruel to be born,
the beginning is as cruel as the end… Look
how the recently born, helpless, turns into
the old man. One takes the light; the other
leaves it. The two are, following the same
law of transformation,
on a journey that leads
to the uncertain. Between sighs, he who
arrives barely understands, and gasping, he who must leave, forgets.
So, one would say, in every moment there are
two ages always crossing each other
giving the present a balanced chiaroscuro, *
a dance step
that includes the past and the future.
[Kristine Doll’s translation of this last sonnet in Hores, reprinted with permission, first appeared in the “Twelve Catalan Poets” section of The Loch Raven Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2017, at: https://thelochravenreview.net/loch-raven-review-volume-13-no-1-2017/ .]
* Chiaroscuro (l. 12) is Italian for “light-dark” and is typically recruited into discussions of oil painting techniques especially where three-dimensional effects are gained by contrasts between light and dark, most popularly being associated with figurative works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and Rembrandt van Rijn.
Sonet dotzè
Cruel és despertar, cruel és néixer,
el començ és cruel com la fi... Mira
si no el nounat que, desvalgut, retira
a l'ancià. L'un pren la llum; la deixa
l'altre. Tots dos estan, per la mateixa
llei del mudar,
en un revolt que gira
cap a l'incert. Entre sanglots respira
el qui arribant tot just n'aprèn, i bleixa
qui n'ha de desaprendre per marxar.
Així, diria, en cada instant hi ha
dues edats que sempre entrecreuant-se
li donen un present de clarobscur
equilibrat, un moviment de dansa
que enclou el seu passat i el seu futur.
Teresa d’Arenys, the pen name of Maria Teresa Bertran Rossell, was born in the small coastal fishing village of Arenys de Mar in 1952, about forty kilometres north-east of Barcelona, to a highly literate, multi-lingual family. A precocious writer and constantly anthologized since the late ‘seventies, she has authored several books of poetry, including, for example: Onada [Wave] (1980) and Murmuris [Murmurs] (1986). Upon resuming her studies in language owing to her perception of expressive shortcomings and her nurturing friendship with the prolific poet and translator of her generation Miquel Desclot in the early ‘nineties, other works followed, such as Hores [Hours] (2007), Versos de vi novell [Verses of New Wine] (2009) with illustrations by Enric Maass, her late husband, and the retrospective collection Obra poètica: 1973-2015 [Poetic Works: 1973-2015] (2017). During that period, her translations include Dos Rèquiems [Two Requiems] by R. M. Rilke in El Marges, No. 59, 1997 and Tuareg: Cants d’amor i de guerra de l’Ahaggar [Songs of Love and War of the Ahaggar Massif] (1999)—Tuareg being the Berbers (or Imazighen) of Saharan southern Algeria, an awareness of whom she continues to publicise—as well as the novel El quadern d’Agnès Solà [The Notebook of Agnès Solà] (2000) and the memoir Epístola a un amic mort [Letter to a Dead Friend] (2013). For further details, see http://www.escriptors.cat/autors/bertrant/ .
Note
All poems selected are from Teresa d’Arenys’ sonnet collection Hores (2007), and translated here with permission by the widely published North American translator and poet Kristine Doll.