Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology by Paula Deitz Page B

rst,
    To drowsy sheep-bells tinkling in the night;
    Th
    e false dawn was aglow with kindly light
    In that still hour when lions slake their thirst.
    Th
    e whole world dreamed, from Ur to Jerimadeth;
    Stars studded the blue velvet of the air;
    Th
    e crescent moon hung low; Ruth said her prayer,
    Begging the heavens in her soft est breath—
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    Barely moving, with veiled, half-lidded eyes—
    To say what god, what summer harvester,
    Had come that night to make his peace with her,
    Leaving his golden scythe there in the skies.
    R. S. Gwynn, 2009
    V ic t or H ug o 85
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    Lecon te de Lisle (1818–94)
    Leilah Asleep
    No wing-stir, no murmur of springs: all sounds are stayed.
    Dust of the sun fl oats above the blossoming grass,
    and the bengalee wren, with furtive beak, taps the rich juice
    of mangoes in full bloom and ripe with golden blood.
    In the king’s orchard, where the mulberries blush red,
    beneath a sky that burns limpid and colorless,
    Leilah, all rosy in the heat and languorous,
    closes her deep-lashed eyes in the dark-branching shade.
    Her forehead, circleted in rubies, rests upon
    one lovely arm. Her naked foot, with amber tone,
    tints the pearled lattice of her slim babouche. Apart
    she sleeps; and smiles in dream upon her lover’s presence,
    like an empurpled fruit, perfumèd and intense,
    that makes the mouth’s deep thirst a freshness in the heart.
    Frederick Morgan, 1953
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    Ch a r les Baudel a ir e (1821–67)
    “Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville . . .”
    I remember it well enough, on the edge of town,
    Th
    at little house, and its quiet, and out in back
    Th
    e fertile goddesses, naked Venus and so on,
    Up to their plaster breasts in wild sumac;
    And the sun at evening, fl ooding the whole place,
    Ignited the window with bursting Catherine wheels,
    And seemed like a great eye in a prying face,
    Watching our mute, interminable meals
    And diff using its votive radiance on all shapes,
    On the frowsy tablecloth, the worsted drapes.
    Th
    e Swan
    I
    Andromache, I think of you. Th
    e little stream,
    A yellowing mirror that onetime beheld
    Th
    e huge solemnity of your widow’s grief,
    (Th
    is deceiving Simois that your tears have swelled)
    Suddenly fl ooded the memory’s dark soil
    As I was crossing the Place du Carrousel .
    Th
    e old Paris is gone (the face of a town
    Is more changeable than the heart of mortal man).
    I see what seem the ghosts of these royal barracks,
    Th
    e rough-hewn capitals, the columns waiting to crack,
    Weeds, and the big rocks greened with standing water,
    And at the window, Th
    eir Majesty’s bric-a-brac.
    One time a menagerie was on display there,
    And there I saw one morning at the hour
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    Of cold and clarity when Labor rises
    And brooms make little cyclones of soot in the air
    A swan that had escaped out of his cage,
    And there, web-footed on the dry sidewalk,
    Dragged his white plumes over the cobblestones,
    Lift ing his beak at the gutter as if to talk,
    And bathing his wings in the sift ing city dust,
    His heart full of some cool, remembered lake,
    Said, “Water, when will you rain? Where is your thunder?”
    I can see him now, straining his twitching neck
    Skyward again and again, like the man in Ovid,
    Toward an ironic heaven as blank as slate,
    And trapped in a ruinous myth, he lift s his head
    As if God were the object of his hate.
    II
    Paris changes, but nothing of my melancholy
    Gives way. Foundations, scaff oldings, tackle and blocks,
    And the old suburbs drift off into allegory,
    While my frailest memories take on the weight of