en la jaula del tiempo
la dormida mira sus ojos solos
el viento le trae
la tenue respuesta de las hojas.
Alejandra Pizarnik
(Árbol de Diana)
in the cage of time
the sleeper looks into her lonely eyes
wind bringing to her
the faint response of shaking leaves.
from The Tree of Diana
tr. Zachary Jean Chartkoff
the sleeper looks into her lonely eyes
wind bringing to her
the faint response of shaking leaves.
from The Tree of Diana
tr. Zachary Jean Chartkoff
oh..
ReplyDeleteyou ARE much more attractive
than i thought..
what happened?? :-p
i like it!!
i hate to question this, especially as my spanish isn't very good, but is that translation correct? i would have thought it should read more along these (somewhat breezy) lines:
ReplyDeletein the cage of time
sleep gazes into her lonely eyes
the breeze bearing her
the leaves’ feeble reply
(lovely portrait by the way)
Neither past, nor future, eternal presents, let me linger until I can no more - but no, let me see and hear time as it moves through the night into the day, open up, open up the cage and let fly eyes to see, as your light travels faster than my sound, wishpering through the leaves you meet in the morning, at the tree which stands to the right of your door, telling how __________ you are.
ReplyDelete"And did you exchange
ReplyDeleteA walk on part in a war
For a lead role in a cage..."
Not to mention the beautiful piece by Bruce Cockburn titled "Pacing the Cage" ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h_VKaoITio&feature=related
A couple of cage related thoughts...
what do we have here?
ReplyDeletewho " " " "
the cage, the tree, or the leaves?
...shaking leaves... is so much more subtle, than say, rattling the bars. Nice. -Jayne
ReplyDeleteI saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her 'Sibyl, what do you want?' that one replied 'I want to die'.
ReplyDeletePetronius
and the way those eyes look back ... the sheer ambiguity of that half-look above the glasses.
ReplyDeletefascinating portrait - one feels drawn in as a spectator and yet one becomes very shy too, because of that kindly-ironic, softly-sad and very, very searching gaze
beautiful you...
ReplyDeletewhenever i think of this life as life without death, it seems to me a terrible prospect, and the cage of time seems as much a blessing as anything else.
Ce Portrait très ouvert j'aime bien ce noir et blanc douce lumière sur les verres de lunette.
ReplyDeleteAllan
J'aime beaucoup ce sourire qui se dessine sur les lèvres et ce regard intense, comme le café "noir" !... Superbe photographie ! J'adore ce piqué de photo avec ce grain qui apporte un superbe relief à la photo...! Comment fais-tu Roxana ?...
ReplyDeleteBises Roxana...
De la solitude
ReplyDeleteJe me joue du vent
Ma cage isolée
Je m'amuse de toi
Le regard au loin
L'avenir c'est toi
L'avenir est loi
Just discovered your blog.
ReplyDeleteyour work is really interesting!
thank you Peter!
ReplyDeletei see you think you recognized me despite my ever-changing face, thanks to the never-changing shape of my glasses? :-)
one thing i am not sure about, though: "you are much more attractive than i thought" - is this a compliment or an insult? :-P
Michael, why would you "hate to question" the translation? one of my greatest pleasures in life is pondering translations, i know, that says a lot about me, doesn't it? :-)
ReplyDeletei like your translation better, it's true, the last two lines are much simpler and somehow render the original feeling much better, the "shaking" leaves was just an invention of the translator. but no, it is not "the sleep" ("sleep gazes into his eyes" is a line you could have written, perhaps, or so it seems to me) - "la dormida" means "the sleeping one" but it is a feminine form, so "sleeper" cannot express the same thing in English, once again i have to ponder the gain and loss which inevitably occur when translating from one language which has gender-related thought patterns into one which is gender-neutral (are you reading this, swiss? :-)
i read this line as an expression of the same theme which is one of Alejandra's major obsessions, the alienation of self, she wrote in her last letter before committing suicide: "i am entirely a different one/another one"...
robert,
ReplyDelete"let me see and hear time as it moves through the night into the day, open up, open up the cage" - this is so beautiful, just allow me to contemplate it, silently and gratefully.
thank you.
Owen, a very melancholical piece for a melancholical mood... a very good match, indeed, thank you!
ReplyDeletemr, i like to have your photo.. which is more than beautiful..
ReplyDeleteyour eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, hair.. oh my god..
I really like to have it for posting on my blog. I am seeking your permission now.
i know you don't post this comment. :-)
anon, the cage, the tree, or the leaves, the turtle or the fox? again so confused? or do you mean to express a highly poetical truth, that you see all that in her eyes? :-P
ReplyDeletethank you, dear Jayne, yes, who can resist the shaking of leaves?
ReplyDeleteProspero, dear one, this time it's very difficult for me to answer you. the quote you chose, the truth, the way it resonates in me - what could i possibly say, what her eyes haven't already told?
ReplyDelete"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?"
shyness, kindness, irony, softness, sadness, inquisitiveness - dear ffflaneur, i wonder whether there is still something there your gaze has missed, but i would be very surprised if there were :-)
ReplyDeletei think you read into this image much more than it managed to express (but i had wished it did) - and for that i am truly grateful.
thank you for your empathy...
Manuela, you are blessed to be able to see beauty even in the cage of time... i have just read something terribly interesting:
ReplyDelete"It is striking that chimpanzees start to fail the test [recognizing themselves in the mirror, as only human beings are able to] once they reach 30 years old despite having some 10 or 15 years left to live.
The reason is that self-awareness comes at a cost.
Consciousness allows the brain to take part in mental time travel.
You can think of yourself in the past and even project yourself into the future.
And that is why Gallup believes that in later life chimpanzees prefer to lose their ability to conceive of themselves.
"The price you pay for being aware of your own existence is having to confront the inevitability of your own individual demise.
"Death awareness is the price we pay for self awareness."
(http://pensum.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/the-cost-of-i/)
Allan, merci beaucoup pour la sensibilite extraordinaire que tu montres toujours par rapport a mes images... (et non seulement!)
ReplyDeleteJeff, mon cher Jeff, alors tu aimes ce regard... comment est-ce que tu as dis, "intense comme le cafe noir"? :-) cela m'a fait sourire, je n'y avais jamais pense. surtout cette comparaison, comme moi je ne bois pas du cafe... j'aurais cherche des comparaisons du cote du the :-)
ReplyDeleteet oui, tu as bien raison, c'est beau de pouvoir dire et sentir comme ca, non?
Le regard au loin
L'avenir c'est toi
L'avenir est loi
ce sont les paroles d'une chanson, je l'imagine maintenant, et si cette chanson n'existe pas, il faudrait l'inventer, n'est-ce pas? tu peux chanter? :-)
Peter, i just posted it :-P
ReplyDeleteand now what will you do, go and hide somewhere until i forget it? or try to make up for that by finding the perfect "Snow"-quote to go with it? (Pamuk's Snow, i mean, of course). see, i am even suggesting ways for you to redeem yourself :-)
oh.. where is snow!!
ReplyDeleteactually I need avalanche
to cover myself
and to whitening my soul!!
it's too early in season.. alas..
roxana.. you won, congra!
anyway it's ok to post it as a perfect facial prototype of female human from enthropological perspective.., right? :-p
Elisabelle, thank you for visiting and for your kind words...
ReplyDeleteAhh so we have the 'real' you at last, beautiful picture.
ReplyDeleteah, the "real" me, that is a difficult one, especially when it comes to my photographs :-)
ReplyDeletethank you, dear Sorlil.
at last a language I can understand so I won't have to act like the village idiot.
ReplyDeletethere is much irony in that look. I likes.
and no, I'm not here becuse you beckoned. I generally appear to fair maidens when 'sleep looks into their lonely eyes'... (infact, pertitenly enough, 'la dormida also means 'the dreamer' as well as 'the sleeper')..
:-)
ReplyDeleteso you also see the irony (more "self-irony" than plain irony, in many cases) - and i who thought i had hidden that so carefully :-)
i am still laughing about that "generally" - how can Zuma be so sure this happens to fair maiden caught in the cage of time as well? couldn't this be precisely the exception which makes that "general" fallible? :-)
and that is very interesting about "la dormida", how come you know that, do you speak Spanish?
hmmm... okay then, how about this?:
ReplyDeletein the cage of time
the dreamer plunges into her lonely eyes
the breeze bearing her
the leaves’ feeble reply
Michael, we will never get tired of translation qualms, will we :-) and if i count James and Swiss as well, we make quite a bunch of translation fans (freaks?).
ReplyDeletei love this one, except "plunges" - it's very clear in Spanish, "look", i feel that "plunge" is too much compared to the simple "mirar".
and indeed, i have no idea why he chose "shaking leaves"! i should go and ask him on his site, perhaps i will do just that.
thank you for this enriching dialogue :-)
i am sure he added the "shaking" in order to give a sense of tenuousness without actually using "tenuous" what i don't understand is why he chose "shaking" over "trembling" which would make more sense to me in that case.
ReplyDeleteas for "plunge" it was an attempt to give a sense of looking deeply into the dark wells of the eyes. in an attempt to convey what is written in the original i don't think one can be very literal in this case. though it is important to think of this stanza in the context of the entire poem . not that reading it helped me in the least, as i still find that an odd line. however my interpretation is that "la dormida" is looking into the eyes of her double (or vice versa) perhaps in a mirror, but that too is just a guess.
Michael, i agree with your interpretation, keeping in mind that this sleeping double might also be the unborn/unutterable/painfully-trying-to-become poem.
ReplyDeleteagain, i thank you... as you might have noticed, i have an "Alejandra"-tag which means that i intend to post regularly from her, i am looking forward to other challenging translation-related discussions :-)
esti tu aici?
ReplyDeleteda.
ReplyDeletece frumoasa esti.
ReplyDelete:). nu te mai vad pe blogul meu. te-au pierdut pozele mele?
:-)
ReplyDeleteba nu, sunt acolo. cum as putea sa nu vin sa vad imaginile tale?