44
PARTISAN REVIEW
Yeats said, "Only that which is weak will win," or something like that.
Meaning, basically, that a rhythm will change the world. This next poem is
written in that faith, although it looks back to events which should have ren–
dered such a faith ridiculous.
It
is called "1945" and was written in 1985.
-You! the last Polish poet!-drunk, he embraced me,
My friend from the Avante-Garde, in a long military coat,
Who had lived through the war in Russia and , there, understood.
He could not have learned those things from Apollinaire,
Or Cubist manifestos, or the festivals of Paris streets.
The best cure for illusions is hunger, patience, and obedience.
In their fine capitals they still liked to talk
Yet the twentieth century went on. It was not they
Who would decide what words were going to mean. [. ..
J
A friend of mine once asked Robert Lowell, "What do you think of
Heaney's poems?" I had just translated a Middle Irish story in prose and
verse called "Buile Suibhne: The Madness of Sweeney," about an early
medieval king who is cursed by a saint and turned into a creature who lives
on the mountains, in the woods. Until Beckett arrives in Irish literature,
he, Sweeney, is the most resourceful complainer. And whinges constantly
about having to live in these denuded conditions. He praises the trees a lot,
and so on. Anyway, Lowell answered my friend: "Ah, lots of trees." Well,
Czeslaw too has lots of forests and rivers and so, to throw a kind of branchy
net between Ireland and Lithuania, I will say this translation of one of the
pieces of "Buile Suibne," where Sweeney praises the trees and vegetation
of the countryside. He praises it in a very traditional way, so the translation
is an almost nursery rhyme verse. "Mad Sweeney's Praise of the Trees."
The bushy leafy oak tree
is highest in the wood,
the forking shoots of hazel
hide sweet hazel-nuts.
The alder is my darling,
all thornless in the gap,
some milk of human kindness
coursing in its sap.
