युवा कवि !

लिखो जैसा तुम चाहो 

जिस भी अंदाज़ में। 

पुल के नीचे बहुत सारा रक्त 

बह चुका है सिर्फ़ यह साबित करता हुआ 

कि एक ही रास्ता सही है। 

कविता में सब कुछ जायज़ है 

तुम्हें सिर्फ़ एक कोरे 

काग़ज़ को बेहतर बनाना है। 

 ~ निकानोर पार्रा {अनुवाद: मंगलेश डबराल}

"Estadio Chile", or "Somos Cinco Mil"

There are five thousand of us herein this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
in the cities and in the whole country?
Here alone
are ten thousand hands which plant seeds
and make the factories run.
How much humanity
exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain,
moral pressure, terror and insanity?
Six of us were lost
as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I could never have believed
a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror
one jumping into nothingness,
another beating his head against a wall,
but all with the fixed stare of death.
What horror the face of fascism creates!
They carry out their plans with knife-like precision.
Nothing matters to them.
To them, blood equals medals,
slaughter is an act of heroism.
Oh God, is this the world that you created,
for this your seven days of wonder and work?
Within these four walls only a number exists
which does not progress,
which slowly will wish more and more for death.
But suddenly my conscience awakes
and I see that this tide has no heartbeat,
only the pulse of machines
and the military showing their midwives' faces
full of sweetness.
Let Mexico, Cuba and the world
cry out against this atrocity!
We are ten thousand hands
which can produce nothing.
How many of us in the whole country?
The blood of our President, our compañero,
will strike with more strength than bombs and machine guns!
So will our fist strike again!

How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the momentÂ…

---Victor Jara

प्रश्नपत्र

अकवि क्या है:

वह, जो ताबूत और अस्थि-कलश की दलाली करता है?

एक जनरल, जो खुद के बारे में ही निश्चित नहीं है?

एक पादरी, जिसे किसी चीज पर आस्था नहीं है?

एक सैलानी, जिसके लिए हर चीज अजीब है; वृद्धावस्था और मृत्यु भी?

एक वक्ता, जिस पर आप विश्वास नहीं कर सकते?

खड़ी-चट्टान की कोर पर खड़ी एक नर्तकी ?

एक आत्ममुग्ध, जो हर किसी से प्यार करता है?

एक जोकर, जो गाल बजाता है

और बेवज़ह यूँ ही बुरा बनता है ?

एक कवि जो कुर्सी पर सोता है?

आधुनिक समय का एक कीमियागर?

एक आरामतलब क्रांतिकारी?

एक पेटी-बुर्जुआ?

एक जालसाज?

एक ईश्वर?

एक मासूम?

सैंटियागो, चिली का एक किसान?

सही उत्तर को रेखांकित करें.

अकविता क्या है:

चाय की प्याली में एक तूफ़ान?

चट्टान पर बर्फ का एक धब्बा?

मानव-मल से ऊपर तक भरा एक पतीला,

जैसा कि फादर साल्वेतियेरा मानता है?

एक आइना, जो झूठ नहीं बोलता?

लेखक-संगठन के अध्यक्ष के गाल पर पड़ा एक तमाचा?

(ईश्वर उनके आत्मा की रक्षा करे!)

युवा कवियों को एक चेतावनी?

जेट-चालित एक ताबूत?

एक ताबूत, जो वायुमंडलीय दायरे से बाहर परिक्रमा करता है?

एक ताबूत, जो कि केरोसिन से चलता है?

एक शवदाह-गृह, जहाँ कोई शव नहीं है?

सही उत्तर के सामने X चिन्हित करें.

---निकानोर पार्रा (उदय शंकर द्वारा अनुदित)

You start dying slowly

You start dying slowly
if you do not travel,
if you do not read,
If you do not listen to the sounds of life,
If you do not appreciate yourself.

You start dying slowly
When you kill your self-esteem;
When you do not let others help you.
You start dying slowly
If you become a slave of your habits,
Walking everyday on the same paths…
If you do not change your routine,
If you do not wear different colours
Or you do not speak to those you don’t know.

You start dying slowly
If you avoid to feel passion
And their turbulent emotions;
Those which make your eyes glisten
And your heart beat fast.

You start dying slowly
If you do not change your life when you are not satisfied with your job, or with your love,
If you do not risk what is safe for the uncertain,
If you do not go after a dream,
If you do not allow yourself,
At least once in your lifetime,
To run away from sensible advice…

~ Pablo Neruda

Lord’s Prayer

Our Father which art in heaven
Full of all manner of problems
With a wrinkled brow
(As if you were a common everyday man)
Think no more of us.
We understand that you suffer
Because you can’t put everything in order.
We know the Demon will not leave you alone
Tearing down everything you build.
He laughs at you
But we weep with you:
Don’t pay any attention to his devilish laughter.
Our Father who art where thou art
Surrounded by unfaithful Angels
Sincerely don’t suffer any more for us
You must take into account
That the gods are not infallible
And that we have come to forgive everything.

--- Nicanor Parra [translated from the Spanish by Miller Williams]

Die Slowly

He who becomes the slave of habit,
who follows the same routes every day,
who never changes pace,
who does not risk and change the color of his clothes,
who does not speak and does not experience,
dies slowly.

He or she who shuns passion,
who prefers black on white,
dotting ones i's rather than a bundle of emotions, the kind that make your eyes glimmer,
that turn a yawn into a smile,
that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings,
dies slowly.

He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy,
who is unhappy at work,
who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,
to thus follow a dream,
those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives,
die slowly.

He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.

He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,
who does not allow himself to be helped,
who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops,
dies slowly.

He or she who abandons a project before starting it, who fails to ask questions on subjects he doesn't know, he or she who doesn't reply when they are asked something they do know,
dies slowly.
Let's try and avoid death in small doses,
reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.
Only a burning patience will lead
to the attainment of a splendid happiness.

---Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

---Pablo Neruda

Curse

Furrowed motherland,
I swear that in your ashes
you will be born like a flower of eternal water

I swear that from your mouth of thirst
will come to the air the petals of bread,
the spilt inaugurated flower.

Cursed, cursed, cursed be those
who with an ax and serpent came to your earthly arena,
cursed those who waited for this day to open the door of the dwelling
to the moor and the bandit:
What have you achieved?

Bring,
bring the lamp,
see the soaked earth,
see the blackened little bone eaten by the flames,
the garment of murdered Spain.

--- Pablo Neruda from Spain In Our Hearts (1973) translated by Donald D. Walsh

Su Nombre es Hoy (His Name is Today)

We are guilty of many errors and many faults,
but our worst crime is abandoning the children,
neglecting the fountain of life.

Many of the things we need can wait.
The child cannot.
Right now is the time his bones are being formed,
his blood is being made,
and his senses are being developed.

To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’
his name is today.

---Gabriela Mistral

La Standard Oil Co

When the drill bored down toward the stony fissures
and plunged its implacable intestine
into the subterranean estates,
and dead years, eyes of the ages,
imprisoned plants’ roots
and scaly systems
became strata of water,
fire shot up through the tubes
transformed into cold liquid,
in the customs house of the heights,
issuing from its world of sinister depth,
it encountered a pale engineer
and a title deed.

However entangled the petroleum’s arteries may be,
however the layers may change their silent site
and move their sovereignty amid the earth’s bowels,
when the fountain gushes its paraffin foliage,
Standard Oil arrived beforehand
with its checks and it guns,
with its governments and its prisoners.

Their obese emperors from New York
are suave smiling assassins
who buy silk, nylon, cigars
petty tyrants and dictators.

They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils,
distant regions where the poor hoard their corn
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
the Paraguayan fights its war,
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun.

A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum,
a million-acre mortgage,
a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,
a new prison camp for subversives,
in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots
beneath a petroliferous moon,
a subtle change of ministers
in the capital, a whisper
like an oil tide,
and zap, you’ll see
how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,
above the seas, in your home,
illuminating their dominions.

--- by Pablo Neruda, Canto General, 1940 and Translated by Jack Schmitt

Young Poets

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

-- Nicanor Parra

(trans. by Miller Williams)

Can you imprison poetry?

‘While briefly chilled, I want to tell
without vengeance and what’s more with joy
how from my bed in Buenos Aires
the police took me to prison.
It was late, we had just arrived from Chile,
and without saying anything to us
they plundered my friend’s papers,
they offended the house in which I slept,
My wife vented her disdain
but there were orders to be executed
and in a moving car we roved about
the tyrannous black night.
They it was not Peron, it was another,
a new tyrant for Argentina
and by his orders doors opened,
bolt after bolt was unlocked
in order to swallow me, the patios passed,
forty bars and the infirmary,
but still they took me up into a cell,
the most impenetrable and hidden:
only there did they feel protected
from the exhalations of my poetry.’

--- Pablo Neruda

Epilogue

We all live in darkness, kept apart from each other
by walls easily crossed but full of fake doors;
money drawn for light spending on friends or love
......our arguments
about the inexhaustible don't even graze it
just when it's time to start talking again, and take
a different road to get to the same place.

We have to get used to knowing how
to live from day to day, each one on his own,
as in the best of all possible worlds.
Our dreams prove it: we're cut off.

We can feel for each other,
and that's more than enough: that's all, and it's hard
to bring our stories closer together
trimming off from the excess we are,
yo get our minds off the impossible and on the things
.......we have in common,
and not to insist, not to insist too much:
to be a good storyteller who plays his role
between clown and preacher.

- by Enrique Lihn

from The Dark Room and Other Poems; New Directions Books, 1963