WWI CENTENARY

Re: Sarajevo. Archduke Franz là thừa kế của vương quyền đế quốc Áo- Hung. Cặp vợ chồng viếng thăm Sarajevo, ngày 28 Tháng Sáu, 1914, chừng 1 giờ sau, thì cả hai bị thằng bé sinh viên Princip làm thịt

Note: Đây là đề tài lèm bèm [debate] của tờ nhựt báo Globe and Mail, Toronto, số cuối tuần, Sat, June, 2014.

Nó làm Gấu nhớ đến cái chết dởm của mấy tên tù VC, ở trại tù Phú Lợi, mở ra cuộc chiến Mít lần thứ nhì, làm chết trên 3 triệu Mít, và làm tiêu luôn nước Mít.
Tuy nhiên, nó còn làm Gấu nhớ đến bài thơ thần sầu của Auden, được nhà thơ Mẽo Robert Hass vinh danh sau đây:

Bài thơ chấm dứt một ngàn năm [nô lệ thằng Tầu].
Chính là vì, phải tìm đủ cách ăn cướp Đàng Trong, mà lũ Bắc Kít đã rước họa Tầu Phù vô “Đàng Ngoài “ Chúng quên nỗi nhục nô lệ thằng Tầu 1 ngàn năm.
Bi giờ nghe tụi chúng chống Tẫu, lèm bèm về “thoát Trung”, Gấu thấy tởm, cực tởm!

Tuy nhiên bài thơ thần sầu này chẳng mắc mớ gì tới ba cái chuyện nhơ bửn đó.

Nó làm GCC nhớ đến ông nhà thơ, qua những câu, thí dụ như:

A few thousand will think of this day
Một vài ngàn năm sau sẽ nghĩ đến ngày này

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry
Ái Nhĩ Lan khùng dùng dao đẩy ông vô thơ
[Việt Nam đói nghèo quên ca dao]

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives.
Thơ làm chẳng cái gì xẩy ra: nó sống sót…

DECEMBER 27 [1998]

A Poem for the End of a Thousand Years:

W.H. Auden

We are about to enter the last year of the century and-I was going to write-of a millennium, but who, in fact, has any sense of the year 999, or for that matter 1132 or 1412? This last century has been more than enough for us to try to take in. So I found myself thinking about an appropriate valediction to this last extraordinarily violent hundred years. Sixty years ago this January, on the eve of the Second World War, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats died. A younger English poet, W H. Auden, wrote an elegy for him. It's become a very famous poem. A winter like this one. The tenth year of an economic depression. Hitler's military, having annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, is drawing up plans for the conquest of Europe. And an Irish poet dies:

In Memory of W B. Yeats

(d. Jan 1939)

I.

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forest,
The peasant river was un-tempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumors;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the
Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly
accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II.

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself.  Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley or its making where executives
Would never to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy briefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III.

Earth, receive an honored guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your un-constraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human un-success
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

The Bourse is the name of the French stock exchange

Happy New Year

Robert Hass: Now & Then