Album
Tin Văn
thân chúc độc giả một mùa Giáng Sinh
vui tươi và một Năm Mới hạnh phúc
Joyeux Noel 2017
Earthly Light
Bình an dưới thế: Ánh Sáng Trần Gian
-Homage to the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painters
Vinh danh những họa sĩ Hà Lan thế kỷ 17
1
I thought of northern skies flooded
with blue and gray, of monochromatic clouds
and rain-soaked wind blowing across the plains.
I thought of a cold day in March flattened
like unbleached canvas and steeped
in vertiginous greens, of industrious
local gods who furnished the low provinces
with rivers and lakes, waterlogged forests
and icy streams racing toward the ocean.
Or maybe there is only one God who supplies
the world with shorelines and sand dunes,
sunstruck mornings and thunderous nights,
maybe there is one God who keeps dividing
the world into water and land. I wonder
if the Dutch artists who could liquefy
sunlight and crystallize air worshipped Him
when they painted the large, whitewashed
interiors of churches; I wonder
if they were stealing supernatural light
or giving back to Him an earthly one
when they purified the sunshine skimming
grasslands and illuminating rooftops, burnishing
windows and mirrors, falling across floors.
If painting is to be a form of prayer
(prayer which Weil called "unmixed attention"
and George Herbert "something understood,"
one form among a myriad of forms),
then the Dutch artists prayed obliquely
by turning away from the other world
and detailing the plenitude of this-
the aurora seeping in from the sea
each day, the light dispersed equally
(was this the first time in history?)
on stout-hearted peasants and wealthy
burghers in irreproachable frock coats,
on civic guards and lacemakers, regents
and regentin, blacksmiths, cobblers ...
Such a well-lighted lucky moment-
as if God had cracked the wooden shutters
[suite]
Edward Hirsch:
The living Fire
Sit Tight
________________________________________
When the old clock
That woke the dead
With its loud tick fell silent,
Eternity moved in.
A mirror looked toward the door
With eyes of a dog
Who wanted to be taken
Out for a walk.
—Charles Simic
Charles Simic, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, is the author most
recently of The Lunatic (poetry) and The Life of Images (prose).
Ngồi Im
Khi cái đồng hồ cũ
Đánh thức người chết
Với tiếng tích tắc to tổ bố
Câm,
Vĩnh kửu bò vô
Cái gương bèn ngó về cái cửa
Với cặp mắt của Gấu Chó
Thằng khốn thèm ra bên ngoài
Cái gì gì, "lang thang luân hồi".
Chuyến chót!
Dec 20 at 11:58 AM
Chúc anh Trụ một mùa lễ thánh an bình, hạnh
phúc; một năm mới vui khỏe, tâm và thân thanh thản,
để đọc và viết .
Đọc, vẫn ngẩng đầu . Viết, vẫn THNM như thường lệ .
http://www.art2all.net/tho/tho_nqt/doclagi.html
K
Nếu anh Trụ thắc mắc không biết K lôi ở đâu ra bài
Đọc Là gì ?, thì nó nằm ở hai cái hình
kèm theo đây nì . Chép lại như một món
quà GS nhỏ . Đã có nhiều lần đọc, rồi ngẩng đầu, rán
hiểu xem mình đọc gì, có đúng như mình
nghĩ không, hay là ý của họ khác . Không
những vậy, lại còn lục tung internet, chỉ để dịch một câu,
một chữ, nữa đó .
Tính hỏi rồi. Tks
Chúc K mọi điều an lành cùng mùa mới, GS,
và năm mới.
Lời chúc của K tuyệt quá.
NQT
Đặng Lệ Khánh
CÂY GIÁNG SINH VÀ MỘT ĐÁM CƯỚI
...
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Thơ
Mỗi Ngày
Simone Weil:
The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)
A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.
She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposition:
The irreducible slavery of workers. "To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work."
She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,
In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples
Ten hours per day. She doesn't eat.
She doesn't sleep. She almost doesn't think
Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now
That the furnace has labelled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave's.
Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled
Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbins from the flames.
Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and afflicted
Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.
Proposition: "Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.
Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed."
We have to wake in order to work to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submit
To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabit the repetitions,
To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.
She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to eat ...
Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens.
Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.
Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.
Edward Hirsch:
The Living Fire