On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep: I see a Serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love; In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru; I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away. O what limb rending pains I feel. thy fire and my frost Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent; This is eternal death; and this the torment long foretold.
[In celebration of what would have been the eightieth birthday, July 31, of Milos Sovak, I’m posting the following translations which he and I coauthored in the last years of his life. By the time of his death in 2009, our friendship had lasted over thirty years and had given me the opportunity to work with him on a series of translations, the most important a book of selected poems from the great Czech modernist Vitezslav Nezval and scattered poems from the late Russian Romantic Mikhail Lermontov.
Hank Lazer’s shape-writing walks a very narrow bridge, which is — as the Hasidic mystic, Reb Nahman of Breslov teaches — the world itself, hung across a shattering vessel, swung in awesome cosmic doubt.
Poems and poetics