As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor,
Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become,
so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
BY C. P. CAVAFY TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148576/on-marriage-5b...
[1] https://poets.org/poem/force-through-green-fuse-drives-flowe...
[2] https://allpoetry.com/mad-girl's-love-song
[3] https://allpoetry.com/may-my-heart-always-be-open-to-little
Many either love it or are dismissive of it, but I consider it a form of poetry on its own. e.g. Barks replaces Rumi's lust for God with lust for a lover. As a redditor put it, "he just makes stuff up." Barks is a brilliant poet though, and I feel he enhances Rumi in his own way.
Many accurate translations have difficulty carrying the poetic parts. But my favourite is Jonathan Star's interpretation.
On occasion in the morning light, when I am still in bed,
a joy seizes my soul, bestows abilities I wish I always had.
So splendid and resplendent is this delight
that brings about a totalizing transformation!
My heart turns clear and innocent;
my mind focuses to a point;
even my hand’s writing improves.
The earth opens itself to confess in a whisper
its place for me.
Worries flee, problems dissolve,
and those that do not
still seem soluble easily, with little effort.
I drink tea with golden honey, read,
dance and laugh and sing inwardly.
I might run the faucet to warm to shower,
and send messages of delight to whatever god
stayed my self-negating hand the night before.
I step off the tile onto the white bath, and
the story goes as it goes as it goes.
The water envelops me. The morning slows.
A shadowed normalcy returns to spirit.
i exit the shower, dripping, heavy headed,
dullest eyes a blur, soporific mind.
It is only still mid-morning as I
dry myself quarter hearted,
slumped and sinking,
to drag these pale bones
through chills,
to my sheetless bed
to sleep.
and when I awaken
in the afternoon
it is dark
again
with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...
The University of Virginia has a webpage with some of the best english translations, even better then most published books.
Ballad Of The Army Carts
Wagons rattling and banging, horses neighing and snorting, conscripts marching, each with bow and arrows at his hip, fathers and mothers, wives and children, running to see them off-- so much dust kicked up you can't see Xian-yang Bridge! And the families pulling at their clothes, stamping feet in anger, blocking the way and weeping-- ah, the sound of their wailing rises straight up to assault heaven. And a passerby asks, "What's going on?" The soldier says simply, "This happens all the time. From age fifteen some are sent to guard the north, and even at forty some work the army farms in the west. When they leave home, the village headman has to wrap their turbans for them; when they come back, white-haired, they're still guarding the frontier. The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean, and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended. Hasn't he heard that in Han, east of the mountains, there are two hundred prefectures, thousands and thousands of villages, growing nothing but thorns? And even where there is a sturdy wife to handle hoe and plough, the poor crops grow raggedly in haphazard fields. It's even worse for the men of Qin; they're such good fighters they're driven from battle to battle like dogs or chickens. Even though you were kind enough to ask, good sir, perhaps I shouldn't express such resentment. But take this winter, for instance, they still haven't demobilized the troops of Guanxi, and the tax collectors are pressing everyone for land-fees-- land-fees!--from where is that money supposed to come? Truly, it is an evil thing to bear a son these days, it is much better to have daughters; at least you can marry a daughter to the neighbor, but a son is born only to die, his body lost in the wild grass. Has my lord seen the shores of the Kokonor? The white bones lie there in drifts, uncollected. New ghosts complain and old ghosts weep, under the lowering sky their voices cry out in the rain."
https://people.well.com/user/jmalloy/uncleroger/partytop.htm...
The poetry was accidental. She was limited to 50 characters, and so she turned the lines into poetry. Judy said she was not a poet when she wrote Uncle Roger, but became one after it was done.
A perspective of the old Silicon Valley, when it was about the silicon, from the eyes of a woman. It's familiar yet so different. Things like this:
Jeff kept talking about custom chips.
He got very excited.
I looked into his eyes which are brown.
I wanted him to keep talking.
"What is a custom chip?" I asked.