The Arava Review

By Guy Jean
Versions by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

 

Une clôture à perte de vue. Une foraine en équilibre jongle. Ses jambes entrouvertes invitent le rêveur.

Les drapeaux se branlent. Grisaille de novembre. Crevasse entre saisons, expiation pour les excès des récoltes et l’oubli des labeurs généreux.

Au réveil il met le masque des dimanches, court dans la ville, met le feu à ses amours. Un cœur y bat-il encore?

Il enterre. Son deuil laboure l’hiver. La tempête enneige ses errances.

Il fouille au-delà des yeux. Le mirage d’un feu de bois, d’une femme en chaleur, dans le froid à perte de vue.

 

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A fence. As far as the eye can see. A fence.
The traveling gypsy, performs as she walks along it, she juggles.
Her legs opened, partly. To invite the dreamer.

Flags along the fence. They wave. November.
Gray wind. Crevice between November and January, atonement for excesses of the fruits in harvest. For the forgetting, for the labors
generous forgetting.

A generous forgetting. To invite the dreamer, as he walks.

As he walks, he puts on the face of Sundays, his mask; he roams through the city streets, sets fire to his loved one’s apartment.
A heart there—does it beat still? It beats.

He calms. His mourning ploughs the winter. He calms.
The snow drops on his steps as his legs lift and fall.

It beats. With his eyes he wants to touch the earth.
He does not see in a wood-fire, what he wants is to touch.
He does not see it in a woman in heat, what he wants is to touch.
That coolness, a loss of sight. He wants.
As far as the eye can see.

 

 

By Guy Jean
Versions by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

 

Si je naissais à Prague

je me ferais moine prémontré pour contempler en bas de la colline les toits ocre et verts, les murs crème, les clochers, les tourelles au fer noirci, chapeautées d’une boule dorée, d’un cône aux arêtes vert pistache, les fenêtres circulaires

je me ferais moine pour fréquenter l’évangéliaire de Strahov et autres manuscrits anciens, leurs reliures serties d’émaux et de cristaux de roche

je consacrerais toute ma vie, anonymement, à calligraphier sur parchemin et relier dans le cuir un texte inutile qu’on admirerait dans mille ans.

 

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If I were born in Prague

I’d grow up as a prémontré monk and would contemplate at the bottom of the hill. I would sit on ochre and green roofs, by the cream walls. I would sit on church towers, by the blackened iron turrets capped with a golden ball or a pistachio green ridge. I would jump in the circular windows.

I’d become the first monk to frequent the Strahov book of gospels; I’d spend my life, anonymously, as a calligrapher, binding in leather all useless and beloved texts.