Hart Crane / Voyages

 

Hart Crane

Versión inglesa de la serie completa de poemas «Voyages» del libro White Buildings, de Hart Crane.

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Voyages

 

I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf

Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.

They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,

And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed

Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections

The sun beats lightning on the waves,

The waves fold thunder on the sand;

And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,

Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached

By time and the elements; but there is a line

You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it

Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses

Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

II

― And yet this great wink of eternity,

Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,

Samite sheeted and processioned where

Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,

Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this sea, whose diapason knells

On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,

The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends

As her demeanors motion well or ill,

All but the pieties of lovers’ hand.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador

Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,

In these poinsettia meadows of her tides, ―

Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,

Complete de dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,

And hasten while her penniless rich palms,

Pass superscription of bent foam and wave, ―

Hasten, while they are true, ― sleep, death, desire,

Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.

O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,

Bequeath us to no earthly shore until

Is answered in the vortex of our grave

The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

III

 

Infinite consanguinity it bears ―

This tendered theme of you that light

Retrieves from sea plains where the sky

Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;

While ribboned water lanes I wind

Are laved and scattered with no stroke

Wide from your side, whereto this hour

The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates

That must arrest all distances otherwise, 

Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,

Light wrestling there incessantly with light,

Star kissing star through wave on wave unto

Your body rocking!

                                   And where death, if shed,

Presume no carnage, but this single change, ―

Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn

The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands …

IV

Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose

I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge

Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings

Whose circles bridges, I know, (from palm to the severe

Chilled albatross’s white immutability)

No stream of greater love advancing now

Than, singing, this mortality alone

Through clay aflow immortally to you.

All fragrance irrefragably, and claim

Madly meeting logically in this hour

And region that is ours to wreathe again,

Portending eyes and lips and making told

The chancel port and portion of our June ―

Shall they not steam and close in our own steps

Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I

Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?

In signature of the incarnate word

The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling

Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown

And widening noon within your breast for gathering

All bright insinuations that my years have caught

For islands where must lead inviolably

Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes, ―

In this expectant, still exclaim receive

The secret oar and petals of all love.

V

 

Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,

Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast

Together in one merciless white blade ―

The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.

― As if too brittle or too clear to touch!

The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,

Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.

One frozen trackless smile…what words

Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we

Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword

Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,

Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved

And changed … ”There’s

Nothing like this in the world”, you say,

Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look

Too, into that godless cleft of sky

Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.

“― And never to quite understand!" No,

In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed

Nothing so flagless as this piracy.

                                      But now

Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.

Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;

Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:

Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

VI

 

Where icy and bright dungeons lift

Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,

And ocean rivers, churning, shift

Green borders under stranger skies,

Steadily as a shell secretes

Its beating leagues of monotone,

Or as many waters trough the sun’s

Red Kelson past the cape’s wet stone;

O rivers mingling toward the sky

And harbor of the phoenix’ breast ― 

My eyes pressed black against the prow,

― thy derelict and blinded guest

Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,

I cannot claim: let thy waves rear

More savage than the death of kings,

Some splintered garland for the seer.

Beyond siroccos harvesting

The solstice thunders, crept away,

Like a cliff swinging or a sail

Flung into April’s inmost day ―

Creation’s blithe and petalled word

To the lounged goddess when she rose

Conceding dialogue with eyes

That smile unsearchable repose ―

Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,

― unfolded floating dais before

Which rainbows twine continual hair ―

Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!

The imaged Word, it is, that holds

Hushed willows anchored in its glow.

It is the unbetrayable reply

Whose accent no farewell can know.

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TOMÁS BROWNE (1982), ha traducido la poesía de E.E.Cummings, Poemas (Chancacazo Publicaciones, 2015). Es autor de los libros de poesía Trazar con voz (Foro de Escritores, 2004), Excursión a los sucesos (Editorial Luciérnaga, 2008), Revelaciones de un cuidador de inicios (Premio de poesía latinoamericana transgresora, México, Verso Destierro, 2012) y Las semillas de Urano (Editorial Comba, 2014). En la actualidad, trabaja en la traducción de The Complete Poems de Hart Crane.   

  

RITA DRPIC (1932) es pedagoga en inglés y traductora. Ha estado becada en los Estados Unidos y vive en Punta Arenas, Chile.