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Two Countries By Jos� Mart� Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Spanish I have two countries: Cuba and the night. Or are they one? No sooner does the sun withdraw its majesty than, dressed in long veils with a carnation in her hand, Cuba appears to me a silent widow. I know what that bloodstained carnation is atremble in her hand. My breast is empty. Sundered it is, and empty where the heart once was. The hour is already come to begin dying. Night is a good time to say goodbye. Light is impediment as is the human word. The universe speaks better than man.   Like a flag that calls to battle on the field, the candle's flame flutters ablaze in red. I open windows feeling such tightness. Crushing the carnation's petals in silence, like a cloud befogging the heavens, widow Cuba passes by. Random notes on the Spanish: Un clavel en la mano  � echoes the phrase un clavo en la mano  "a nail in the hand" and has a slightly ghastly f

A song from between the two World Wars, from Werich and Voskovec's Balada z hadru (Rag Ballad) a theatrical work drawing on the life, times and work of Fran�ois Villon, but inspired as much as anything by the Great Depression. My translation is free, as is my wont when working with song lyrics. I have deemphasized the medievalism. I have included modernity-specific terms. I have, in fact, turned the song into something a bit different than what it was in Czech. Leslie Jameson, the donor who requested this, asked that I translate one poem from a language I don't know well. Granted, Czech is quite easy for me to understand in its written form. So here it is. Hey, Royal Highness By Jan Werich and Jir� Voskovec Requested by Leslie Jameson Translated by A.Z. Foreman ( YouTube link to a cover version of this song ) So here's a topic for you, researchers and scholars Of the academy: does it say in your books Why it is just the poor they put in prison-collars, When rich homes have

"The lips of dead men..." By Yehuda Amichai Translated by A.Z. Foreman The lips of dead men whispered thoughtlessly A single word of silence in the earth. Already every flower, every tree Has wildly overdone its springtime birth. Bandages are torn off, again undressed The earth does not want healing. It wants pain. Spring is not peace at all. Spring is not rest At all. Spring is enemy terrain.  We went with other lovers on patrol To see if we could reach our goal. We were sent to the End of Rainbow Land,  Though we already knew: the dead return; Though we already knew: the storm is borne Out of a young girl's open hand. The Original: ???? ???? ????? ????? ???????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ????????? ??????????, ??????? ????? ???????, ??????? ???????????, ?????? ???? ?????, ?????????? ???????? ?????????????. ???????????????? ????? ?????????? ???????, ????????? ??????? ?????? ????????, ?????? ??????. ?????????? ????????? ??????, ??? ???????, ?????????? ???? ????? ????????. ???

This translation was done when I was 16 or so. I'm posting it as is. From a Stormy Night By Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by A.Z. Foreman Frontispiece Roused by the risen storm, the night expands and begins its climb from otherwise lying compressed in a tight and tiny crevice of time. No bar of stars can end it in space, It doesn't begin in the grove Nor in the features of my face Nor in the way you move. The lanterns stammer and blindly ask: "Are we faking light? Has the one real thing for millennia been The night?" I. In such nights you can come across a few Future ones on the sidewalks- pale and peaked Visages that do not acknowledge you And mutely let you pass, Though if they were to speak, You�d be long forgotten As you stood there, And long rotten. Yet they keep the silence of deadmen Though they are the ones to come. The future hasn�t been yet. They can only plunge their faces in time�s Suboceanic light and cannot hope To see, but endure it a while To discern i

Yonatan Ratosh was born in 1908 in Warsaw, and emigrated to Palestine in 1921. In 1939 he founded the Canaanite movement, which rejected both Judaism and Zionism in favor of a new "Canaanite" identity which was, as Yatosh believed, more organic to the Fertile Crescent, and which sought to liberate all who lived the region from the stranglehold of Abrahamic monotheism. The Canaanite movement cultivated an archaic Biblical (or, theoretically, pre-Biblical) diction modeled to some degree on the language of Ugaritic epic (c.f. in this poem the Ugariticizing terms ??? ??? ?? ???? and ??? ???? ???? in this poem. Both of which are identical to phrases found in Anat's lamentation for Ba?l in the Ugaritic Baal cycle.) This dirge was written for the poet's father, and is envisioned as a hymn for the pall-bearers. It describes how the dead father is carried westward beyond the sea to the dwelling of El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon. The title of this poem in Hebrew is  Et

From A Day In The Hands of the Stormtroopers Execution  By Abraham Sutzkever Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Yiddish As I must, as they order, I'm digging a hole. I search in the dirt for what might console.  A dig and a cut. A small worm is shaking Away below me. My heart is breaking.  My spade cuts him through. Then miraculously One severed worm is two. Then three. Another cut: they are four. Can it be That all these lives were created by me?  The sun comes through the dark of my mood A conviction sets my arm firm:  If a worm does not succumb to the spade,  Are you any less than a worm?  - May 22, 1942 The Original: ????????? ??????? ????????? ????? ??? ?? ???? ??? ??? ?????, ??? ??? ?????! ??? ??? ????-????? ??? ??'??? ???? ?? ??????. ?? ????? ??? ?? ????, ??? ?? ??????? ????? ???? ???????? ???? ????? � ???? ????? ??? ??????. ???????? ??? ???? ????, ??? ???????? ??????: ???????????? ????? ?????, ????? ????: ??? ??????? ?? ????, ????? ????, ???

Abraham Samuel Schwartz (1876-1957) spent the majority of his life as a medical doctor with a busy practice in the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn, until retiring at the age of 77. He was the elder brother of Israel Jacob Schwartz, the Yiddish modernist poet and translator (author, incidentally, of ????????  Kentucky , a Yiddish epic about the adaptation of Lithuanian Jews to life in rural America. You can download it in Yiddish here .) He was born outside Vilnius, in Lithuania. His father was a learned Hebrew scholar, and Schwartz himself quickly excelled in Talmudic studies. He broke with tradition when he discovered secular literature, first in Yiddish and Hebrew, then in Russian. He arrived in New York at the age of 24 (followed by his brother four years later) with the hope of making his living with literary work, but soon found this impossible. He obtained a medical degree, and thereafter began his practice. He continued to write poetry during spare moments of respite from tendi

The Circus By Annabelle Farmelant Translated by A.Z. Foreman I have grown tame cat claws. When the wheel revolves for my next incarnation I will return As a lion. I will re-turn time to circa the Roman circus And they will set me loose in the ring.  All beasts walk on two feet And I will dig my claws into the flesh of all The men of little heart and little mind And puke my shame in their faces.  A typical shame I swallowed in secret. The snow has long melted The snowdrop long died out But I can never blacken even the name Of shame So typical, so pure and bright.  Men of little mind and little heart, Your hearts that were ocean-vast Shrank back into the mire of imbecility, Your minds brilliant As adamant gemstones Switched for bogus rhinestones That used to be the cornerstone Of Empire.  Now shout not: "Ave, long live Caesar!"  His stoney pity Shall never be moved.  Shout not: "Ave, long live Caesar!" All the Caesars are long dead.  When the next revolution cycles Th

The Poet By Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by A.Z. Foreman Hour, you wind ever farther from me. Your wings wound me as they beat away. Alone: what would I do with my lips? With my night? With my day? I have no lover. I have no home. I have nowhere I can stay. All things to which I give myself Get rich and then give me away. The Original: Der Dichter Du entfernst dich von mir, du Stunde. Wunden schl�gt mir dein Fl�gelschlag. Allein: was soll ich mit meinem Munde? mit meiner Nacht? mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe Alle Dinge, an die ich mich gebe, werden reich und geben mich aus.

Two for Me at Night Moshe Feinstein Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Hebrew Two things brought to me by night: A shriveled leaf, a blasted thing of rot Whose shoot of green vitality was shot Out by the passing storm, fell right Against my window in the throes of the near-dead, To look on desolation-soaked shrouds of the bed And said "Oh cold it is beneath the grave's old plank, Cold and dank...." And a heh heh at my window, like the bearer of great tidings, tapped � A laugh of rapture born out of a lusty woman's warm young breast To intimate suggestively about night secrets, and the creases of a dress Of black. Like a gazelle the cry cavorted through my blood  Aroused a thirsty tremble on my lips And said aloud: "desire, desire." This it said Then went off into exile of the night Born off as a snowy bell's clear chimes Into the distance where the blackness climbs, The leaf still shuddering on the shrouds of my bed. The Orig

Parda-e-ghaflat utha pesh-e-nazar yaar hai, Dair-o-haram mein na ja dhoondhne maujood ko ! ~ Hazrat Khwaja Haider Ali 'Atish' (Remove the veil of heedlessness, The beloved is in view. Do not seek Him in a temple or Kaaba, Who is present everywhere)

"Hebrew is the language of the Bible and in this language it is written:  "God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, and God saw the light that it was good." There is not another language today in which almost every word is loaded with so many possibilities for expression and for meeting the need of human poetry in its eternal quest to speak of the sorrows of man and his wondrous attempts to find meaning in life. At times I have felt the distinctive weight of the Hebrew while reading again the most beautiful love songs in the world; the Song of Songs, and David's elegy on the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. The power of Hebrew does not end here. It begins here.  I am not sure if the Jewish people in Israel are aware of what I think of the Hebrew language, and this does not concern me. It is not for them that I write in Hebrew, but because of them. As to the question of whether or not I am a Hebrew poet, the answer is very simple: a Hebrew poet, yes, bu

She Is Asleep T. Carmi Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Hebrew "I sleep, but my heart waketh; Hark! my beloved knocketh" �Song of Songs 5:2 She is asleep; but her hand is awake, More than the surgeon's palm in operation,  To breathing, to the odors, to pulsation, To murmurings that hidden dirges make. She is asleep; but her ear still takes in The clinkings of cool metal, the unsteady Eyelids that fall too heavy. Ever ready For silence of a sudden, and chagrin.... She is asleep; but watch her eye will keep On you, on heedless spring, on autumn's thresh, The dead to be, the breath of all that lives. Oh may she rest in dream. She is asleep.  But her hand will cut trusty as the knives Till sundown in the raw and living flesh. The Original: ?. ???? ??? ???? ???? ????????; ????? ?????? ????? ?????? ???????????? ???? ??????????? ??????? ?????????? ?????????, ???????? ????????? ?????????????. ???? ????????; ????? ???????? ????????? ??????? ???

What you hear in the recording, by the by, is my natural way of pronouncing Hebrew. Though Ma?al?a himself does not use such a pronunciation. His Hebrew is what one might call "Israeli-assimilated Arabic" pronunciation. He has an alveolar /r/ but lacks the pharyngeal articulation of ? and ?. I Am An Arab Poet By Salman Ma?al?a Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Hebrew I am he: an Arab poet  who has colored all in black.  I will open the latch on my heart for a world that is whirling back. A poet strings rhyme on rhyme of brother united with brother. His scheme so crossed the line. His father be damned and his mother.  The sun will dawn from the east on a land where the dirt holds sway.  Let the blisters bloom on my hand, and the village girls in their day.  To hold to his dreams was all the boy's hope � before his betrayal.  The day he was born he found in his hand a spoon of Sheol. I am he: an Arab poet. The word abides all with its beat.