Great Jewish Women-4

Paula E. Hyman

b. 1946

The noted social historian Paula E. Hyman has focused her scholarly exposition on her two primary areas of interest, the Jews of France and Jewish women. Her work as co-editor of both Jewish Women in America and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia reflects a commitment to Jewish feminism that is both personal and academic.

Credit Richard Cohen

A role model for many Jewish women, Hyman has shared her dedication to and vision of Judaism with her husband Dr. Stanley Rosenbaum and their two daughters, Judith (b. 1973) and Adina (b. 1976). Her profound involvement in the professional world was matched only by her commitment to family and Jewish communal affairs. A Zionist, Hyman regularly spends time in Israel, lecturing in Hebrew as well as English at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University. She has been involved in liberal political causes both in the Jewish community and in the larger American society. Never one to be stymied by adversity and difficulty, Hyman was forthright and accomplished in all that she set out to do and has made her impact in all her fields of endeavor, both personal and public.

Scholarship, feminism, dedication, perseverance and integrity immediately come to mind when Paula Hyman’s name is mentioned. Those who know her well would add family and friendship to the list. Though she has ostensibly moved only from Boston, where she was born on September 30, 1946, to her present residence in New Haven, Connecticut, Hyman has traveled wide and far, spiritually, intellectually and physically. Hyman remains steadfast in her dedication to Jewish and humanitarian commitments and to her professional and personal concerns.

The oldest of three sisters, Paula was educated in a home where Jewish culture was an essential aspect of her upbringing, and so it has remained throughout her own career. Her mother, Ida (Tatelman), the daughter of impoverished Russian immigrants, transferred her aspirations for education to her daughters while managing the household and working as a bookkeeper. Her father Sydney, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, worked as an office manager to support his family. Upon graduating from high school, Hyman studied at Radcliffe College, where she received her B.A. (summa cum laude) in 1968, having studied with a wide range of scholars in the Humanities, including two renowned mentors in Jewish history, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Isadore Twersky. She acquired her knowledge of Hebrew and of classic Jewish texts from the Hebrew Teachers College of Boston (now Hebrew College), which she attended ten to thirteen hours a week in addition to regular high school and college.

In 1966 she gained her B. J. Ed. there. Hyman went on to Columbia University to do post-graduate work in history and completed her Ph.D. in 1975, after studying with distinguished medievalists, Gerson D. Cohen and Zvi Ankori, and prominent modern historians, Robert O. Paxton and Ismar Schorsch. Hyman‘s dissertation on the Jews in France after the Dreyfus Affair appeared with Columbia University Press under the title From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (1979), a work that immediately asserted her place among modern Jewish historians.

Widely acclaimed and one of the finalists for the annual National Jewish Book Award in history, From Dreyfus to Vichy treated carefully and judiciously the different strands of French Jewry, granting special attention to the inter-war period and the dramatic transformation of the Jewish community, by virtue of the extensive immigration of Eastern European Jews. While still a graduate student, she joined with two colleagues, Charlotte Baum and Sonya Michel, to publish a pioneering work on The Jewish Woman in America (1976), that gave pride of place to Hyman’s growing involvement in Jewish feminism, both on a scholarly and a personal level. In 1971 she had been one of the founders of Ezrat Nashim, a small feminist activist group that lobbied vigorously for the ordaining of women as Conservative rabbis and for equality of women in Jewish religious and communal life.

Indeed, French Jewry and Jewish feminism were to remain at the center of her intellectual and communal attention during the following decades. Her work on French Jewry in the modern period entered into new directions with the publication of The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace. Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1991). Forever interested, academically and personally, in the ways in which Jews construct different forms of identity in a non-traditional society, Hyman inquired into the ways in which modernization impacted upon Jews in the Alsatian cities and countryside following emancipation. Sensitively employing the tools of a social historian, she looked at a wide range of sources to understand the behavioral patterns of “simple Jews” (e. g. peddlers, shopkeepers, cattle dealers).

She concluded that they showed a greater ability to withstand the pressures of modernization than previously maintained with regard to city Jews. In this study she was also concerned with identifying how the process of modernization impacted on the experience of Jewish women, and she successfully illuminated aspects of their ritual observance and economic involvement. Hyman’s move from the ideological problems that dominated her interest in the first book to social ones in this study attested to her ability to address a wide-range of social and cultural issues in equally professional quality. Her synthetic volume The Jews of Modern France (1998) was thus a natural outgrowth of these different interests and a product of her full command of the scholarship in modern French history and modern French Jewish history. Indeed, her perspective in this volume is grounded in her belief that French Jewish history highlights the evolution of French history while attesting to the struggle of a minority group to sustain itself in a highly centralized state system.

While pursuing these works, Hyman continued her engagement in the history of Jewish women and her efforts to integrate their experience into the Jewish historical narrative. She taught and lectured on Jewish women and after publishing Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (1995), a book on the process of acculturation of women in America and Europe that developed from the Stroum Lectures, she undertook with Deborah Dash Moore the editing of a two-volume historical encyclopedia Jewish Women in America (1997).

The latter work, which generated much enthusiasm among scholars and received several distinguished awards, could not have come to fruition without the tremendous dedication of the editors. Following that effort, Hyman published the memoirs of Puah Rakovsky (My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman. Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, 2002), whose life story as a committed feminist and Zionist was very close to her heart. Indeed, like Puah, Hyman could not live a life without total engagement in these areas, as in others.

Hyman was always involved and active in academic and communal affairs while she pursued her career. After serving as assistant professor of history at Columbia (1974–1981), she became dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies, the first woman to hold the position, and associate professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1981–1986). In 1986 she became the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University, where she served for over a decade as chair of Jewish Studies. Deeply committed to the advancement of Jewish studies, she has directed a large number of doctoral dissertations and has given herself unstintingly to a wide range of professional associations, bringing to all of them unfailing energy, exceptional insight and unique dedication. In recognition of her contribution to Jewish scholarship and her leadership role, in 2004 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Historical Studies from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and was elected President of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

She has served as an active member of various editorial boards of leading research journals (e. g. YIVO Annual, Jewish Social Studies, AJS Review, Journal for the Feminist Study of Religion) and, with Deborah Dash Moore, has for over two decades edited Indiana University Press’s series on The Modern Jewish Experience. She has been awarded many distinguished prizes and awards, including honorary degrees from the Hebrew Union College (2002) and The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (2000). Her most recent work has been as co-editor, with Dalia Ofer, of Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

Great Jewish Women-3

Lina Abarbanell

1879 – 1963

Credit: Eric A. Gordon

Lina Abarbanell was born on January 3, 1879, in Berlin, Germany, to Paul and Marie Abarbanell. A descendant of an eminent Sephardi family, Paul Abarbanell was a leading theater conductor. His daughter first sang in public at the age of seven. She later received both dramatic and vocal training, and appeared in numerous civic theaters in Germany. At fifteen, Abarbanell made her debut with the Berlin Court Opera, where she sang the role of Adele in Die Fledermaus over a hundred times. She performed all over Europe and gave command recitals before Austrian, Bavarian, and Persian royalty.

Though she sang but one season and one role at New York’s Metropolitan Opera—Hänsel, in the company’s first staging of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (premiere: November 25, 1905)—Lina Abarbanell’s place in American opera was secured when Leonard Bernstein dropped her name in the scat chorus of his one-act Trouble in Tahiti. This opera is dedicated to fellow composer and mentor Marc Blitzstein, who had married Abarbanell’s daughter Eva in 1933. After becoming the best-known exponent of Viennese operetta style in America, Abarbanell made an effective transition to American theater, contributing to it every talent for which her thorough European training had prepared her.

Her success lay in lighter musical fare and operetta. Composers such as Oscar Straus, Franz Lehár, and Edmund Eysler wrote for her expressive soubrette voice. She made about twenty recordings in 1903 and 1904, only four of which appear to have survived. In 1905, Heinrich Conried, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, invited her to sing the role of Hänsel and to perform at his Irving Place Theater, where she delighted his German-speaking audiences.

After that season, Abarbanell and her husband, journalist Eduard Goldbeck, settled in America with their daughter Eva (b. 1901). For a time she flirted with Christian Science; from a Jewish point of view she can be considered totally assimilated.

She toured the country for almost thirty years, singing her way though frothy Viennese-inspired confections such as The Geisha, Madame Sherry, The Red Canary, The Silver Swan, Flora Bella, The Grand Duke, Enter Madame, and The Student Prince. Sheet music publishers placed her photograph on the covers of numbers such as “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own,” which she had popularized. Her greatest triumph came in the role of Hanna in Lehár’s The Merry Widow, which she played for weeks on end, the press doting on her at every turn.

Abarbanell stopped singing in 1934 after the death of her husband, but she did not leave the theater. She became a well-known casting director, Broadway producer, and occasional director, for years as partner to Dwight Deere Wiman. Among the shows she cast were I Married an Angel, Street Scene, the famous Porgy and Bess that toured the world in the early 1950s, and the film version of Carmen Jones.

Marc Blitzstein and Abarbanell remained close friends long after Eva, Blitzstein’s wife and Abarbanell’s daughter, died in 1936. Abarbanell cast Blitzstein’s opera Regina in 1949 and his musical Juno in 1959, when she had already passed the age of eighty.

Lina Abarbanell continued working in the theater almost until the day she died, on January 6, 1963. Thus a sweet singing nightingale went silenced

Great Jewish Women-2

Sarah Aaronsohn

1890 – 1917(Nili activist Sarah Aaronsohn Institution: Tamar Eshel)

Refusal to adopt prescribed roles

Credit : Billie Melman

“Believe me I no longer have the strength to suffer and it would be better for me to kill myself than to be tortured under their bloodied hands…if we do not remember, you should [illegible]. As heroes we died and did not confess. … I aspired for my people and for my people’s well-being, and if my people is base—so be it.”

These fragments from the 1917 suicide note of Sarah Aaronsohn, nationalist activist, coordinator and later local leader of the Jewish pro-British underground “Nili” (established to liberate Palestine from Ottoman rule), represent a new interpretation of the role of women within the national project of resettlement and regeneration in Palestine after 1881.

The semi-military role Sarah carved for herself in the underground, her activity and her voluntary death made her an icon and a model of a new “Hebrew” femininity, a model especially cultivated within the so-called civic sector of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine (defined as distinct from the socialist labor sector, dominant throughout the period before the late 1970s).

Sarah Aaronsohn was born on January 5, 1890, in the agricultural colony (moshavah) of Zikhron Ya’akov on Mount Carmel, the fifth of six children and older daughter of Efraim Fischel (1849–1939) and Malka (née Glatzano) of Baku, Romania. Her father, a prosperous grain-merchant, fell under the influence of Hovevei Zion, joining its first group of settlers together with his family, setting out from Galatz in Romania in 1882 to purchase and inhabit lands in Arab Zemerin and found the new colony of Zikhron.

The Aaronsohns became one of the colony’s most prominent families, not least because of the career and reputation of Aaron (1876–1919), Sarah’s eldest brother and mentor, a world-famous agronomist and botanist. Sarah and her siblings belonged to and characterized the second generation of the First Aliyah (1881–1904), the native-born and Hebrew speaking youth in agricultural settlements (moshavot) based on privately owned property and organized around a family economy.

The native generation fashioned themselves as a new “Hebrew” elite, establishing a plethora of youth organizations aimed at the revival of Hebrew and of a national culture, as well as clandestine semi-military organizations whose aim was the defense of Jewish property and honor, notably the Gideonim (after the biblical Gideon), founded in Zikhron in 1913 by Sarah’s brother Alexander (1888–1948).

The evolving civic elite posited itself against the Zionist labor-oriented leadership in Palestine, developing a distinct anti-socialist agenda and a nationalist activism, especially after the outbreak of World War I. The social networks which they and their leaders forged were buttressed by family relations and networks.

The social-familial network which sustained Sarah throughout her youth and adulthood included the older Aaron Aaronsohn and the younger Aaronsohn siblings, the charismatic Avshalom Feinberg of Haderah (1889–1916), described as “the first native-born man,” with whom Sarah most probably had a love relationship and who later co-founded Nili; his younger sister Zila (1894–1988), and the Belkind brothers, Eitan (1897–1979) and Na’aman (1889–1917) of Rishon le-Zion. Sarah and other members of her milieu used a familial vocabulary to describe these relations, referring to themselves as siblings and to the nation as a family of brothers and sisters, thus ignoring their elders and parents.

Elite women of the native generation forged their own nationalist language, set of mannerisms, dress and forms of social conduct which created a place for them within the Zionist project, a place which was not necessarily maternal and which was non-domestic.

Sarah herself never completed her formal education. However, encouraged by her brother Aaron, she studied languages and was fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, Turkish and French, had reasonable command of Arabic and taught herself English. She was also apprenticed in agronomy and botany, often accompanying Aaron on his travels through Palestine, collecting flora, minerals and soils for his accumulating collection, cataloging it and supervising the experimental agricultural station and farm which he established in Atlit, near Zikhron, with the support of American Jewish leaders such as Henrietta Szold.

Like other women in her native milieu, Sarah became an accomplished rider and shot, conducting an active outdoor life. Traveling through the land developed her sense of territoriality, so central to the make-up of the national identity of the native Hebrews and their notion of activism. In the spring of 1914, probably following the rift between herself and Feinberg and his engagement to her younger and less dynamic sister Rivkah (1890–1981), Sarah married the affluent and older Bulgarian merchant, Chaim Abraham (n.d.–1954), and followed him to Istanbul. The marriage quickly foundered both because of a lack of shared interests and due to the impact of world and regional events on the couple’s private life.

The outbreak of World War I, Turkey’s joining of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) in the autumn of 1914 and declaration of war on the Allied Powers, propelled the men and women in the Aaronsohns’ milieu to embark upon a route of action designed to benefit from the war by aiding the British to oust the Turks from Palestine.

They thought that a new order in the Middle East, under the rule of Great Britain in place of a corrupt Turkey, would help achieve degrees of autonomy for Jews in Palestine. Following a short period of cooperation with the Turkish authorities, which came to an end in mid-1915, Aaron Aaronsohn and Feinberg decided on an active anti-Ottoman policy and established an espionage network, Nili (an acronym for Nezah Israel lo yeshaker, “The Glory of Israel does not deceive,” 1 Samuel 15: 29), known to British intelligence as “A Organization.” Nili developed into the largest pro-British espionage network in the Middle East.

Upon her return from Istanbul to Zikhron in November 1915 Sarah joined the underground. From at least the end of 1916 until her capture and death in October 1917 she coordinated and virtually conducted its activities in Palestine and the Lebanon area, handling Nili’s core of about forty agents, its larger circle of supporters and informers and the organization’s finances. She decoded and sifted information, encoded it and communicated with British intelligence headquarters in Cairo, making contact from the Atlit station with the British warship Managam.

She also supervised the transmission by Nili of Jewish American money converted to gold to aid the Jewish population, which was suffering destitution, hunger and dislocation. In addition she liaised with the Turkish authorities (who were unaware of the underground until late 1917), the increasingly hostile community of her native colony and the formal leadership of the Yishuv which distanced itself from the organization. Though Hebrew sources compiled during the aftermath of the war present her leadership as familial, drawing on her position as the sister of the powerful Aaron Aaronsohn, British and Turkish intelligence sources never regarded her as a strong man’s aid and proxy.

She alone of Nili’s top hierarchy stayed on in Palestine (Aaron traveling between Europe and Cairo and Feinberg having disappeared in 1916, in an aborted expedition to Egypt). She refused the advice of British intelligence to leave Palestine by sea to save herself, remained in Zikhron after Turkish intelligence uncovered Nili’s activities, dispersed the network and was arrested on October 1, 1917. During rigorous interrogation and torture she did not disclose any information. Having learnt that she would be transferred to Damascus prison and fearing she would break down, Sarah committed suicide, using a pistol hidden in the washroom in a wing in her parental home which Aaron occupied. She lay dying for nearly four days before expiring on October 10, 1917.

Her correspondence with her siblings and with other members of Nili reveal her independent thought and refusal to adopt prescribed roles for women. She cross-dressed, occasionally referred to herself in the male gender and admonished underground members for their attempt to idealize her as a female saint. Her pre-meditated and staged suicide constitutes the first example of a secular, active death of a Jewish-Zionist woman for the nation, unprecedented in both religious martyrdom and in the Zionist tradition established in Palestine.

In the latter, women were excluded from full participation in the nation in its ultimate manifestation: a violent sacrificial death, buying the land in blood. Following her death, Sarah became the center of a cult of commemoration. Annual pilgrimages to her tomb in Zikhron’s cemetery started in 1935. The cult, idealizing her as the “hero of Nili” (rather than its heroine), elevated Sarah to a symbol of an activist nationalism and initially blurred her femininity, representing her as a soldier-saint.

She was routinely described as a Jewish Joan of Arc. The analogue with the virgin peasant of Lorraine, liberator of France from foreign rule and burnt by the English in 1431, struck a chord in the same milieu from which Sarah herself emerged: the civic circles. Her myth was also adopted by the Jewish Right in Palestine, serving as a counter, or opposing myth, to that of Yosef Trumpeldor (1880–1920), the “Hero of Tel Hai.” The legend of Sarah proved exceptionally resilient. After the Six Day War of 1967 she and Nili were incorporated in the central state-sponsored cult of heroism, officially recognized by Labor and perpetuated in children’s literature.

Great Jewish Women-1

Gerty Theresa Cori

1896 – 1957

In the radio series This I Believe, Gerty Cori, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel prize, which she shared with her husband and lifelong collaborator, Carl Cori (1896–1984) in 1947, stated, “Honesty, which stands mostly for intellectual integrity, courage and kindness are still the virtues I admire, though with advancing years the emphasis has been slightly shifted and kindness seem more important to me than in my youth. The love for and dedication to one’s work seem to me to be the basis for happiness.”

Gerty’s interest in studying medicine was sparked by her maternal uncle, a professor of pediatrics. Born on August 15,1896 in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to an upper middle class Jewish family, Gerty was the oldest of three daughters of Otto Radnitz, a chemist who was a manager of sugar refineries, and Martha Neustadt. Initially tutored at home and then graduating from a girls’ finishing school, Gerty was ill-prepared to study medicine.

At the age of eighteen, after making up her academic deficiencies in two years of concentrated study at a gymnasium, she successfully matriculated at the medical school of the German University in Prague. In her first year at medical school she became a constant companion of fellow student Carl Cori, with whom she shared many interests, love of the outdoors and fascination with basic scientific research. While students, Gerty and Carl published their first joint research paper on immune bodies in disease and thus began a most productive collaboration. World War I interrupted their medical education; Carl was drafted into the Austrian army in 1916, while Gerty spent the next two years as an assistant at the medical school, doing routine work.

Resuming their medical studies after the war, they received their medical degrees in 1920 and married, in spite of the opposition of his family, who were convinced that her Jewish background would hamper Carl’s career. Though Gerty converted to Catholicism, she was unsuccessful in assuaging their fears.

Turning to research careers, they found positions in Vienna, Gerty at the Karolinen Children’s Hospital and Carl at the University of Vienna. Both managed to do research with minimal facilities. Carl moved on to the University of Graz, but Gerty, unable to obtain a position there, remained in Vienna. Their decision to leave Europe was fueled primarily by rampant antisemitism. Fortunately Carl was offered a position as a biochemist at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease in Buffalo, New York, which he accepted with alacrity. Gerty followed six months later when an assistant pathologist position became available there. They never regretted their decision to emigrate. Enthusiastically embracing American culture, they became United States citizens in 1928.

Their research focused on carbohydrate metabolism and the bulk of their eighty publications between 1922 and 1931 were joint. With a couple interacting so intimately, it is difficult to divide credit between them and no attempt will be made to do so. The question they addressed was what regulates blood sugar levels. Balance experiments on glucose metabolism in rats demonstrated that the breakdown of muscle glycogen as modulated by insulin and epinephrine, led to formation of blood lactic acid which then forms glycogen in the liver.

The liver in turn releases glucose to the blood, which transports it to the muscle where glycogen is reformed. Their formulation of the Cori cycle of glycogen metabolism answered the question they had posed. Their success resulted from their development of precise analytical methods for the determination of glucose, glycogen, lactic acid, inorganic and organic phosphates—a strength and hallmark of all their future work.

In 1931, after refusing a position at a university which would prohibit Gerty from working with him, Carl accepted the chairmanship of the Pharmacology Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where Gerty was given a research assistantship at a nominal salary. Their research on glycogenolysis flourished. In 1936, extending their quantitative analytical methods to hexose monophosphates in glycogenolysis, they discovered a new intermediate, glucose-1-phosphate, the Cori ester. That same year Gerty gave birth to their only child, Thomas Carl, an event which did not change her dedication to her work.

The Coris launched a full-fledged effort in enzymology, concentrating on phosphorylase, the enzyme which converts glycogen to glucose-1-phosphate. The formation of glycogen in the reverse reaction was the first demonstration of synthesis of a macromolecule in a test tube, contradicting concepts then current. Reporting two forms of phosphorylase and their interrelationships, the Coris foreshadowed regulation by protein phosphorylation, now known to be a major regulatory mechanism of numerous cellular processes.

Recognition by the Nobel committee in Physiology or Medicine followed, citing “their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen.” The award was shared with Bernardo Houssay. Unfortunately 1947 was also the year when Gerty was diagnosed with myelosclerosis, a debilitating bone marrow disease. Nevertheless, her dedication to science continued unabated.

In 1946 Carl was appointed chairman of Biochemistry at Washington University and Gerty was promoted to associate professor. Shortly before receiving the Nobel Prize, she reached the top of the academic ladder, full professorship. Scientists from all over the world flocked to this Mecca of enzymology to work with the Coris. Among those mentored by them, six subsequently received the Nobel prize.

In the last decade of her life Gerty continued to do groundbreaking research. She discovered the branching and debranching enzymes which catalyze the formation and breakdown, respectively, of branch points in glycogen. In her last research project, Gerty identified the individual enzyme defect in various forms of inherited glycogen-storage diseases in children, establishing for the first time that the lack or impairment of a single enzyme activity could cause a disease.

Among the many honors which Gerty Cori received were: American Chemical Society: Midwest Award and Garvan Medal; National Academy of Sciences: Sugar Research Prize; Borden Award: Association of Medical Colleges; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

On October 26,1957, at age sixty-one, Gerty Cori succumbed to her illness. It was difficult to accept that this vivacious, outgoing person with her quick, sharp mind and her passionate love of science—an inspiration to all who spent time in the Cori lab—was gone.

Credit : Mildred Cohn

Reminding the suggestive power

Poet Laureate Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan was born in 1945 in San Jose, Calif., and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Her father was an oil well driller and sometime-prospector. She received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1971, Ryan has lived in Marin County. Her partner of 30 years is Carol Adair.

For more than 30 years, Ryan limited her professional responsibilities to the part-time teaching of remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., thus leaving much of her life free for "a lot of mountain bike riding plus the idle maunderings poets feed upon." She said at one point that she has never taken a creative writing class, and in a 2004 interview in The Christian Science Monitor, she noted, "I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy."

In her poems Ryan enjoys re-examining the beauty of everyday phrases and mining the cracks in common human experience. Unlike many poets writing today, she seldom writes in the first person. She has said, "I don’t use ‘I’ because the personal is too hot and sticky for me to work with. I like the cooling properties of the impersonal." In her poem "Hide and Seek," for instance, she describes the feelings of the person hiding without ever saying, "I am hiding":

It’s hard not
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It’s
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It’s
like some form
of skin’s developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.

She describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader: "Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading."

Ryan’s poems are characterized by the deft use of unusual kinds of slant and internal rhyming–which she has referred to as "recombinant rhyme"–in combination with strong, exact rhymes and even puns.

The poems are peppered with wit and philosophical questioning and rely on short lines, often no more than two to three words each. She has said of her ascetic preferences, "An almost empty suitcase–that’s what I want my poems to be. A few things. The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying." Because her craft is both exacting and playfully elastic, it is possible for both readers who like formal poems and readers who like free verse to find her work rewarding.

John Barr, president of The Poetry Foundation, said: "Halfway into a Ryan poem, one is ready for either a joke or a profundity; typically it ends in both. Before we know it the poem arrives at some unexpected, deep insight that likely will alter forever the way we see that thing."

Ryan has written six books of poetry, plus a limited edition artist’s book, along with a number of essays. Her books are: "Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends" (1983), "Strangely Marked Metal" (Copper Beech, 1985), "Flamingo Watching" (Copper Beech, 1994), "Elephant Rocks" (Grove Press,1996), "Say Uncle" (Grove Press, 2000), "Believe It or Not!" (2002, Jungle Garden Press, edition of 125 copies), and "The Niagara River" (Grove Press, 2005).

Her awards include the Gold Medal for poetry, 2005, from the San Francisco Commonwealth Club; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation in 2004; a Guggenheim fellowship the same year; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2001; the Union League Poetry Prize in 2000; and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1995. She has won four Pushcart Prizes and has been selected four different years for the annual volumes of the Best American Poetry. Her poems have been widely reprinted and internationally anthologized. Since 2006, she has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Ryan's "Mirage Oases" is one of the six poems that McClatchy selected:

Mirage Oases

First among places

susceptible to trespass

are mirage oases

whose graduated pools

and shaded grasses, palms

and speckled fishes give

before the lightest pressure

and are wrecked.

For they live

only in the kingdom

of suspended wishes,

thrive only at our pleasure

checked.

—Kay Ryan, 1997

Ryan and the short poem

Ryan's poems are often quite short. In one of the first essays on Ryan, Dana Gioia, wrote about this aspect of her poetry. "Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry–how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L.Hix and the veteran maestri like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis– signals a return to concision and intensity." Gioia illustrated his essay with Ryan's poem, "Paired Things":

Paired Things

Who, who had only seen wings,

could extrapolate the

skinny sticks of things

birds use for land,

the backward way they bend,

the silly way they stand?

And who, only studying

birdtracks in the sand,

could think those little forks

had decamped on the wind?

So many paired things seem odd.

Who ever would have dreamed

the broad winged raven of despair

would quit the air and go

bandylegged upon the ground,

a common crow?

—Kay Ryan, 1997

Influences and affinities

Many reviewers have noted an affinity between Ryan's poetry and Marianne Moore's. Charlotte Muse suggests a comparative reading of "Mirage Oases" and Moore's "By Disposition of Angels

By Disposition of Angels

Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.

Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?

Something heard most clearly when not near it?

Above particularities,

These unparticularities praise cannot violate.

One has seen, in such steadiness undeflected,

How by darkness a star is perfected.

Star that does not ask me if I see it?

Fir that would not wish me to uproot it?

Speech that does not ask me if I hear it?

Mysteries expound mysteries.

Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate,

no need to say, how like some we have known; too like her,

too like him, and a-quiver forever.

—Marianne Moore, 1945

Lightness and seriousness

Ryan's "wit", "quirkiness", and "slyness" are often noted by reviewers of her poetry, but Jack Foley emphasizes her essential seriousness. In his review of Say Uncle he writes, "There is, in short, far more darkness than "light" in this brilliant, limited volume. Kay Ryan is a serious poet writing serious poems, and she resides on a serious planet (a word she rhymes with "had it"). Ryan can certainly be funny, but it is rarely without a sting."Some of these disjoint qualities in her work are illustrated by her poem "Outsider Art", which Harold Bloom selected for the anthology The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997

Outsider Art

Most of it’s too dreary

or too cherry red.

If it’s a chair, it’s

covered with things

the savior said

or should have said—

dense admonishments

in nail polish

too small to be read.

If it’s a picture,

the frame is either

burnt matches glued together

or a regular frame painted over

to extend the picture. There never

seems to be a surface equal

to the needs of these people.

Their purpose wraps

around the backs of things

and under arms;

they gouge and hatch

and glue on charms

till likable materials–

apple crates and canning funnels–

lose their rural ease. We are not

pleased the way we thought

we would be pleased.

— Kay Ryan, 1997

Some other poems

Bad Day

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

Dutch

Much of life

is Dutch

one-digit

operations

in which

legions of

big robust

people crouch

behind

badly cracked

dike systems

attached

by the thumbs

their wide

balloon-panted rumps

up-ended to the

northern sun

while, back

in town, little

black-suspendered

tulip magnates

stride around.

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?

A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,

She can ill afford the chances she must take

In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.

Her track is graceless, like dragging

A packing-case places, and almost any slope

Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,

She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way

To something edible. With everything optimal,

She skirts the ditch which would convert

Her shell into a serving dish. She lives

Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery

Will change her load of pottery to wings.

Her only levity is patience,

The sport of truly chastened things.

Born with the vision from below

Manoel de Barros


Manoel de Barros, author of more than twenty collections of poetry, was born in the swamp region of Brazil known as the Pantanal in 1916. He received Brazil’s highest award for poetry, the Jabuti Prize, in both 1990 and 2002, the Nestle Poetry Prize in 1997 and 2006, and the Ministry of Culture’s Cecilia Meireles Prize in 1998. His life and work were the subject of Joel Pizzini’s 1989 film O Caramujo Flor.

At 82, with a new book out, Retrato do artista quando coisa (A portrait of the artist as a thing), 81 pages, Manoel de Barros can no longer be referred to as simply the "poet of the Pantanal". With 14 books published since 1937, today he is renowned by his critics as one of the great names of contemporary Brazilian poetry. Each year his popularity increases since being discovered by the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo hub of intelligence in the 80s. His work has been referred to as ecological, earthy and primitive. Of these labels the only one he appreciated was the last.

"One day they called me primitive:/ I was in ecstasy" he describes in one of the poems in his latest book. The truth is, the image most incorrect that one could have of Manoel de Barros, is one of a poet dedicated to singing the praises of the scenery and wildlife of the Pantanal. As he has reiterated uncountable times, his interest has returned to the small, humble, underrated things by the utilitarian reason in our society. The beings that his poetry is filled with are periwinkles, rocks, frogs, slugs, salamanders and at times, a heron.


"I was born with the vision from below" he summarized in Retrato do artista quando coisa. But it is not with the spirit of a photographer or entomologist with which he encompasses these beings, but rather with the objective of reaching the "epiphany of transformation", in other words, an illumination of the sacred mystery of life. The search is less intellectual than it is spiritual. Without mocking the solemnity of the poetry ("A poem, before anything else, is unuseful," he wrote in Arranjos para assobio (Arrangements to whistle) in 1982), Manoel de Barros agrees that it was an essential work in the search for knowledge.

As all great artists, Manoel does not conform to the incompleteness of man (which nevertheless he considers "the greatest asset") and their incapacity to integrate with the anonymous flow of nature. An artist's utopia is greater than all others': to abolish the distance between the subject who sees the universe and their actual universe. Verses suggesting "nature becomes sick of us" (O livro das ignorãças (The book of ignorance)) and commenting "It's necessary to be in the state of a tree" (Retrato do artista quando coisa) are most characteristic of the poet which suggest a wish to erase the limits between man and other beings of the world.

The root of the impulse towards cosmic integration—very similar to searching for "satori" in Zen-Buddhism or enlightenment—results in an absolute overthrow of syntax, which is seen as a form of imprisonment of analogous words through the domestication of beings by everyday logic.

An example of this tendency to overcome the barriers of language are the verses: "Where the river starts a fish, / river me thing / river me frog / river me tree" (O livro das ignorãnças). Nouns that become verbs, verbs that become adjectives—in the literature of Manoel de Barros the language is considered a live organism, fluid, unobstructed. His power of synthesis and condensing is each time greater—because of this his poems and books continue to diminish in size.

Unique Life

To arrive at the linguistic liberty and at the same time the formal purification, was a long road. The angle Manoel de Barros has on life is as individual as his poetry. Born in Cuiabá in 1916, he was raised as a farm boy, amongst the country animals on the rivers of the Pantanal region. He studied in a private school, but at a young age was already familiar with the great cities, beginning in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1930s, at the age of 20, he undertook an adventurous trip that included Bolivia and New York. He published his first book at 21 in 1937: Poemas concebidos sem pecado (Poems conceived without sin). No one noticed.

In the following decade, while living in Rio de Janeiro, he married Stella, the daughter of Minas Gerais farmers and his partner still today. In Rio, timid and withdrawn, he was unable to get close to the literary resources of the era. One interesting episode illustrates his situation. One day he got up the courage and found the home of his greatest idol, the poet Manuel Bandeira. "I knocked on the door of his apartment in Esplanada do Castelo, a neighborhood in Rio—and I waited, trembling with emotion. And, when the poet waited to open the door, I broke out running for the stairs, six or seven floors, with a pulse of 120, surely", he reported in an interview.

On another occasion, in the Pantanal, he was introduced to Guimarães Rosa, who visited the region. Timidly, Manoel exchanged information with the author of Sagarana regarding the animals and regional dialect of the Pantanal. The conversation was not very long, but the affinity between the two writers was evident. Manoel de Barros—who often is referred to as the "Guimarães Rosa of poetry"—confesses that it has taken a lot of strength to not succumb to the influence of the fictionist from Minas Gerais. Along with the books that he still plans to publish, there is a reconstitution, half true, half invented of his dialog with Rosa.

In 1949, with the death of his father, Manoel de Barros saw himself at a crossroads. He had to choose between continuing in Rio, anonymous and isolated, discretely publishing his books from time to time or return to the Pantanal region, to take care of the land he inherited from his father, in the Corumbá area. By his wife's suggestion, they became farmers.

Ever since, Manoel de Barros has divided his time between taking care of the land and creating poetry. He continued publishing his books (releasing four between 1956 and 1970), and slowly burrowed through the barrier of animosity, becoming recognized in growing circles of readers. His discovery was not ignored by the great centers of the Southeast, in 1980, when he sent his book, Arranjos para assobio, to the writer, drawer and humorist Millôr Fernandes, from Rio. Millôr liked his work so much that he personally made every effort to publicize the book amongst intellectuals and journalists in Rio. Soon after, Manoel became, in the middle of academics and great-thinkers, a type of cult author.

Newspapers and magazines began requesting interviews, in most cases with unsuccessful results. Contrary to the truth, the publicity and the social columns created a myth which referred to him as an "animal of the land" leading the life of a hermit that distanced himself from the world and only talked to animals. Beyond the initial timidness, the author manifests as amiable and talkative, capable of discussing everything from the animals of the region, to literature, cinema or plastic art—always offering his doubts wanting to avoid sounding like a professor.


Syntax of the Illiterate

Possibly the person who has become most captivated by the ambivalence of Manoel de Barros—a man in the confluence between beastly nature and a more refined culture—has to be the cinematographer, Joel Pizzini (Mato Grosso) who dedicated his short film, Caramujo Flor (Reticent Flower), in 1990, to the poet. The two sides of Manoel de Barros—modern and archaic, rural and urban, rustic and sophisticated—appears in the film divided into two "alter egos", one interpreted by Ney Matogrosso and the other by Rubens Correa.

The year 1990 was also the first time Manoel de Barros combined all of his work into a single volume, Gramática expositiva do chão (Expository grammar from the ground), which was almost entirely poetry, edited by Civilização Brasileira. Thanks to that collection, which has taken the title of one of his first books published in 1966, his work has become more accessible to a larger audience that was unaware of the author's first production.

Thanks to this it was discovered that Manoel de Barros since his first two books—Poemas concebidos sem pecado (1937) and Face imóvel (Immovable face) (1942)—had cultivated some of the core characteristics of his work: paying attention to linguistic creations in popular speech, childhood memories, humor and irony of the literary culture, etc.

Manoel de Barros, today, spends more time in the city (Campo Grande) than on the farm. Dividing his time between talking to the general public and writing, he seeks the awkward syntax of the illiterate, the crazed and children. "The normal definition of words is not good for a poem", he wrote in O guardador de águas (The keeper of the waters) (1989).

He writes every day by hand, in small notebooks. His greatest work will come later when he shapes what he has written, throwing out everything commonplace, redundant and predictable. Before he is satisfied with his poetry, his wife Stella gives her opinion of whether it is complete or needs more work.

That is how the "workshop" of one of most original poets of our time functions. The result of observation and lived experience because of an acute intelligence and an absolute generosity of words and life can be found in bookstores for all to read.

Some of his works

Excerpt

Man's biggest wealth

is his incompleteness.

With this I am wealthy. Words that accept me the way

I am—I don't accept.

I can't stand being just a guy who opens

doors, who pulls valves,

who watches the watch, who

buys bread at 6 in the afternoon,

who goes out there,

who sharpens the pencil,

who sees the grape, etc., etc.

Forgive me. But I need to be Others

I intend to revitalize man

from An Education on Invention

To enter the state of being a tree it’s necessary

to begin with a gecko’s amphibian torpor

at three in the afternoon in the month of August.
In two years inertia and scrub grass will begin

to expand our mouths. We will suffer

a little lyrical decomposition

until the scrub grass emerges in our speech.
For now, I have designed the smell of the trees.

In War

The Mayor dispatched a messenger by horse with a letter to the Emperor.
The letter announced the city had been invaded by Paraguayan troops

and expressed a need for extra recourses.
Two months later, the messenger handed the letter to the Emperor.
When the recourses arrived, the Paraguayans were no longer there.
The Emperor’s men came with fifteen young women and a few provisions to eat

on the way.
I guess they ate them all.

Corumbá is a city whose population is well mixed with Paraguayans.

In the Time of Jaguars

Devotion

There was a high wall between our houses.

Difficult to send her a message.

There was no email.

Her father was a jaguar.

We tied notes to a rock bound to a rope

and I threw the rock into her backyard.

It was glorious.

But sometimes the note got stuck in the branches of the guava tree

and then it was agony.

So it was in the time of jaguars.

Portrait

As a child, he lengthened rivers.

He walked slowly, obscurely—half-formed

in silence.

He wanted to be the voice in which stones speak.

Landscapes wandered across his eyes.

His chants were full of fountains.

Like an aroma,

he stuck to things.

from Song of Seeing

Having lived many years in the scrub grass in the way of birds

The boy took on a bird’s kind of stare—

He obtained a fountain-esque vision.

He observed things the way birds observed them.

All the unnamed things.

Water wasn’t the word water yet.

Rock wasn’t the word rock.

They just were.

Words were free of grammar and could inhabit any position.

So it was the boy could inaugurate them as he pleased.

He could give rocks the costume of the sun.

He could give song the sun’s format.

And, if he wanted to end up a bee, it was only a matter of

opening the word bee and stepping inside it.

As if it were the infancy of language.

Six or Thirteen Things I Learned by Myself

1.

The necktie of a vulture is colorless.

Leaning into the shadow of a lone nail, the vulture is born.

Moonlight on the rooftops flusters the dogs.

Waters crystallize on the leg of a fly.

June bugs don’t use their wings when they track over excrement.

A poet is a creature who licks words and gets delirious.

In the bone of a lunatic’s speech are the lilies.

3.

There are four tree theories I know well.

First: that a shrub of garbage is mightier for its ants.

Second: that a plant of filth produces the most flaming fruits.

Third: in vines that strike through the cracks in walls a sensual power grows in the cavities. Fourth: that there are in lone trees a superior rapture for horizons.

7.

Intimate is the rain

If seen from a wall damp with flies;

If beetles appear in the foliage; If geckos stick to the mirrors;

If cigarettes, out of love, get lost in the trees;

And the dark dampens on our skin.

9.

In passing her vaginula over the poor things of the ground,

the slug leaves little liquid prints.

It influences my desire to slobber over words.

In a coitus with letters!

The slug chafes on the stone’s dryness.

It drips over the aridness of the desert that is the life of a stone.

It screws the stone.

The slug requires this desert to live.

11.

That the word “wall” not be a symbol

of obstacles to freedom

of repressed desires of childhood restrictions,

etcetera (those things the explorers find in the disclosures of mental arcana).

No.

The wall that allures me

is made of tiles, adobe applied

to the abdomen of a house.

I have a crawling taste

for going through entryways

coming down into the cracks in walls

through fissures, through crevices–lascivious

as ivy.

To be the tile’s blind lip.

The worm that glows.

12.

His France is useless.

It’s only good for playing violin.

From drinking water out of a hat the ants already know who he is.

It’s totally useless.

The same as saying:

a dust that likes what’s left of the soup is a fly.

He said one needs to be a nobody his whole life.

To be a developed nothing.

He said the origin of the artist is in this act of suicide.

13.

Place where there is decadence.

In which the houses begin to die and bats inhabit them.

In which the grasses enter, enter men, houses shut from the inside.

The moonlight will find only rocks vagabonds dogs.

Grounds besieged by abandon, given over to poverty.

Where men will have the strength of poverty.

And the ruins will bear fruit.

The name of redeemer from mirrors

Forough Farrokhzad

Forugh Farrokhzād (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد) (January,1935-February 13,1967 was an Iranian poet and film director. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably Iran's most significant female poet of the twentieth century. She was a brilliant modernist poet and an iconoclast.

Forugh (also spelled as Forough) was born in Tehran to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar in 1935. She was the third of seven children (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydon, Pouran, Gloria) and attended school until the ninth grade, then learning painting and sewing at a girl's school for the manual arts. At age sixteen or seventeen she was married to Parviz Shapour , an acclaimed satirist. Forugh continued her education with classes in painting and sewing and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. A year later, she had her only child, a son named Kāmyār (subject of A Poem for You).

Within two years, in 1954, Forough and her husband divorced. Parviz won custody of the child. She moved back to Tehran to write poetry and published her first volume, entitled The Captive, in 1955.

Forough, as a female divorcée writing controversial poetry with a strong feminine voice, became the focus of much negative attention and open disapproval. In 1958 she spent nine months in Europe and met film-maker/writer Ebrahim Golstan, who inspired her to express herself and live independently. She published two more volumes, The Wall and The Rebellion before going to
Tabriz to make a film about Iranians affected by leprosy.

This 1962 film was called This House is Black and won awards world-wide. During 12 days of shooting, she became attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers, whom she adopted and had live in her mother's house.

In 1963 she published the volume Another Birth and by now her poetry was mature and sophisticated, also being a profound change from previous modern Iranian poetic conventions.
On February 13, 1967, at 4:30 pm, Forough died in a car accident at age thirty-two. In order to avoid hitting a school bus, she swerved her Jeep, which hit a stone wall; she died before reaching the hospital. Her poem 'Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season' was published posthumously and is considered the best-structured modern poem in poetry.

A brief literary biography of Forough, Michael Hillmann's A lonely woman: Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry, was published in 1987. Also about her is a chapter in Farzaneh Milani's work Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (1992). She is the sister of the singer, poet and political activist Fereydoon Farrokhzad (1936 — 1992; assassinated in Bonn, Germany. Translations into English include those by Sholeh Wolpe, The Sad Little Fairy Maryam Dilmagahani , Sin: Selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad. Nasser Saffarian has directed three documentaries on her; The Mirror of the Soul (2000), The Green Cold (2003), and Summit of the Wave (2004).


Some of her poems

Another Birth
My entire soul is a murky verse
Reiterating you within itself
Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings
In this verse, I sighed you, AH!
In this verse,
I grafted you to trees, water and fire
Perhaps life is
A long street along which a woman
With a basket passes every day
Perhaps life
Is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
Perhaps life is a child returning home from school
Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette
Between the lethargic intervals of two lovemakings
Or the puzzled passage of a passerby
Tipping his hat
Saying good morning to another passerby with a vacant smile

Perhaps life is that blocked moment
When my look destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes
And in this there is a sense
Which I will mingle with the perception of the moon
And the reception of darkness
In a room the size of one solitude
My heart
The size of one love
Looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness,

At the pretty withering of flowers in the flower pots
At the sapling you planted in our flowerbed
At the songs of the canaries
Who sing the size of one window.

Ah
This is my lot
This is my lot
My lot
Is a sky, which the dropping of a curtain seizes from me
My lot is going down an abandoned stairway
And joining with something in decay and nostalgia
My lot is a cheerless walk in the garden of memories
And dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
"I love
Your hands"

I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
And the sparrows will lay eggs
In the hollows of my inky fingers
I will hang a pair of earrings of red twin cherries
Round my ears
I will put dahlia petals on my nails
There is an alley
Where the boys who were once in love with me,
With those disheveled hairs, thin necks and gaunt legs
Still think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
Who was one night blown away by the wind
There is an alley which my heart
Has stolen from places of my childhood
The journey of a volume along the line of time
And impregnating the barren line of time with a volume
A volume conscious of an image
Returning from the feast of a mirror

This is the way
Someone dies
And someone remains
No fisherman will catch pearls
From a little stream flowing into a ditch

I
Know a sad little mermaid
Dwelling in the ocean
Softly, gently blowing
Her heart into a wooden flute
A sad little mermaid
Who dies with a kiss at night
And is born again with another kiss at dawn

Window

A window to see,

A window to hear,

A round window like an unending well:

It should reach to the core of the earth.

And should release into that kind, blue, even air.

A window that loads lonely little hands

by the nocturnal scent of the generous stars.

A window that invites the sun

to the glacial exile of blooms.

A window is enough for me.

I am coming from the land of puppets

And from the shade of painted trees

in the printed gardens of the fiction books.

And from the arid season of thrills of romance,

From deserted lanes of innocence,

From the years of pastel faced letters.


I am coming from behind bench of a tired class.

And from that confusing time

whilst I wrote the spell of “stone” on the board

and terrified birds fled from the cracking branches of the trees.


I arrive from beneath roots of the carnivorous trees,

And my mind is still filled by the fearful calls

of dried butterflies,

under heavy volume of blank, aged books.

When my trust was hung from the frail justice line of the town,

And in the roads, they were cutting the head of my torch,

When they had blind folded innocent eyes of my love,

When fresh blood erupted from all veins of my shaking dreams,

And when my life was nothing but the regular song of the grandfather clock,

I realized that I had to love,

I had to love madly.

A window is enough for me.

A window to the instance of insight, sight and peace,

Now that little walnut tree is so grown, grown, so grown,

that it can narrate the tale of wall

to its young leaves.



Ask the name of redeemer from mirrors:

You see,

This trembling ground underneath your feet

is lonelier than you.


The verdict of ruin arrived in prophetic, sealed notes,

And those infected clouds and incessant blasts perhaps,

flow from those sacred words.



My friend!

Don’t forget,

When you land on the moon,

engrave the date of the carnage of the blooms

on its sad, pale, wrinkled face.


Dreams always fall from their naive heights and die,

And on the soil, where old beliefs silently rest,

a little plant, with four tiny leaves, constantly grows.

I smell this plant.


A woman was buried in the chaste coffin of her hope.

Is she my young days?

A gentle god was taking nightly walks,

in the fresh air of the roofs.

Will I climb again, climb again

the curious steepness of the stairs

to greet him?


I feel that the time had left.

I feel that my share of instant is planted in the past.

I feel that this stand is just a virtual room between my hairs

and the hands of this sad, strange guest.


Talk to me,

I donate you all that kindness of streaming life

I expect you nothing but the reflection of its truth.

Talk to me,

You see,

In the shelter of my window,

I am attached to the sun.


Regret
Note : It is from her first published book.

Thou left me, Ô still naïve me,

I don’t believe this spite of thee.

I had faith in thy love like a prayer

Now I can not trust any other lover.


Thou left and gone with thee, my hope and bliss

Why would I yearn yet rapture of thy kiss?

Sure, I still long for thy love, by patience

In this bitter darkness, callous silence.

Remember that mad woman who rest

One long night, on thy shielding chest?

Engulfed by love, her trembling lips heaved a sigh

Desire laughed in her glistening eye.

“She was thirsty, dampened by thy burning lip,

She recited then her plea, her sheer worship.

Coiled around thy waist like twines of vines,

Ô those shimmering arms, in the moon light lines.”

“All tales of love, whispered to her

In her lone soul, they will linger,

But what remained from that wondrous night?

The strings of vines, dried; the moon light, died.”


Alas, thou left with haste and disregard!

I adored thee, how could thou depart?

Hey Judas! Return, I will hold thee tight

I want to lodge thee in my blazing heart!


The Gift

I am talking about the extremes of darkness

and from the edge of night.

I am talking about the thickness of absolute shade.


My darling!

If you are coming to my place

Bring me a torch

and put up for me

a little window

I will then watch

the noisy crowd of the happy lane.


Friday


My silent Friday,

My deserted Friday,

My Friday: sad, like old abandoned lanes.


My Friday:

The cold day of ailing, idle thoughts,

Moist day of long, evil bore,

loaded with grief,

grief for my faith, for my hope,

Oh, my Friday, this renouncing day…


Oh, this empty room,

Oh, this gloomy house…


These isolating walls from attacks of youth,

These collapsing roofs on my slight daydream of light,

In this place of lone, reflection and doubt,

In this space of shade, text, image and sign.


My life, like a mysterious river,

streamed into those silent, deserted days,

so calmly with a lot of pride.


My life, like a mysterious river,

Streamed into those empty, gloomy rooms,

so calmly with a lot of pride.


The Wave


To me you are a wave

never here, never there,

you are nowhere!

hurling, dragging, diffuse like a plague,

You're on the go for somewhere vague.


To me you are a revolting tide in an eternal glide:

Persistent, impatient, though restless and confused

silent in your heart, fretful in your acts.

The sea of regret is your native land.


Yes, you are a revolting tide!

So always on the ride,

in an eternal glide...


One night

I will wear a mask

made of the thirst of remote shores

And I’ll capture you in my absorbing sands,

eternally away from your naval native lands