Gyula Krúdy, ‘Sindbad’s Prayer’ (From The Adventures of Sindbad, 1944)

Lord, give me untroubled dreams and a quiet night. Stop my ears against words poured into it by women. Help me forget the scent of their hair, the strange lightning of their eyes, the taste of their hands and the moist kisses of their mouths. Lord, you are wise, advise me when they are lying, which is always. Remind me that the truth is something they never tell. That they never do love. Lord, up there, far beyond the tower, think occasionally of me, a poor, foolish man, admirer of women, who believes in their smiles, their kisses, their tickling and their blessed lies. Lord, let me be a flower in that garden where lonely women retreat in the knowledge that no one’s by. Let me be a lantern in the house of love where women mutter and babble and sigh the same old words. Let me be the handkerchief into which they weep their false tears. Lord, let me be just a gatepost ladies pass lightheartedly while clinging to the arms of their suitors. Lord protect me, never let me fall into the hands of women.

Translated by George Szirtes.

W.H. Auden, ‘The More Loving One’ (1957)

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Lascano Tegui: From ‘On Elegance While Sleeping’ (1925)

Syphilis is a civilized disease, and I intend to declare my allegiance to its aesthetic. I acquired it in the most charming of ways. Suffice to say, she who bestowed this gift upon me did so with the same ease and elegance as the doves of Aphrodite must alight upon the breasts of sleeping women…

* * *

If I wrote a book about Don Juan’s syphilis, I’d worry about acquiring that habit or weakness of writers who plot out all their actions as though for a book, writers whose days have become the monotonous pages of a novel. A book is a secret vice. If we could collect all our dandruff as easily as we collect the so-called contents of our heads, it would be just as publishable. Like the eighteenth-century woman who liked lace so much she cut it up and ate it in a tortilla, there are people who worship the fetish object that is a book and want nothing more than to see themselves reflected in it—like Narcissus.

I’d also like to avoid the mania of writing books to serve as funeral wreaths. I remember some grief-stricken parents who published a book about a daughter of theirs who’d died at the age of eighteen. Now, what could that poor anonymous girl have accomplished at such a young age to warrant such a tribute? Two photographs included in the text gave us the measure of this extinct creature. In one of them the girl is playing croquet. She’d played just once, in a hotel I used to frequent. Hardly a devotee!

The other photograph showed her on a horse. A few minutes after the picture was taken, the horse bucked the girl off and she broke her leg.

The seeming pedigree of such images made her parents forget the facts. Writers are the same.

They publish books for the pleasure of seeing them printed and bound, without remembering that the saddest aspects of their lives will end up contained in those pages.

But wouldn’t my book be the result of my desire to commit a crime, and thus be a part of it? Wouldn’t every page be a sliver of glass in the daily soup of my fellow citizens?

A book is the vegetal pulp left behind by man. And now, after countless centuries of digging up and studying palimpsests and engraved tablets, they’re saying that we should just allow all those dead, abandoned cities to become buried again beneath the windblown sediment…

A book is a slow, unavoidable catastrophe.

Translated by Idra Novey.

William H. Gass: From ‘Order of Insects’ (1968)

I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we’d never bury the dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we’d find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with tilted as they always were—rib cage, collar, skull—still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection.

Mixtape: Welkin

As when to warn proud Cities warr appears
Wag’d in the troubl’d Skie, and Armies rush
To Battel in the Clouds, before each Van
Prick forth the Aerie Knights, and couch thir Spears
Till thickest Legions close; with feats of Arms
From either end of Heav’n the welkin burns.

• • •

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W.H. Auden, ‘Who’s Who’ (c. 1934)

A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day:
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

William Carlos Williams: Letter to Nicholas Calas, 4 Dec. 1940

All this fits well into my scheme. I don’t care how I say what I must  say. If I do original work all well and good. But if I can say it (the matter of form I mean) by translating the work of others that also is valuable. What difference does it make?