Squirrel Queen.

The Chase for Baja

The Road to Here

Through Squirrel Eyes

SHE...is a great photographer, she had awarded me with "One Very Lovely Blog Award". That´s cool , "THANY YOU JUDY, I ADORE YOUR´S NATURE PHOTOS".

"One Very Lovely Blog Award".

Rules for sharing this award are different than other awards because instead of just passing it on to just anyone, you are supposed to pass it on to NEW to YOU blogs you've just become familiar with, which is very, very cool! :1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award, and his or her blog link. You can also make a comment about the person who gave the award to you by asking your readers to stop by their blog, pay them a visit, leave a comment, or even 'follow' their blog if they feel led to.2) Pass the award on to other blogs that you’ve newly discovered. Contact these bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award. Just go to their site and leave a comment to one of their posts telling them you have an award for them and to please come by your blog to get it. Just a little note: You pick the number of blogs to pass the award to, just give it to those you have recently discovered.A second note, I am not passing this award along as much as I am giving to you.
Thank´s .

THE AWARD GOES TO:

1-CREEATIE
2- lasotrasevas
3-Walk the Wilderness
4-Ioana Clonţa
5-Larry's Creative Zone-
6- The Australian Poet
7- Razors and Vines
8-SASSY SASHA THE LOVABLE SHIH TZU

9- THE COOL ARTS

10-Magie si Mister in Lemuria

11-Azahari Salleh Photography

KAY RYAN

Kay Ryan born in San Jose ,California raised in San Joaquim Valley and the Mojave Desert attending Antelope Valley College, bachelor's and master's degrees in English from University of California , Los Angeles. lived in Fairfax California, Kkentfield.Carol Adair, who was Ryan published her sixth collection of poetry, The Niagara River, in 2005. Her first collection, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, published in 1983 second collection, Strangely Marked Metal (1985), her work went nearly unrecognized until the mid 1990s, when some of her poems were anthologized and the first reviews in national journals were published. receipt theRuth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2004.
In July, 2008, the U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for a one year term commencing in Autumn 2008.

A CAT/A FUTURE

A cat can draw
the blind
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides.Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

THE NIAGARA RIVER


As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice — as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced —
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

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.

tarot

"I’m not an expert in the deck at all. My interest lies somewhere near a sense that words are like tarot cards, and that a poem manipulates unpredictable depths with its words. . . . I like the tarot because it works like poetry and because you don’t really have to ‘believe in’ anything. It’s there to be used. The symbols are remarkably durable and beautiful; they float out to encompass all kinds of meanings.” —Kay Ryan,“

GRIESSKLÖSSCHENSUPPE WITH REAL CHICKEN BROTH

OUR "GUEST FRIEND"

SPACE FOR EVERY TWO WEEKS SHOWS A POST OF MY LIST OF BLOGS.
Travel on the rainbow from
der Gauzibauz or
Erika -Norbert

Griessklösschensuppe with real chicken broth

For the broth:

1 Chicken, in the end does it even chicken Klein
Celery, carrot, parsley root, onion, leek,
Bay leaf, 1 clove, lovage 1 and 1 / 2 hours to boil.

For the dumplings (dumplings):
Something melted butter, semolina about two eggs, nutmeg,
Parsley, salt into a dough.
Note: The thinner the dough, the more the loose balls.
I like when they loved the interior still has a hard core.
With two teaspoons of small dumplings, and tap into the non-
bubbling

Broth basket. 20-30 minutes.

.

DEMETRIOS CAPETANAKIS

DemetriosCapetanakis -Kapetanakis, Δημήτριος Καπετανάκης-
Smyrna-1912 London-1944 Greek poet, essayist and critic. Resident in the United Kingdom -from 1939, he wrote some poetry in English. He came to Athens when his mother fled the Asia Minor catastrophe and the invasion of Smyrna with her three children. He was a graduate of Athens University, where he was taught by Panagiotis kanellopoulos whom he would encounter again in the Greek government-in-exile in London, and held a doctorate from theUniversity of Heidelberg. . In 1939 with a scholarship from the Bristish Council he came to theUniversity of Cambridge, studying under Dadie Rylands He became a protégé of Edith Sitwel . In 1941 he met John Lehmann, who published Kapetanakis in New Writing and became a close friend. Through Lehmann he met Willian Plomer.In 1944 he died (leukemia)




























The Isles of Greece & Other Poems


The sun is not in love with us,
Nor the corrosive sea;
Yet both will burn our dried-up flesh
In deep intimacy
With stubborn tongues of briny death
And heavy snakes of fire,
Which writhe and hiss and crack the Greek
Myth of the singing lyre.

(Monograph contains the seventeen short poems written by the Greek philosopher Demetrios kapetankis before his death in 1944,in London . They are metaphysical poems, written in English, not his native language but one in which he achieved such mastery during the few years he lived in England that he was able to concentrate the intensity of his thought into the four-line stanza of English verse. )
"He had spoken more than once about his desire to write a poem representing a truth about Greece which Byron had missed in his famous poem; and now, into those twenty short lines he concentrated all that he felt about his country and her eternally renewed destiny of suffering, lines which are among the most tragic and haunting he ever wrote, and which express Greece perhaps more completely than anything that has been written in our time.John Lehmann "-

Introduction to his book Demetrios Capetanakis--- A Greek Poet in England -London, 1947

GARCIA LORCA

John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) . The passion . . . El Jaleo 1882 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Oil on canvas 237 x 352 cm (93 3/8 x 138 1/2 in.)


Federic Garcia Lorca born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada,Spain June 5, 1898 he died near Granada, August 1936 . Murdered by the Nationalist at the start of the Spanish Civil War.Poet and dramatist. was a talented artist and a member of the 'Generation of 1927', a group of writers who advocated avant-gardism in literature. He read law at the University of Granada.García Lorca read law at the University of Granada.He studied music collaborating in the 1920s with Manuel de Falla, he plays piano and guitar. In Madrid he entered the Residence de Estudiantes, a modern college and the intellectual center of the town. Friend of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pablo Neruda. With Salvador Dali and Louis Bunuel he did different productions. When the two made their notorious Un Chien Andalou (1928), García Lorca was offended: he thought that the film was about him. García Lorca became known even 'Libro De Poemas' (1921), a collection of fablelike poems. In 1923 García Lorca earned a degree in law, but the turning point in his literary career was folk music festival Fiesta de Cante Jondo in 1922, where he found inspiration for his work from the traditions of folk and gypsy music. In 1927 García Lorca gained fame with his romantic historical play arina Pineda where the scenery was constructed by Salavador Dali and the distinguished actress Margarita Xirgu played the heroine. By 1928, with the publication of RIMER ROMANCERO GITANO he was the best-known of all Spanish poets, and leading member of the 'Generation of 27', which included Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti and others. In 1929-30 García Lorca lived in the city of New York, on the campus of Columbia University. suffered a deep culture shock. His suicidal mood was recorded in posthumously published POETA EN NUEVA YORK(1940, Poet in New York), in which he praised Walt Whitman. , He escapes to Havana to experience the harmony of a more primitive life. After visitCuba García Lorca was back in Spain by 1931, and continued with theatre productions. He became the head the traveling theatrical company, La Barraca, which brought classical plays and other dramas to the provinces. After the death of his friend, a bullfighter, García Lorca wrote ament for the Death of a Bullfighter(1935), which has been regarded by most critics as his greatest poem. . The figure of one man facing death in the bullring, exemplified by his friend Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, expressed the author's tragic sense of death. Mejías himself had written a play and he was well-known in the literary circles. Lorca's The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 and García Lorca was seen by the right-wing forces as an enemy. The author hid from the soldiers but he was soon found, dragged from a friend's house, and shot in Granada on August 19/20 of 1936 without trial by the Nationalists. The circumstances of his death are still shrouded in mystery.


















F.G.L.

Gacela of Unforseen Love

No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
Nobody knew that you tormented
a humming bird of love between your teeth.



A thousand Persian little horses fell asleep
in the plaza with moon of your forehead,
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.



Between plaster and jasmins, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I sought in my heart to give you
the ivory letters that say "siempre",


"siempre", "siempre" : garden of my agony,
your body elusive always,
that blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already lightless for my death.

THE END OF THE NIGHT

OUR "GUEST FRIEND"

The End of the Night
by Ronaldo Monte

Failed to light yesterday evening. For absolute lack of what to do, I expect to sleep in bed.
With the delay of sleep and the absence of internal images, focused my attention on the total darkness that was immersed. I spent the hand in front of the eyes and did not notice any movement. I thought I was close to having an experience of blindness and one end of trouble appeared. But then I remembered what I told me my friend Jane Belarmino, blind and visionary: the fear of the dark is a problem for you. I do not know the darkness. In fact, taking isolated experiences as last night, I do not know the darkness.

And very few people living in cities can be said of the intimate dark. The night, as a synonym of darkness, is an increasingly rare phenomenon. The concern for security and control of people did with the darkness that was banned from the streets and buildings of cities. The evening today is only a period of time very different from the day. When you enter a supermarket or a mall, jumping in a time continuum, where the artificial light eliminates any difference between day and night. The - small dark of the film -is more an expression of caring that real. Besides not being an absolute darkness, the clear light projected on the screen, it can be enjoyed by day or night.

For lack of a clear distinction (or dark) in the day, the night lost its purpose for the period to rest and sleep. Pushed increasingly into the night did the things of day. Pharmacies, supermarkets, gas stations and many other services are open continuously. Varamos the night studying or working. Just going to bed when the exhaust no longer allows us to any activity. Here, then, is the insomnia. And then we realize that we lost contact with our first night. The side that leads us to dream and the pastures repairers that reveals the other side of sleep. The dry eyes, the soul dry, the dryness of the imagination. This is the price we pay at the end of the night. Besides the bad mood the other day.

Ronaldo Monte

Born in Maceio, Brazil. Lives in João Pessoa, Paraíba, 1978. poet, writer, psychoanalyst and professor. Public chronicles in newspapers .
PUBLICATIONS
1983, The corner of the Eyes-book of poems. 1996 - Short Memory, chronic and short texts.-2000 - Weaving Night; poems.- 2003, Small Chaos, chronicles. 2006, -Memory of Fire; romance publisher by Objetiva. In 2007,- The Place of Healing - Construction of the Psychoanalytic Situation-by Editora da Paraíba.

SPACE FOR EVERY TWO WEEKS SHOWS A POST OF MY LIST OF BLOGS.

TYRENA RESCUED

• 
  Rescued from the streets,sunday morning two weeks ago ,with hungry and sick of love. Tyrena is very well now , acceptedby the other three kittensin the house (all adopted)
• 
  
  
  
  
  

ARVO METS

Arvo Mets (1937 – 1997)

Born in Estonia, and educated at St. Petersburg Universityand at Literary Institute in Moscow. lived most of his life in Moscow where he edited several literary magazines, including Novy Mir New World. Started writing poetryin the early 1960s,and also translated Estonian poetry to Russian. Three criticallyacclaimed collections of hispoetry miniatures were published in Moscow and Tallinn.His Selected Poems appeared in Moscow in 1992.

Haikus

Blustery wind
we‘re caught in the golden blizzard
of falling leaves

A tiny feather
descending –
birdless sky

The train screams
and slows down –
three silver firs on the pane

SAKUTAÖ HAGIWARA II

To is unpenetrated darknesses we have no ligth to holds the mirror up to nature,
he feell out the invisibles shapes and shows images , shining visons , golden spots ,
perhaps distordes but auhtentic versions of the terrible nature of his vision and
of the staggering beauty of his language. Hagiwara has left for man's enlightenment
poems of the dark that will last as long as light and darkness.








SHIAMAMOTO-PARABOLIC TRAJECTORY BEFORE REACHING THE CANVAS--- 5 M LONG

Grass Stem


Look at the grass-stem shawled
Against the nip of winter
In such a flimsy wrap.


O mark that little splinter,
So delicate and sad,
Which all the winter shook
Blue in its fibre shawl.


Look at the grass-stem.
Look.


Beyond a far-off sky
That sags with laggard snow
The grass exhilarates,
Its greenness to grow.

Visage sick to the bottom of the earth

(Hurler to the Moon (1917))

In the depths of the earth there is a face,

A face of a patient alone.

In the darkness at the bottom of the earth

Gently push the stems of herbs,

Appear nests of rats

, Began to shake the hair innumerable

Who are involved,

Push bamboo fine roots green

They grow,

And they seem quite grim,

As if they smoked,

Really evil.

In the darkness at the bottom of the earth,

There is a face of a patient alone.

Hurler to the Moon (1917)

SAKUTARÕ HAGAWARA

http://www.shakuhachi.com/Sound/Tanifuji/Tanifuji-Shakulute-C-1.mp3

Onchi =Koshiro
-Japanese, 1891-1955-

portrait of Sakutaro

Sakutarō Hagiwara -( Hagiwara Sakutaro ) 11-0-1886--05-11-1942 .
Was a writer of free-style verse, active in Taishö and earlyShowa period Japan.
He liberated Japanese free verse from the grip of traditional rules,
and he is considered the father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan.
He published many volumes of essays, literary and cultural criticism ,
and aphorisms over his long career.


New Road at Koide



This road, just newly opened,goes


Straight to the city, I suppose.

Dark melancholy day.

I stand at a new crossing where

A new horizon like a tear


Runs lonelily away.



The sun above a straggling row

Of huddled roof-tops huddles low...

How thin, how shorn of shade,

Stand the few trees in that sparse wood


That once so greedily sturdy stood


Before the road was made.

Such bleakness feeds my blemished mood

Of anger and incertitude

As black sorts well with black

How, how can I re-fangle me?

How be what once I used to be?

Where does the road run back?

Oh where’s that leafy road I seek

That runs to boyhood from the bleak Horizon of the town?

For this new road, which I rejectAnd will not travel,

more was wrecked

Than all those trees hacked

RABÉARIVELO

A Surrealist influence in

Cactus,( lines 13-20)

Here
,when the flanks of the city were made as green
as moonbeams glancing through the forests,
when still they cooled the hillsides of Iarive
crouched like bulls after food,
upon these rocks, too steep for goats,
they drew apart to guard their springs.
Lepers in finery of flowers.

Romantcism (France, 19th Cent.) influenc

Pomegranate, (lines 9-13) perhapS Keats??????

Its taste will be sweeter,
because it was pregnant with desire
And with fearful love and scented blossoms -
Pregnant by the love sun.


Three day breaks, Part III,( lines 1-10 (of III parts))

All the stars are melted together
in the crucible of time,
then cooled in the sea
and turned into a many-faceted stone-block.
A dying lapidist, the Night, setting to work with all her heart
and all her grief to see her millscrumbling, crumbling,
like ashes in the wind,
cuts with what living care the prism.


A Reflection on Merina (Ethnic Group) Culture


Two Old Merina Songs, excerpt from Part II (of II parts)

... my cousin, I have scarcely any lovers for my lovers
areno more than seven; the first is the lover that cuts my
nails; the second is the lover who takes the place of the one
withus in the house, when I am away from home; the third
takes her place in an emergency; the fourth is the lover
who
follows me with her eyes when I go away; the fifth is the
lover who comes to meet me when I return; the sixth is
the lover sustains my life like rice; the seventh is the
lover who does not mix with the crowd andeven when she
happens to be amongst them always knows how to
make
herself distinguished.

And you witness of his daily suffering
and of his endless task;
you atch his thunder-riddled
agony until the battlements of the East re-echo
the conches of the sea -
but you pity him no more
and do not even
remember that his sufferings begin
again
each time the sun capsizes.


(from Traduit de la nuit, 1935 )

JEAN-JOSEPH RABÉARIVELO


















Passionate and restless, drifted from on job to another, and suffered from drug addiction and depression. Rabearivelo took his own life at the age of 36; on June 22, 1937 by poisoning himself . Various reasons have been given for his suicide, including the colonial administration's decision to send a group of basket-weavers instead of him to France to represent the colony. One of Africa's most important French-language poets, a prominent figure in the literary revival known as the Mitady ny Very which swept Madagascar in the 1930s. Rabearivelo wrote both in Malagasy and in his own unique version of imperfect French.
Born in Antananarivo (Tananarive), capital of Madagascar. His mother, who married a tailor, was an aristocrat, related to the royalty of the largest Malagasy ethnic group, the Merina people. In 1895 Malagasy armed forces had been defeated by the French, and the new administration led to the pauperization of most of the Merina royalty. .
Rabearivelo was educated by his uncle, ( sent to the Ecole des Freres des Ecoles Chretiennes - Andohalo, and after to the Collrge Saint-Michel in Amparibe. Left schooling at the thirteen continued to read widely the classics western. He was secretary and interpreter of the head of the Canton of Ambatolampy, and then returned to Tananarive. Rabearivelo worked in odd jobs, but ended as a proof-reader at the printing press in Imerina until his death. Razafitrimo, and have five children .A terrible blow for him was the death of his youngest daughter blow for In Un conte de la nuit, a short story, he recounts the family tragedy.
Rabearivelo's mother encouraged him to write at the age of 20 he published his first poems . In 1923 the international revue Anthropos accepted an article of him on the poetry of Madagascar. He contribute to journals in his own country, in the neighboring Mauritius, and in Europe. Rabearivelo's early poems were influenced by French Symbolist poets. In 1930s he lauched his own journal, Capricorne, in 1931 he was accepted into the Academie Malgachethe .Rab*arivelo never got a higher-paying job from the administration which he always hoped.
. In the 1910s several nationally prominent writers had been imprisoned, Malagasy- language writing was restricted, but memories of independence were still fresh under the colonial rule. In his early collections Rabearivelo's recurring theme was exile, the journey away from the native land, referring to the loss of independence. When all text written in French were considered to belong to French literature, Rabearivelo supported bilingual works and proposed that 'Malagasy literature' would recognize French-language texts composed by the Malagasy.
Like Baudelaire Rabearivelo was too much of an aesthetician to join the cadres of militant poets. He created his own world,-strange and mythical-,which was shadowed by visions of suffering and death, teeth marks of colonized civilization. Cosmos was for Rabearivelo full of sad beauty, wandering tribes, and bodies in perpetual mutation. His plays, Imaitsoanala, Fille d'oiseau (1935) and Aux portes de la ville (1936), focused on rituals and folklore and carefully avoided any reference to politically inflammable issues. On the other hand, none of his critical works were published in his lifetime.

I know a child, a prince in God's kingdom
Who would continue the tale:

'Fate too pity on the lepers
And told them to plant their flowers
And guard their springs afar from man's cruelty.'

(from Presque-songes, 1934)

THE FIRE

Extreme Beauty

THE WINDOW´S GUY

........sweating sunny afternoons.

JAPANESE POETS OF UTA-ESSAYS

Yone Noguchi

Yone Noguchi, born -and known in JAPAN aS-Yonejiro Noguchi (野口米次郎 Noguchi Yonejirō, December 8, 1875 - July 13, 1947), was an influential writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism in both English and Japanese.













It was in the darkest age of China that some poet declared, "To learn how to read is to learn how to be sad."

Autumn, -season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,
- is the book season of the year.

Here by a little hibachi, sipping tea ,the late Naofumi Ochiai's book of uta "Haginoya Kashu."

Dear, sad Haginoya!

How he loved the hagi flowers

How he sings of them--
Yes, the hagi it is,
The hagi is my life,
How could I forget
My own heart!

. . The modern poets may embrace a variety of rhythm and technical effects, and they may excel in descriptive song and external portraiture. But, alas, they lost the golden song of heart and love. Building of a composite period here in Japan.
Our song is growing quite idyllic.

Hear his simple muse--

From beyond the lake,
The temple bell is heard to-day too,
And the day, too,
Passes away.

Blown and blown and beaten
By the Autumn wind,
Yet the suzuki reed puts out its head,
-- Oh, how it is like me!


I push my sick body on
To the verandah, and I set
The butterfly free
From a spider's net.

Forgetting the floating world,
With thee, this day,
I gaze on
The white mountain cloud.

After the goddess of my dream
I [sought],
This morn:--
Lo, the lily white!


Are they the hair jewels
Forgotten by an angel,
At eve?
Oh, dews upon the hagi flowers!

Thou art ill,
I am too.
What misery, what misery
In this world where we have so much to do!

The Autumn night is deep:
Canst [thou] hear
The passion talk of the man-star
And woman-star met together?

He has been dead some ten years. His last uta is sad indeed:
O fall of leaves, I'll dream
On the last silence of thy passing way,
And sleep,
This night.

I find his sweet temperament and also his unspeakable sadness in the following poems:
I cannot think of them
As the Spring things:
Yea, how lonely and quiet
Are they, --those white wistaria!

So, wistaria
Like the Yellow cloud!
How longing
Toward the Lord Buddha!

And when I try to find his highest lyrical loftiness I read the following. They are of the real poetical creation according to our Japanese judgment, --the work which only the soul steeped in poetry could utter:--


Suppose the morning stars
Fall and break?
Do they sound
Like my own song?

I will sleep on Fuji's Mountain top,
And see whether my dream
Rise to the heavens,
Or fall to the earth.

In the midnight,
I awake, and think over the song:

Oh, am I not
The god?

As a cataract
It once has fallen,
And now it rises up,---
Lo, white mountain cloud!

What difference they show from the somewhat suffocated English poems! It is a delightful change to read after Keats and Tennyson. Any one who has such tenderness and fancy in heart, I should say, could appear as a genuine poet under any clime. It is a pity that such simple song is dying away in Japan.

TANEDA AND HÖSAI

Taneda Santöka Free style haiku, Santōka is often ranked along side Ozaki Hösai, a fellow student of Seisensui. They both suffered from the ill effects of their drinking habits and were similar in their reliance on Seisensui and other patrons of the arts for aid and support. The literary tone of their poems, however, differs .
Haiku excerpts from Hiroaki Sato’s translation of Santōka’s Grass and Tree Cairn

I go in still blue mountains
Wakeitte mo wakeitte mo aoi yama

Fluttering drunk leaves
horohoro yöte ki no ha chiru


Westerners like to conquer mountains;

Orientals like to contemplate them.


As for me, I like to taste the mountains.





Taneda Santooka 種田山頭火(1882-1940)a haiku nonconformist who cast aside all the rules including the 5-7-5 syllable structure, is also associated with Matsuyama. Santoka, an ordained Zen priest, after spending most of his life wandering all over the country as a begging monk, chose to settle in Matsuyama only to die 10 months later. The humble cottage where he dwelt -- Isso-an (A Blade of Grass Hermitage) is preserved north of Ehime University.His books and documents are also preserved in Shiki Memorial Museum.



Hōsai (尾崎 放哉) Ozaki Hoosai, Ozaki Hosai 20 January 1885 - 7 April 1926An alcoholic, Ozaki witnessed the birth of the modern free verse haiku movement. His verses are permeated with loneliness, most likely a result of the isolation, poverty and poor health of his final years.


I go in still blue mountains


Wakeitte mo wakeitte mo aoi yama




Fluttering drunk leaves



Horohoro yōte ki no ha chiru Haiku excerpts from Burton Watson’s translation For All My Walking


there
where the fire was
something blooming
yake-ato nani yara saite iru

feel of the needle
when at last
you get the thread through it
yatto ito ga tōtta hari no kanshoku




snow stopped
in the voices of children
the sun shines—

GERMAN ARTIST

WELL, NOT TO HOT!

AND,ELSEWHERE, SUDDEN ARROWS ENTERED EYES

Vis e Ramin
"And, elsewhere, sudden arrows entered eyes
Like sleep that takes a warrior by surprise;
Like love, spears pierced through hearts, and like good sense
Axes split open heads and arguments.
It seemed that swords found out exactly where
God placed the soul with such abundant care,
And where men's flesh was opened by the blade
The soul fled through the gaping wound it made"

It was the first major Persian romance, written between 1050 and 1055 in rhyming couplets. This remarkable work has now been superbly translated into heroic couplets (the closest metrical equivalent of the Persian) by the poet and scholar Dick Davis. Vis and Ramin had immense influence on later Persian poetry and is very probably also the source for the tale of Tristan and Isolde, which first appeared in Europe about a century later. The plot, complex yet powerfully dramatic, revolves around royal marital customs unfamiliar to us today. Shahru, the married queen of Mah, refuses an offer of marriage from King Mobad of Marv but promises that if she bears a daughter she will give the child to him as a bride. She duly bears a daughter, Vis, who is brought up by a nurse in the company of Mobad’s younger brother Ramin. By the time Vis reaches the age of marriage, Shahru has forgotten her promise and instead weds her daughter to Vis’s older brother, Viru. The next day Mobads brother Zard arrives to demand the bride, and fighting breaks out, during which Vis’s father is killed. Mobad then bribes to hand Vis over to him. Mobad’s brother Ramin escorts Vis to her new husband and falls in love with her on the way. Vis has no love for and turns to her old nurse for help.... Told in language that is lush, sensual and highly inventive, Vis and Ramin is a masterpiece of psychological perceptiveness and characterization: Shahru is worldly and venal, the nurse resourceful and amoral (she will immediately remind Western readers of the nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), Vis high-spirited and determined, Ramin impetuous and volatile. And the hopeless psychological situation of Vis’s husband, Mobad, flickers wearily from patience to self-assertion to fury and back again. The origins of Vis and Ramin, are obscure. The story dates from the time of the Parthians (who ruled Persia from the third century bce to the third century ce), and certainly existed in oral and perhaps written form before the eleventh century Persian poet Fakhraddin Gorgani composed the version


You’ve never truly slept with any man.

You’ve had no joy of men, you’ve never known

A man whom you could really call your own . . .

What use is beauty if it doesn’t bless

Your life with pleasure and love’s happiness?

You’re innocent, you’re in the dark about it,

You don’t know how forlorn life is without it.

Women were made for men, dear Vis, and you

Are not exempt, whatever you might do.


And to make quite sure that Vis knows what she is talking about, the nurse goes on to add:


God made us so that nothing’s lovelier than

What we as women feel when with a man,

And you don’t know how vehemently sweet

The pleasure is when men and women meet;

If you make love just once,

I know that then

You won’t hold back from doing so again.



This is a very hothouse world, and if the opportunities for pleasure are numerous and varied so are the opportunities for disgrace. Associated with the currency of one’s good name is the fairly frequent invocation of chivalry, especially by Ramin, as an ideal of behavior. An aspect of the poem that is perhaps startling at first, given the emphasis on courtly protocol, chivalry, and correct behavior, but which has clear parallels in Western medieval narratives that deal with the same kind of world, is the validation of adultery. The nurse’s admonitions to Vis, once her charge has realized she is married to someone for whom she feels no affection, are given with cynical insouciance:


The well-born women of the world delight

In marrying a courtier or a knight,

And some, who have a husband, also see

A special friend who’s sworn to secrecy;

She loves her husband, she embraces him,

And then her happy friend replaces him.

THE LAST SNOW-STORM

A grey cloud in the sky overhead,’

ANNA AKHMATOVA POEM

A grey cloud, in the sky overhead,
like a squirrel skin uncurled.
‘I’m not sorry your body,’ he said,
‘will melt in March, frail snow-girl!’

In the fluffy muff my hands grew cold.
I felt afraid, somehow confused.
How to recall the swift weeks’ flow,
his short-lived insubstantial love!

I don’t want bitterness or revenge,
let me die with the last snow-storm.
My fortune told of him at year’s end.
I was his before February was born.


The last snow -storm by Elaine Erig-oil on canvas -150- 150 cm -
New York-1994-award :the best paint of the year-
John Hultberg class

THE PLACE...IS NOT EXOTIC

Eight in the morning and this infernal heat,
sweaty- a cold shiver
In the middle of paints and brushes
over an order of finish, which has no end ...
A difficult week
A unpleasant host
walking like a snail
Cats restless, complaining , vomiting, peeing to expel the intruder .
Unsolved problems of inheritance,
my bags up.
Suddenly a torrential summer rain.

... and the place is not exotic.
As Mishima I have dreams of Bangkok.
In Out of Africa I am looking the savanha,
But I am here, in this gummy summer
like those who for years I spent in New York.
Only I am not there.
I am here.
In a place that is neither exotic or developed West
Full of beaches
Fuck you
I'm tired of this landscape