I’m a bit disappointed. The Translation issue is usually the best of the year, but this one failed to live up to the standard of the last couple.
Two sections from from the poems of Dahlia Ravikovitch:
An orange did love
With life and limb
The man who ate it,
The man who flayed it.An orange did love
The man who ate it,
-from The Love of an Orange
and:
If I could only get hold of the whole of you,
How could I ever get hold of the whole of you,
-from The Second Trying
A couplet from the Cretan Folk Poetry Collection:
The everything of the world is zero, the life of the world is naught;
It is from nothing to nothing that eternity is wrought.
Victor Teran : The north wind whips
Biddy Jenkinson, an Irish poet, writes a poem of a Chinese mother binding her daughter’s feet. The first two lines go:
Pull in your feet, little darling,
so I can kiss your wee trotters
and I love the picture a Chinese mother using the phrase “wee trotters”.
