Montale, Ashbery, in transit

E andando ned sole que abbaglia
sentire con triste meraviglia
come'è tutta la vita e il suo   travaglio
in questo seguitare una muraglia
che ha in cima occi aguzzi di   bottiglia.


And walking in the dazzling sun,
feel with sad amazement
that all life and its torment
consists in following along a wall
with broken bottle shards embedded in its top

Some departure from the norm
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The consensus gradually changed; nobody 
Lies about it anymore. Rust dark pouring
Over the body, changing it without decay -
People with too many things on their minds, but we live
In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,
Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness
And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.
How careless.

So l'ora in cui la faccia più impassibile

è traversata da una cruda smorfia:

s'è svelata per poco una pena invisibile.

Ciò non vede la gente nell'affollato corso.

I know the moment when a raw grimace

crosses the most impassive face:

for an instant an invisible pain is revealed.

The people in the crowded street don't see it.

.. Yet in the end each of us

Is seen to have traveled the same distance - it's time

That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,

Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it were

The same as making it happen. You're not sorry,

Of course, especially if this is the way it had to happen,

Yet would like an exacter share, something about time

That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means.

This posting was conceived

in glad memories of times

with Mme Ulli Steltzer,

portraitist of Mann, Einstein,

Oppenheimer, Bruno Walter, 

and me; lady of Princeton
and one's mentor in coffee.

Yes, Ulli. I'm Papa's

complaint with Brahms.

Eugenio Montale

Ossi di Seppia, 1926

Jonathan Galassi, translation

Cuttlefish Bones

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998©

John Ashbery

Saying It to Keep It from Happening

 Houseboat Days

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975©

Ludwig van Beethoven

Op. 73, Adagio un poco mosso

Walter Gieseking, piano

Herbert von Karajan

The Philharmonia Orchestra

EMI, 1952©