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PLAYBOY
III. THE BEST THINGS FROM
ABROAD
TWO ESQUIMAUX LOVE
SONGS
Translated from the Esquimaux by
Maida Thompson and Nanook
Kruger
Ice, green, brittle,
Tinctured with stems of translucence—
Ice, hard, persuasive,
Stabbing with fretted steelwork
The thick black air.
Sliding
Along the back water.
You my beloved, are grateful to me
As whaleblubber
After looking at the icefloes.
II
Sleek as sealskins
Is your brown body.
And your hair as a bear’s pelt
Swaying in water.
They speak your name in Kamchatka
And there are none like you in Atha-
bascah.
Your father has seven whitebearskins,
And I have only the hide of a muskrat.
But the frost of your eyes has fired me
like fat of a muskox,
I will woo you by the trembling incan-
escence
Flashing through the . sixmonthslong
midnight
In shafts of icegreen and pink of sal-
monsteaks,
IV. ESSAY WITH TRANS-
LATION
THE FABRIC OF PAUL
VERLAINE
With a Translation of One of
is Poems
By Eric Elberson Quoits
In a country waich, | ke this one,
has so much more to say to the roman-
tic homiletics of Mr. Winston Churchill
and the callow flush of Mr. Scott
Fitzgerald than to however perfectly
achieved a work ia a higher and more
introverted genre, it is not much cause
for surprise that the lyrics—to use the
classical term—of Paul Verlaine, who
has so recently refreshed Paris, have
remained as little heard of as the work
of Rémy de Gourmort. Not only,
an ke
therefore, by reason of their attempt to
popularize these I'ttle known wriers,
Page Forty-three
but also, perhaps, a little, on account f 4
of the absolute beauty of the transla-
tion itself, the editors of HOLOCAUST
have importuned me to exhibit in
their so irresistible étalage a scrap of
the hueshot fabric which is Paul Ver-
e.
Of that fabric what can one say? §
It is so new, so unaccustomed. Let
this sharp sigh serve as ersample:
“Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme!
Un arbre, par-dessus le toit,
Berce sa palme.
“La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit,
Doucement tinte.
Un oiseau sur l’arbre qu'on voit
Chante sa plainte.
“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est la,
Simple et tranquille.
Cette paisible rumeur-la,
Vient de la ville.
“_Qu’as-tu, 0 toi que voila
Pleurant sans cesse,
Dis, qu’as-tu fait, toi que voila,
De ta jeunesse 2”
over the roofs
the sky
acrid stirless blue
a tree winces
do you see the sky
there that was a clockstroke
a bird in song
life
a drowze
farfaint brouhaha of thick streetage
you are crying you are crying
was it young
V. PARIS LETTER
By Ezra Pound
This letter is destined to be a
dull drip of an affair, because but
little nowadays is being produced that
in any way approaches my own Cantos.
Paul Bijou is the one exception and,
as he writes better than I, there is no
point in mentioning him. However,
there is his poem beginning:
“Ton ventre a l'incertitude
D’une confiture de fraises.””
and which I should do ill not to notice.
Laurent Tailhade (born 1854)
continues as a vendor of Parnassian
cutlery with the occasional gestures of
an indefatigable rhetorician. There
remains his Si tu veux, prenons un
fiacre, listed once again among the
Poémes Aristophanesques:
“Si tu veux, prenons un fiacre
Vert comme un chant de hautbois.
Nous ferons le simularce
Des gens urf qui vont au Bois.”
rr meen
And so on, but I am already too weary
of it to quote the whole.
Saint-Pol-Roux (born 1861) is,
of course, more uncompromisingly mod-
ern. I am still able to reread such
phrases as Cognac du pére Adam for
the harsh savor of it, and Vivant petit
clocher de plumes, for its pale Auso-
nian grace.
(Parenthesis: These phrases lit-
erally translated are Brandy of Father
Adam—though, of course, brandy is
scarcely even an approximation to the
untranslatable ‘“‘cognac’’—and__ Little
living belfry of plumes,—though I
doubt whether belfry is still good Eng-
lish usage.)
There remain the younger French
modernists: Georges Grabat, Camille
Macache, Vittorio Fuocolino, Ignace
Czernowski, Tristan Krauss and
Achille Anthropopoulos. They are
very brave and have tied the can of
satire to the tail of the “‘mochisme”’ of
such men as Apollinaire. But they
have as yet written nothing and, any-
how, I should hesitate to introduce
them to New York, which still allows
Rosa Bonheur to hang unmutilated on
the walls of its museums. (Parenthesis:
Not that I really think it makes any
difference what is hung in American
museums, but I can’t think of anything
more insulting to say about America.)
Frankly, however, I may say
that I can hardly read anything these
days save an occasional line from
Luxorius or Apollinaris Sidonius. I go
rarely even to Provence. If I were not
too weary, I should look up the lines
in Tiberianus (to credit Garrod’s
ascription of the poem),—something
about
“‘Tlla cantat: nos tacemus? quando
ver veniet meum?”
But I forget how it goes... .
N. B. In spite of Ulysses, the
service at the Café de la Paix still
continues wretched. I never go there
any more than one goes to the Salon,
but the above piece of intelligence was
imparted to me the other day by an
old householder from Boston, (Mass.)
who distinctly remembers Lowell and
to whom I am indebted for a bad
mauvais quart d'heure.
mereaveetresnedl ny