poetry translation

C.P. Cavafy

C.P. Cavafy (1863 – 1933) is the most famous and arguably greatest of the Modern Greek Poets. He was born and died in Alexandria, but spent part of his childhood in Liverpool (his first poems were in English and he is said to have spoken Greek with an English accent), and he lived for a time in Constantinople. His subjects range from homosexual love affairs to arcane Hellenistic history, but his treatments of them share a remove in time, a distance or irony. His poems were collected only after his death. Many celebrations this past year have marked the sesquicentennial of his birth.

 

Francesco Petrarch

Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374) is the great Italian master whose work helped to create the Renaissance sonnet craze in England. He was a priest, a scholar of the Classics, a friend to the great poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and an immensely popular poet in his day. Although a religious professional, he had two children out of wedlock, and is best known for his sonnets professing his intense love for a woman named Laura.

 

 

Bilal Shaw

Bilal Shaw, is a Kashmiri scientist working in quantum information science who completed his PhD at the University of Southern California. In the past he has worked on DNA-based computation and nanotechnology, software architecture, and theoretical self-assembly. He is currently working as a scientist in the Analytics department at ID Analytics in San Diego, where he applies machine-learning techniques to build statistical risk models for fraud and credit space. He is also an accomplished poet.

 

 

Asadullah Khan Ghalib

Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797 – 1869), known by his pen name, Ghalib, is the famous romantic and mystical poet of the Mughal Empire in India. His poems are characterized by great wit, puns, and a mystical, erotic imagery so passionate as to veer at times into the surreal. He is the acknowledged world master of the ghazal, though certain Persian poets such as Hafiz and Rumi give him a run for his money!

 

 

Tony Barnstone

Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English at Whittier College and author of fifteen books and a music CD, Tokyo’s Burning: WWII Songs. His poetry books include Beast in the Apartment, Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, The Golem of Los Angeles, Sad Jazz: Sonnets, Impure, and selected poems in Spanish, Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (1999-2012). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese literature, and he dabbles in other languages.

 

Parcere personis, dicere devitiis

english translation

Parcere personis, dicere devitiis

original Latin poem

Martial X:33

Vis fieri liber? Mentiris, Maxime, non vis:
sed fieri si vis, hac ratione potes.
Liber eris, cenare foris si, Maxime, nolis,
Veientana tuam si domat uva sitim,
si ridere potes miseri chrysendeta, Cinnae,
Contentius nostra si potes esse toga
se plebeian Venus gemino tibi iungitur asse,
si tua non rectus tecta subire potes,
haec tibi si vis est, mentis tanta potestas,
liberior Partho vivere rege potes.

 

Martial II:53

english translation

Martial II:53

original Latin poem

Martial II:53

Vis fieri liber? Mentiris, Maxime, non vis:
sed fieri si vis, hac ratione potes.
Liber eris, cenare foris si, Maxime, nolis,
Veientana tuam si domat uva sitim,
si ridere potes miseri chrysendeta, Cinnae,
Contentius nostra si potes esse toga
se plebeian Venus gemino tibi iungitur asse,
si tua non rectus tecta subire potes,
haec tibi si vis est, mentis tanta potestas,
liberior Partho vivere rege potes.

 

Martial

Martial, Latin in full Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 40 – c. 103), was born in the Roman colony on the Iberian peninsula in present-day Spain. He made his way to Rome and chronicled courtly life with epigrams, some of which were bitingly satirical, and others of which were clearly poems-for-hire and occasional verse likely commissioned or written with the anticipation of patronage in return. As the winds of favor shifted, he returned to his native Iberia, where he died.

 

 

Mark S. Bauer

Mark S. Bauer’s poems have appeared in various literary journals and two chapbooks: Imperial Days (Robert Barth Publishing, 2002), a chapbook of epigrams, and The Gnarled Man Rises (Scienter Press, 2005), a chapbook of lyrics. He edited the anthology A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, & Addiction (Oxford, 2009), and is on the psychiatry faculty at Harvard Medical School.

 

 

Ballade LXXXVI from Les Cent Ballades

english translation

Ballade LXXXVI from Les Cent Ballades

original French poem

Ballade LXXXVI

Jadis par amours amoient
Et les dieux et les deesses,
Ce dit Ovide, et avoient
Pour amours maintes destresses;
Foy, loiaulté et promesses
Tenoient sanz decepvoir,
Se les fables dient voir.

Et du ciel jus descendoient,
Non obstant leurs grans hauteces,
Et a estre amez queroient
Les haulz dieux pleins de nobleces;
Pour amours leurs grans richeces
Mettoient en nonchaloir,
Se les fables dient voir.

Lors si trés contrains estoïent,
Nymphes et enchanterresses,
Et les dieux qui lors regnoient,
Satirielz et maistresses
D'amours, qu'a trop grans largeces
Mettoient corps et avoir,
Se les fables dient voir.

Pour ce, princes et princepces
Doivent amer et savoir
D'amours toutes les adresces,
Se les fables dient voir.

 

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