Books
by Mark Spitzer available at Amazon.com (click
on the title for reviews and ordering info):
Collected
Poems of Georges Bataille
Bottom
Feeder
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PITY
by Blaise Cendrars, translated
from the French by Mark Spitzer |
Man
is alone--completely alone. As soon as he was born, he fell into
a bucket.
It
is raining tonight. It is dark out. I hear something in the silence,
like heavy footsteps landing in puddles. They are the massive steps
of clouds, moving in the sky. But is there still a sky? Everywhere,
I feel the battered heart of Man crushed by the heavy footsteps
of pain--that black, battered, crying heart, weeping with blood.
The
wheels of madness turn in the ruts of the sky, splashing mud in
the face of God! The clouds are startled from their stupor.
The
moon rises. This is really the face of God. A desolate, beardless
face. A bald head, completely round, with a mouth that looks like
it's about to burst. Two tears can't even fall from his cheeks.
Wait,
maybe this is my own head, swinging sad and alone in space.
A
cloud moves.
Two
bear paws land on my shoulders, and a carnal tongue way up there
licks the eyes of God. I can't see anything more than my face in
the heavens. A dog tongue comes out, hotly, from a cloud...
Something
moves. A section of night crumbles away. Is this you, Woman?
Pity!
BLAISE
CENDRARS is celebrated in France and other countries of the world
for his exquisite corpus of poems, prose, radio plays, and more.
His Transsiberian Poetry and novels such as Dan Yack are famous
in the USA, thanks to Ron Pagett's translations. The poem translated
here is a work of preSurrealist verse originally published by Apollinaire
in 1914.
MARK
SPITZER kills gross swamp creatures in the Atchafalaya Basin and
translates French guys like Celine, Rimbaud, Cendrars, and Bataille.
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