Lady Gregory, la Penèlope de Kiltartan. Padraic Fallon

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My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

W.B. Yeats
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
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Kiltartan Legend

Penelope pulls home
Rogue-lord, artist, world wanderer,
Simply by sitting in a house,
Its sturdy genius;
Of all sirens the most dangerous.

She’ll sit them out,
The curious wonders, the ventriloquial voices,
Spacious landfalls, the women, beds in the blue;
Her oceanography
The garden pond, her compass a knitting needle.

The arc-lamped earth, she knows,
Will burn away and she
Still potter among her flowers waiting for him;
Apollo runs before
Touching the blossoms, her unborn sons.

Knitting, unknitting at the half-heard
Music of her tapestry, afraid
Of the sunburned body, the organs, the red beard
Of the unshipped mighty male
Home from the fairy tale;

Providing for him
All that’s left of her she ties and knots
Threads everywhere; the luminous house
Must hold and will
Her trying warlord home.

Will she know him?
Dignity begs the question that must follow.
She bends to the web where her lord’s face
Glitters but has no fellow
And humbly, or most royally, adds her own.

Padraic Fallon (1905 – 1974)

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Padraic Fallon
‘A Look in the Mirror’ and other poems

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Fallon became a Civil Servant who made his literary reputation as a contributor to Seumas O’Sullivan’s Dublin Magazine in the 1930s. He was encouraged by AE (George Russell), met Yeats, and was a valued friend of Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins and Patrick MacDonogh. His radio plays were broadcast by Radio Eireann and the BBC, and his stage plays produced in Cork and Dublin. These achievements would suggest a successful career as a man of letters but for one crucial blank: Fallon did not publish in book form until several months before his death in 1974, when his Collected Poems appeared from Dolmen Press. A further Collected appeared in 1990, some three-quarters of which (excluding juvenilia and some translations) are represented in “A Look in the Mirror” and Other Poems.

The problematic side of Yeats’s influence is seen most clearly in early, set piece poems such as “Yeats’s Tower at Ballylee” and “Poem for My Mother”. In both, Fallon echoes the elegant stanzaic patternings of the poems from The Tower, and meditates on family history and inheritance, mythology and topographical lore. Yet when we read of how a Norman settler “Divined like an architect a house of life / Where violence had an energetic place / Only to find a holy face / Stare back serenely from the end of strife”, the suspicion must be that strife has ended only because the poet has accepted the older poet’s vocabulary and mannerisms with an almost abject passivity.

At this point, a reader new to him may fear the worst, but Fallon comes to a reckoning with his Yeatsian inheritance with impressive speed. “Another emblem there”, Yeats announced in “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”, but Fallon backs off from such imperious transformations of the given world. If the “ornamental water” of Johnstown Castle “Should be backed with mercury that the sculptured swan / May be ideal swan forever”, the poet prefers to shatter the ornamental mirror, “Because a real swan mucks up a lake”; and that, he implies, is as it should be. His adoption of a polished but easygoing classical register becomes an important resource: celebration and civilized scepticism combine in Horatian measures. In “Kiltartan Legend”, Fallon portrays Lady Gregory as an Anglo- Irish Penelope pulling her “Rogue-lord, artist, world-wanderer” home “Simply by sitting in a house, / Its sturdy genius”; less flatteringly, in “On the Tower Stairs”, she becomes “A dumpy vernacular Victoria”.

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David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement, 8th July 2005

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Padraic Fallon

‘A Look in the Mirror’ and other poems

Carcanet Press Ltd. Manchester, 2003

ISBN: 9781857546422

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Maud Gonne no tenia una altra Troia per cremar; «No second Troy», de Yeats

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Maud Gonne

NO SECOND TROY
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Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
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W. B. Yeats

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NO HI HA UNA SEGONA TROIA
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Com blasmar-la d’haver-me omplert els anys
d’afliccions, o d’haver, últimament,
llançat els carrerons contra els palaus
o ensenyat els vulgars a ser violents,
si almenys llur valor fos com llur anhel?
Què hauria pogut temperar-la si té
una ment noble i simple com el foc
i una bellesa com un arc tensat,
no natural en un temps com aquest,
tan solitària, alterosa i tenaç?
Què hauria pogut fer, essent com és?
Hi havia cap més Troia, per cremar?
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Traducció de Josep M. Jaumà

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Irlanda indòmita
150 poemes de W. B. Yeats
Traducció de Josep M. Jaumà

1984 poesia, 14
Edicions de 1984
Barcelona, novembre de 2015
ISBN: 978-84-15835-70-7

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Borges: «The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes…»; i Rossetti, i Yeats, …

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Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,

The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes,

The tulk that the trammes of tresoun there wrought

Was tried for his tricherie, the trewest on erthe.

Hit was Ennias the athel and his highe kynde

That sithen depreced provinces, and patrounes bicome

Welneghe of al the wele in the West Iles :

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Gawain and the Grene Knight

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Once the siege and assault of Troy had ceased,

with the city a smoke-heap of cinders and ash,

the traitor who contrived such betrayal there

was tried for his treachery, the truest on earth;

so Aeneas, it was, with his noble warriors

went conquering abroad, laying claim to the crowns 

of the wealthiest kingdoms in the western world.

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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Traducció en vers de Simon Armitage

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Los cuatro ciclos

J. L. Borges, “Los cuatro ciclos” [1972].

 

Cuatro son las historias. Una, la más antigua, es la de una fuerte ciudad que cercan y defienden hombres valientes. Los defensores saben que la ciudad será entregada al hierro y al fuego y que su batalla es inútil; el más famoso de los agresores, Aquiles, sabe que su destino es morir antes de la victoria. Los siglos fueron agregando elementos de magia. Se dijo que Helena de Troya, por la cual los ejércitos murieron, era una hermosa nube, una sombra; se dijo que el gran caballo hueco en el que se ocultaron los griegos era también una apariencia. Homero no habrá sido el primer poeta que refirió la fábula; alguien, en el siglo catorce, dejó esta línea que anda por mi memoria: The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes. Dante Gabriel Rossetti imaginaría que la suerte de Troya quedó sellada en aquel instante en que Paris arde en amor de Helena; Yeats elegirá el instante en que se confunden Leda y el cisne que era un dios.

Otra, que se vincula a la primera, es la de un regreso. El de Ulises, que, al cabo de diez años de errar por mares peligrosos y de demorarse en islas de encantamiento, vuelve a su Ítaca; el de las divinidades del Norte que, una vez destruida la tierra, la ven surgir del mar, verde y lúcida, y hallan perdidas en el césped las piezas de ajedrez con que antes jugaron.

La tercera historia es la de una busca. Podemos ver en ella una variación de la forma anterior. Jasón y el Vellocino; los treinta pájaros del persa, que cruzan montañas y mares y ven la cara de su Dios, el Simurgh, que es cada uno de ellos y todos. En el pasado toda empresa era venturosa. Alguien robaba, al fin, las prohibidas manzanas de oro; alguien, al fin, merecía la conquista del Grial. Ahora, la busca está condenada al fracaso. El capitán Ahab da con la ballena y la ballena lo deshace; los héroes de James o de Kafka sólo pueden esperar la derrota. Somos tan pobres de valor y de fe que ya el happy-ending no es otra cosa que un halago industrial. No podemos creer en el cielo, pero sí en el infierno.

La última historia es la del sacrificio de un dios. Attis, en Frigia, se mutila y se mata; Odín, sacrificando a Odín, Él mismo a Sí Mismo, pende del árbol nueve noches enteras y es herido de lanza; Cristo es crucificado por los romanos.

Cuatro son las historias. Durante el tiempo que nos queda seguiremos narrándolas, transformándolas.

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‘Helen of Troy’. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Oil on panel. 1863

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Leda and the Swan

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A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
………………………………………Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

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W.B. Yeats
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Un cop sobtat: les grans ales agitant-se
sobre la tremolosa noia, les cuixes acaronades
per les fosques palmes, el seu clatell atrapat pel bec,
el seu pit desemparat premut contra el d’ell.
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¿Com allunyar aquesta glòria emplomallada de les seves cuixes,
que ja s’afluixen, amb aquests dits dèbils i aterrits?
¿I com pot el cos, pres per aquesta blanca empenta,
no sentir contra seu el batec estrany d’aquest cor?
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Un tremolor en les entranyes hi dóna a llum
la muralla afonada, el teulat i la torre en flames,
i Agamèmnon mort.
……………………………..Així presa,
així dominada per la sang salvatge de l’aire,
¿va rebre d’ell, per la seva força, el seu saber,
abans que el bec indiferent la deixés anar?

 

 

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