Prayer before Sleep 28 March 1931 at Seven O’Clock in the Evening by Daniil Kharms

‘Lord, in broad daylight

apathy overcame me.

Allow me to lie down and fall asleep Lord,

and while I sleep fill me Lord

with your strength.

There is much I want to know,

but neither books nor people

will tell me this.

May You alone Lord enlighten me

by means of my verses.

Wake me strong for the battle with meaning,

swift in the arrangement of words

and zealous to praise the name of God

for ever and ever.

 

by Даниил Иванович Хармс (Daniil Ivanovich Kharms)

a.k.a. Даниил Иванович Ювачёв (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov)

(date unknown)

translated by Robert Chandler

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Concerning the chorus in Euripides by Osip Mandelstam

The shuffling elders: a shambles

of sheep, an abject throng!

I uncoil like a snake,

 

my heart an ancient ache

of dark Judaic wrong.

But it will not be long

 

before I shake off sadness,

like a boy, in the evening,

shaking sand from his sandals.

 

by Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам (Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam. His surname is commonly latinised as Mandelstam)

(1914)

translated by James Greene

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Fun facts: Euripides (Εὐριπίδης), c. 480 – c. 406 BC, was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom a significant number of plays have survived. There are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined —he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.

‘Not A Word Will I Utter…’ by Afanasy Fet

Not a word will I utter

of what I keep muttering to myself –

not for anything in the world.

 

Night flowers sleep all summer’s day

but leaves wake as sun sets behind a corpse –

and my heart starts to blossom.

 

And into my tired breast wafts a moist

breath of evening. Something flutters, is stirred.

But no, not a word.

 

by Афанасий Афанасьевич Фет (Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet)

a.k.a. Шеншин (Shenshin)

(1885)

translated by Robert Chandler

On The Ills Of Smoking by Daniil Kharms

You should quit smoking in order to boast of your will power.

It would be nice, not having smoked for a week and having acquired confidence in yourself that you will be able to hold back from smoking, to come into the company of Lipavsky, Oleinikov, and Zabolotsky, so that they would notice on their own that all evening you haven’t been smoking.

And when they ask, “Why aren’t you smoking?” you would answer, concealing the frightful boasting inside you, “I quit smoking.”

A great man must not smoke.

It is good and useful to employ the fault of boastfulness to rid yourself of the fault of smoking.

The love of wine, gluttony, and boastfulness are lesser faults than smoking.

A man who smokes is never at the height of his circumstance, and a smoking woman is capable of just about anything. And so, comrades, let us quit smoking.

 

by Даниил Иванович Хармс (Daniil Ivanovich Kharms)

a.k.a. Даниил Иванович Ювачёв (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov)

(1933)

translated by Matvei Yankelevich

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Fun facts: Lipavsky refers to Leonid Lipavsky, Oleinikov to Nikolay Oleynikov, and Zabolotsky to Nikolay Zabolotsky.

Zabolotsky was part of OBERIU (ОБэРИу) a short-lived avant-garde collective of Russian Futurist writers, musicians, and artists in the 1920s and 1930s. The group coalesced in the context of the “intense centralization of Soviet Culture” and the decline of the avant garde culture of Leningrad, as “leftist” groups were becoming increasingly marginalized.

Lipavsky and Oleynikov belonged to a later grouping, which had no public outlet, is generally called the “chinari” (i.e. “the titled ones”) group in Russian literary scholarship, though it is uncertain that they ever formalized a name for the group, nor that they called themselves “chinari” with any consistency. Thus, the names “OBERIU” and “chinari” are somewhat interchangeable in the scholarship. The borders between the two groups are (and were) permeable, and the only basic continuity is the presence of Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky.

Leaving Cardiff by Dannie Abse

I wait in the evening air.

Sea-birds drop down to the sea.

I prepare to sail from where

the docks’ derelictions are.

 

I stand on the deck and stare,

slack hammocks of waves below,

while black shapes upon the pier

make the furthest star seem near.

 

Now the funnel’s negations blow

and my eyes, like spaces, fill,

and the knots of water flow,

pump to my eyes and spill.

 

For what who would choose to go

when who sailing made no choice?

Not for one second, I know,

can I be the same man twice.

 

The straw coloured flames flare still,

spokes over the long horizon,

and the boats under the hill

of Penarth, unload and move on.

 

by Dannie Abse

from Tenants of the House (1957)

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Fun facts: This was written in 1957 and the former working docks, which by the time of the poem were ‘derelict’ and I myself recall in childhood walking through along the barrage, were redeveloped (‘gentrified’ wouldn’t be an understatement) in recent years into the Cardiff Bay area filled with bars, restaurants, the Wales Millennium Centre, the Senedd and BBC buildings amongst many other developments. Penarth is an affluent town, within walking distance along the coastline, south west of Cardiff .

Rhymney by Idris Davies

For Ceinfryn and Gwyn

 

When April came to Rhymney

With shower and sun and shower,

The green hills and the brown hills

Could sport some simple flower,

And sweet it was to fancy

That even the blackest mound

Was proud of its single daisy

Rooted in bitter ground.

 

And old men would remember

And young men would be vain,

And the hawthorn by the pithead

Would blossom in the rain,

And the drabbest streets of evening,

They had their magic hour,

When April came to Rhymney

With shower and sun and shower.

 

by Idris Davies

The Chapel by R. S. Thomas

A little aside from the main road,

becalmed in a last-century greyness,

there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal

to the tourist to stop his car

and visit it. The traffic goes by,

and the river goes by, and quick shadows

of clouds, too, and the chapel settles

a little deeper into the grass.

 

But here once on an evening like this,

in the darkness that was about

his hearers, a preacher caught fire

and burned steadily before them

with a strange light, so that they saw

the spendour of the barren mountains

about them and sang their amens

fiercely, narrow but saved

in a way that men are not now.

 

by R. S. Thomas

from Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)