There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.
There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.
There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.
And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.
by R. S. Thomas
from The Bread of Truth (1963)
Tag: evening
One Man Fell Asleep by Daniil Kharms
One man fell asleep a believer but woke up an atheist.
Luckily, this man kept medical scales in his room, because he was in the habit of weighing himself every morning and every evening. And so, going to sleep the night before, he had weighed himself and had found out he weighed four poods and 21 pounds. But the following morning, waking up an atheist, he weighed himself again and found out that now he weighed only four poods thirteen pounds. “Therefore,” he concluded, “my faith weighed approximately eight pounds.”
by Даниил Иванович Хармс (Daniil Ivanovich Kharms)
a.k.a. Даниил Иванович Ювачёв (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov)
(1936-37)
translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
Evening by R. S. Thomas
The archer with time
as his arrow – has he broken
his strings that the rainbow
is so quiet over our village?
Let us stand, then in the interval
of our wounding, till the silence
turn golden and love is
a moment eternally overflowing.
by R. S. Thomas
from No Truce With the Furies (1995)
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
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
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
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.
