De Engelse dichter en schrijver Ted Hughes werd geboren op 17 augustus 1930 in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire. Zie ook alle tags voor Ted Hughes op dit blog.
Pike
Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads –
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds
The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.
Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them –
Suddenly there were two. Finally one
With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two foot long.
High and dry in the willow-herb –
One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks –
The same iron in his eye
Though its film shrank in death.
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them –
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
Night-Ride on Ariel
Your moon was full of women.
Your moon-mother there, over your bed.
The Tyrolean, the guttural,
Mourning and remaking herself.
It was always Monday in her mind.
Prouty was there, tender and buoyant moon,
Whose wand of beams so dainty
Put the costly sparkle
Into Cinderella. Beutscher
Moon of dismemberment and resurrection
Who found enough parts on the floor of her shop
To fill your old skin and get you walking
Into Tuesday. Mary Ellen Chase,
Silver nimbus lit, egg eyes hooded,
The moon-owl who found you
Even in England, and plucked you out of my nest
And carried you back to collage,
Dragging you all the way, your toes trailing
In the Atlantic.
Phases
Of your dismal-headed
Fairy godmother moon. Mother
Making you dance with her magnetic eye
On your daddy’s coffin
(There in the family film). Prouty
Wafting you to the ballroom of broken glass
On bleeding feet. Beutscher
Twanging the puppet strings
That waltzed you in air out of your mythical grave
To jig with your Daddy’s bones on a kind of tightrope
Over the gap of your real grave.
Mary Ellen Moon of Massachusetts
Struck you with her chiming claw
And turned you into an hourglass of moonlight
With its menstrual wound
Of shadow sand. She propped you,
On her lectern,
Lecture-timer.
White-faced bolts
Of electrocuting moonlight-
Masks of the full or over-full or empty
Moon that tipped your heart
Upside down and drained it. As you flew
They jammed all your wavelengths
With their criss-cross instructions,
Crackling and dragging their blacks
Over your failing flight,
Hauling your head this way and that way
As you clung to the sun – to the last
Shred of the exploded dawn
In your fist-
That Monday.
Kraai strijkt neer
Kraai zag de kudde bergen, stomend in de ochtend.
En hij zag de zee
Donkergerugd, met heel de aarde in zijn lussen.
Hij zag de sterren, het zwart in dampend, zwammen van
het nietswoud, hun sporen maskerend, het virus van
God.
En hij rilde bij de gruwel van de Schepping.
In de hallucinaties van de gruwel
Zag hij die schoen, zonder zool, verregend,
Die op een heide lag.
En er was die vuilnisbak, bodem weggeroest,
Een speelplaats voor de wind, in een woestenij van poelen.
Er was die jas, in de donkere kast, in de stille kamer,
in het stille huis.
Er was dat gezicht, dat een sigaret rookte tussen het schemerend
raam en de sintels van het vuur.
Bij het gezicht, die hand, bewegingloos.
Bij die hand, die beker.
Kraai knipperde. Hij knipperde. Niets vervaagde.
Hij staarde naar het bewijs.
Niets ontsnapte hem.(Niets kon ontsnappen.)
Vertaald door Daan Doesborgh
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 17e augustus ook mijn blog van 17 augustus 2021 en ook mijn blog van 17 augustus 2019 en ook mijn blog van 17 augustus 2016 en ook mijn blog van 17 augustus 2014 deel 2.