A Landscape to Inhabit

Take This Waltz

Cohen describes his translation of Lorca's "Pequeno Vals Vienes" as a gift to the great poet, whose work changed Cohen's life as an adolescent. The translation itself is a gift too, a great work that allows me to inhabit Lorca's landscape with Leonard Cohen, through his eyes and in his company. The words, set to a waltz, dance me through my day.

Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's this tree where the doves love to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws

Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of a lily
In some hallway where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and death
Dragging its tail in the sea

There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There's this bar where the boys have stopped talking
They've been sentenced to death by the blues
But who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it's been dying for years

There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lilies of snow

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With its I'll never forget you, you know
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and death
Dragging its tail in the sea

And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Oh my love, oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It is yours now, it's all that there is

Leonard Cohen, translation of Frederico Garcia Lorca

"[A] translation I did of a very great poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet who touched me very deeply, a poet who provided a landscape which I could inhabit..."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l9j6s

 

Pequeno Vals Vienes

En Viena hay diez muchachas,
un hombro donde solloza la muerte
y un bosque de palomas disecadas.
Hay un fragmento de la mañana
en el museo de la escarcha.
Hay un salón con mil ventanas.

¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals con la boca cerrada.

Este vals, este vals, este vals, este vals,
de sí, de muerte y de coñac
que moja su cola en el mar.

Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero,
con la butaca y el libro muerto,
por el melancólico pasillo,
en el oscuro desván del lirio,
en nuestra cama de la luna
y en la danza que sueña la tortuga.

¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals de quebrada cintura.

En Viena hay cuatro espejos
donde juegan tu boca y los ecos.
Hay una muerte para piano
que pinta de azul a los muchachos.
Hay mendigos por los tejados,
hay frescas guirnaldas de llanto.

¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals que se muere en mis brazos.

Porque te quiero, te quiero, amor mío,
en el desván donde juegan los niños,
soñando viejas luces de Hungría
por los rumores de la tarde tibia,
viendo ovejas y lirios de nieve
por el silencio oscuro de tu frente.

¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals, este vals del "Te quiero siempre".

En Viena bailaré contigo
con un disfraz que tenga
cabeza de río.
¡Mira qué orillas tengo de jacintos!
Dejaré mi boca entre tus piernas,
mi alma en fotografías y azucenas,
y en las ondas oscuras de tu andar
quiero, amor mío, amor mío, dejar,
violín y sepulcro, las cintas del vals.


Frederico Garcia Lorca

Imperfect Offerings

Photo: Devdutt Shastri, our man in the Mission

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

From Anthem, Leonard Cohen.
 

Love's Burn

Aries Horoscope for week of March 1, 2012

 
At one point in his book The Divine Comedy, the Italian poet Dante is traveling through purgatory on his way to paradise. American poet T.S. Eliot describes the scene: "The people there were inside the flames expurgating their errors and sins. And there was one incident when Dante was talking to an unknown woman in her flame. As she answered Dante's questions, she had to step out of her flame to talk to him, until at last she was compelled to say to Dante, 'Would you please hurry up with your questions so I can get on with my burning?'" I bring this to your attention, Aries, because I love the way you've been expurgating your own errors and sins lately. Don't let anything interfere with your brilliant work. Keep burning till you're done. 
(Source: "A New Type of Intellectual: Contemplative Withdrawal and Four Quartets," by Kenneth P. Kramer.) 
Rob Brezsny, www.freewillastrology.com

Catharsis, Greek κάθαρσις   cleansing, purging

Cathexis,  Greek κάθεξις   holding, retention

Our urge to cathect with an other, one other, re-form the uterine, the maternal connection, both drives our search for "love" and undermines our understanding of what love is. (Or: my search, my understanding.)

I, you, she, we.

In the garden of mystic lovers

these are not true distinctions

Rumi 

Expurgating this visceral-emotional drive and learning of love: this has been my work. This, behind the "errors and sins" along the way that are neither costly nor deadly, that are par for each course, that hoist us from one level to another as we learn; this work is my Dantean paradise.

So to burn as catharsis. I burn my points of cathexis; the pain that attends this fire is an internal not eternal suffering. With promise of an end, the pain is that of becoming-released, of childbirth, of a phoenix renewal, not hell's slow infinite burn, the fearful unknown at death's pyre. 

It was deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and then she clearly understood
if he was fire, oh then she must be wood.
I saw her wince, I saw her cry,
I saw the glory in her eye.
Myself I long for love and light,
but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright? 

Leonard Cohen "Joan of Arc"