Carissima In Deliciis: November 2008

¡Qué hermosa y qué encantadora eres, amor mío, con todos tus encantos!

Published Tuesday, November 11, 2008 by O. Elias Lira.

I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf

The sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup

Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
A newer Sèvres pleases,
Old ones crack.

I could not die with you,
For one must wait
To shut the other's gaze down —
You could not.

And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
Without my right of frost,
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise with you,
Because your face
Would put out Jesus',
That new grace

Glow plain and foreign
On my homesick eye,
Except that you, than he
Shone closer by.

They'd judge us — how?
For you served heaven, you know,
Or sought to;
I could not,

Because you saturated sight,
And I had no more eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise.

And were you lost, I would be,
Though my name
Rang loudest
On the heavenly fame.

And were you saved,
And I condemned to be
Where you were not,
That self were hell to me.

So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!

["I cannot live with you", Emily Dickinson - Poems, Mabel L. Todd and T.W. Higginson, eds., 1890, and Poems, T.W. Higginson and Mabel L. Todd, eds., 2nd series, 1891.]

Published by O. Elias Lira.

[...]
Je me dis : dans trois jours
tu auras sept ans.
Je me le disais pour arrêter
la sensation de tomber hors
du monde tournant et rond
dans l’espace froid, bleu-noir.
Mais je sentis : tu es un je,
tu es une Elizabeth,
tu es l’une d’entre eux.
Pourquoi faut-il que tu sois l’une d’eux ?
A peine si j’osais regarder
et voir ce que c'était que j’étais
[...]
Je sus que rien de plus étrange
n’avait jamais eu lieu, que rien
de plus étrange n’aurait jamais lieu
[...]

(Elizabeth Bishop, Dans la salle d’attente, in Géographie III, traduction de Claude Mouchard , Linda Orr et Alix Cléo, Roubaud, Circé, 1991, p. 19.)