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| Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 27 June 2023 |
I was never a friend of poetry. In the late 50s at my Austin, Texas boarding school, St. Edward’s High School, I could never earn extra points in my English classes as the idea was to memorize a poem. My memory was suspect for this sort of thing. I hated poetry.
Then in my 11th grade we listened to James Mason, on a record, reading Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee. That may have been the jolt I needed.
Further jolts came from the poems that my mother wrote. A few were dedicated to me.
Una mujer para amarte - Filomena de Irureta Goyena Hayward
But my ignorance of poetry persisted. In 1967, when I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy, I disobeyed vocally to an Argentine Lieutenant Commander. He told me he could have shot me in time of war or could send me to the Argentine Antarctic where the only women would be female penguins. He told me he was going to put me into the navy brig for a week but would do me the favour of allowing me to go to a bookstore to buy some books, “You are going to need them.” I went to the Librería Pigmalion which sold books in English. While there I noticed a well-dressed older man who seemed to be almost blind. In my complete ignorance it was only months later I figured out that the man was Jorge Luís Borges.
I have made progress for all that lost time as I read at least one poem or story by Borges every night. There is something about this poet that causes in me a deep feeling of nostalgia for the country where I was born.
When I started blogging in 2006 I found that mating my photographs with poems was a good pastime. Now all these years later I know most of the poems of Emily Dickinson, Jorge Luís Borges, Alfonsina Storni, William Carlos Williams, the sonnets of Shakespeare, Julio Cortázar, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost and (yes!) Ogden Nash.
It seems that few in this century understand that the first photograph to appear in a newspaper in the mid-1870s, using the brand new halftone process, was a photograph of the Steinway Building in NY. From that point on photographs and copy became dependent on each other. Photographs, more often than not need context.
For me it is fun to look at one of my photographs and then to search for the proper poem to illustrate it.
Today 27 June 2023 I scanned four Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’ and I knew that there were few poems that to me adequately go well with red roses. Inevitably it is one of my most favourite Borges poems, La Lluvia or The Rain. While I will insert a translation into English, the expression, “el curioso color del colorado,” somehow does not translate all that well to, “the curious colour of colorado” as in English we only use the word red but in Spanish colorado and rojo are synonymous.
La Lluvia - Jorge Luís Borges
Bruscamente la tarde se ha aclarado
porque ya cae la lluvia minuciosa.
Cae o cayó. La lluvia es una cosa
que sin duda sucede en el pasado.
Quien la oye caer ha recobrado
el tiempo en que la suerte venturosa
le reveló una flor llamada rosa
y el curioso color del colorado.
Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales
alegrará en perdidos arrabales
las negras uvas de una parra en cierto
patio que ya no existe. La mojada
tarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada,
de mi padre que vuelve y que no ha muerto.
The Rain :: J. L. Borges
The afternoon grows light because at last
Abruptly a minutely shredded rain
Is falling, or it fell. For once again
Rain is something happening in the past.
Whoever hears it fall has brought to mind
Time when by a sudden lucky chance
A flower called “rose” was open to his glance
And the curious color of the colored kind.
This rain that blinds the windows with its mists
Will gladden in suburbs no more to be found
The black grapes on a vine there overhead
In a certain patio that no longer exists.
And the drenched afternoon brings back the sound
How longed for, of my father’s voice, not dead.
[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]
