כמה שלא

שיר של המשורר האמריקאי סריקָנת' רֶדי, מספרו הראשון שנקרא "מידע למבקרים" (Facts for Visitors). השיר קשה לתרגום. הרבה דברים הולכים לאיבוד, אבל בכך גם עוסק השיר, ובדיוק לכן הוא מזמין נסיונות תרגום  שנדונו מראש לכשלון. הנה אחד הנסיונות שלי, ואחריו משהו שכתבתי על השיר באנגלית. 

A poem by Srikanth Reddy, from Facts for Visitors, his first book. The poem is difficult to translate. A lot gets lost, but this is part of the thematics of the poem, and why it invites repeated attempts at translation, predestined to fail. Here is one of my attempts, followed by a little something I wrote about the poem.

Shira Stav, The other one (2014)

מָלון עֶרש / סְריקָנת' רֶדי

כמה שלא דופקים   

על הים הים 

רק משיב גלים. לָרִיק

נכנסים שוב ושוב אל הים

הים עדיין אומר

שאף אחד לא בבית. עלייך לעזוב 

אורסולה יקרה. בעודי כותב,

הם מבריקים את הנברשת

הגדולה. כל מנסרה

שקיעה מופשטת

או ביז'וּ פוֹאַיֵיה

תלוי איפה עומדים. 

הם מפרקים אותה כל סתיו

וקוראים לזה ניקיון אביב. 

הם מגישים לי תה.

הם שואלים אותי לשמי

ואני אומר להם אורסולה,

אני לא יודע אפילו

איך להתגעגע למי שעזבת.   

Hotel Lullaby / Srikanth Reddy

No matter how often you knock

on the ocean the ocean

just waves. No matter

how often you enter the ocean

the ocean still says 

no one's home. You must leave

her dear Ursula. As I write this

they polish the big

chandelier. Every prism

a sunset in abstract

or bijou foyer

depending on where you stand. 

They take it apart every Fall

and call it Spring cleaning. 

They bring me my tea. 

They ask me my name

& I tell them Ursula, 

I don't even know 

how to miss who you left. 

* 

This poem, the third in Reddy’s debut, Facts for Visitors, takes the form of a letter, written from a hotel and addressed to Ursula. It begins with an image of grief, the speaking (or writing) subject’s insistent but fruitless attempts to solicit a response from, or retrieve, a lost beloved from the ocean construed as a house. The lost beloved is likely Ursula, the ocean perhaps a formerly shared home, perhaps a marine Hades. The letter is written from the hotel in which the speaker sojourns having aborted these attempts.

The poem itself is structured like a hotel, nine (identical) rooms — stanzas (or, in Hebrew, houses) — and a bottom line. In these rooms, the sentences of the poem are only guests. Mostly, they pass through them. No room manages to host a full sentence. In one case, a kind of public space, a hotel lobby, hosts more than one sentence (“they bring me my tea. \\ They ask me my name”). Hotel fact for visitors: no one’s home.

In some cases, traces left in a room by guest sentences that have checked in and out reveal simultaneously the transient ephemerality of hotel reality and the phenomenology of longing: “Just waves. No matter”.

There is one exception. Room #7 (or #4, depending on where you stand) does house a full sentence, but one describing the impersonal hotel staff (they) performing periodic hotel maintenance, the operation of polishing “the big chandelier”. This cyclical operation is one of disguise: “They take it apart every Fall // & call it Spring cleaning”. This disguise is essential to the operational logic of a hotel, which presents a heavily used space constructed for no one in particular, and in which no one really lives, as an always fresh, personal space constructed for you as a home away from home. (Throughout the poem, the anaphoric reference of the pronoun you is never unambiguously resolved).

I cannot resist reading this stanza as an allusion to Hopkins’ Spring and Fall, the taking apart of the chandelier paralleling the “unleaving” of the “Golden Grove” of that poem. Hopkins’ speaker laments our cosmologically ordained “blight” — the inevitable process in which our ability to empathize and grieve the mortality and demise of individuals transforms into mundane, generalizing apathy. The disguising operation performed by the hotel staff is then meant to conceal this process, to dress Fall as Spring, emotional erosion as rejuvenation.

In his essay on the hotel lobby, Sigfried Kracauer describes it as the inverse image of the house of God:

“In the house of God, which presupposes an already extant community, the congregation accomplishes the task of making connections. Once the members of the congregation have abandoned the relation on which the place is founded, the house of God retains only a decorative significance … The typical characteristics of the hotel lobby ... indicate that it is conceived as the inverted image of the house of God.  It is a negative church, and can be transformed into a church so long as one observes the conditions that govern the different spheres. In both places people appear there as guests. But whereas the house of God is dedicated to the service of the one whom people have gone there to encounter, the hotel lobby accommodates all who go there to meet no one.”[1]  

Having failed to meet the one he longs to encounter, the lost Ursula, the poem’s speaking subject enters the hotel, qua negative church, to meet no one. As he encounters the chandelier, it diverts his grief, and his attention. The poem itself here is diverted, changing topics from the content of the letter, to the maintenance of the chandelier and the visual tricks of its prisms. But the diversion provided by the chandelier seems self-referential, the semblances of the prisms internal to the fabricated reality of the hotel: a “bijou foyer” and a “sunset in abstract”.

Looking back at the second stanza through this sunset-abstracting prism, one imagines seeing there an eroticized image of the setting sun and the ocean. “No matter \\ how often you enter the ocean \\ the ocean still says: no one’s home”. Through the chandelier, the desolation of this estranged love scene between sun and ocean becomes an abstract, perhaps mass produced, decoration.

If the hotel brings diversion, relief and sleep — a lullaby — this comes with the loss, not only of the object of longing, but of the capacity to long, and, gradually, of the memory of the once vital longing self. The poem ends in a Kracauerian hotel condition of apathetic anonymity:  “I don’t even know // how to miss who you left”.

---

[1] (Kracauer, Siegfried. "The hotel lobby." In "The mass ornament: Weimar essays.[Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin.]." (1995) p.175)