Уистан Оден - Стихи и эссе

• Название: Стихи и эссе
• Автор: Уистан Оден
• Жанр: Публицистика

УИСТЕН ХЬЮ ОДЕН (WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN; 1907–1973) — англо-американский поэт, драматург, публицист, критик. С 1939 года жил в США. Лауреат Пулицеровской и других литературных премий. Автор многих поэтических сборников, среди которых «Танец смерти» («The Dance of Death», 1933), «Гляди, незнакомец!» («Look, Stranger!», 1936), «Испания» («Spain», 1937), «Век тревоги» («The Age of Anxiety», 1947), «Щит Ахилла» («The Shield of Achilles», 1955), «Избранные стихи» («Collected Shorter Poems», 1968).

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1962

The Common Life

(for Chester Kallman)

     A living-room, the catholic area you
     (Thou, rather) and I may enter
     without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts
     each visitor with a style,

     a secular faith: he compares its dogmas
     with his, and decides whether
     he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms
     where nothing's left lying about

     chill me, so do cups used for ash-trays or smeared
     with lip-stick: the homes I warm to,
     though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling
     of bills being promptly settled

     with cheques that don't bounce.) There's no We at an instant,
     only Thou and I, two regions
     of protestant being which nowhere overlap:
     a room is too small, therefore,

     if its occupants cannot forget at will
     that they are not alone, too big
     if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel
     for raising their voices. What,

     quizzing ours, would Sherlock Holmes infer? Plainly,
     ours is a sitting culture
     in a generation which prefers comfort
     (or is forced to prefer it)

     to command, would rather incline its buttocks
     on a well-upholstered chair
     than the burly back of a slave: a quick glance
     at book-titles would tell him

     that we belong to the clerisy and spend much
     on our food. But could he read
     what our prayers and jokes are about, what creatures
     frighten us most, or what names

     head our roll-call of persons we would least like
     to go to bed with? What draws
     singular lives together in the first place,
     loneliness, lust, ambition,

     or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop
     or murder one another
     clear enough: how they create, though, a common world
     between them, like Bombelli's

     impossible yet useful numbers, no one
     has yet explained. Still, they do
     manage to forgive impossible behavior,
     to endure by some miracle

     conversational tics and larval habits
     without wincing (were you to die,
     I should miss yours). It's a wonder that neither
     has been butchered by accident,

     or, as lots have, silently vanished into
     History's criminal noise
     unmourned for, but that, after twenty-four years,
     we should sit here in Austria

     as cater-cousins, under the glassy look
     of a Naples Bambino,
     the portrayed regards of Strauss and Stravinsky,
     doing British cross-word puzzles,

     is very odd indeed. I'm glad the builder gave
     our common-room small windows
     through which no observed outsider can observe us:
     every home should be a fortress,

     equipped with all the very latest engines
     for keeping Nature at bay,
     versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling
     the Dark Lord and his hungry

     animivorous chimaeras. (Any brute
     can buy a machine in a shop,
     but the sacred spells are secret to the kind,
     and if power is what we wish

     they won't work.) The ogre will come in any case:
     so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit,
     fasting or feasting, we both know this: without
     the Spirit we die, but life

     without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
     and always, though truth and love
     can never really differ, when they seem to,
     the subaltern should be truth.

1963

August 1968

        The Ogre does what ogres can,
        Deeds quite impossible for Man,
        But one prize is beyond his reach,
        The Ogre cannot master Speech.
        About a subjugated plain,
        Among its desperate and slain,
        The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
        While drivel gushes from his lips.

* 1968 *

Moon Landing

     It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for
     so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
        it would not have occurred to women
        to think worth while, made possible only

     because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
     the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
        hurrah the deed, although the motives
        that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.

     A grand gesture. But what does it period?
     What does it osse? We were always adroiter
        with objects than lives, and more facile
        at courage than kindness: from the moment

     the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
     a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's,
        still don't fit us exactly, modern
        only in this-our lack of decorum.

     Homer's heroes were certainly no braver
     than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
        was excused the insult of having
        his valor covered by television.

     Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
     Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
        and was not charmed: give me a watered
        lively garden, remote from blatherers

     about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
     on August mornings I can count the morning
        glories where to die has a meaning,
        and no engine can shift my perspective.

     Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
     as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
        Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
        still visits my Austrian several

     with His old detachment, and the old warnings
     still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
        an ugly finish, Irreverence
        is a greater oaf than Superstition.

     Our apparatniks will continue making
     the usual squalid mess called History:
        all we can pray for is that artists,
        chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

1969

River Profile

Our body is a moulded river

NOVALIS

     Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering
     head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an
     up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll country,
     deadly to breathers,

     it whelms into our picture below the melt-line,
     where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell,
     wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner's-lamp country,
     already at ease with

     the mien and gestures that become its kindness,
     in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable,
     flows as it should through any declining country
     in probing spirals.

     Soon of a size to be named and the cause of
     dirty in-fighting among rival agencies,
     down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country,
     it plunges ram-stam,

     to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer
     strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven,
     robber-baron, tow-rope, portage-way country,
     nightmare of merchants.

     Disemboguing from foothills, now in hushed meanders,
     now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile
     plain, well-entered, chateau-and-cider-press country,
     its regal progress

     gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,
     then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder
     retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country,
     it changes color.

     Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete,
     now it bisects a polyglot metropolis,
     ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country,
     à-la-mode always.

     Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases,
     turbid with pulverised wastemantle, on through
     flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country
     it scours, approaching

     the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,
     disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,
     punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,
     wearies to its final

     act of surrender, effacement, atonement
     in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled
     attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,
     image of death as

     a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely
     monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
     too, even as water, the selfless mother
     of all especials.

1966

A New Year Greeting

After an article by Mary J. Marples

in Scientific American, January, 1969

     On this day tradition allots
        to taking stock of our lives,
     my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,
        Bacteria, Viruses,
     Aerobics and Anaerobics:
        A Very Happy New Year
     to all for whom my ectoderm
        is as Middle-Earth to me.

     For creatures your size I offer
        a free choice of habitat,
     so settle yourselves in the zone
        that suits you best, in the pools
     of my pores or the tropical
        forests of arm-pit and crotch,
     in the deserts of my fore-arms,
        or the cool woods of my scalp.

     Build colonies: I will supply
        adequate warmth and moisture,
     the sebum and lipids you need,
        on condition you never
     do me annoy with your presence,
        but behave as good guests should,
     not rioting into acne
        or athlete's-foot or a boil.

     Does my inner weather affect
        the surfaces where you live?
     Do unpredictable changes
        record my rocketing plunge
     from fairs when the mind is in tift
        and relevant thoughts occur
     to fouls when nothing will happen
        and no one calls and it rains.

     I should like to think that I make
        a not impossible world,
     but an Eden it cannot be:
        my games, my purposive acts,
     may turn to catastrophes there.
        If you were religious folk,
     how would your dramas justify
        unmerited suffering?

     By what myths would your priests account
        for the hurricanes that come
     twice every twenty-four hours,
        each time I dress or undress,
     when, clinging to keratin rafts,
        whole cities are swept away
     to perish in space, or the Flood
        that scalds to death when I bathe?

     Then, sooner or later, will dawn
        a Day of Apocalypse,
     when my mantle suddenly turns
        too cold, too rancid, for you,
     appetising to predators
        of a fiercer sort, and I
     am stripped of excuse and nimbus,
        a Past, subject to Judgement.

1969