Translation of masterpiece by Pablo Neruda: "Oda al Traje" (Ode to the Suit*).

Each morning you’re waiting
Suit, on a chair
For me to fill you
With my vanity, my love
My hope, my body
I just
Have gotten out of sleep
I say goodbye to the water
I enter into your sleeves
My legs look for
The hollowness of your legs
And so embraced
By your tireless faithfulness
I go out to walk in the grass
I enter into poetry
I look through windows
At things
Men, women,
Deeds and struggles
Keep forming me
Keep coming against me
Laboring with my hands
Opening my eyes
Using up my mouth
And so,
Suit,
I also keep forming you
Poking out your elbows
Snapping your threads
And so your life grows
Into the image of my live.
In the wind
You ripple and rustle
As if you were my soul.
In bad minutes
You stick
To my bones
Empty, through the night
Darkness, sleep
Populate with their fantasies
Your wings and mine.
I ask
If one day
A bullet
From the enemy
Might leave a spot of my blood on you
And then
You would die with me
Or maybe
It won’t all be
So dramatic
But simple
And you’ll just get feeble,
Suit,
Growing old
With me, with my body
And together
We will enter
The earth.
That’s why
Every day
I greet you
With reverence and then
You embrace me and I forget you
Because we are just one
And we’ll keep going on together
Against the wind, in the night
The streets, or the struggle
One single body
May be, may be, some time will be immobile.

*Many translations use Clothing for Traje, but the correct translation is Suit.

Cruz:  I've got mixed feelings about Pablo.  But good one.  Is that your translation, by the way?  I've got most of his verse in bilingual translations.  Also have his memoirs.


Bothhist:  good to see you back.  You've been hitting the books for your new profession I take it?

I love this one:

"La perfezione non esiste, esiste l’armonia dell’imperfetto, quella che solo noi napoletani riusciamo a creare."

Perfection does not exist, rather the harmony of imperfection, that only us Neapolitans are successful at creating.

Patrizio Cappelli, bespoke tie maker, Napoli.

Edit: sorry, lacking English spell check on foreign computer.

Last edited by Cruz Diez (2006-08-02 12:59:42)

Last edited by Marc Grayson (2006-08-06 16:09:52)

"A few days before leaving Los Angeles, as part of my program to assault the big town, I had purchased a new suit--the only one I owned.  Out there the suit had seemed completely right, but I had only to walk two blocks up Park Avenue and watch the men nod approvingly at each other's snug-shouldered splendor (New York is the only city in the country where I have noticed this peculiar effeminacy) to see that it was unequivocally wrong, nearly diastrous.  It was steel-gray--in the bright sun it had sheen--and California-cut, with those wide, dandified lapels that run all the way down to one's belly before a button can be detected; it had those monstrously padded shoulders, making my neck appear a lily shoot rising from a pile of papier-mache boulders.  Its effect was unalterably wrong, and I was walking along smarting somewhat from this sartorial deficiency when, as I say, I suddenly experienced something more provocatively wrong."

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley (1968)

Last edited by bosthist (2006-08-08 05:17:14)

"You notice these things on a gentleman - or I do. The way a suit fits exactly. You can never get that except by always having them made by the same tailor, someone who really knows your build. Not just how you stand but how you move, that's the trick. Especially across the shoulders. A very dark grey stripe and four buttons it was, under a cashmere overcoat. And his gloves; hardly anyone would wear yellow gloves in town now, and certainly not of that quality."

Mr Page meets Mr Clive on Jermyn Street one Saturday afternoon in the 1950's...



'Mr Clive & Mr Page'. Neil Bartlett. Serpent's Tail. 1996

M.

Last edited by Horace (2006-09-19 06:12:04)