During summer teaching opportunities a dozen or more years ago in Deva, Romania I met Doru Radu who taught English there -- and our mutual love of poetry led us to collaborate on English translations of work by Romanian poets George Bacovia and Ileana Malancioiu. Now Doru is in Poland and he is translating Polish poetry into Romanian. One of his favorite poets is Ewa Lipska -- a poet I have met via Poetry International. Below is her poem "Newton's Orange: Infinity" -- found at Poetry International together with the original Polish poem.
As I have noted before, "infinity" is a term whose varied uses fascinate me. Sometimes I wonder how much of my "mathematical" understanding of the concept I might some day incorporate into a poem.
Newton's Orange: Infinity by Ewa Lipska
They already were.
They fight a losing battle of dates.
Blurred. Surly clouds in the background.
In the Theater Hollywood
a train of abandoned chairs whistles.
The remains of films
still breathe through the screen’s lips.
“But Venice means happiness’s burial
ground to me so much that I don’t feel up
to returning”—wrote Marcel Proust.
We just are.
In love’s globalization
we succumb to sensuous market forces.
Speculative fireworks.
The corrupt bed linens of Shakespeare
in the national theater.
A city of muscular stadiums
sticks to us.
A pirated copy of welfare.
A wilted rose’s penitence
doesn’t tell us anything yet.
Arrhythmia of infinity.
Gigabytes of memory.
At dawn
a bigoted breeze shivers.
Norton antivirus software
scans our lungs.
All around
the broken glass of frost.
You are yet to be.
On a balcony a woman
a cloud resembling a kiss.
New Year’s Eve night is trembling.
The twenty-second century.
The twenty-third century.
The twenty-fourth century.
We are connected by
a dye works of sunrises and sunsets.
A polishing shop of magic, words and fire.
They divide us forever.
Found here at Poetry International, this translation of Lipska's poem is by Robin Davidson and Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska.
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