We

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937)
RECORD ONE

An Announcement
The Wisest of Lines
A Poem

            This is merely a copy, word by word, of what was published this morning in the State newspaper:

            “In another hundred and twenty days the building of the Integral will be completed. The great historic hour is near, when the first Integral will rise into the limitless space of the universe. A thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the United States. A still more glorious task is before you, – the integration of the indefinite equation of the Cosmos by the use of the glass, electric, fire breathing Integral. Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words.

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Departure

Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864–1931)

The black woods murmur
like psalm singing around the leaning cross of the fathers,
and dull as a watchful bumblebee
behind the ridges fades the Avesta rapids.
Than the wind chimes creak at the mine,
and the hammers peck at the iron of the furnaces,
but the spov sleeps on the tuft,
and the ducks rest on resting ponds.

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Alice Munro

Alice Munro

…

“I made sure I had got to the edge of the stone. That was all the name there was – Meda. So, it was true that she was called by that name in the family. Not just in the poem. Or perhaps she chose her name from the poem, to be written on her stone.

I thought that there wasn’t anybody alive in the world but me who would know this, who would make the connection. And I would be the last person to do so. But perhaps this isn’t so. People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilms, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”

…

Ghazal

Zeb Ghauri (1928–1985)

All outlines are lost, all sights, all landscapes and me
They’re one again – the sky, sea, shore, and me

A secret word being a mirror to the heart
A haze spread from scene to scene, and me

As the maiden wind teases when it passes on
But silent for so long are the deep sea, and me

How well known they are to each other, Zeb!
Those coconut trees, these stones on shore, and me

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Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
Faust, First Part

“You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.”

The Pit

Ivan Goran Kovacic (1913–1943)

BLOOD is my daylight, and darkness too.               
Blessing of night has been gouged from my cheeks                   
Bearing with it my more lucky sight.               
Within those holes, for tears, fierce fire inflamed                     
The bleeding socket as if for brain a balm –               
While my bright eyes died on my own palm.               

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