XII from Butterfly Valley
My ears still answer with their deafened tone,
as do my eyes, an introverted glance,
and while my heart knows full well I’m no one,
it answers—that familiar little dance.
I see myself in frost and fallen leaves,
shuffling amid November’s scrub of oak,
where reflections of streaming moonlit sheaves
are piercing like sunbeams through night’s dark cloak.
I spy myself mirrored in this pupae wood,
where merciless release screams loud as need
in the glint-spackled halls of their last brood,
and, in the naked glass, I find what lies
in that lost look is much more than dead.
It’s death itself as seen with one’s own eyes.
—Inger Christensen
(translated from the Danish by Mark Olival)
XII fra Sommerfugledalen
Mit øre svarer med sin døve ringen,
mit øje med sit indadvendte blik,
mit hjerte ved, at jeg er ikke ingen,
men svarer med det kendte lille stik.
Jeg spejler mig i frost- og løvfaldsmåler
en aften i novembers egekrat,
de reflekterer månelysets stråler
og leger solskin i den mørke nat.
Jeg spejler mig i deres puppedvale,
hvorfra de nådesløst befries, når nøden
er størst i kuldens spejbelagte sale,
og det jeg ser ved selvsyn, spejlets nøgne,
fortabte blik, er ikke bare døden,
det er døden som med egne øjne.
—Inger Christensen
Translator’s Notes
Kailua, Revised
Because no scene is set in black and white
(in the truest sense), I trace the beaches
of Oahu’s southeastern shore: Each is,
in its way, a hued process—a honed fight
of turquoise and dun; a fondant sea meets
the saline granules of sharp coral cards,
which are a kind of not-quite-white, mere shards
that once were and are now naught. Memory eats
this up like a sponge. (The simile veils
the hunger of the trope.) Color does bleed
into a mud of whorls, misted motes borne
falling fell-fast into the whole shopworn
gamut of burnt blues that have lost green mead
foam, like the eyes of a cabbie one hails.
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