시인의 첫사랑 시 (2)

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Carmela Ciuraru ("First Loves" Introduction에서):

 

[In college I was transfixed by Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art."] Soon afterward I discovered the poems of Anna Akhmatova, in an edition translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. My favorite, "We don't know how to say goodbye." begins:

 

            We don't know how to say goodbye:

            We wander on, shoulder to shoulder.

            Already the sun is going down;

            You're moody, I am your shadow.

 

I liked the simplicity of the language and marveled at its ability to express complex, devastating emotions in just twelve blunt lines. It remined me of a favorite Langston Hughes poem, "Suicide's Note," which I'd found years earlier -- so evocative, yet only twelve words in its entirety:

 

            The calm,

            Cool face of the river

            Asked me for a kiss.

 

    The most essential poet to me early on was Louise Glück. I first read her in a college class room.... On  my own I read everything else she'd written. I loved the austerity of her work; the stern, resolute voice; the articulation of grief over and over again, so heartbreaking and honest. Her poems in some way sustained me. They helped me to endure what Hopkins referred to as those 'cliffs od fall' we sometimes experience ... without feeling entirely alone. Eventually I had to buy a second copy of her book The Triumph of Achilles, I needed it so often that the first one worn out. Later, the same was ture of The Wild Iris.