{"id":184,"date":"2010-11-19T18:54:41","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T23:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/?p=184"},"modified":"2010-11-19T18:54:41","modified_gmt":"2010-11-19T23:54:41","slug":"after-a-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2010\/184\/poems\/after-a-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"After a flight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Eugenio Montale<\/em><br \/>\n(translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi)<\/p>\n<p>There were birches, stands of them, to hide<br \/>\nthe hospital where someone suffering<br \/>\nfrom too much love of life was bored<br \/>\nhanging between everything and nothing.<br \/>\nA cricket chanted, perfectly in key<br \/>\nwith the therapeutic plan,<br \/>\nand the cuckoo you&#8217;d already heard<br \/>\nmore economically in Indonesia.<br \/>\nThere were birches, a Swiss nurse.<br \/>\nthree or four half-wits in the courtyard.<br \/>\nan album of exotic birds, a phone,<br \/>\nsome chocolates on the nightstand.<br \/>\nAnd I was there, of course, and other nuisances,<br \/>\ntrying to provide the kind of cheer<br \/>\nyou would have overwhelmed us with, if only<br \/>\nwe&#8217;d had eyes to see. I had them.<\/p>\n<p>I cannot breathe without you:<br \/>\nKeats to Fanny Brawne,<br \/>\nwhom he wrested from oblivion. It&#8217;s strange<br \/>\nmy case, if you&#8217;ll permit, is different:<br \/>\nI breathe much better when you&#8217;re not around.<br \/>\nNearness brings us moments to remember.<br \/>\nbut not the way they happened:<br \/>\nas we imagined them, like smelling salts<br \/>\nfor the future, just in case,<br \/>\nor medicated vinegar (but no one faints today<br \/>\nover trifles like a shattered heart).<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s these hoarded facts that take the blow,<br \/>\nbut add the corpse and the scaffolding won&#8217;t hold.<br \/>\nI won&#8217;t try to explain. I know that if you read me<br \/>\nyou believe that you contributed<br \/>\nthe impetus I needed, and the rest<br \/>\n(as long as it&#8217;s <em>not<\/em> silence) matters little.<\/p>\n<p><em>These are the first and last sections of Montale&#8217;s last great &#8220;story-poem&#8221; from the late 1960s and concerns the old poet&#8217;s infatuation with a beautiful, emotionally unstable younger woman. The complete translation is in Eugenio Montale, Selected Poems, translated by Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright, and David Young, edited by David Young, Oberlin College Press, 2004).<\/em><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eugenio Montale (translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi) There were birches, stands of them, to hide the hospital where someone suffering from too much love of life was bored hanging between everything and nothing. A cricket chanted, perfectly in key with the therapeutic plan, and the cuckoo you&#8217;d already heard more economically in Indonesia. <a href='http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2010\/184\/poems\/after-a-flight\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}