"Where are the snows of yesteryear?"
Hadas, Zagajewski, Villaurrutia, Villon, Kafka
Rachel Hadas:
Adam Zagajewski:
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Xavier Villaurrutia (tr. from Spanish by Eliot Weinberger and Esther Allen):
François Villon:
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
[Where are the snows of yesteryear?]
Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, January 15, 1913:
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New subscriber here, and so happy to have (just) found you! Thank you! The (paragraph of the) Kafka letter has haunted me all day--all day!--so I wrote (a quite bad attempt at) a syllabic poem using the final phrase, "why even night is not night enough" as an epigraph out-of-context for my own lines. This is the first time that I've written anything from the recess of my own mind in too many months (almost a year). Nothing brilliant--to be sure--but some writing, clearing, imagining, at last. Temporarily freeing from and fighting and joining the world. Thank you for this possibility, truly, and for the brilliance--brilliance!--of The Sharpener.