World Poetry Translation Project

Please Join My Facebook Page by CLICKING HERE Diccussions, translations and positive people at our Facebook Page 8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain by Jim Carroll 1/ Genius is not a generous thing In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover And it resents fame With bitter vengeance Pills and powdres only placate it awhile Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse Where the currents of electricity shift Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth, Cheese whiz and guns Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust In timeless illusion 2/ The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem. The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverbrating In your mind And from the stage All the faces out front seemed so hungry With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding From where they sat, you seemed so far up there High and live and diving And instead you were swamp crawling Down, deeper Until you tasted the Earth's own blood And chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds 3/ You should have talked more with the monkey He's always willing to negotiate I'm still paying him off... The greater the money and fame The slower the Pendulum of fortune swings Your will could have sped it up... But you left that in a plane Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration 4/ Here's synchronicity for you: Your music's tape was inside my walkman When my best friend from summer camp Called with the news about you I listened them... It was all there! Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound Less and less light Until you hit solid rock The drill bit broke and the valley became A thin crevice, impassible in time, As time itself stopped. And the walls became cages of brilliant notes Pressing in... Pressure That's how diamonds are made And that's WHERE it sometimes all collapses Down in on you 5/ Then I translated your muttered lyrics And the phrases were curious: Like "incognito libido" And "Chalk Skin Bending" The words kept getting smaller and smaller Until Separated from their music Each letter spilled out into a cartridge Which fit only in the barrel of a gun 6/ And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible Because that's where the pain came from That's where the demons were digging The world outside was blank Its every cause was just a continuation Of another unsolved effect 7/ But Kurt... Didn't the thought that you would never write another song Another feverish line or riff Make you think twice? That's what I don't understand Because it's kept me alive, above any wounds 8/ If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma... You could have gone to Florence And looked into the eyes of Bellinni or Rafael's Portraits Perhaps inside them You could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms Where it all began... No matter that you felt betrayed by her That is always the cost As Frank said, Of a young artist's remorseless passion Which starts out as a kiss And follows like a curse Please Join My Facebook Page by CLICKING HERE

Translations for this Poem  English  Spanish  French  Italian  Portuguese  Korean  Russian  Chinese  Japanese

Poems by Jim Carroll 8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain

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Jack Gilbert	Jack Kerouac	Jack Prelutsky
Jack Spicer	James A. Emanuel	James Schuyler
James Tate	James Wright	Jane Kenyon
Jean Cocteau	Jean Toomer	Jim Carroll
John Betjeman	John Clare	John Donne
John Dryden	John Keats	John Masefield
John Milton	John Wilmot	Jon Anderson
Jonathan Swift	Jorge Luis Borges	Jorie Graham
Joseph Brodsky	Joseph Warton	Judy Grahn

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