Based on a true story [Thalia]

Hey friends,

So this blog has been dead for awhile - just wanted to let y'all know I started a new one:

http://thistenderwind.blogspot.com

You can expect poems, essays, ramblings, literary criticism & other miscellany. Would love to see you there!

Love,
Talia

"During the Communist era, parents needed special permission form to give a child a name that does not have a name day on the Czech calendar. Since 1989, parents have had the right to give their child any name they wish, provided it is used somewhere in the world and is not insulting or demeaning. However, the common practice is that the most birth-record offices look for the name in the book "Jak se bude vaše dítě jmenovat?" (What is your child going to be called?), ISBN 80-200-1349-0, the semi-official list of "allowed" names. If the name is not found there, offices are extremely unwilling to register the child's name."


For three weeks Marketa thought she was going to have a baby. Under her print dress, it was working as avidly on assembling itself as she worked on her sums, or at cleaning house. Marketa didn’t tell anyone. After all, words disappeared from her lips as soon as she said them, but the hollow bowl of her belly was filling up to the top. She had devised a secret name for the baby that wasn’t in the name-day calendar. There was no saint behind it and perhaps no history at all. If anyone had ever been named thus, she imagined it was a devil made all of glass, who capered about, quick as a greased whip, and glittered in the light. For three weeks, each motion of her hand—to straighten the shelves, to mark bought bolts in the books with her pencil-stub—recalled to her the pretty motion of the hand of the daughter of Pharaoh, catching up the baby from his reed basket. In her own walk she found a new consciousness, a heavy prettiness of gait, between the beeches, themselves heavy with light. But soon enough she found she was only a reed basket: shedding its pitch lining. Down it came, a thick, blackish tar. Of this, Marketa, too, said nothing: only watched the beeches part, then bend again, into a fragrant lattice, covering the continuous slow progress of the river.


148 poems guys. http://apoemadayfromharvard.blogspot.com

Dudes, dudes!

I made it to 100 poems with this friggin' blog!

http://apoemadayfromharvard.blogspot.com


... granted not all within a 24 hour period, but I expanded "day" to mean "each period from the time I wake up til the time I go to sleep" (like a college definition) and it worked out that way.

Also: home for the holidays, so bittersweet eh? All the old problems come oozing out and bare their dark teeth.

T

Trembling and sullen
before the goad,
I drag my feet
in stitched skin
over stone
and howl
drenched and animal
through the new ice
kindling a little light
under the wretch-bone trees,
me all heavy
gunny-sack
thighs, the tongue ransomed
in my mouth,
hiding from that slick
luminary disc
half-slitted in cloud,
down
the salted brick,
half-sane,
bleating for
you,
hot guts, shorn
fur, and reek
of warm
ordure

This is where my blogging has moved mostly! http://apoemadayfromharvard.blogspot.com

It's not a typical blog per se, but instead I've been writing a poem every day for the last 18 days there - I'm trying to do it every day of my sophomore year. I'd love it if you checked it out and pressed 'follow' (you don't get any emails or anything, it's just a way of letting me know you're out there readin' :) ).

Sophomore year is great. I am 200% in love with my tall Yid scientist boyfriend of eight months. I am a scholastic bum bum bum bum. I'm a comparative literature major. I'm dragging my feet through second-year Russian making sloppy cursive loops. I don't like the way college kids mock religion uncouthly but sometimes religion can be repressive and cruel.

In class I discuss things like the Babylonian creation epic and Buddhist dance. Cambridge is surprisingly sunny in the fall. Good things in the air. You know you're in love with someone when they never fail to pry you up out of your gloom.

off to Iceland on Sunday - a mere 2 days! I am excited to go off and acquire a whole new set of experiences in a country I've never seen, whose language I don't peak -- go stare at geothermal vents and pull rhubarb from the cold, damp earth. I'm bringing Icelandic sagas, Buddhist scriptures, "East of Eden" and a whole host more, a few sweaters, jeans and hiking boots, and a whole lot of excitement. I seem to have all these convictions - that it's good to farm, sail and travel, that I want children, that the earth is sacred and overconsumption is ugly - that have appeared out of nowhere. I know I want to spend some years after college working odd jobs on ships and farms and seeing the world. That's the plan.

Dear Everyone,

I am leaving to Iceland June 22nd. I plan to bring a few pairs of jeans, sneakers, Tevas, no laptop, no phone, and a lot of books. Since I will be on a farm in the middle of nowhere, with eighteen hours of daylight and nobody I know, I will presumably have a lot of time to read. But I want these books to be special.

So recommend me some books that have changed your life. One to three, since I obviously can't bring (or read) all of them. I don't care the category or the nation of origin, poetry or play, essay, manifesto or novel. I also don't care if you think I've read it before--chances are, I haven't. Just give me something that will knock my sheep-crap-sodden socks off in the land where geyers spring and the Northern Lights shine.

Can you do it? Yes you can!

Love,
Talia

Retrospectives are stupid, especially of monumental years.

Took a lot of classes... found a boyfriend who wears a kippah who is, like me, a datlash ("dati l'she'avar, or: formerly a religious Jew, and now not observant). Farming this summer in Iceland and rural Virginia. Reading Slavic folktales. A paucity of close friends at school, but hopefully that'll change.

Things I did this year I never thought I would do:
take a telescope safety class; do (a whole lot) of stand-up comedy; write for a television show; date a boy who wears a kippah; eat a gypsy pancake (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3463/3307476123_a79b225831.jpg?v=0)...


So much to do left!
I wish I'd partied more and had more adventures. These things can be cured-- three years of college left!

what a surprise on this blog.
thanks for reminding me of this song [Bad username: _twoheadedgirl"]

In comes you, not the same person I knew.
Looking roughly the same, but something hungry getting restless in your brain.
So there I go.
Not the same person you used to know, peaking through a fish eye lens at you.


And the cornet blows where the oleander grows.
And us too, not the same people that our old friends knew.


And so down the street you head in the high summer heat.
White long sleeve oxford pushed up to just before your elbows.
Black pumps & a medium length black skirt, eating a path through the dark, damned birth.
I hope they've got plenty of money where you're going.


And the cornet blows, where the oleander grows.

Could I have picked a more pretentious post title? Maybe not. Even so though, today I got out of class in Harvard's Semitic Museum and there was a streak of skywriting turning yellow against the setting sun. To my left the herbarium with five million dried plants in glass held its quiet, wreathed heavily in snow. I'm translating a sonnet cycle by Shaul Tschernikovsky, who wrote from 1890 on in difficult Hebrew, defiantly, about the Greeks. I read his translation of Goethe's "Prometheus" into Hebrew and the fifteen sonnets I am translating are about the sun. It's called "To The Sun," and the epigram is a quotation from the Talmud in Tractate Succot, saying, "And the rabbis deemed that it was all right, when no sun shone on the Holy Temple, for the people to pray facing the sun in the east" (obviously a very rough translation). In Hebrew, in Petrarchan meter, to the sun!

Here's sonnet #2 because I feel like it. My translation is terrible, the poems are much more rigidly structured and they rhyme... I want to make this into a longer project, and perhaps I can bring back the sophistication of the language, but for now I'm just focusing on conveying the images (which is hard enough in his Hebrew, let me tell you):


Like one of the golden ears in wheat-stalks heavy with grain,
that rose in full beauty and will flourish in all of its plenty,
like a single grain that hides within its breast its secrets,
a guarantee of eternal life, and a remainder of something already;

like the ear of grain stolen from the field, that suckled at the village's breast,
and wet with the juice of life, dreaming a dream of her beauty,
I also grew! and yet my soul thirsts for more.
ah, day will chase day! and will I collect this debt?

ere my dream comes! my path is hidden from my eyes.
as I turn this way and that--I turn: what is mine, who is mine?
and have I come to the border? or have I passed it already?

did my father lie to me, did he not guard what came from his mouth?
I am a bud of grain, and my father is my sun,
and he summoned for me the hot rains, and commanded the mountain mists.


Tschernikovsky love. They called him "The Greek," but he was a Russian.

All my classes are making me think a lot but not work too hard, which is, I think glorious. It leaves me time to be in love, which is a good thing to sandwich into a schedule. Love has crept up on me suddenly, not unpleasantly, as if I'd eased my body into cool water. Suddenly the whole flesh is engaged; every pore is present. It's a good thing to walk around in winter continually being surprised at your own joy.