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Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

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Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#172

Post by galfarragem »

My ex-girlfriend (not Portuguese) when she wanted to "paper cut me" used to say that every Portuguese is a poet. Seeing Portugal with the distance of an expat this is (un)fortunately true.

The most relevant of us is certainly Fernando Pessoa.[1]

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#173

Post by thomson »

fasouto wrote: post #98

I love Neruda, specially "No culpes a nadie". It helped me a lot to stop complaining. C&P a possibly wrong translation ## Don't Blame Anyone Never complain about anyone, nor anything, because basically you have done what you wanted in your life. Accept the difficulty of improving yourself and the courage to start changing yourself. The triumph of the true man emerges from the ashes of his mistake. Never complain abou…

This poem (and the original spanish) is one of my favourites! Thank you for posting.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#174

Post by walshemj »

Keith Douglas ww2 war poet

"The noble horse with courage in his eye, clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst: away fly the images of the shires but he puts the pipe back in his mouth. Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88; it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance. I saw him crawling on the sand, he said It's most unfair, they've shot my foot off."

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#176

Post by jfaucett »

throwaway43 wrote: post #7

Neruda is my favourite. I want to do to you , what the spring does to the cherry trees. Here's another one Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. How he is able construct such powerful verse out of simple words and concepts always blows me away. Though it looks easy I've never seen a good imitation of his style. Then there's this poem by Phillip Larkin that I like. They fu…

"I want to do to you , what the spring does to the cherry trees." I've never seen that in english, so I looked it up (http://albalearning.com/audiolibros/neruda/poema14-sp-en.htm...) I guess it goes without saying, but english really doesn't do him justice, rhyming trees with kisses is pretty poor compared to cerizos and besos which is perfect rhyme. But I suppose poetry is about the most difficult thing to translate b/c of the many levels from phonetical to subtle contextual and semantical differences that are all overlayed and compacted into a few small verses. I certainly wouldn't want to / couldn't translate it.

But yea, in spanish my favorites are Neruda and Borges (see: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generaci%C3%B3n_del_45). I found this link which has a lot of other good poets IMHO for instance ruben dario or mario benedetti (http://www.cubaeuropa.com/cubarte/poesia/PoesiaLatinoamerica...).

In english I just nerd out on the old the stuff and for some reason never really got into anything newer... I like chaucer, spencer, milton, shakespeare, plus just reading through all those in the original is so cool after a couple pages you slip into another world and time, nice escapism.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#177

Post by wiresurfer »

Thats a tough question to answer. Between bukowsky , Edgar Alan Poe, Shakespeare, a few of miltons work, Gulzar, Tolkien, you can imagine the choice to be tough! But here is an unlikely candidate I find particularly interesting because of his simplicity and yet intricacy of expression. Vikram Seth. His work "golden gate" is just a masterpiece with so many hidden gems. To have a story spannig a good 700pages in verse itself is astounding. Here are some of his smaller beauties

Awake

    *Awake for hours and staring at the ceiling 
    Through the unsettled stillness of the night 
    He grows possessed of the obsessive feeling 
    That dawn has come and gone and brought no light.*
And this, which happens to be the name of the small book of his selected short poems

    *All you who sleep tonight 
    Far from the ones you love, 
    No hand to left or right 
    And emptiness above -

    Know that you aren't alone 
    The whole world shares your tears, 
    Some for two nights or one, 
    And some for all their years.*
PS: pardon the bad formatting. Long form text entry via a tiny screen is still a pain point :)

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#179

Post by bdr »

A correspondence:

Python - Robert Frost

Ruby (Matz) - Kay Ryan

Ruby (dhh) - Fred Seidel

JavaScript - e e cummings

Brainfuck - John Ashbery

Java - Auden

C - Shakespeare

Haskell - Anne Carson

Pascal - Longfellow

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#180

Post by nakkiel »

I really don't know what to do with this. It's from a Spanish poet, I discovered it in French and got to prefer the Spanish original. I haven't been able to find the English translation.

    DEDICATORIA
    
    Más allá de donde
    aún se esconde la vida, queda
    un reino, queda cultivar
    como un rey su agonía,
    hacer florecer como un reino
    la sucia flor de la agonía:
    yo que todo lo prostituí, aún puedo
    prostituir mi muerte y hacer
    de mi cadáver el último poema.
    
    – Leopoldo María Panero
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