Τζων Μπέρρυμαν, «Παραιτείται». John Berryman, “ He Resigns”

Egon Schiele (1890–1918), Death and the Maiden (1915), oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria. Wikimedia Commons.

Τα γηρατειά, και οι θάνατοι, και τα φαντάσματα

 Εκείνη τώρα πια καθόλου

 δεν με νοιάζεται. Πλήθος

 οι τύψεις έρχονται και άδειο με βρίσκουν.

 

Δεν νομίζω πως αυτό θ’ αλλάξει.

Δεν θέλω ούτε πράγμα

Ούτε πρόσωπο, ξένο ή γνώριμο.

 

Νομίζω πως ποτέ ξανά

δεν θα τραγουδήσω παρά μονάχα

τώρα μία κι έξω. Πρέπει ν’ αρχίσω

 να ζω μ’ ένα άχρηστο κρανίο

 πάνω από μια καρδιά κενή.

Egon Schiele (1890–1918), Landscape with Ravens (1911), oil on canvas, 95.8 × 89 cm, Die Sammlung Leopold, Vienna, Austria. Wikimedia Commons.

Μετάφραση: Γιάννης Λειβαδάς.

“He Resigns”

Anonymous, Funerary Portrait of a Woman ‘Isidora’ (c 100 – 110 CE), encaustic on panel, Getty Villa, Los Angeles. By Dave & Margie Hill / Kleerup from Centennial, CO, USA (Getty Villa – Collection Uploaded by Marcus Cyron), via Wikimedia Commons.

Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.

Her having gone away

in spirit from me. Hosts

of regrets come & find me empty.

 

 I don't feel this will change.

 I don't want any thing

 or person, familiar or strange.

 I don't think I will sing

 

any more just now;

ever. I must start

to sit with a blind brow

above an empty heart.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682), Penitent Mary Magdalene (1640), oil, dimensions not known, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Photo credit: Tom Berthiaume.

John Berryman was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, on October 25, 1914. He received an undergraduate degree from Columbia College in 1936 and attended Cambridge University on a fellowship. 

Berryman’s early work was published in a volume titled Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940) and reflects the influences of Irish and British poets W. H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Americans Hart Crane and Ezra Pound. Tremendously erudite and a brilliant teacher, Berryman, in his early work Poems (New Directions, 1942) and The Dispossessed (W. Sloane Associates, 1948), displayed great technical control in poems that remained firmly rooted in the conventions of his time.

It was not until the publication of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (Noonday Press) in 1956, when Berryman was already in his forties, that he won widespread recognition and acclaim as a boldly original and innovative poet. Nevertheless, no one was prepared for the innovation that would follow, a collection that would seal Berryman’s reputation as an essential American original: 77 Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which was published in 1964 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize, unveiled the unforgettable and irrepressible alter egos “Henry” and “Mr. Bones” in a sequence of sonnet-like poems. Their wrenched syntax, scrambled diction, extraordinary leaps of language and tone, and wild mixture of high lyricism and low comedy plumbed the extreme reaches of a human soul and psyche. In succeeding years, Berryman added to the sequence until there were nearly four hundred collected in The Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969). In 2025, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, with an introduction by Shane McCrae. 

Berryman taught at Wayne State University in Detroit and went on to occupy posts at Harvard and Princeton. From 1955 until his death in 1972, he was a professor at the University of Minnesota. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1966 and served as a Chancellor from 1968 until his death.

Berryman, who never recovered from the childhood shock of his father’s suicide, was prone to emotional instability and heavy drinking throughout his life. On January 7, 1972, he died by jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis.

Πηγές: https://pickmeuppoetry.org/he-resigns-by-john-berryman/ - https://popaganda.gr/art/paretite-tou-tzon-berriman/  - https://poets.org/poet/john-berryman