Ezra Pound
Dans le Restaurant (Ezra Pound translation)
The waiter idle and dilapidated
With nothing to do but scratch and lean over my shoulder
Says:
"In my country the rain is colder
And the sun hotter and the ground more desiccated
and desecrated".
Voluminous and spuminous with a leguminous
and cannimaculated vest-front and pantfront
and a graveyperpulchafied yesterdays napkin in a loop
over his elbow
(I hope he will not sputter into the soup)
"Down in a ditch under the willow trees
Where you go to get out of the rain
I tried in vain,
I mean I was interrupted
She was all wet with the deluge and her calico skirt
stuck to her buttocks and belly,
I put my hand up and she giggled",
You old cut-up,
"At the age of eight what can one do, sir,
she was younger
Besides I'd no sooner got started than a big poodle
Came sniffing about and scared me pealess",
Your head is not flealess
now at any rate, go scrape the cheese off your pate
and dig the slush out of your crowsfeet,
take sixpence and get washed, God damn
what a fate
You crapulous vapulous relic, you ambulating offence
To have had an experience
so nearly parallel, with, . . . .
Go away,
I was about to say mine,
I shall dine
elsewhere in future,
to cleanse this suture.
Phlebas the Phenicien, fairest of men,
Straight and tall, having been born in a caul
Lost luck at forty, and lay drowned
Two long weeks in sea water, tossed of the
streams under sea, carried of currents
Forgetful of the gains
forgetful of the long days of sea fare
Forgetful of mew's crying and the foam swept coast
of Cornwall,
Born back at last, after days
to the ports and stays of his young life,
A fair man, ports of his former seafare thither at last