John Ashbery - From "Litany" [tekst, tłumaczenie i interpretacja piosenki]

Some certified nut
Will try to tell you it's poetry,
(It's extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense)
But watch out or he'll start with some
New notion or other and switch to both
Leaving you wiser and not emptier though
Standing on the edge of a hill.
We have to worry
About systems and devices there is no
Energy here no spleen either
We have to take over the sewer plans--
Otherwise the coursing clear water, planes
Upon planes of it, will have its day
And disappear. Same goes for business:
Holed up in some office skyscraper it's
Often busy to predict the future for business plans
But try doing it from down
In the street and see how far it gets you! You
Really have to sequester yourself to see
How far you have come but I'm
Not going to talk about that.

I'm fairly well pleased
With the way you and I have come around the hill
Ignoring and then anointing its edge even if
We felt it keenly in the backwind.
You were a secretary at first until it
Came time to believe you and then the black man
Replaced your headlights with fuel
You seemed to grow from no place. And now,
Calmed down, like a Corinthian column
You grow and grow, scaling the high plinths
Of the sky.

Others, the tenor, the doctor,
Want us to walk about on it to see how we feel
About it before they attempt anything, yet
In whose house are we? Must we not sit
Quietly, for we would not do this at home?
A splattering of trumpets against the very high
Pockmarked wall and a forgetting of spiny
Palm trees and it is over for us all,
Not just us, and yet on the inside it was
Doomed to happen again, over and over, like a
Wave on a beach, that thinks it's had this
Tremendous idea, coming to crash on the beach
Like that, and it's true, it has, yet
Others have gone before, and still other will
Follow, and far from undermining the spiciness
Of this individual act, this knowledge plants
A seed of eternal endeavor for fear of
Happening just once, and goes on this way,
And yet the originality should not deter
Our vision from the drain
That absorbs, night and day, all our equations,
Makes us brittle, emancipated, not men in a word.
Dying of fright
In the violet night you come to understand how it
Looked to the ancestors and what there was about it
That moved them and are come no closer
To the divine riddle which is aging,
So beautiful in the eternal honey of the sun
And spurs us on to a higher pitch
Of elocution that the company
Will not buy, and so back to our grandstand
Seat with the feeling of having mended
The contrary principles with the catgut
Of abstract sleek ideas that come only once in
The night to be born and are gone forever after
Leaving their trace after the stitches have
Been removed but who is to say they are
Traces of what really went on and not
Today's palimpsest? For what
Is remarkable about our chronic reverie (a watch
That is always too slow or too fast)
Is the lively sense of accomplishment that haloes it
Form afar. There is no need
To approach closely, it will be done from here
And work out better, you'll see.

So the giant slabs of material
Came to be, and precious little else, and
No information about them but that was all right
For the present century. Later on
We'd see how it might be in some other
Epoch, but for the time being it was neither
Your nor the population's concern, and may
Have glittered as it declined but for now
It would have to do, as any magic
Is the right kind at the right time.
There is no soothsaying
Yet it happens in rows, windrows
You call them in your far country.

But you are leaving:
Some months ago I got an offer
From Columbia Tape Club, Terre
Haute, Ind., where I could buy one
Tape and get another free. I accept-
Ed the deal, paid for one tape and
Chose a free one. But since I've been
Repeatedly billed for my free tape.
I've written them several times but
Can't straighten it out---would you
Try?