the dry salvages

• t s eliotin four quartetsinin ucuncusu ve en guzellerinden biri
  
  the dry salvages
  
  (the dry salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small
  group of rocks, with a beacon, off the n.e. coast of cape ann,
  massachusetts. salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
  groaner: a whistling buoy.)
  
  i
  
  i do not know much about gods; but i think that the river
  is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
  patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
  useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
  then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
  the problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
  by the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
  keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
  of what men choose to forget. unhonoured, unpropitiated
  by worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
  his rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
  in the rank ailanthus of the april dooryard,
  in the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
  and the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
  
  the river is within us, the sea is all about us;
  the sea is the land's edge also, the granite
  into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
  its hints of earlier and other creation:
  the starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
  the pools where it offers to our curiosity
  the more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
  it tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
  the shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
  and the gear of foreign dead men. the sea has many voices,
  many gods and many voices.
  the salt is on the briar rose,
  the fog is in the fir trees.
  the sea howl
  and the sea yelp, are different voices
  often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
  the menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
  the distant rote in the granite teeth,
  and the wailing warning from the approaching headland
  are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
  rounded homewards, and the seagull:
  and under the oppression of the silent fog
  the tolling bell
  measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
  ground swell, a time
  older than the time of chronometers, older
  than time counted by anxious worried women
  lying awake, calculating the future,
  trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
  and piece together the past and the future,
  between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
  the future futureless, before the morning watch
  when time stops and time is never ending;
  and the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
  clangs
  the bell.
  
  ii
  
  where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
  the silent withering of autumn flowers
  dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
  where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
  the prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
  prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
  
  there is no end, but addition: the trailing
  consequence of further days and hours,
  while emotion takes to itself the emotionless
  years of living among the breakage
  of what was believed in as the most reliable—
  and therefore the fittest for renunciation.
  
  there is the final addition, the failing
  pride or resentment at failing powers,
  the unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
  in a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
  the silent listening to the undeniable
  clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.
  
  where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
  into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
  we cannot think of a time that is oceanless
  or of an ocean not littered with wastage
  or of a future that is not liable
  like the past, to have no destination.
  
  we have to think of them as forever bailing,
  setting and hauling, while the north east lowers
  over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
  or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
  not as making a trip that will be unpayable
  for a haul that will not bear examination.
  
  there is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
  no end to the withering of withered flowers,
  to the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
  to the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
  the bone's prayer to death its god. only the hardly, barely prayable
  prayer of the one annunciation.
  
  it seems, as one becomes older,
  that the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
  or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
  encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
  which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
  the moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
  fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
  or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
  we had the experience but missed the meaning,
  and approach to the meaning restores the experience
  in a different form, beyond any meaning
  we can assign to happiness. i have said before
  that the past experience revived in the meaning
  is not the experience of one life only
  but of many generations—not forgetting
  something that is probably quite ineffable:
  the backward look behind the assurance
  of recorded history, the backward half-look
  over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
  now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
  (whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
  having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
  is not in question) are likewise permanent
  with such permanence as time has. we appreciate this better
  in the agony of others, nearly experienced,
  involving ourselves, than in our own.
  for our own past is covered by the currents of action,
  but the torment of others remains an experience
  unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
  people change, and smile: but the agony abides.
  time the destroyer is time the preserver,
  like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
  the bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
  and the ragged rock in the restless waters,
  waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
  on a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
  in navigable weather it is always a seamark
  to lay a course by: but in the sombre season
  or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
  
  iii
  
  i sometimes wonder if that is what krishna meant—
  among other things—or one way of putting the same thing:
  that the future is a faded song, a royal rose or a lavender spray
  of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
  pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
  and the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
  you cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
  that time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
  when the train starts, and the passengers are settled
  to fruit, periodicals and business letters
  (and those who saw them off have left the platform)
  their faces relax from grief into relief,
  to the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
  fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
  into different lives, or into any future;
  you are not the same people who left that station
  or who will arrive at any terminus,
  while the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
  and on the deck of the drumming liner
  watching the furrow that widens behind you,
  you shall not think 'the past is finished'
  or 'the future is before us'.
  at nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
  is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
  the murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
  'fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
  you are not those who saw the harbour
  receding, or those who will disembark.
  here between the hither and the farther shore
  while time is withdrawn, consider the future
  and the past with an equal mind.
  at the moment which is not of action or inaction
  you can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
  the mind of a man may be intent
  at the time of death"—that is the one action
  (and the time of death is every moment)
  which shall fructify in the lives of others:
  and do not think of the fruit of action.
  fare forward.
  o voyagers, o seamen,
  you who came to port, and you whose bodies
  will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
  or whatever event, this is your real destination.'
  so krishna, as when he admonished arjuna
  on the field of battle.
  not fare well,
  but fare forward, voyagers.
  
  iv
  
  lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
  pray for all those who are in ships, those
  whose business has to do with fish, and
  those concerned with every lawful traffic
  and those who conduct them.
  
  repeat a prayer also on behalf of
  women who have seen their sons or husbands
  setting forth, and not returning:
  figlia del tuo figlio,
  queen of heaven.
  
  also pray for those who were in ships, and
  ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips
  or in the dark throat which will not reject them
  or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell's
  perpetual angelus.
  
  v
  
  to communicate with mars, converse with spirits,
  to report the behaviour of the sea monster,
  describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
  observe disease in signatures, evoke
  biography from the wrinkles of the palm
  and tragedy from fingers; release omens
  by sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
  with playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
  or barbituric acids, or dissect
  the recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
  to explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
  pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
  and always will be, some of them especially
  when there is distress of nations and perplexity
  whether on the shores of asia, or in the edgware road.
  men's curiosity searches past and future
  and clings to that dimension. but to apprehend
  the point of intersection of the timeless
  with time, is an occupation for the saint—
  no occupation either, but something given
  and taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
  ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
  for most of us, there is only the unattended
  moment, the moment in and out of time,
  the distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
  the wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
  or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
  that it is not heard at all, but you are the music
  while the music lasts. these are only hints and guesses,
  hints followed by guesses; and the rest
  is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
  the hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation.
  here the impossible union
  of spheres of existence is actual,
  here the past and future
  are conquered, and reconciled,
  where action were otherwise movement
  of that which is only moved
  and has in it no source of movement—
  driven by daemonic, chthonic
  powers. and right action is freedom
  from past and future also.
  for most of us, this is the aim
  never here to be realised;
  who are only undefeated
  because we have gone on trying;
  we, content at the last
  if our temporal reversion nourish
  (not too far from the yew-tree)
  the life of significant soil.
• ismet özel tarafından yapılmış kısmi çevirisi
  
  tanrılardan pek anlamam: ama sanırım ırmak
  güçlü boz bir tanrıdır-somurtkan, elegeçmez ve serkeş,
  bir yere kadar sabırlı, sınırdır diye bilindi önceleri;
  yararlıydı bir ticaret yolu olarak, güven vermezdi;
  sonra köprü mimarları önündeki mes'ele oldu yalnız.
  
  bir kez çözüldü mü mes'ele, unuttular boz tanrıyı
  kentlerde oturanlar- o yine de aman vermez kaldı, daima,
  terketmedi kendi mevsimlerini, taşkınlığını, yıkıcı,
  insanların unutmayı seçtiğinin hatırlatıcısı. makinaya
  tapanların gönlünden, gözünden düşmüş, ama bekliyor,
  gözetliyor ve bekliyor.
  
  alıntı karakutu com