can we talk about this poem? (1 Viewer)

it's called "Love Is A Piece Of Paper Torn To Bits". and I'm digging to understand some of it (reminding you that I have the Portuguese as my native language):


"nobody to grab sail... and the N. wester ripped the sheets like toenails
and we pitched like crazy" so it was a ship that fucked up? like titanic sort of?

"and all the time in the corner
some punk had a drunken slut (my wife)
and was pumping away"
what the hell the punk
was doing with bukowski's lady? is that what
pumping away means? fikkofikko?

...sorry about that, but:

"and took the thing
and heaved it
over
the side."

the thing was the cat?

shit my fucking old fellas... I don't like to talk about poetry, but your language is hard to get it. they dance to much in some ways that confuse my dementic head. what sucks most: poetry here is rhymed and stinky. so it's ok to talk about this whiteheads?

with LuV.



 
poetry [...] your language is hard to get it. they dance to much in some ways
I think that's the point of poetry.

You should probably be reading poets who wrote in Portuguese.

Not everyone agrees with that, but all you're going to get are opinions, and that's mine.
 
the problem is Portuguese poets don't write poetry. They silly and they rhyme. I'm just trying to get some slangs or meanings that I can't translate or have some american to tell me.

Thank you for your opinion, mjp, I would like to read more...
 
Andreas has been diligently working with translations. You may want to message him about how he is going about it. A lot of Bukowski's lines don't have a lot of hidden meaning. For Americans (and I don't mean that as a language) it's easier for us to understand and appreciate automatically. But even we Americans have questions from time to time, and I expect those questions to grow as our generation fades out. It's the way Bukowski used the language that makes it special -- and hard to translate. I have really appreciated folks on here that have pointed out real "meanings" behind the words that I never caught the first time reading the poems.
 

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