loose lips sink ships
"Stop worrying!" Marlowe said before workshop. "I can see the worry; it's coming off you in waves." The workshop was fine, as it turns out. I have the sense of having cleared a hurdle, and though there are hundreds more I can face them in good heart.
My recording of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 14 is on the cheap Naxos label, and the sparse liner notes don't include lyrics. I found them here: Russian translations of poems by García Lorca, Apollinaire, and Rilke. They're all about death, but nobly so. I get particularly stuck on the two opening poems by García Lorca—I assume they're about the Spanish civil war, in which he died.
De profundis
A hundred ardent lovers
fell into eternal sleep
deep beneath the dry earth.
Red sand covers
the roads of Andalusia.
Branches of green olives have spread over Cordoba.
Here crosses will be erected for them,
so that people will not forget them.
A hundred ardent lovers
fell into eternal sleep.
Malagueña
Death
entered and left
the tavern.
Black horses
and dark souls
in the ravines of the guitar
still wander.
They smell of salt
and hot blood
from the foaming
of the nervous ripples.
Death
keeps leaving and entering,
and entering, leaving and entering.
keeps on entering and leaving!
Death keeps on leaving
and still will not leave the tavern.
