13 september 2025

13 september 2025

John Bjarne Grover

In the morning I read Esenin's poem 'Осень' = 'Autumn'.

In the afternoon I went for a walk and took the following photos which I thought of as 'the logic of vision' or maybe 'the logic of photography':

1
2
3

4
5
6

which could tell something like this:

1. The pupil of the eye is a rose
2. The script is something very different
3. such as the hedge
4. and the ledge
5 or the lady with the dog
6. tells the camera house

Then I discover that it is of course Esenin's poem I have photographed. Here it is in russian original and my tentative translation:

Сергей Есенин: Осень

Тихо в чаще можжевеля по обрыву.
Осень — рыжая кобыла — чешет гриву.
Над речным покровом берегов
Слышен синий лязг ее подков.
Схимник-ветер шагом осторожным
Мнет листву по выступам дорожным
И целует на рябиновом кусту
Язвы красные незримому Христу.
(1914)
Sergey Esenin: 'Autumn'

Silent by the juniper thicket along the precipice
the autumn - a reddish mare - combs her mane.
On the protection of the riverside
a blue clattering senses the horse-shoes.
The clipping wind slowly and carefully -
The imagined leaf at the caring ledge -
and a rowanberry bush kisses
the beautiful/red sore of an invisible Christ.
(1914)

I could not find out of the word 'Схимник' and translated it 'clipping', or maybe it should have been 'the wind clipping slowly and carefully', like what must be done with a hedge now and then, but it seems that other translators have taken it as a 'wandering monk' of some sort. It is true that there probably is a wanderer there. Here is a 'Google' translation - it lets the wind kiss the bush while I take the rowanberries to be the kiss itself - like the sound is in the alphabetic letters on the ground.

Here is one translation
Here are several other attempts.

The looking eye of autumn is found also under the discussion of 'The falling of the leaves' in my article on Yeats:

As I had completed the above and decided that the 'kissing bush', even if it could be wrong linguistically, nevertheless could be right poetically - when an apparent thunderclap sounded from outside. I myself have a poem called 'Autumn' - that is TEQ #1125. Computing by the principle described in this article, Wittgenstein's parallel to my TEQ #1125 is his Philosophische Untersuchungen #91 - which seems to explain this thunderclap. Could it be about the sound in the script? The ear of the 'sinner' (the 'holy ghost' to the right) as a 'pen' in the eye of the 'father' (in the middle)? My own poem seems to tell of the 'father' (cp. the trinity) in the sense of an eye with a pen inside - that is, the script in the vision. Celan's letter #91 (Celan 2019:154-155) could tell of the 'intoxicated' memory of the house that was opened for him, cp. the opened shutter of the camera house and (the logic of) the visual memory, and there could be a wanderer in Dickinson's #1125.

Sources:

Celan, P.: 'etwas ganz und gar Persönliches'. Briefe 1934-1970. Ausgewählt, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Barbara Wiedemann. Suhrkamp 2019.

Dickinson, E.: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H.Johnson. Little Brown and Company, Boston 1960.

Esenin, S.: Poesie e poemetti. A cura di Eridano Bazzarelli. BUR Classici moderni, 2014.

Esenin, S.: https://www.culture.ru/poems/43564/osen

Grover, J.: Four parallels: Dickinson, Wittgenstein, Celan, Grover.

Wittgenstein, L: Philosophische Untersuchungen. Herausgegeben von G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees 1952. Ludwig Wittgenstein Werkausgabe, Band 1. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2016, S. 231–485.