Table of contents - The University of Texas at Dallas

BEAUTY WITH A WHITE SHAWL
“Hey, beauty in your milkwhite shawl,
Have those breasts budded out at all”
“They started just a week ago,
A week, I think, maybe a year.
They’ve got bad habits as they grow,
They’re hard, and they stick out to here.
My bodice chafes them, and they flow
With sherbet if you touch them, so.”
“Now won’t you give some to the squire,
Some of that sweet stuff to me”
“I’ll save it for a boy with fire,
Young, unmarried, young and free,
Someone who will rise much higher,
Who sings and plays his flute for me.”
This apparent freedom, however, exists in the
context of a system is which a father can make
his daughter marry a rich and nasty old man:
MARTA GOSSIPS
Marta tells the girls that please her:
“Poor wife saddled with a geezer.
Daddy wed me to this oldie,
Buried me alive with Moldy.
Nothing’s worse than when you face
Death’s-head by the fireplace.
Sixty years went to create
Gray-bush beard and barren pate.
Drool is all he gives, or worse:
Daddy, here’s a daughter’s curse.”
But fierce and lasting love can emerge from the
repression and the explosive physical passion of
these mountain people:
HEY, BEAUTIFUL!
“Beauty by the flowerbed,
Head up like a thoroughbred,
Hear what I have got to say:
If I catch you, caught you’ll stay.
I have got a heavy jones,
I’ve a yen to jump your bones,
Pink cheeks, breasts as white as snow,
Two big handfuls, just like so,
Damned if I will let them go!”
“Suck my white tits, young Sir Randy
You’d go crazy, like they’re brandy,
Kill somebody, like enough,
Then go home to sleep it off.”
“I’d kill twenty, literally,
Just to lie upon your belly —
Where’d you get those cheeks I see”
“Almighty God gave them to me,
Given me by God Almighty:
Partly fat and partly meaty,
Partly muscle, partly fatty,
Just to please my latest sweetie,
Just to keep my lover happy —
But he must be young and peppy,
So that when I hear his call,
I will let my dinner fall,
I will leave my own grave-dust
To be the roadmap of his chest —
But I hope we will both die
On the same night, you and I;
And we’ll lie there, grave by grave —
Who needs Heaven if you’ve love”
These are, in fact, the themes of traditional
pastoral — naïve love, the celebration of the
land and the shepherd’s life, the emblematic
contrasts of old and young, city and country, the
lament of the lover, the satire on human nature,
the cruelty of the fair maid. These shepherds,
then, are not unlike their colleagues a few
hundred miles south and seventeen centuries
earlier, whose Arcadian lives were celebrated by
the Hellenistic bucolic poets, Theocritus, Bion,
and Moschus. Hearing and translating these
Albanian folk poems is like encountering for the
first time the astonishing limestone landscapes
of the river Li in China: suddenly we realize
that the strange little sugarloaf mountains in
Translation Review 63