POEMS FROM Translations From the Human Language Bather, 1927 He does not record dreams, but constructs images, the uneasiness of amorphous shapes passing as human limbs. from Pablo Picasso by Jaime Sabartes and Wilhelm Boeck The bather is a piece of driftwood propped up on the shore, breasts like torpedoes, hair the prongs of forks, arms smooth branches, curving like a man's erection. She had another life her arms remember, tree and bird. Her ankle swings like the neck of a seagull, a black cormorant, and the round knob of her head holds one cut-glass eye, a circle mouth crying "oh!" standing naked at the dressing room door. The bather is a shaded piece of driftwood, a lovely, horrible thing, crying in the windy, ticking sun. Woman with a Book, 1932 1 In a yellow frame hangs the face of a man, a profile with sensitive lips she might kiss. She is posing in long, sensual curves. One arm bends like a palm tree her head leans against. Ah! She is reading. But see how the book has fallen open into her lap. He is thinking about her round breasts, the curve of her belly. He places his hand along her folds and opens her. She tilts back her head, lowers her eyelids. Her mouth a red berry. Her nipples two red berries. The man in the yellow frame is blank and abstract. She is bound up in his obsession with curves. The hand in her lap, his heavy dark lines. 2 She is posing with sensitive lips a profile a yellow frame He is thinking about bending like a palm tree He is thinking about the dark lines of a man He places his mouth along her folds and opens two red berries She is posing blank and abstract hands in her lap her folds his sensitive lips the heavy frame she is bound up in the sensual curves of a man see how the book hangs open the thought she might Dora Maar, 1942 He can wholly possess it only as long as she fits into the picture that his imagination is always arranging. from Pablo Picasso by Jaime Sabartes and Wilhelm Boeck I hold my hand in my hand below the frame things are in place -- so, just so. Here is the dress I have always worn. Here is my hair, my mouth, my jaw, my arms like two schoolgirls awkward and fixed against my side as if they ought not to be there at all, having no business being there at all. "This part of the painting will be black," he says, bending my elbow to fit a little more into the lower edge. "It will be dark, even monstrous, and you will not like it there. On your forehead a furrow above the eyebrow because when you look, there is an absence you want to fill and it makes you very proud, very vulnerable -- nothing dangerous. "The death of your father sits behind you on the wall that is gray. It moves up from the floor in the lines of your dress, over your breasts. But see, I will paint here a white collar for you, white with a lace edge, because if I were to take it away now not even a red hat would keep you from breaking into angles, your teeth clenched in your hand, your eyes the eyes of birds of prey."