The following is an adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ part 1, ‘The Burial of the Dead.’ This is the fourth and final(?) work arising out of the 911 tragedy, two being wholly my own (‘Okarma bin Laden’ and ‘Prayer For Those Having Arrived at a Tuesday Morning Late’) and the third being ‘The New York Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ an adaptation of Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ As with the ‘The New York Love Song…’ I have attempted to rewrite it as I imagine Eliot might have done. I tried to change only such words or phrases as would make it specific to a post-911 world, to convey the enormity of the tragedy and its emotional impact, while at the same time retain, as much as possible, the essential structure and vowel sounds of the original. I did, however, take liberties with ‘translating’ several passages in a foreign tongue. I call it an adaptation as opposed to a parody since the latter is more an attempt to make a mockery or a travesty of the original and so hold it up to ridicule which was not my intent. For those of you who may wish to compare it to the original, I have included a link following the poem rather than take up more bandwidth on this site. If (as per Hugh Clary’s suggestion) you hold down the shift key when clicking on the link, it will open up a separate window and you can thus compare the two should you so choose.
D.M.
The Wasted Land
“I saw with my own eyes the terrorists hanging fire and when I said to them ‘What do you want?’ each one replied ‘We want to die.’ ”
————————————————————————————————————
I. THE ARIA OF THE DEAD
September is the cruellest month, breeding
Fanatics out of the old land, mixing
Treachery and deep ire, smearing
Tall roofs with stinging rain.
Interment kept us from harm, covering
Worth (in regretful show), feeding
A busy life with dying rumors.
Somehow they surprised us, coming over the Stearns-Bear city
With a shower of hate; we were shocked in the Towers Trade
And went down in stunned fright, into ‘the lost’ garden
(We ranked Khadafi and talked of his power).
Listen to us!
We, the missing, in dust.
And when we were ill-done, praying at the hearts’ ache,
Our dying, Death took us out on a sled
And we were frightened. He said, Foresee!
Foresee—endless night! And down we went
Into his mountainous pile of debris.
We plead much of the night, our mouths full of cinders.
What are the soots that clutch, what stenches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Living man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you only know
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead plea gives no shelter, Death’s thicket no relief,
And the dry stone no son or daughter. Only
There is sadness under this dread rock,
(Come in under the sadness of this dread rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your sadness in mourning rising behind you
Or your sorrow at evening striding to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Gone with the wind
Our finest few,
Our flesh and kin
Woe! wailest anew.
“You gave we dying, sent first, sad tears to go;
You called us, in highest sense, pearls.”
—Yet when you came back, late, from the high-scented garden, Your arms dull, and your eyes wet, you could not
Speak, and your senses failed, you were neither
Living nor dead, and you knew nothing,
Looking into departed life, the silence.
O doom—leer, death’s near.
Laden, preposterous, heinous terrvoyante,
Mad, as bad, cold, ever ruthless,
And known to be the ‘most despised woe-man in terror’
Flashes a wicked attack of cards. Here! said he,
Is your card, the downed American Trade Center
(Those are coals that pass for eyes) Look!
And here is Pentagonna, most hated of all blocs,
The mother of fortifications.
Here is the land with free slaves, and here is the weal,
And here is the untied virgin, and this card,
Which is blank, is some sin she carries on her back
Which I am forbidden to see (I do not find
The hanged man). Fear death by slaughter.
I see crowds of people, walking round, hands awring.
Thank you. If you don’t see dear-misses (ex-of home),
Tell Fear I bring their horror-scope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal city.
Under the drown-fog of interment’s dawn,
A crowd flowed over the Undone Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs of a sort death-recent were exhaled
As each transfixed, dead eyes before dead feet,
Flowed up the hill and down Unwilling street
To where Saint Mary, dull-swathed, bewept the towers
With a dead sound on their final stroke of Time.
There I saw one I knew and stopped him crying: “Deathson!
“You who were with me when the ships crashed—vilely!
“That corpse you planted in Death’s garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has Life’s sudden loss disturbed it’s bed?
“Oh keep the dog far hence that’s foe to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig Death up again!
You! Hypocrite! Which is unfairer:
That one lives or one dies in terror?”
[eliotswasteland.tripod.com]
Fun for you, I see. Fun for me, too, thanks.