Poetry
Original
Translations
Jack Brown
“It was rare that I escaped the confines of Columbia when one fine fall Saturday in October 1943, demerit free, I was given a 12-hour pass starting at noon. I wasted no time in abandoning ship and hotfooting it over to 128th Street to catch the subway bound for Times Square, the heart of the great U.S. metropolis. With a quickstep, I boarded and held on in wonderment as the electric-powered marvel, like a giant mole, sped through dark tunnels. At each stop, more people squeezed in than out so that we hung suspended from straps gripped firmly in hand while those without were kept in place by bodies closing in on all sides. At Times Square, all exited en masse into the brightly lit station, where throngs more were waiting to get on. I couldn’t distinguish which of the passages was egress and was carried by the crowd up and out of the mole’s hole into the crisp autumn air tainted with the exhaust of cabs, buses and some private automobiles. I stood on the sidewalk as long
