Robert Bly:
It can change everything.
It can make the darkness shine.
It’s the light switch for the whole country.
Robin Fulton:
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine.
It is a switch for the whole country.
Little differences like not specifying that it’s a “light switch” and the use of an indefinite article (”a”) means that there may be other switches for other purposes to be found by other people including the current and future readers.
The peculiar punctuation and capitalization in the Robin Fulton version is from the poem as quoted in the New York Times obituary
Same punctuation and capitalization as the version in the The great enigma : new collected poems. Line break as switch?! Fulton is following the Swedish (Den kan förvandla allt / den kan få mörkret att lysa.) The immediate context is of a stone among stones nestled in moss in a forest. A path led here to the stone and here leads on to a shift in the poet’s punctuation practice. Upon the line break depends departure… a punctum.
And so for day 2960
18.01.2015