Hallucinatory Ballade #1 (after Berryman)

[RC James]

Maxwell felt, heart area,
a matter burdensome,
massive, so even a century
of bewailing, awake walking, never
set him down a way aright.
Recurring, Maxwell suffers sounds,
slight hacking next door, a smell.

And his other way thinks
a Warhol face a thousand years on
spinning still, will clear be past
what he calls innocence.
Here or there, not a matter,
try again, crying disallowed,
do it, just do it.

Hallucinations, fatigued, showed
Maxwell a type assassin to be,
but his blade had no reach,
no hacking and hiding pieces
obvious where friends could find.
In the index he keeps,
at dusk, taking count,
discovers he, everybody,
everybody’s here.

[Achebe]

Hi RC - I assume the Berryman reference is just an acknowledgement to the general theme of Dream songs / Hallucinatory ballades? I hadn't heard of him until your post, so if there's an allusion to a specific poem, I wouldn't know.
The atmospherics of the poem are pretty good - the inverted, complicated sentence structure suggests schizophrenia (again, I may be totally mistaken). 'Slight hacking next door' is a good line.
However, S2 and S3 completely escape me. I don't know what to make of 'will clear be past' - that's too convoluted for me to interpret.
The final bit of S3 suggests hallucinations once again to me, but I'm not sure.

[RC James]

Maxwell felt, heart area,
a matter burdensome,
massive, so even a century
of bewailing, awake walking, never
set him down a way aright.
Recurring, Maxwell suffers sounds,
slight hacking next door, a smell.

And his other way thinks
a Warhol face a thousand years on
spinning still, will clear be past
what he calls innocence.
Here or there, not a matter,
try again, crying disallowed,
do it, just do it.



Berryman is pretty oblique and involuted in syntax, I tried to get some of that.  "will clear be past"  simply means "beyond."  I love the way he kinda turns the language on its ear, so to speak, and this is a homage to the man and his innovations.  RC

Hallucinations, fatigued, showed
Maxwell a type assassin to be,
but his blade had no reach,
no hacking and hiding pieces
obvious where friends could find.
In the index he keeps,
at dusk, taking count,
discovers he, everybody,
everybody’s here.

[opposabletoes]

Hey brother,
I know well and love the poem you're working off here. The first couple of times I read it through I couldn't work out what you were trying to do. But I reckon you've shifted the payoff to the second stanza in the 'translation' and I like it. 
"try again, crying disallowed,
do it, just do it"
is such a gross translation of "all the bells say, etc." that it has to be the point.
Not sure about 
"will clear be past what he calls innocence." 
It's a heinously difficult passage in the original but don't think you've nailed it. Personally, I think the difficulty lies in the fact that Berryman didn't really know what he was doing with those few lines and just ran with what fit.
Otherwise, the translation's fucking epic.