The dolls leave and don’t come back “because life in the city is unbearable.” Who cannot sympathize with their choice? In this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a haunting poem by the Maltese writer Clare Azzopardi, translated into plain, elegiac English by Albert Gatt. In presenting a city mourning the exodus of the dolls, Azzopardi’s poem draws us into the spectacle of objectification, the reduction of living creature to inert, inscribed surface that precedes all mass violence. Here as elsewhere the doll is the perfect image of womanhood under fascism, but what sets Azzopardi’s poem apart is not just its mastery of the elegiac tone, but a gesture, so small it’s almost imperceptible, towards the possibility of communication with fascism’s despised other: “sometimes the protagonist is also I / and sometimes / sometimes / words are.” Read on.
The dolls migrate once a year.
They come out of their houses and walk to the shore.
It’s an auspicious day, the day the dolls migrate.
Little boats await them along the shore.
Twenty dolls take their leave, give or take.
Year after year.
One day the nation will be bereft of dolls. It will mourn the absence of dolls. But there’ll be nothing to be done.
The dolls leave because life in this city is unbearable.
This migration, Ezra said, is a form of protest.
Against the authorities, corruption, bombs, doll trafficking, lack of space, dolls who get discarded, poor living conditions, abuse.
By now, Ezra said, a large number of dolls have left, both those belonging to children and those adults have had since they were children.
The ragged have left, Ezra said, as well as the patched, those who spent years in a display case, those who carry clandestine memories of childhood.
Many, Ezra said, have found their way to a better place.
It’s not certain, Ezra said, whether all of them will find their way to a different land, there’s no telling whether the sea will have a hand in drowning a few.
Ezra himself hasn’t migrated yet.
But every year he goes down to the shore to bid his friends farewell. And he waves to them. And wishes them a life happier than the one in this city.
The folk and their children gather on the shore with tears in their eyes reciting the litany of the sea.
Legend has it that the sea can get angry if it isn’t propitiated.
There’s an ode to the dolls by a very famous poet who also left this city and found another; after the litany of the sea, they sing this ode.
At the break of dawn they trudge back to their homes.
When they go inside they don’t say a word.
For
Epilogue
(declaration to the dolls, made on the 7th of February, 2021)
Like Francis Ponge, who advocated solidarity with objects,1 I hereby advocate solidarity with dolls. Actually, I propose to go further. Dolls should have a day dedicated to them, and only to them. We who celebrate so many things, a panoply of saints, madonnas and all our dead, should also have a day dedicated to dolls. Dennis Silk2 proposed a Day for Dead Objects, after the Day of the Dead and All Saints. So I propose All Dolls.
I feel that this is the only way we can show them the respect they deserve. I dedicate it to all the dolls I ever spoke to and expected an answer from, imagined an answer from, or in whose stead I ever spoke. I dedicate it to the dolls I broke, burst, ripped apart in search of their soul, all the dolls I left behind years ago, to whom I spoke for days and nights on end before putting them out of mind, all the dolls who comforted me during winter nights and whom I carried with me everywhere, from morning till evening, the dolls I exchanged, discarded, buried, lost and mourned …
The day will come when I will walk in a procession, candle in hand, in memory of all the dolls I ever had, still have, for all the care they gave me, for all the times they sat in my lap in place of my children, my friends, hand in hand …
The day will come.
The day will come.
*
For now, all I have is these stories, these scattered verses. That too is an act of solidarity, isn’t it? One day, these dolls belonged to Glen or Lori, and no one else. They fashioned them out of nowhere, out of nothing … in our image, in our form; they have spines, heads, some have hair and arms, their legs are somewhat more fluid, I can’t decide whether they’re meant to walk or fly (though flying would be nice) or whether they’re simply meant to stand like statues, on a pedestal, a box, a block, a bone. There are Winter and Spring dolls, urban dolls and country dolls. They are alone, or among families, tribes. Some I felt I’d known for a long time. I felt closer to them than to others. Others I seem to have come to know from afar, but I’ve come to know them nonetheless. I gave each and every one of them a story and they gave me one back. I told them stories, I told their stories, and they told me stories during long and sleepless nights. What I have written about them is mine as much as it is theirs, about me as much as it is about them. These dolls are I. And I am they. They are the protagonists, but sometimes the protagonist is also I
and sometimes
sometimes
words are.
Translated from the Maltese by Albert Gatt
Clare Azzopardi is an award-winning writer who writes for both children and adults. For the past several years she has been an active member of Inizjamed, an NGO whose mission is to promote literature in Malta and abroad. Her work has been translated into several languages and published in different journals including Words Without Borders and Asymptote. Her book of short stories Kulħadd ħalla isem warajh was published in Croatian, Hungarian, Slovenian and Arabic. Azzopardi published her first novel Castillo in 2018 and it has been published in English, Arabic and Italian.
Albert Gatt trained as a linguist and computer scientist. He has translated several works of poetry and prose, including In the Name of the Father by Immanuel Mifsud (UK: Parthian, 2019), Exodus of the Storks by Walid Nabhan (UK: Peter Owen, 2022) and The Lives and Deaths of K Penza by Clare Azzopardi (UK: Praspar Press, 2022). He currently works as a Professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
1 Le Parti pris de choses by Francis Ponge, 1942.
2 “The Marionette Theatre” by Dennis Silk. In: On Dolls, ed. Kenneth Gross, 2012.
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