Translations

Translation Tuesday: Two poems by Maung Day

January 2, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Maung Day

Khine Khine Monkfish doesn't like the deaf physicians.

We are back with our first Translation Tuesday of 2018! Today, we showcase two short poems by Burmese writer Maung Day wherein he imagines worlds without mysteries or poets. Enjoy!

Fire Alarms Are Real

All the poets in the world

Will be gone in a day or two

After singing of roses and naked monks.

Then we can start our celebration

With giraffes sitting on top of poles

And people eating curries with green rice

While their souls defecate on their heads.

 

Since when did our gardens become markets

Teeming with walking wardrobes and skeletal birds

Buying music cds from deaf physicians?

Maybe nothing’s too surprising anymore

Now that our place has become a willow tree,

Our houses the innards of a violent vegan,

And our genitals electronic cigarettes.

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Translation Tuesday: “Reading on the Tram” by Aibhe Ní Ghearbhuigh

December 19, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Aibhe Ní Ghearbhuigh and Matthew Ryan Shelton

The staccato poetry / of noticeboards

Today we are thrilled to present a frosty poem that brings us to the trains of Ireland. Irish poet Aibhe Ní Ghearbhuigh beautifully weaves together locomotive travel with the more abstract movement of reading. 

Reading on the Tram

The morning tram

I go unseen

in the concertina of life,

in the articulation

between two cars

 

(out with your book)

 

I can feel

every soft turning

every

rounding of the bend

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Translation Tuesday: BALLERINA by Kinga Tóth

December 12, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Kinga Tóth and Owen Good

in the hole is the wire / the wire coiled / around the girl / like a lace collar

“BALLERINA” is a poem from Hungarian writer Kinga Tóth’s book, ALL MACHINE. Tóth is not only a poet, but a visual and multimedia artist, some of whose visual work was featured in the Summer 2016 issue of Asymptote. The sound poetry Tóth produced for ALL MACHINE can serve as a fitting prelude (or accompaniment) to reading “BALLERINA.” We hear a whirring, disjointed medley of voices surrounded by the squeaking of an unoiled machine, much like the rotating figure in the music box of the poem. 

Also included here are some illustrations from ALL MACHINE and photos from Tóth’s live work. Of them, Eva Heisler has written, “While the typed phrases in Tóth’s visual poems are a mix of English, German, and Hungarian, the poet insists that translation is not necessary, that legibility is not the point; words in her poem-drawings shake their signifying function and border on visual stammers, the line spacing often squeezed, the lines tightly stacked, and the pages factory-tuned.”

Kinga Toth, cover, 1._balerina (1)

1

the object’s shape material
regular 10×10 wood
top and bottom parts
joined with metal hinges
rotating a cylinder
in the centre a hole where
sharp fixings
are screwed
its internal design
delicately lineated
including curves
in the centre of the cylinder
(and opposite too)
is wire knotted
to hooks inside the object
the other end
positioned on a platform
onto a turning rod
wound to 2/3
with the opening and
closing of the lid the taut
rod scrapes against
the object’s inner wall/border
upon lowering against
the opposite the aim
of the first phase is to scour
the girl out from within

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What’s New in Translation: December 2017

December 11, 2017  |  in New in Translation, News, Translations  |  by Dylan Suher and Lizzie Buelher

Looking for new books? Look no further!

2017 was a fantastic year for books, but there’s still so much more we want to share before we enter the New Year! This month, our team of editors review two new books from China and Japan—each of them special in their own way. Dive in! 

lianke

The Years, Months, Days by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, Vintage (UK)

Reviewed by Dylan Suher, Contributing Editor

Released years after the publication of the original, translations benefit from historical hindsight. Although the two novellas contained within The Years, Months, Days (Grove Atlantic, December 2017) are the latest of Yan Lianke’s works to be translated into English, they were originally published in 1997 (The Years, Months, Days) and 2001 (Marrow, originally titled Balou Mountain Songs 耙耧天歌), just before the string of novels upon which Yan’s reputation now rests: Hard Like Water (2001), Lenin’s Kisses (2004), Dream of Ding Village (2005) and Four Books (2011). Read in retrospect, these novellas represent a critical point in the evolution of Yan’s aesthetic. In both, we can see Yan learning how to best use his preferred technique of primordial allegory, painted with a broad Fauvist brush. Carlos Rojas tends to smooth out and harmonize Yan’s expressive phrasing, but the credit (or blame) for the rough symbolist feel of a metaphor like time that “rushes past their interlocked gazes like a herd of horses” should all go to Yan.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Train” by Martín Tonalmeyotl

December 5, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Martín Tonalmeyotl and Paul Worley

Each step is a return: towards death, towards life

From the humorous to the profane and the sacred, Náhuatl poet Martín Tonalmeyotl’s poetic work is firmly rooted in the mountains of his native Guerrero (Mexico) and reflects his commitment to his culture and his language. Far from idealizing his home state, however, Tonalmeyotl’s work frequently takes an unflinching look at a sociopolitical situation where, in addition to the 2014 kidnapping and murder of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa amidst increasing violence from drug trafficking, Guerrero’s citizens have gone so far as to organize independent civil defense groups for protection. In “The Train,” the poet takes up another aspect of life in contemporary Mexico, human migration, in the series of freight trains otherwise known as La bestia (the Beast) or El tren de la muerte (the Death Train) that transport migrants from Central America to the US border.

—Paul Worley

The Train 

Each step is a return: towards death, towards life
Each train is a nightmare: of blood, of hunger, of cobwebs
Each child is a piece of fruit: rotten, sweet, bitter, what does it matter
At any rate life is sold to the scavengers
To the rancid wolves who’d like to eat us whole
Because if they don’t devour our stick-thin bones
Their potbellies will become hollow
And they won’t have any shit to feed their own parasites
We should get drunk, I tell you,
So we forget that on this earth
Day by day we are hunted down like rabid dogs

Translated from the Náhuatl into Spanish by Martín Tonalmeyotl
Translated from the Spanish into English  by Paul Worley

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Translation Tuesday: The Strawberry Pickers by Felix Nicolau

November 21, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by MARGENTO and Martin Woodside

freedom is expensive, paid up front!

This Tuesday, we’re excited to share a new poem by the Romanian poet, Felix Nicolau, whose work is a cutting and humorous comment on life for those crossing borders and coming into contact with other cultures, yet who are still at the very bottom of the social ladder. 


The Strawberry Pickers

is President Iliescu around—the sun will come out!
on Christmas we took our measure of freedom
seriously, didn’t the Star Poet of Pit Coal and his miner comrades from Jiu Valley invade
the capital?
didn’t they march through the springtime quarter or through the slums?
Hooray President Goatee!  Did he eat salami with soy like all of us?  Boo, Goatee!
we won’t sell our country out!
back then we had the means but no beans
now there’s lots of beans but no financial means
we’ve been hit by a nuclear bomb of whiskey and cigarettes
is President Iliescu around—the sun will come out!
the retirees applaud the miners the students heckle their grandparents
the scenery’s cleared of railroad locomotive plants
the sea is cleared of our fleet
freedom is expensive, paid up front!  Give us money to stay up front!
finally we can buy and sell the best football players
more powerful than the Chinese—we take all the strawberry picking jobs in Europe
we pick the strawberries on the bottom of the Atlantic
we emerge on the east coast and keep picking
watch out Alaska—WE’RE COMING!

Translated from the Romanian by MARGENTO and Martin Woodside


Felix Nicolau is Professor in the Faculty of Theology and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of eight books of literary and communication theory, five volumes of poetry (Kamceatka—Time IS honey, 2014) and two novels. He is member on the editorial boards of The Muse—an International Journal of Poetry and Metaliteratura magazines. His areas of interest are translation studies, the theory of communication, comparative literature, cultural studies, translation studies, British and American studies, and Romanian studies. He is also swims, rollerblades, and rides a scooter. Sometimes he even reads more than writes.

MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu) is a poet, performer, academic, and translator who has lectured, launched books, and performed in the US, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe. His pen name is also the name of his multimedia cross-artform band that won a number of major international awards. He is co-author of poetryartexchange, his co-translations with Martin Woodside from Gellu Naum’s poetry (Athanor and Other Pohems) were nominated by World Literature Today as Most Notable Translation in 2013, and he has written the libretto for a rock opera composed by Bogdan Bradu. He deploys networks-of-networks and natural-language-processing algorithms in his collaborative poetry, and continues his work on the graph poem project together with Diana Inkpen and their students at the University of Ottawa. MARGENTO is Romania & Moldova editor-at-large for Asymptote.

Martin Woodside is a writer, teacher, scholar, and founding member of Calypso Editions. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who earned his MFA and a certificate of specialization in Children’s Literature from San Diego State University and his Ph.D. in Childhood Studies from Rutgers-Camden in 2015. He ​has written five books for children, a chapbook of poetry (Stationary Landscapes, Pudding House), and a full-length collection of poetry (This River Goes Both Ways, Wordtech). His translations of Romanian poetry have appeared in several books and journals, including The Kenyon Review Online, Asymptote, and the Brookyn Rail’s inTranslation. He’s published two collections of Romanian poetry in translation: Of Gentle Wolves, an anthology of contemporary Romanian poetry, and—along with MARGENTO—Athanor & Other Pohems, collecting the work of the brilliant surrealist Gellu Naum.


*****

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Translation Tuesday: Poems by Roberto Piva

November 14, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Maíra Mendes Galvão and Roberto Piva

I am the acid trip / in nighttime boats

Today we present the Brazilian poet, Roberto Piva, translated by Asymptote Editor at Large for Brazil, Maíra Mendes Galvão. At once spiritual and carnal, Piva’s poems are rooted in the chaos of the metropolis, the dirt and grime of the urban underworld, all with a Surrealist and sometimes Romantic tinge, at the heels of André Breton, Murilo Mendes, Lautréamont, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His utter divergence from the formal constraints of constructivism and the then-flourishing Brazilian concrete movement, as well as his reliance on the sensorial, rendered him one of the “poetas malditos”—maligned poets—an outcast even from the infamous yet famous Brazilian “marginal generation.” “Piazza I” first appeared in Piazzas (1964), while “Poema Vertigem” (Poem Vertigo) was published in Ciclones (1997).

Piazza I

One afternoon
is enough to go mad
Or to hit the Museum to see Bosch
a winter’s afternoon
on a grave patio
where garòfani milk-shake & Claude
obssessed with angels
or vast engines that spin with
seraphic grace
playing the banjo of Remembrance
without the love found tasted dreamed of
& long municipal vivaria
without seeking to understand
imagine
the eyeless marrow
or virgin birds
it just so happened that I saw again
the simple mortal tower of Dream
not with real & cylindrical fingers
Du Barry Byron the Marquess of Santos
Swift Jarry with the noise
of bells in my barbarian nights
the chariots of fire
the trapezes of mercury
are hands writing & fishing
eschatological nymphs
small cannons of blood & the large open eyes
for some miracle of Luck
I am the jet set of damned love
INSIDE THE NIGHT & ITS ILLUMINATED CRAMPS
the parrots of death with Aristotle at the stern of thunder
THE WILL TO DRIFT AROUND LOVE’S DATA
spinach in the morning & cream cheese
sporty-souls with flowers between their teeth
my orange opening up like a door
YOUR VOICE IS ETERNAL I see the ashen hand tearing
the wall of the world
WE ARE IN LIFE DEFINITELY

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Love Crisson” by Milli Graffi

November 7, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Jennifer Scappettone

Talklossenette wavening / the palpid culdicurve / ambashes.

I fell in love with the poetry of Milli Graffi in 2008, when I was seeking authors to include in a dossier for Aufgabe on “poesia ultima e della ricerca,” or the latest Italian poetry of research. It was immediately clear to me that we had heroes in common—Lewis Carroll and James Joyce in particular.

There’s a section in Finnegans Wake on Anna Liva Plurabelle in which Joyce speaks of “loosening your talktapes.” When he translated this passage into Italian, Joyce himself rendered this phrase as “scioglilinguagnolo,” a translation that likely reveals the matrix of the original notion he had in mind: in English, we speak of tongue twisters, or what we might render in Italian as attorci–lingua, while in Italian one uses the term “scioglilingua,” or tongue-dissolvers, tongue-thawers, tongue untiers. The Italian idiomatic expression might very well have been the origin of the “loosening” that ended up in Finnegans Wake, a book in which all languages converge in tangles of phonemes and roots.

I discovered this point of correspondence in a book of English exercises that Milli Graffi edited for Paravia publishers, aimed at high school students—because Graffi, unstoppable champion of the avant-garde that she is, chose this mind-twistingly complex passage for the teaching volume. When we got together this summer in Milan to prepare for a public chat on translation, on a sultry heat-thickened afternoon further stultified by a city-wide transit strike, Milli told me that she had used the word in a poem, and I knew that I had to try translating it.

The work was published in Mille graffi e venti poesie, 1977-78 (Geiger, 1979), and I soon found that Graffi had rendered Joyce’s phrase even more Byzantine, because she transformed scioglilinguagnolo into sperdilinquagnolo, turning the action of loosening embedded in the original Italian phrase into loss (sperdersi refers to losing oneself; sperdere means dispersal, scattering), and lingua (“tongue; language”) into linqua, some sort of calque tending toward the English “linkage” while containing the heavily deictic “qua” (Italian “here”; Latin “what; as; in the capacity of”). I took other necessary liberties while working with this poem: my translation of ambiscia is a calque of ambassador and ambush, and so on. A proper gloss would proceed word by word, but I’ll leave it up to readers to discover some tripwires of their own.

—Jennifer Scappettone

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Translation Tuesday: “The Despair of Roses” by Frédérique Martin

October 31, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Frédérique Martin and Hilary McGrath

I sold my mother the other day.

If Camus’ Meursault once shocked us with his emotional alienation, opening his novel with “Today, mother died,” Frédérique Martin’s unsentimental narrator takes it one step further in “The Despair of the Roses”: “I sold my mother the other day.”  This Translation Tuesday, we present the brilliant fiction leading off our New Voices in French Literature Special Feature showcase in our latest issue. If you are a French reader, hop over to this article page for the French original and translator Hilary McGrath’s note, and consider following us at our newly launched French Facebook page!

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

I sold my mother the other day. At the market in Saints-Sauveurs, the one that’s open to the public twice a year like in many large towns. I wanted to take care of the sale myself rather than handing her over to one of the merchants. They may know all the right things to say but they don’t always keep their word. Don’t think that I don’t love my mother. I said to her—I love you, Mum. Don’t ever forget that—but the day comes when you have to move on from your parents and let go of the apron strings. My father has been dead for some time so this question never arose with regard to him.

She was gone by around three in the afternoon. You could hardly say they had to tear us apart. She’s not even that old and is still in excellent health. She wasn’t a burden on me either. It was more a question of weighing things up and finding a balance; when one stage in life comes to an end you need to move on. To leave your childhood behind you, selling your mother becomes a necessary step. I’m not the only one who believes this to be true but I know what some people think about it; they consider it a little too . . . radical. For the most part, they are hypocrites who end up putting their elderly relatives into retirement homes where death awaits them. Some keep them at home but reduce their living space little by little and send them to bed earlier and earlier, knowing that the deadly boredom of the interminable days will grind them down. Some people probably still love them enough to relinquish a space for them, some corner, over there. And wait it out.

I don’t want all that palaver in my house. My mother is affectionate and very active. That’s the memory I’ll always have of her. However, she did weave an invisible, sticky web around me that prevented me from growing up, my heartbeat stuck in a groove that wasn’t my own.
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Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “The Garden of Seven Twilights” by Miquel de Palol

October 24, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Adrian West

I grew aware of the immense distances spread out in front of me, breathing for me.

“When I read Miquel de Palol,” says Mireira Vidal-Conte, “I see reflections of such authors as Claudio Magris, Robert Walser, Cortázar, Ray Bradbury, Clarice Lispector, Stendhal, Szymborska, Casares, Karel Čapek, Pessoa, Proust, Flaubert, or Novalis; but also of painters like Brueghel the Elder (the first of many predecessors of the surrealism of the detail) or the cinema of David Lynch, Fellini, or Wong Kar-wai. This is true irrespective of the genre, for the poet under discussion works not in a specific genre (save for that of language), but in the broader category of art. As a literary artist, he employs genre in the manner of a simple tool, employing the one that works or those occasions when it works. He is a poet when poetry is what is called for.” For this Translation Tuesday, we present an excerpt from The Garden of Seven Twilights, in which the great Miquel de Palol touches the real in all its vertiginous vastness in childhood moments spent face to face with the cosmos. This piece was first published last Thursday along with new work from thirty-one countries in our Fall 2017 issue.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

The Story of the Swing and the Stars

My American childhood, super-protected, closed in on itself, took place between Long Island and New England: Providence, Boston, Salem . . . Now they seem to me like places from a dream. My godfather Kaspar had a house on the outskirts of Boston, and I stayed there for long stretches in the summer, until my mother died.

There was a swing between two apple trees in the garden behind the house, but from a very young age, I preferred to kill time staring at the cockroaches and butterflies.

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Mediterranean Suite by Florin Caragiu

October 17, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by MARGENTO and Marius Surleac

Not far away, the frescoes catch in their fishing nets The memory and the wind. Closely following behind us, the dolphins.

Today’s Translation Tuesday is brought to you by MARGENTO, Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, and poet and translator Marius Surleac. As you immerse yourself in these lines, it is worth keeping in mind Florin’s unique profile and approach to creation as he combines poetry, mathematics, and Eastern Orthodox theology. There is a specific emphasis on mystical practice, particularly the kind that involves “iconic Hesychasm.” These excerpts from Florin Caragiu’s work, Mediterranean Suite, explore a sense of nostalgia, loss, and change.

Excerpts from Mediterranean Suite

It was only after long that we found the poet’s grave

In the graveyard by the sea. We barely made out

His name on the burial stone. We had passed

The spot several times

Without noticing it. Just as day after day people keep reaching

Your sight and you have no idea what they’re holding back.

Just as the blotchy calligraphic lettering

Overshadows a voice and its sharp beams

Coming out of a cloud of sea gulls, out of the lighted beacon

Piercing the sea’s costa and its coastal heart,

The wave amphitheater, and the city’s watery arteries.

 

Not far away, the frescoes catch in their fishing nets

The memory and the wind. Closely following behind us, the dolphins.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Formaldehyde by Carla Faesler

October 10, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Adam Greenberg

​"There is a human heart the size of a fist inside of a jar."

This glimpse into a new work by Carla Faesler offers an intriguing portrait of a married couple’s life and the spectre of their daughter, memories of a deceased mother, and a heart preserved in a jar. This excerpt seems to almost represent a cross-section of the story, focusing on one particular, seemingly normal day, yet with flickers of the past as well as into the future. The ending leaves us unsettled, but wanting more—we’ve become witness to a family’s mysterious secret, and we won’t be let go just yet. 

Excerpt from Formaldehyde

“The heart, if it could think, would stop.”

—Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet

Febe, Larca’s mother, swallows her pills in the morning. Her circulatory system pumps the pharmaceuticals in minutes. Only then can she cook breakfast. When the effect peaks, she’s finishing her second cup of coffee. Larca walks to school hand in hand with Celso, her father, while Febe, engrossed like a hen, perches in her armchair, purveying a section of foliage out the window, a bit of sky, the fraction of a lamp post, to wonder how her husband, after dropping off their daughter, can walk to the hardware store and hoist the storefront’s heavy curtain under the constant watch of the guards. The physical force flushes red Celso’s face, supplied with blood by a network of fine veins. Then Febe, pallid, stands to fix her hair and slip something on in time for her husband to come home. Once he’s climbed the stairs, they greet one another with the warmth of a hand resting on a shoulder or the idle motion of clothes settling. Immediately then, two mannequins long out of fashion go down the white wood stairs. They drive to the market to buy food, and they check up on grandma’s house, which is really the house of Cristina, Celso’s dead mother, where everything remains unchanged thanks to Aurora who, despite her ponderous age, has held to her thrifty ways. They leave behind some groceries and the daily request that she resist the cloisters that have her walled in, consumed. It’s not that there are ghosts, with the family legend there would be enough dead to populate a country, it’s Aurora who frightens herself, the terrible appearance of her varicose veins, her wearied insides burdening her with the notion that she won’t ever disappear.

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Translation Tuesday: To a Girl Sleeping in the Street by Nazik al-Mala’ika

October 3, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Emily Drumsta

"people are a mask, artificial and fake, their sweet, gentle exteriors hide burning hate"

Though best known as the pioneer of “free verse” in Arabic, Nazik al-Mala’ika was in fact a fervent defender of Arabic meter, both in her poetry and in her criticism. Indeed, her theory of free verse was not very “free” at all, but rather took the undulating metrical feet of classical Arabic verse as the basis for a new prosodic system. Where classical poetry is governed by fixed line lengths and strict monorhyme, al-Mala’ika’s prosody allowed modern poets to vary the number of feet in each line and weave their rhymes as they saw fit. “Meter is the soul that electrifies literary material and transforms it into poetry,” she wrote in the critical text Issues in Contemporary Poetry. “Indeed, images and feelings do not become poetic, in the true sense, until they are touched by the fingers of music and the pulse of meter beats in their veins.”

To honor al-Mala’ika’s belief in meter’s vitality—the way it can anchor meaning in the body, transforming ordinary speech into a form of incantation—I have rendered her metered, rhymed Arabic verse into English metrical forms that reproduce, in some form, the music of the Arabic. Where al-Mala’ika uses the mutadarik or “continuous” meter in Arabic, for example, I use anapestic hexameter, English’s answer to Arabic’s most galloping verse form. Al-Mala’ika’s poetry, with its balance between tradition and innovation, ultimately teaches us not to deal so violently with the past, but rather to tread lightly in poetry’s ancient footsteps. My hope is that my English renderings of her verse might begin to do precisely this.   

— Emily Drumsta

To A Girl Sleeping In The Street

In Karrada at night, wind and rain before dawn,
when the dark is a roof or a drape never drawn,

when the night’s at its peak and the dark’s full of rain,
and the wet silence roils like a fierce hurricane,

the lament of the wind fills the deserted street,
the arcades groan in pain, and the lamps softly weep.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Tempodrome by Simona Popescu

September 26, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by MARGENTO

"You have as many countries as the languages you speak."

Today’s Translation Tuesday is brought to you by MARGENTO, Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova. The lyrical excerpts from Romanian essayist and poet Simona Popescu’s writing explore a mood—memories of the nineties related as if at a remove, stating plainly what the narrator saw, while encapsulating the myriad complications simmering beneath the still surface of the narration. 

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like
to fold my magic carpet, after use,
in such a way as to superimpose one part
of the pattern upon another.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Then everything regroups as if in a hot fog
where things recover among the obscure
plantations of the accidental.”
—Gellu Naum, The Blue Riverbank

“I have no idea of time, and I don’t wish to have”
—Wislawa Szymborska, On the Tower of Babel

In the house of my childhood, somewhere in my parents’ mixed up bookcase, leaning on a couple of books stood a black teddy bear in a white sash ribbon with some red lettering on it saying Grüsse aus Berlin. On other shelves there were other “souvenirs” from Abroad. For instance, a wooden cylinder with a lid in the shape of a Russian church dome, with a rose and the word “Bulgaria” burnt onto it. Inside was a vial of Bulgarian rose perfume. My folks never traveled Abroad. In fact, nobody in our little town ever traveled Abroad. Not even the Saxons and the Hungarians who, judging by the language they spoke, had to have another country somewhere, if push came to shove, right? You have as many countries as the languages you speak, the saying went. The Hungarians and the Saxons were therefore half foreign. But even so, even they never got Abroad—it was only the old people that sometimes went, but they always returned. Nobody needed them and they didn’t need anybody or anything except a quiet life in their homes. Only old people returned. They and the migrating birds.

It was me who had brought the rose perfume home. I was 12 when I went, without my parents, on a trip—well, yes—Abroad. I don’t recall much. It was I think in spring, there was I think a crisp sun, I was on a terrace I think by the sea, somewhere on a cliff, there were breakers I think in front of me, not very close though, I think I never went down the stairs to dip my toes in the sea. In the “vision” conjured by the word “Bulgaria” in which I’m a child a milky light and a bluish expanse approach me. And I’m all alone there, for a second, my back turned on everybody else. And I can hear a roaring wind. (I am back there anytime I want. I’m 12 and then—as I keep adding now—44. I hold an invisible butterfly net in my hand and collect images with it.) READ MORE…