Archive
Two poems from the Persian by Ali Abdolrezaei
translated by Abol Froushan
Threesome
زنی که لب هایش می بوسید
در قطاری که داشت لندن را وسط پاریس پیاده می کرد
از زنی که بوسه بر لب هایش ماسید
وقتی جدا شد
به سوی مردی دوید
که من نبودم
اگر چه می دانم
چمدانی هم آن وسط جا ماند
که مال او نبود
دو دست که دور یک گردن گره خورد
عاشقانه هم را بوسیدند
بدون آنکه بدانند
زن دیگری هم هست
که عاشقانه می خواهد
در این مراسم شرکت کند
1
The woman whose lips kissed
in the train that dropped London off mid-Paris
when she parted
from the woman on whose lips smeared a kiss
ran towards a man
that I was not
though I know
a book also stayed open in the middle
that was not hers
two arms that tied around a neck
and kissed each other like lovers
without knowing
that there is another woman too
who is longing to take part in this ritual
تمام این چند سالی که با هم ازدواج کرده بودند
زنش داشت به او خیانت می کرد
امروز آمده بود اینجا که اعتراف کند زنی را گاییده ست
و هق هق می گریست
طفلی
ما مردها
چقدر مادر جنده ایم!
2
In all the years they are married
she has been cheating on him
He had come here today to confess he has slept with a woman
and he was all in tears
poor us
Men! So many sons of bitches!
دلش می خواهد
با من به سینما برود
بیاید!
بیاید و حالش را ببرد
بعد هم می خواهد
به کافه ای در هلبورن دعوتم کند
چرا که نه!؟
تازه دوست دارد
مرا به دوستش هم نشان بدهد
چه بهتر!
بعد از چهل بهار آب دادن
طبیعی ست
که هر گلی عاشقم باشد
علی الخصوص هر آن دو تایی که مایلند سه بکنند
فقط مانده ام با این یکی چه کنم
شورش را درآورده
چه آرزوی محالی
چه غلط ها!
با من دلش می خواهد
بخوابد و آخ!
عاشق هم نشود
3
She desires
to go to the movies with me
let her!
Let her come and enjoy
and then she wants to invite me to a cafe in Holborn
why not?
she would also even like to show me off to her friends
so much the better!
it is natural after all of forty sprinklings
for any flower to fall in love with me
especially any two who would like to make three
I’m just stuck not knowing what to do with this one
they’ve really spoiled the show
what an impossible dream
what hubris!
with me her heart wants to mix
let her want to Ah!
and she should not fall in love
* * *
فرانسه
فرانسه دارد کم کم خودمانی می شود با ما
یا پاریس را به کشور دیگری برده اند
که دریا هم سیاهم کرده ست؟
ماهی به این سیاهی
کوچولو!
جای صنم که صمد را دنبال نمی کند
به قلابی که انداخته ای در دلم
دیگرهیچ قلبی تُک نمی زند
باد سراسیمه رفته ست شمال
خشک است لب ساحل و
نم پس نمی دهد دریا
و باران که تکلیف آمدنش روشن نیست
دیگرنمی آید
که با انگشت های باریکش
موهای مرا شانه کند
پس اگر در پاریس
یا کشور دیگری در پاریس
مرا دست در دست دختر دیگری در خیابان دیدی
خیال نکن خیانت کرده ام به تو
حتمن او را با تو اشتباه گرفته بودم
France
Is France getting more and more familiar with me
or has Paris been transported to another country
that even the Seine is deceiving me as a black sea?
This little black fish
no longer bites the bate you threw in my heart
the wind has hurriedly driven north
the seaside gives no water
and the sea gives no wave
and the rain the probable rain
no longer rains down on my hair like your slender fingers
so if in Paris
or another country in Paris
you ever saw me arm in arm with another girl
don’t think I’m cheating you
be certain I have mistaken her for you
Ali Abdolrezaei (website, page on Poetry International Web) was born in 1969 in Northern Iran. He graduated with a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tehran Technical and Engineering University. He began his professional poetic career in 1986 and became one of the most serious and contentious poets of the new generation of Persian poetry. Abdolrezaei has had an undeniable effect on many Persian poets through his poetry as well as his speeches and interviews. He is also one of the few poets who has succeeded in expressing a unique poetic individuality. His 21 varied books of poetry demonstrate his poetic creativity and power. Nearly all well-known poets and critics of Persian poetry have written about Abdolrezaei’s work. In September 2002 after his protest against heavy censorship of his latest books such as So Sermon of Society and Shinema, he was banned from teaching and public speaking. He left Iran and after staying a few months in Germany, followed by two years in France, he moved to London, where he has been living for the last 5 years.
Abol Froushan (page on Poetry International Web) was born in Tehran and has lived in London since 1975. Alongside a career in high-tech (from nuclear engineering to information architecture) where he works for a major UK insurance company, Abol has published two selections of his poetry: A Language Against Language (English) 2008 by EWI and the bilingual volume, I Need Your Desert for my Sneeze [PDF] (in Persian & English) in 2009 by PoetryPub. He has also published two volumes of his English translations of Ali Abdolrezaei: In Riskdom where I lived (2008) by EWI and Sixology (April 2010) by PoetryPub. Other published translations of Abol include Parham Shahrjerdi’s Risk of Poetry, by Poetry Pub. Abol has been published in the anthology Silver Throat of the Moon Ed. J Langer and the Exiled Ink magazine, as well as many online literary magazines such as Danse Macabre, Indigo Rising Magazine, Troubadour21 and Luciole Press.
Spermicidal and other poems
by Howie Good
Spermicidal
I ask if you remember the story headlined FIRE. You slowly circle the parking lot again, searching for a close-in spot. We’re the ghosts of our own thoughts — or no, a character in each other’s stories. At the track your horse stumbles. Potential orphans pass us on the stairs. We’re far from the ocean. I watch a bird that looks like the bird that picks the crocodile’s teeth.
* * *
Cannibals & Missionaries
A man sits alone in a room, staring at the fire like Descartes, broken glass in his beard. There are things for which he doesn’t know the reasons. He throws his arms around a horse’s neck on a street in Turin and bursts into tears. Someone slits someone’s throat. And where did the bullet come from? Death is just like a pink eraser, only more so.
* * *
Uneasy Dreams
1
Mix a little gunpowder with saliva. Memory is a building, a fountain, a madman who becomes calm on seeing a sheep. In floats an empty word balloon. It shimmers like the ashes of some extinct halo.
2
You dread the cough of a stranger. Agents sent to investigate force the prisoner to kneel. The hand that stops moving still holds a pen. Your ancestors saw so many witches they ran out of stakes to burn them all. I wipe my eyes; I was once a fan of riddles myself. Tiny flying things with grinning monster faces continue their dance.
3
Fireworks in my chest, and there’s a fresh dusting of snow, a white hare without fur or bones.
Howie Good is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011).
Unsaid
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Lois P. Jones has been published in American Poetry Journal, Rose & Thorn, Tiferet, Quill & Parchment, The California Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Arsenic Lobster, Prism Review and other print and online journals in the U.S. and abroad. She is co-founder of Word Walker Press and a documentarist of Argentina’s wine industry. You can hear her as host on 90.7 KPFK’s Poets Cafe (archive of Lois’s shows) and see her as co-producer of Moonday’s monthly poetry reading in Pacific Palisades, California. She is the Associate Poetry Editor of Kyoto Journal and a 2009 Pushcart Nominee. In August 2010 her poem “Ouija” was selected as Poem of the Year by judge Dana Goodyear.
Flicker and Flux: Versions of Heraclitus
by Magda Kapa and Teju Cole
The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus sounds strikingly modern. He wrote in fragments, of which only fragments survive, and this is part of the secret of his seemingly miraculous talent for compression. Not a word is wasted. Each aphorism strikes the ear like a mathematical formula: direct but gnomic, amoral and shorn of sentiment. One of the fragments might be read as an apologia for this mode of working: ὁ ἄναξ, οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει. (“The lord whose oracle is at Delphi is neither clear nor cryptic. He signals.”)
We were interested in doing “versions” or “readings” of Heraclitus rather than “translations” because we wished to test the fragments against modern expression. We tried to find a voicing balanced somewhere between poetry, vernacular speech, and laconic statement, always with an eye to brevity. We began with the ancient Greek text, and were guided by German, English, and modern Greek translations. What we aimed for was not a word-for-word rendering of each fragment, but a statement that retained the pith of the original while plundering it for new signals. Our version of fragment 49a, probably the best known of the Heraclitean fragments, illustrates our approach.
(The Greek fragments are taken from, and numbered as in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [9 ed. Berlin 1960], edited and translated by Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz.)
1
ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων. (119)
Human being, human daimon.
2
ξυνόν ἐστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν. (113)
Mind is all, and in all.
3
ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν. (101)
I have searched myself.
4
ὅσων ὄψις ἀκοὴ μάθησις, ταῦτα ἐγὼ προτιμέω. (55)
The things I can see or hear or study are the things I prefer.
5
ὀφθαλμοὶ γὰρ τῶν ὤτων ἀκριβέστεροι μάρτυρες. (101a)
Eyes see better than ears.
6
χρυσὸν γὰρ οἱ διζήμενοι γῆν πολλὴν ὀρύσσουσι καὶ εὑρίσκουσιν ὀλίγον. (22)
Goldminers mine earth mostly.
7
. . . μεταβάλλον ἀναπαύεται. (84a)
Things are at ease in flicker and flux.
8
τοὺς καθεύδοντας ἐργάτας εἶναι καὶ συνεργοὺς τῶν ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ γινομένων. (75)
Even sleepers are at work on the work of the cosmos.
9
ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν. (49a)
We cannot enter a river at all. We are and are not.
*
Magda Kapa was born in Greece and now lives in translation in Northern Germany. She has worked as a freelance screenwriter and teaches Modern Greek and English. She writes poetry and short stories.
Teju Cole (website) is a Nigerian-American novelist, photographer, and historian of art. He is the author of Open City, just out today from Random House.
Two modern Greek poets
translated by Dean Kostos
ΘΑΛΑΣΣΙΝΟ ΚΡΑΣΙΝίκος Αντωνάκος I Στούς κύκλους Νά πιείς II Τροχίζει ό ήλιος ούρανό Κι έσύ στήν πέτρα III Κάτω άπ’ τό ψάθινο γέλιο IV Δούρειος V ’Αμυλο τών σταχυών της VI Στίς δήλες τών ματιών |
Sea Wineby Nikos Antonakos I In the circles To drink II The sun sharpens the sky And you in the stone III Under her straw smile IV Trojan V In silent shafts of wheat VI In the sheen of her eyes |
* * *
ΣΤΟ ΦΕΓΓΑΡΙΚώστας Ταχτσής Φεγγάρι μου |
To The Moonby Kostas Tachtses My moon |
Translator’s note: This poem begins with the Demotic word for moon and concludes with the word in Katharevousa, which I have italicized. There is no equivalent in English.
* * *
ΑΓΑΠΗΚώστας Ταχτσής Θά έξορύξω καί θά πιώ τά μάτια |
Loveby Kostas Tachtses I will pluck out and drink your eyes |
Nikos Antonakos was a filmmaker, poet, and journalist and a devoted member of the Greek Communist Party. He died of a heart attack two years ago while he was giving a speech about another Greek poet, the great Yannis Ritsos.
Kostas Tachtses’s only novel, To trito stefani (The Third Wedding, 1962) was a bestseller, and is still widely read. He was openly homosexual and a transvestite, and fought for gay rights and the rights of prostitutes. He was murdered in 1988.
Dean Kostos’s books include: Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma, and Celestial Rust. He was the editor of Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry and the coeditor of Mama’s Boy: Gay Men Write about Their Mothers. His poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Boulevard, Southwest Review, Chelsea, Stand Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He has taught at The City University of New York, The Gallatin School of New York University, Wesleyan, Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and elsewhere.
Two poems from the Turkish by Ahmet Uysal
translated by Nesrin Eruysal and Ken Fifer
Mercanyine görmeye geldim işte: homeros’un zeytin ağacı ki; çizikler atıp durdu utanmaz, gökyüzü eğildi üzerime |
CoralI came back again to see Homer’s olive tree, Shameless wild blackberries, The sky, bent over me, |
* * *
Lirik Ezgileraşkın şiirini de yazmamı * * * * * |
SongsWet-winged seagulls From a stopover between kisses, With buzzing wings It’s strange, as I grow old There’s no time to be a pessimist. From the Hittite land with one thousand gods |
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(Thanks to Hayri Çelebi at Ankara University for recording the part in Turkish.)
Ahmet Uysal (b. 1938 in Balikesir, Turkey) worked as a teacher and administrator at elementary, high school and vocational education schools in Balikesir, Yozgat, Çanakkale and Bursa, and later as a Ministry of National Education’s Primary School inspector. Since publishing his first poem in 1954, his poems, short stories and critical essays have appeared widely, winning numerous awards. The founder and editor of the literary magazine Stories for Children, he has written more than 120 books for children, winning both the Unesco Special Award and Sedat Simavi Foundation’s Children’s Year Special Award for Once and Twice Upon A Time (1979). His poetry books include With Waters (Yeni Biçem Yay, 1994); Long Gone Summers (Düslem Yay, 1998), recipient of the Ceyhun Atuf Kansu Poetry Award; The Silence of Suffering (Bilgi Yay, 1999), recipient of the Yunus Nadi Poetry Award; Fugitive Poetry (Imbat Yay, 2006); and Paper Marbling of September (Mühür Kitapligi, 2009), recipient of the Ergin Günçe Poetry Award. He currently lives in Edremit/Altinoluk.
Nesrin Eruysal is a literary scholar and translator of two books, Corporate Religion (Mediacat, 2002) and A Company of Citizens (Mediacat, 2005). She has published a number of articles that explore the relationship between literature and Jungian thought and is the author of “I Wish That Jewish Doctor Had Come Earlier” (Gozlem Publication Company, 2002).
Ken Fifer lives in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, and is a Professor of English at Penn State University, Berks campus. His own poems and his translations of contemporary Turkish poetry have appeared in many journals, including Barrow Street, New Letters, Ploughshares, and The Wolf (UK). He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being After Fire.
Intellectuals in Bubbatown
I was in no mood to go to a party.
I was teaching Junior High English in a violent, all-minority school. Earlier that day, a 16-year-old student (he had been held back twice) had taken a swing at me. I’d blocked his punch and wasn’t hurt, but it unsettled me. In addition, I had just read The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno, a complex work that I loved but still don’t fully understand. De Unamuno’s humiliation and death during the Spanish Civil War had plummeted me into a full-scale depression. I suppose I thought that, if de Unamuno — the premier Spanish intellectual of his time, and the rector of the University of Salamanca — could be hounded to his death, what hope was there for anyone who loved books?
But the night was young and so were we. It was Houston, in the early 1980s, before the oil boom went bust. It was a time when dumb guys made huge amounts of money.You didn’t even have to be in the oil business. If you knew how put up dry wall, and could hire cheap Mexican labor to work for you, you could make a fortune.
Intellectuals, as usual, were poorly paid.
I was at a party with my then-girlfriend, Andrea, a graduate student at the University of Houston. We both wanted desperately wanted to be writers. I was drinking. Andrea was stoned.
Andrea knew our host from somewhere, and he welcomed us into his gated mansion. An amiable good ol’ boy who had made his fortune in plumbing, he handed me over to his trophy wife and disappeared with Andrea. His wife introduced me to a knot of her husband’s peers and disappeared.
The men were all alike: slack-jawed yet successful. They wore their good jeans, held up by hand-tooled leather belts with gaudy belt-buckles. They stood in ostrich or alligator-skin cowboy boots. They all sported gold Rolex watches, except for one fashion outlaw who apologized for wearing a platinum one. A few of them wore string ties with turquoise clasps. I was the only one wearing an ascot.
Their conversation was entirely about cars and pickup trucks. Talking about cars bores me like an auger.
Besides, I could easily imagine them as the right-wing Falangists who chased de Unamuno from the podium, shouting their slogan of “Long Live Death!”
I excused myself and went in search of Andrea.
And found her in the house, having sex with our host. They were easy to find. The bedroom door was open, and our host kept yelling “yee-haw!”
While Andrea and I did not have an exclusive relationship, I did ascribe to the notion that “you dance with the one what brung you.” But I was too depressed to fight. I found the patio bar and began some serious drinking. Sometimes having a nymphomaniac, bisexual girlfriend wasn’t as fun as it sounds.
I was still at the bar, a half-hour later, when our host found me. He grinned and slapped me on the back.
“Your gal is doin’ my wife back in house.”
“Nothing Andrea does surprises me any more.”
“Wisht I could join ‘em, but they said no. Well, I got the video camera goin’ — I’ll get to watch that later. Your gal done this before?”
I wasn’t going tell him that Andrea’s parties usually ended up with a half-dozen people in her bedroom. Instead, I said, “You know, this party is insufferably Anglo. There’s not a single person of color here.”
“Hell, you want to talk to some Mexicans, they’re working back in the kitchen. But I figger folks mostly like to stick to their own kind. Would you want to be the only white boy at a Mexican party?”
“I’ve been the only white boy at a party of Uruguayans. I liked it. It gave me the chance to practice my Spanish.” I didn’t tell him it was back East, not in Texas.
“Well, I’ll be. What’d they talk about?”
“Lot of things. Politics, mostly. Did you know that one-fifth of the adult population of Uruguay is in prison or in exile at the moment?”
“God bless America! Any of them Uruguay-icans do plumbing work? I’m always hirin’.”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, I got t’ check on the party. Nice talkin’ with ya.” And he sauntered back to his posse.
I begged some coffee from the kitchen — the staff was Mexican — and sat alone in the darkened dining room. I asked myself why I was still with Andrea. We weren’t having much sex any more — at least, not with each other. I didn’t even really like her.
Gradually, I realized it was our desire to be writers that was our only commonality. She was in a writing seminar with the famous short-story writer Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston. I was too busy teaching and drinking to do much writing at all. But as long as I was with her, and she was studying under a writer who was routinely published in The New Yorker, I felt as if my own writing career was still progressing.
Then and there, I decided to break up with Andrea and stop drinking. (The former was easy. I’m still working on the latter, thirty years later.)
Just then Andrea reappeared. “I’m ready to go,” she said. “Have a nice time?”
“Yes,” I lied.
Oh, and I lied about the Uruguayan men at that party, too. They didn’t talk about politics, not unless I asked them.
Mostly they talked about cars.
Wayne A. “Tony” Conaway is a writer with only himself to blame. He deeply regrets not pursuing a career sterilizing bowling shoes. His reading for the podcast was recorded in front of a live audience on December 15th, 2010, at Michael’s Restaurant, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
Spotted Towhee: translating the guide
by Deb Scott
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The artwork is a digital (iPad) sketch based on one of my photographs, taken on an urban walk. The birdcall “Che che zheeeee” is from the Sibley Field Guide To Birds Of Western North America.
Deb Scott lives in Portland, Oregon. She blogs at Stoney Moss and was one of the folks behind Read Write Poem. These days she and friends are ring-leaders at Big Tent Poetry, an online poetry prompt site. Deb’s poetry, prose and photography are published or forthcoming in a number of journals, including Ouroboros Review and tiny words. (A complete list is here.)
Mistranslating Li Bai’s “Voice of the Autumn Wind”
by Avra Wing
I got the mise en scene:
Bright moon and pure autumn breeze
making the dry leaves spin. Even
brought in the crow, on a cold branch,
startled by such dancing. Into the hard, clear night
I placed the lovers, hands clasped,
fearlessly entering the cell of memories
where other hearts would falter.
Yet I misunderstood,
about the poem and the heart—
on the wrong path between words,
I failed to see, even in all that moonlight,
that there was only one, stranded
at the onset of winter, bitter as night;
was deaf to the wind’s sharp truth:
It would have been better had we never met.
Avra Wing is the author of the novel Angie, I Says, which was made into the movie Angie starring Geena Davis and James Gandolfini. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, and her memoir chosen for OnlineOriginals.com. Most recently, her poems appeared in Apple Valley Review (nominated for Best of the Net), New Madrid, Silk Road and Tattoo Highway, among others. She is a workshop leader for the New York Writers Coalition, and an adjunct professor of English at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives.
qarrtsiluni 