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Three poems by Jean-Claude Renard
translated by Hélène Cardona
Incantation du sang
À peine au bord du puits,
Ce jeune feu de ceps allumé sur la neige,
Devant la mer,
Quel sang beau comme un abricot
Parle-t-il de sa soif d’un mystère, d’un sacre, d’une métamorphose
Qui n’arment le désire qu’en l’habitant déjà,
Lorsque la mort l’éveille
De ce qu’il doit sans trêve, pour sortir de soi-même et entrer dans soi-même
En s’inventant sans cesse,
Accueillir et fonder comme une ville neuve,
Une commune langue,
Le seul espoir de demeurer vivant puis de combler de sens, partout, sous la falaise,
Les labyrinthes vides,
—Et dans ce voeu d’atteindre la plénitude d’être,
Dans ce pur mouvement de sève et de rivière où peut-être mûrit une fête essentielle,
Lui donnent le pouvoir, s’ils sont plus que ses fables,
D’accomplir avec eux la création du monde?
La braise et la rivière: poèmes et proses (Éditions du Seuil, c1969)
*
Blood Incantation
Barely by the well
This young fire of vinestocks lit on snow,
Facing the sea,
What blood beautiful as an apricot
Speaks of its thirst for a mystery, consecration, metamorphosis,
Which only arm desire by already inhabiting it,
When death awakens it,
With what it relentlessly must, to quit itself and enter itself,
Inventing itself incessantly,
Welcome and found like a new city
A common language,
The only hope able to survive then fill with meaning, everywhere, under the cliff,
The empty labyrinths,
—And in this vow to reach plenitude of being,
In this pure movement of sap and river where perhaps an essential feast ripens,
Do they give it the power, if they are more than its fables,
To achieve with them the creation of the world?
* * *
Parole 1
La même fête patiente sous les tilleuls roses,
Dans la parole d’interrogation.
J’oserai veiller près des pierres.
Quand l’enfance les aura lavées,
Elles prophétiseront le sacre.
Déjà, dans le secret simple des îles,
Un seul sanctuaire rassemble,
Comme de grandes laines fraîches et vertes,
Toutes figures du dieu sur la mer.
Les oiseaux rusent.
Mais quel corps n’a prescience qu’un texte très blanc dans le sable
Indique le savoir d’être un?
S’il s’avance un peu,
L’eau habite la mort.
*
Spoken Word 1
The same feast awaits beneath pink linden trees,
In the word of questioning.
I will dare keep watch by the stones.
When childhood has bathed them
They will prophesy the sacrament.
Already in the simple secret of the islands
A single sanctuary gathers,
Like great fleeces cool and green,
All figures of the god upon the sea.
Birds use cunning.
But what being doesn’t foresee that a very white text in the sand
Indicates the knowledge of oneness?
If he moves slightly forward,
Water inhabits death.
* * *
Parole 2
La grêve brûlée
(Mais chaque fois les oiseaux reviennent)
D’autres algues montent de la mer.
Elles tracent les signes qui luisent – qui s’interrogent.
Je ne cesserai pas d’y marcher.
S’enfouir dans le silence du sable,
Comme les bucardes,
Sans chercher la demeure possible: l’éventuel lieu d’alliance,
Abîme l’être.
Quand l’eau dégage la caverne,
—S’il n’y a rien
N’est pas une preuve.
Plus tard (ailleurs dans l’identique espace)
La parole peut encore sourdre,
Attirer encore les racines
—Jusqu’à la fin.
Même le vide prodigue une naissance.
*
Spoken Word 2
Burned strand
(But each time the birds return)
More seaweed rises from the sea.
It traces glistening, questioning signs.
I will forever walk there.
To bury oneself in the sand’s silence,
Like cockles,
Without seeking the possible dwelling: the potential place of alliance,
Damages being.
When the water clears the cave
—If there is nothing,
That’s no proof.
Later (elsewhere in the selfsame space)
The spoken word may still rise,
Still lure the roots,
—Until the end.
Even emptiness is prodigal with birth.
Jean-Claude Renard (1922-2002), born in Pontoise and educated at the Sorbonne, was a prolific French poet and writer. His work is filled with mystery and spirituality. He won the Prix Sainte-Beuve (1966), the Golden Eagle of Poetry (1970), the Prix Max Jacob (1974), the prix Guillaume Apollinaire (1978), the Grand Prix de poésie de l’Académie française in 1988 and the Prix Goncourt de la poésie in 1991. He was literary director of Editions du Seuil and Editions Casterman. His books include Notes sur la poésie (Le Seuil 1970), Le Dieu de Nuit (Le Seuil 1973), Notes sur la foi (Gallimard 1973), La Lumière du Silence (le Seuil 1973), Dix runes d’été (Mercure de France 1994), and Ce puits que rien n’épuise (Le Seuil 1993). He also wrote many essays.
A citizen of the U.S., France and Spain, Hélène Cardona (website) is a poet, actor and translator. She studied English Philology in Cambridge; Spanish at the International Universities of Santander and Baeza; and German at the Goethe Institute in Bremen. She writes and translates in English, French and Spanish. She attended Hamilton College, New York, where she taught French and Spanish, and the Sorbonne, where she wrote her thesis on Henry James for her Master’s in American Literature. She worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy and the French Chamber of Commerce and taught at the Ecole Bilingue in Paris and LMU in Los Angeles. She is the author of the bilingual collections Life In Suspension, forthcoming from Tupelo Press, The Astonished Universe (Red Hen Press) and Breeze Rider forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.
Norse Code
by Sarah Neely
If you really look you see the simmering foam
unfurling between sky and earth.
You see the birds dive upwards to the clifftop’s edge
and the Norseman’s message, that drifted there
over time, fallen from the Broch of Birsay.
If you really listen you hear it in the breath from the North
as it whistles through faultlines of basalt
and groans from the deep rising surges of the sea.
The Norseman’s message is hidden there
between clouds as they shift against the horizon,
between the gasps of wind, first long then short,
and the tap, tap, tap at the window.
The Norseman’s message is written in blue lines
between edges of horizon and sea,
and the low cosmic hum stretched out
like strings on the ancient violin,
between sand bars and the whistling wind.
The Norseman’s message is in the Westray stone,
etched out by the delicate claws of the sea eagle.
In fine tracks of glitter that wind their way around its edges:
hinting at the light within.
But you have to look.
You must stand at the cliff’s edge
over algae slick rock and quaking bog,
against temperamental winds
and the gulls sweeping forth from under your feet,
circling you the way you’ve seen them do at the very top of Storr.
You must, if you wish to see the great tumult of water and light
and the energy that drives it that just is.
Sarah Neely lives in Glasgow, Scotland and is currently writing a book on the Orcadian filmmaker and poet, Margaret Tait.
Dear Old Stockholm
by James Brush
We communicated in images. Flickering moments on dueling monitors. Shoes on cobbled pavement. Clothes rustle in the wind. Wind? We both understand this thing, wind. The colors are suddenly blinding. I can’t even name them. The view of open parkland and a blue pond widens to almost 360 degrees. My stomach drops as the ground falls away, earth tumbling into a pit of sky, images bleeding off the monitors now. We’re flying again. It’s all she thinks about, the only thing she’ll show. I rip the cables from my temples. She flaps them from her wings. We stare at one another across the sterile distance of the research lab. Going nowhere. Again. A white feather floats on the air-conditioned current. We’re as alien and far apart as ever. Three feet away yet separated by species and the awkwardness of the now-severed connection with its illusion of understanding and love. Can she feel it too? She doesn’t blink, her avian eyes as incomprehensible as the machines humming in this lab. I glance at the security cameras and lean in. Please, I whisper, please. Don’t make me leave. I’ll show you everything. Outside, I hear engines and the wind of ten thousand wings beginning to flap.
A flight of egrets
glides toward the setting sun—
the moon rises.
James Brush lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, cat and two rescued greyhounds. He teaches English in a juvenile correctional facility. You can find him online at Coyote Mercury where he keeps a full list of publications.
from Ode to the Dove by Avrom Sutzkever
translated by Zackary Sholem Berger
אָדע צו דער טויב
(פּאָעמע אין צען טיילן)
אברהם סוצקעווער
1954
III
בלעטל פּאַפּיר, ביסט אַ דענקמאָל, אַ נעסט בויט די טויב אין דײַן חומר,
בלעטל, אין דיר, ניט אין מאַרמאָר, איז אייביק דאָס פּנים פֿון טרוימער,
דאָ, צווישן אָפּקלאַנגען רויע, פֿאַרזונקענע, ליימענע פֿאָרמען,
זאַמל איך זילבערנע זילבן, צו קענען מײַן טײַבעלע קאָרמען.
זונפֿאַרגאַנג זינגט אין אַ לעמפּל. און אונטערן מאַגישן לעמפּל
בוי איך פֿון ביינערנע קלאַנגען, באַגאָסן מיט בלוט מײַנס – אַ טעמפּל.
ע ר האָט דאָס וואָרט ניט דערזונגען, אַזוי איז דאָס וואָרט ניט-דערשליפֿן!
גליט דער וווּלקאַן פֿון פּאָעזיע פֿאַרזיגלט אין בראָנזענע טיפֿן.
דאָ, מיט דער פּען, דיריזשיר איך אַן אייגענע, שטילע קאַפּעליע:
קומען אין רעגן נשמות און טריפֿן אַרײַן דורך דער סטעליע.
קאַרשן, פֿאַרמויערט אין ביימער, באַפֿעל איך צו בײַטן די ערטער,
קומען אויף פּורפּורנע פֿיסלעך צו לעבן ווי קאַרשן אין ווערטער.
ווײַזט זיך אין טעמפּל אַ וואָרעם, אַזאַ צויבערײַ איז אים פֿרעמדלעך.
אמתע קאַרשן אין ווערטער צעראַצן זײַן גומען ווי זעמדלעך.
וואָרקעט די טויב ווי אַ שוועסטער: באַפֿעל, זאָלן קומען די קאַרשן,
ד ו ביסט דער מאָס און דער מעסטער, פֿאַרשוווּנדענע זעונגען ירשן
Ode to the Dove
(poem in ten parts)
by Avrom Sutzkever
1954
III
Dove builds a nest in your substance, paper: you are a memorial.
Paper, in you, not in marble, the face of the dreamer’s immortal,
Here, among the raw echoes, among the sunken clay forms
I collect silvery syllables to bring to my dear dove and feed her.
Sunset is in a lamp singing. Under that magical lamp
I’m building with bonesounds, watered with my blood — a temple.
He hasn’t yet sung the last word! So the last word’s not sharpened yet.
Under seal, the volcano of poetry glows in bronze depths.
Here with this pen I’m conducting my own quiet band:
They’re dripping down in through the ceiling: souls in the rain.
Change places! I order the cherries walled up in the trees.
Purple legs rise up to live in the words like the cherries.
In the temple a worm now. To him such enchantment is foreign.
Genuine cherries in words are scratching his palate like sandgrains.
Sisterly coos the dove: Make cherries come, give the order!
You are the measure and measurer, of all vanished visions the heir!
Avrom Sutzkever (Wikipedia entry) was the greatest Jewish poet of his time. He spent his childhood in Siberia and emerged as a writer in the youthful literary flowering of Jewish Vilna. As poet and Jew in the Vilna Ghetto, he was transformed into a living remnant of a people’s near death, writing immortal works and helping to conceal Jewish cultural treasures for later rescue. After the war, he became a prophetic symbol and a cultural-historical institution, founding Yiddish literature’s greatest journal in Israel. A committed Zionist, he earned his country’s highest literary honor even as its powerful never abandoned their suspicion of Yiddish literary creativity. He died in 2010.
Zackary Sholem Berger (English blog, Yiddish blog) is a poet and translator in Baltimore who writes in Yiddish and English. His bilingual Yiddish and English book of poetry, Not in the Same Breath/Zog Khotsh Lehavdl, will be published in 2011. He and his wife, Celeste Sollod, are the forces behind Yiddish House LLC, which publishes Yiddish translations of classic English-language children’s books.
A Do-It-Yourself Kit
I bought a do-it-yourself kit, on sale. I didn’t know what it was a kit for, as all the writing on the package was in a foreign language I didn’t understand, but the price was right, so I bought it. When I returned home from the store I opened the package and, as I suspected, the instructions were in the same foreign language, but other than the instruction sheet there was nothing in the box. I could have gotten upset, but rather I was intrigued. Now, more than before, I had to know what the instructions said. I wasn’t about to throw two dollars out the window. So I went to the library with the instruction sheet. I assumed the language was Asian, as the script itself was unfamiliar, so I went straight to the Asian languages section and started perusing the books on the shelves. Before long I discovered that the language was Tamil. That was the easy part. The hard part was learning the language. I spent months teaching myself Tamil, and when I was confident I had mastered the rudiments of the language I once again looked at the instruction sheet. But the “instructions” gave no clue as to how to make anything. In fact, the sheet consisted of nothing more than several short passages, with such titles as “School Days,” and “Loyalty,” written in the simple style of a child’s primer, followed by one word at the bottom of the sheet, the Tamil equivalent of “Congratulations!” I finally understood what was going on when I looked again at the box the instructions had come in and translated the big red letters, the name of the kit: “TEACH YOURSELF TAMIL.” Not bad for two bucks.
Peter Cherches is the author of two volumes of short prose: Condensed Book and Between a Dream and a Cup of Coffee, as well as several limited-edition artist’s books. His work has recently appeared in the anthologies Poetry 180 and Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992. His fiction and short prose work has been featured in a wide range of magazines and journals, including Harper’s, Semiotext(e), Transatlantic Review, Fiction International, and Bomb. Sonorexia, the avant-vaudeville music-performance group he co-led with Elliott Sharp in the 1980s, appeared at such legendary venues as The Mudd Club and CBGB. Cherches is a two-time recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships in creative nonfiction.
Caprice by Algernon Charles Swinburne
translated into English by Elisabeth Gitter
Je ne veux pas de jours où Juin brûle et flamboie,
Pas de rayonnement de soleil, pas de joie,
Pas de bruit de chansons écloses ça et la,
Pas d’amour; je ne veux rien de ces choses-là.
Je ne veux pas, ô Dieu, de lumière ni d’ombre,
Du matin rose et fier ni du soir fauve et sombre,
De la femme ayant l’œil au vent et l’âme en feu,
De l’homme; je ne veux pas de vous-même, ô Dieu.
Car j’ai dans mes chansons, moi poète, des mondes,
Des mers où maint navire a sombré sous les ondes,
Des forêts pleins de chants et des champs pleins de blé,
Des amants égarés sur le sentier sablé;
Des couchers de soleil, des batailles, des femmes,
Des roses, des enfants, des arbres et des âmes;
Mon œil vaut plus qu’un astre; et j’ai dans mes vingt ans
Toutes les fleurs avec tous les pleurs du printemps.
*
I want no bright June days, no summer light,
No radiance or glory, no delight,
No psalms and serenades; I need none.
No love, God. No shimmering, no shadows,
No rosy-fingered dawn, no forest nights;
I need no woman, icy-eyed, on fire,
Nor any man. I’ve no use, God, for you.
I am a poet. Worlds rise with my songs;
I dream oceans, sink ships beneath the waves;
Birds carol in my woodlands; fields grow gold.
I sing lost lovers wandering the shore,
Sunset, women, willows, children, roses, war,
And souls; my astral eye illumines all.
I grasp within my span of twenty years
The whole of spring: the flowers and the tears.
Sketch of Swinburne by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A specialist in the Victorian period, Elisabeth Gitter is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College, CUNY. Her translations of French and Italian poetry have been published in TLS and Victorian Poetry.
Three Female Chinese Poets: Yuan Zhengzhen, Xue Tao and Yu Xuanji
translated by Song Zijiang and Kit Kelen
長相思袁正真
南高峰，北高峰， 采芙蓉，賞芙蓉， |
paddling the laketo the tune of changxiangsi (long lovesickness) by Yuan Zhengzhen to the north these mountains, this lake, I pluck a lotus paddling a red boat no path to the one I miss
* * * |
鷹離鞲薛濤
爪利如鋒眼似鈴， |
the eagle away from the oversleeveby Xue Tao claws sharp as blades hunted rabbits over the plain received high praise for no reason I must not again be held on the emperor’s shoulder
* * * |
暮春即事魚玄機
深巷窮門少侶儔， |
the late springby Yu Xuanji lovers seldom come to this deep alley whose fragrance of damask is this? sounds of drums in the street how can I care |
Yuan Zhengzhen was a palace lady of the Southern Song Dynasty (c. 1200), a time when 99% of Chinese women were illiterate. The above poem has not been previously translated into English, to the best of our knowledge.
Xue Tao (768–831), along with Yu Xuanji (bio below) and Li Ye, was one of the three best-known female Chinese poets from the Tang Dynasty. Xue was the daughter of a minor government official in Changan, the Chinese capital during the Tang. A hundred of her poems are known to have survived to this day.
Yu Xuanji (approximate dates 844–869) was also from Changan. She is distinctive in that many of her poems are written in a remarkably frank and direct autobiographical style — that is, using her own voice rather than speaking through a persona.
Song Zijiang, Chris, a native of Guangdong Province, is currently completing a Masters degree in Literature at the University of Macau. Song has worked on many translation projects, including from classical Chinese into English, and of Australian and American poets into Chinese. His latest book of poems, Strolling, was published by the Association of Stories in Macao in 2010.
Kit Kelen is an Australian poet/artist whose literary works have been widely published and broadcast since the mid seventies. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Macau in south China, where he has taught Literature and Creative Writing for the last ten years. The most recent of Kit Kelen’s books of poetry is China Years: Selected and New Poems (ASM, 2010).
Atrium
Click on image to see a larger version.
Dominique James (webpage) is an experienced commercial and fine art photographer currently based in New York City. For more than 25 years, he has worked on a variety of film and digital imaging projects, and has presented more than 50 one-man and group photography exhibits. While he is best known for his celebrity portraits, and is proficient as well in fashion, product, food, travel, landscape, architectural, interior, and adventure photography, an ongoing series of personal works explores the many aspects and dimensions of both black-and-white and color fine art photography.
Hayyam’in Sabahi/Morning of Hayyam
by Cahit Koytak, translated by Mustafa Burak Sezer
Hayyam’in Sabahi
Ah, bu rüya gibi vadi, bu bahçe, bu havuz!
Bu ezgi kulakta, bu şarap damakta,
toy düğün gecesinden kalan!
Bu tan yeri cömertliğinde körpe sine,
Bu alev gibi yakan dudaklar,
ah, bu tatlı baş dönmesi!
Avuçlarımın arasında tuttuğum bu biçimli baş,
Bu benzersiz güzel gözler,
bu güzel, bu derin, bu zeki…
Bunların hepsi, ey Kader, bunların hepsi,
Kıyılarımızı döven bu dağ gibi varlık dalgaları,
bir damla ölümün yanında ne ki?
Anlımıza vurduğun o kuzgunî tuğra yanında,
Gözümüze sokmak için değilse onu,
bu çarşaf çarşaf beyazın hükmü ne, Nakkaş?
Kopan telden çıkan o detone tınlamanın,
O tek vuruşluk hoyrat sesin yanında
bunca neşidenin hükmü ne, Çengî?
O bir yudumcuk zehir zıkkım şarabın yanında
Üzüm şerbetiyle dolu bu billur sürahinin,
bu koca kâinatın hükmü ne, Meyhaneci?
Sorası tutuyor işte, aptal mı aptal aklın!
O sorunca da, kafası karışıyor, keyfi kaçıyor,
ödlek mi ödlek nefsin, bedbin mi bedbin yüreğin!
*
Morning of Hayyam
Ah, this dream-like valley, this garden, this pool!
This tune in the ear, this wine in the palate,
Left over from a cold wedding night!
This tender chest as generous as daybreak
These blaze-like burning lips,
Ah, this sweet dizziness!
This beautiful head that I hold in my palms
These unique, pleasant eyes,
This pretty, this profound, this intelligent…
All of these, O! Fate, all of these,
These mountain-like waves of existence that stroke our coasts
What is it worth beside one sip of death?
Beside that raven royal stamp that you dashed to our foreheads,
If it’s not for thrusting under our eyes,
What’s the legitimacy of this sheet by sheet white, O! Embroiderer?
Beside that off-tune tinkling that emanates out of a broken string,
Beside that single pulse of the clumsy sound
What’s the authority of these nasheeds, O! Dancer?
Beside that one sip of poisonous wine
What is the worth of a crystal jug, full of grape sharbat
What’s the rule of this universe, Pub-keeper?
So silly mind falls into an enquiry.
When it enquires, it thickens; its joy runs away,
Of that so coward self, of that so pessimist heart!
20 August 2002
Notes: “Royal stamp” refers to the Tughra, the calligraphic seal or signature of an Ottoman sultan. Nasheeds, or anansheeds, are Islamic songs popular throughout the Muslim world, usually unaccompanied.
Cahit Koytak was born in Erzurum on January 29, 1949. He graduated from Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Chemistry in 1974 as a chemical engineer and worked as an engineer before starting his own business. From 1994-2008, he worked at a private TV channel and he still works as a freelancer. Koytak has translated numerous books from Arabic, English and French into Turkish. His poems have been published in many Turkish literary journals, including in Dirilis, Kelime, Yönelis, Yedi Iklim, Kayitlar, Gergedan, Defter, Kasgar, Hece, Yansima, Le Poete Travaille, Kitaplik, Kirklar, Merdiven Siir, and Anlayis. He won the Turkey Writers Union “Translator of the Year” Prize in 1988 for his translation of Peau noire, masques blancs by Franz Fanon.
Mustafa Burak Sezer was born in Istanbul in 1981, and has been writing poetry, short-stories, essays, and short film scenarios since 1996. His works are widely published in Turkish literary magazines since 2004, including in Dergâh, 7edi Iklim, Istanbul Bir Nokta, Mor Taka, Ikindi Yagmuru and Ç.N. Sezer graduated from International Islamic University Islamabad, Faculty of Languages & Literature, in 2009, and is working as a journalist, a correspondent of TimeTurk in Pakistan. He has translated many poems, essays and short-stories from English and world literature into Turkish and from Turkish into English. His first poetry book, Free Things, will be published soon.
St George’s Bell
by Magda Kapa
St George’s bell was gone.
The cleaning woman, an Albanian who had been living in the village for almost eighteen years, one of the first to cross the border and, in search for work, come all the way down to Peloponnese, mostly on foot and occasionally hitch-hiking, noticed it first when she went to clean up and prepare the chapel for the annual liturgy on St. George’s name day, April 23rd.
The priest, terribly shocked at the news, ran immediately to the cafenion where the village men were enjoying their first coffee in the open. (Spring was really here now and even a Greek winter can cause depressions.)
No, not St George’s bell. It has been ringing ever since 1907, more than a hundred years, and it was the village students’ present to the newly built chapel, financed mainly by their collection of donations. It was from a time when students wore uniforms and caps, and needed almost half a day to arrive here by horse carriage from Athens, nowadays just one and a half hour drive away.
During the German occupation, St George’s bell rang to warn the partisans whenever the German soldiers mobilized towards the hills where the partisans were hiding and from where the chapel watched over the village. The men now in the cafenion, mostly in their sixties or younger, where the sons and grandsons of those men sent running scared up the hills when the bell spoke to them.
A spontaneous meeting was held in the cafenion. A few phone calls and a few more of the village elders joined the angry round. It didn’t take long and, as always happens on these occasions, the foreigners were blamed. But the Albanians who for years and years used to be the usual suspects were not illegals anymore, didn’t sleep under the orange trees in improvised tents, didn’t have to steal everything not nailed down and sell it in order to survive till the next job appeared. No, the Albanians now had labor permits and lived in houses, their kids went to school here and were actually the reason, a few years ago, why the village elementary school was not closed down. Too few were the children being born, the birth rate of the village too low. Blame it on the stress of modern times; everyone knows that we are real men otherwise, all the men in the cafenion agreed.
Spirits were already somehow calmed down. The new illegals, the young Africans who usually hung around in the main district town, were soon also disqualified as bell thieves. The village’s teenagers explained that these were too well controlled by their own Mafia, which was not interested in bells but in whores and pirated CDs and DVDs. They knew this of course, because they were grateful customers themselves.
There was just one possibility left: the old usual suspects, the Gypsies (no one called them Romani here, not even they themselves).
Yes, the Gypsies controlled the scrap metal market and since the prices of copper and iron skyrocketed, the Gypsies had ransacked, bought, took, or dismantled anything they could. Two neighbors went to court last month, accusing each other of stealing the iron posts that had marked the shared border of their properties, before discovering that the posts had been stolen, like everybody else’s in the area.
The metal prices shot up after the real estate crisis in the US for reasons that no one in this cafenion could really explain; it’s just the way capitalism functions.
The villagers agreed that St George’s bell which had been ringing for this village ever since 1907 likely landed in capitalism’s melting pot, together with the iron posts marking land ownership. And not only the communists in the cafenion laughed at this joke.
It was agreed that a new bell would be ordered at the best bell foundry in the prefecture. Who knows, something from the old bell might find its way into the new one. It’s a small world after all.
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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.
qarrtsiluni 