The Great Flight Read online

  •

  Our name is the first wound

  No.1 2016

  © Modern Poetry in Translation 2016 and contributors

  ISSN (print) 0969-3572

  ISSN (online) 2052-3017

  ISBN (print) 978-1-91048-509-5

  ISBN (ebook) 978-1-91048-510-1

  Editor: Sasha Dugdale

  Managing Editor: Deborah de Kock

  Web and Communications Manager: Ed Cottrell

  Design by Katy Mawhood

  Cover art by Molly Crabapple

  Ebook conversion by leeds-ebooks.co.uk

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Charlesworth Press, Wakefield

  For submissions and subscriptions please visit www.mptmagazine.com

  Modern Poetry in Translation Limited. A Company Limited by Guarantee

  Registered in England and Wales, Number 5881603

  UK Registered Charity Number 1118223

  Modern Poetry in Translation gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Council and is proud to be part of Refugee Week.

  MODERN POETRY IN TRANSLATION

  The Great Flight

  CONTENTS

  EDITORIAL

  GËZIM HAJDARI, six poems

  Translated by VIKTOR BERBERI

  BASUKI GUNAWAN, five poems

  Translated by DAVID COLMER

  LUCRETIUS, four excerpts from ‘On the Nature of the Universe’

  Translated by EMMA GEE

  CAITLÍN MAUDE, four poems

  Translated by DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA

  SAKYIL TSETA, ‘Rebkong’

  Translated by TENZIN DICKYI

  NGARMA, ‘An Old Man’s Present’

  Translated by TENZIN DICKYI

  LOUISE LABÉ, four sonnets

  Translated by OLIVIA MCCANNON

  CHRISTINE DE LUCA, ‘Arne Ruste in Shetlandic’

  CLARE POLLARD, ‘Lines after Rābi(ah al-Bașrī’

  BHASKAR CHAKRABORTY, three poems

  Translated by MANASH ‘FIRAQ’ BHATTACHARJEE

  NED DENNY, ‘Wheel River’ after Wang Wei

  Focus

  RIBKA SIBHATU, ‘In Lampedusa’

  Translated by ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY

  Five Assyrian Iraqi Poets

  Translated by JAMIE OSBORN and NINEB LAMASSU

  AMIR POLIS IBRAHIM, ‘The Crucifixion of Baretle’

  BAYDAA HADAYA, ‘Severed Lips’

  ABDALLA NURI, ‘The Great Flight’

  BARZAN ABDUL GHANI JARJIS, ‘My Mother’s Heart’

  ANAS AOLO, ‘My Beloved Baghdede’

  CARMEN BUGAN, ‘A Walk With My Father on the Iron`Curtain’

  AMARJIT CHANDAN, four poems

  Translated by the author and JULIA CASTERTON

  MAYA TEVET DAYAN, ‘My Sister’

  Translated by RACHEL TZIVIA BACK

  HABIB TENGOUR, two poems

  Translated by CAROLINE PRICE

  Three Ethiopian Poets

  Introduced by CHRIS BECKETT

  ALEMU TEBEJE, ‘Greetings to the People of Europe!’

  Translated by CHRIS BECKETT and the author

  HAMA TUMA, two poems

  Translated by the author

  GEMORAW, ‘For the Voiceless People’

  Translated by CHRIS BECKETT and ALEMU TEBEJE AYELE

  MOHAMMED DIB, three poems

  Translated by MADELEINE CAMPBELL

  DON MEE CHOI, ‘A Short Piece on Migration’

  GOLAN HAJI, ‘A Light In Water’

  Translated by STEPHEN WATTS

  MAJID NAFICY, two poems

  Translated by ELIZABETH T. GRAY, JR.

  NASRIN PARVAZ, ‘Writing in the “Host” Language’

  YOUSIF QASMIYEH, ‘If this is my face, so be it’

  Translated by the author

  JUAN GELMAN, from ‘Under the barbaric rain’

  Translated by KEITH PAYNE

  SHASH TREVETT, ‘Glottophagy’

  Essays & Reviews

  SHASH TREVETT, Those Destined to Bear Witness

  An anthology of Tamil poetry from the Civil War

  BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC, A Sensitive Earthquake Zone

  Two new collections by Chinese women poets

  CAROLINE MALDONADO, The Artist and the Poet

  A Spiritual Journey in Bashō’s Footsteps

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  EDITORIAL

  Molly Crabapple, the cover artist for this special refugee issue of MPT, sent me a portrait in response to the poems I sent her from the issue. When I asked Molly to write about the subject of the portrait she replied:

  This is a portrait of my friend Zoza, a Kurdish artist from Aleppo. An early supporter of the revolution, Zoza finally had to leave Syria in 2014, and now, like so many Syrians in exile, lives in Gaziantep, Turkey. We met working on a mural at a school for Syrian refugee kids in the border town of Reyhanli. Zoza paints like Francis Bacon sometimes, but his day job is working as a graphic designer for an NGO supporting refugees.

  The striking thing about Hozan Kaya Jan (Zoza), in Molly’s sketch, is his realness. There is no possibility that this man, with his electric-blue-inked curls and his thoughtful, slightly sardonic gaze, is a figment of anyone’s artistic or journalistic imagination. He looks out and challenges us to reduce him to an infographic or a statistic. He stands in iconic opposition to the ugly notions of refugees swarming into Europe like rats or cockroaches, or even the apparently more positive notion of pitiful hordes of victims. Zoza is a separate and complex existence, as we all are: complex, ineffable creatures, caught somewhere on this planet and dealing with it as best we can.

  Molly responded to the poems in this way, because the poems are also irreducible. The voices in this focus issue are so blastingly individual, that even the noise of flight and migration recedes when you read, for example, Nasrin Parvaz’s anger at the discrimination inherent in not offering asylum seekers the opportunity to learn English, or Amarjit Chandan’s chance meeting with a Punjabi compatriot in the Barcelona metro. What general point can be drawn from this focus, except that politics and war have the power to make us all homeless, wandering, and dependent on the kindness of strangers? We’d better hope that when it happens we meet with more compassion than many refugees have had from us.

  I was anxious that publishing poems seemed an empty gesture. After all, I reasoned, what current refugees need right now is not poems, but aid: warmth, food and medical help. But the response of the Assyrian poets published in the issue, many of whom are living in refugee camps, persuaded me that publishing this work as part of a focus on refugees was the right thing to do. The President of the Syriac Writers Union said that it had ‘turned their sadness into happiness’ to know their poems had reached the UK. It mattered to them that their voices had not been extinguished as their ordinary lives had.

  And what can we do, except to continue to believe in our own form of the Republic of Letters: MPT as a virtual and metaphysical utopia where poets of all races and places meet and share poetry? It’s a minute and fragile vision, and the tiniest drop of cynicism pollutes it in seconds like a pipette of radioactive material. Yet it lasts: fifty years after it was founded at a point of cataclysm in Europe, it continues quietly publishing its republic of poets in the face of war and cataclysm around the world.

  Sasha Dugdale

  MPT is donating all the royalties from its fiftieth anniversary anthology Centres of Cataclysm published by Bloodaxe Books to the Refugee Council. More details at www.bloodaxebooks.com

  HOZAN KAYA JAN: ‘OK this paintin
g started a long time ago when i first left Aleppo and came to Turkey. It’s keeping together from the first day all the personalities i have all the faces i live on daily basis, all the memories i don’t wanna let go, all former life i had i never wanna forget. […] It’s the bodiless form, i don’t know if it’s a correct word, i feel i am having… big dreams yet no legs to go forward.’

  GËZIM HAJDARI

  Translated by Viktor Berberi

  Gëzim Hajdari’s many poetic works range from the sparse, at times lapidary, lyric, to the dramatic monologue (Maldiluna, ‘Moonsick’), to the epic (Nur: Besa ed eresia, ‘Nur: Oath and Heresy’), to contemporary translations of traditional oral forms (I canti dei nizàm, ‘Songs of the Nizam’) and the expansive poem-denunciation (Poema dell’esilio, ‘Poem of Exile’). The arc of Hajdari’s career demonstrates the courage with which he has held tight to his own voice, however at odds with contemporary trends in Italian literature. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Hajdari’s work is its complete dedication to renewing poetry’s task of speaking as the voice of its time. As he tends the memory of a people’s past, Hajdari documents the existential condition of the exile and migrant and calls his readers to an encounter with other worlds.

  An outspoken critic of both the Communist and post-Communist political class in Albania, Hajdari has collected accounts of the innumerable literary figures persecuted under Hoxha’s regime in his Gjëmë: Genocidi i poezisë shqipe (Funeral Lament: The Genocide of Albanian Poetry). Indeed, his entire output can be read as a struggle to restore a voice to the voiceless, whether those suppressed by a brutal dictatorship, those who have been forced to abandon their homelands, or the others left behind to suffer poverty and violence. The following poems are characterized by a movement across borders (cultural, political, linguistic) and between present and past, looking back from Hajdari’s current home in Italy to the landscape, language and legends of the Albanian province of Darsìa. Hajdari’s great gift to Italian literature lies in his having brought to bear in his contemporary poems in Italian the richness of an ancient Balkan, and, more specifically, northern Albanian, epic tradition.

  Perhaps in the Naked Hills of Darsìa…

  Perhaps in the naked hills of Darsìa

  my fragile verses will be buried

  under the dry thorns of the pomegranate tree

  struck by the icy winds of the East.

  Far from the young girls’ loves

  that will never know their anguish,

  solitary under the black sky

  like the robin in the darkness of winter.

  The rustling of the grass, the blackbird’s song

  will accompany their lament.

  While autumn’s brief nights

  will cover them with a pale moon.

  The Ones Who Continue to Flee in the Snow…

  The ones who continue to flee in the snow,

  leaving behind them shrunken skies,

  fragile, trembling walls,

  are at the mercy of an unknown home

  and the night’s pale moon.

  Why are they driven to obliterate memories

  and give up their nostalgia?

  And the ashes of the dead, the altars,

  what will they come to?

  Turn toward recollection, bless

  the trampled flowers, the water of the wells

  from which you have drunk,

  they will protect you through the exile you have undertaken:

  among enchanted woods

  and pitiless seasons.

  You Exist in the Face of Winter…

  You exist in the face of winter

  as a wound. Motionless and foreign

  in an imperfect space, never welcoming,

  waiting for the sand’s even silence

  to speak to you in secret.

  Don’t be astonished by the wandering river and new trees

  that were not here before. All around the transience

  of things, the disappearance of poets who bind

  heaven to land, will continue.

  It is said we will die in opposing lands.

  My years: an escape into the unknown

  and waking again frightened in the night.

  I Fall Back into the Nothingness…

  I fall back into the nothingness

  and keep my secrets hidden.

  On the hills

  the wind moves

  the white sheets

  of the dead.

  Anonymous faces are silent

  because they are unable to cry.

  To whom does one turn

  in this sterile land?

  Like a sorrowful monk

  I bury in the dark soil

  flowers fallen from the almond tree.

  Every Day I Create a New Homeland…

  Every day I create a new homeland

  in which I die and am reborn,

  a nation without maps or flags,

  celebrated by your deep eyes

  that follow me always

  on the voyage toward fragile heavens.

  In all lands I sleep, enamoured,

  in any home I wake a child,

  my key can open any border

  and the doors of any black prison.

  My being is eternal return and departure

  from one fire to the next, from water to water.

  The anthem of my nations: the blackbird’s song

  that I sing in seasons of setting moons,

  moons that have risen from your brow of darkness and stars

  with the eternal will of the sun-god.

  How Poor We Are…

  How poor we are.

  I live from one day to the next in Italy,

  you, in our homeland, can’t even drink a coffee.

  Our fault: we love,

  our sentence: to live alone, divided

  by dark water.

  I will come back in the fall like Constantine,

  in our native hills you have already gathered the oregano

  I will take with me into my empty room.

  Now I live in place of myself

  far from that land that without pity

  devours its children.

  NOTE: In the poem ‘How Poor We Are…’ Constantine, or the Knight of Death, is a character from the most beautiful of the oral tales of the Arbëresh, the ethnic Albanian communities of southern Italy. These tales have as their principal motif the besa, the traditional Albanian word of honour.

  BASUKI GUNAWAN

  Translated by David Colmer

  Basuki Gunawan (1929–2014) was an Indonesian who travelled to the Netherlands as a student in the early fifties and ended up staying and becoming a respected sociologist. As a family friend I was asked to read the English translation of a poem that he had written at his funeral in 2014: ‘I Fill the Earth With My Song’. There had never been a Dutch version and the original Indonesian was thought lost, but looking at the English, and the German translation it had been based on, I was struck by the power of the poem. There were a few points where I wondered if the right translation choices had been made and this led me to do a search which, immediately and to my surprise, yielded an Indonesian site with the original versions of this and twelve other poems as well as five short stories, all published in the mid-fifties.

  The site was dedicated in part to ‘forgotten’ Indonesian writers and maintained by Veronica B. Vonny, who in 1997 had written her thesis on Gunawan’s work, arguing that he had been unfairly neglected and had actually played a leading role in introducing existentialism, surrealism and nonconventional narrative forms into Indonesian fiction. She, in turn, besides being saddened to have missed the opportunity to contact her literary hero herself, was amazed to discover that he had lived such a long life and fascinated to hear that he had also written an excellent novella in Dutch.

  An appraisal of the Indonesian originals of the poems showed that the 1950s German translation had been quite free and the 1960s English
translation had drifted even further away from the originals as a result. These new translations give precedence to the original Indonesian.