Tharanthull
Lavde t’urryeme për atë hymn të zi
që end krijimtarinë ndër mija fije t’helmta!
Koha bahet rreng, vetëvrasje dhe pusi
dhe hapsinat njomen me pika fatesh t’njelmta.
O gjeometri e vdekjes, o art mekanik -
shartesë arkitekture me manifakturë!
Përmasat bashkëpunojnë të japin një çikrik,
që ngre realitete të vdekuna në pëlhurë.
Elegji për dritën
Ka nisë me u zhburgosë drita: çdo rrezë
me pingrrimë çan e then qafën si fyell kristali ndër gurë
ku majmet e panjohuna me bojën e vet.
Si bukë e ardhun, e mbrueme shekave t'errta -
drita ka nisë me teptisë.
Dheu asht i lagësht, qielli - i vramë;
ftyrpremë dergjen buzëprroni krenja t'paqarta ushtarësh
kërleshun me rrajë drandofillash.
Gurgullon i çartun hamendjesh
uji i shterrun qyshkur.
Ka nisë me u zhburgosë drita,
me u rrëxue përjashtë -
thes i artë me kashtë
prej frëngjive picirrake t'ksollës.
Me mendje ngarend dhe e prek,
ngarend dhe e prek,
e puth me buzët me bojë
kambanën në ag.
Tue qa me gjys ngashrime falem:
"Lavde, Zotynë, për dritën
që na e ep ma të madhe se Ndriçuesin!"
E dallgë mbas dallge, dallgë mbas dallge
tue e lpi si kurmin e Afërditës
e shtyn terrin me fshesë
deri kur drita kapet për majë.
Oct 25, 2010
Oct 22, 2010
Elegy on Light
And the light has emerged, each of its rays
Breaking and shattering like a crystal flute upon the rocks
Swelling in colours all its own.
Forth pours the light, rising
Like dough from sombre troughs.
Moist is the soil, overcast the sky,
At brookside gorge ghostly figures of soldiers
Tousled by rosy fingers.
Streams long gone dry
Gurgle now in a rave of murmurs.
And the light has emerged,
Bales, their golden hay tumbling gently
’gainst the tiny cottage windows.
Hastening, the sunlight touches,
Hastens and touches,
Kisses the bell at dawn
With its painted lips.
With sobs of apprehension, I gush:
“Praise be to God for the light
Given unto us, greater than the Illuminator himself!”
Wave after wave, wave after wave,
Its licks with its tongues the body of Aphrodite,
Sweeping night away
Until the sun has seized the summits.
[Elegji për dritën. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
Orpheus
Your tears – so well disguised –
Enveloped and finely fitted
Within the curved peelings of an onion,
That sacrificed – alas – its very essence
Hidden in the core
When it was stabbed by the gleaming blade
That minced your tender heart
Sleepy with fictive erudition.
Eurydice’s tears in the kitchen
Have no source
But you,
The only lachrymogenic ingredient
In the prosaic family salad.
(Moscow, 2001)
[Orfeu. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
Angels in Crisis
… I had just returned from the last war. My hands were longing for the plough as I headed for the shed. I pushed open the door and, when I got used to the dark and the damp that reeked of mould and mildew, I was overcome by the vision before me – a bale of angels sneezing in the corner. One had swollen glands and couldn’t swallow, another gasped and struggled for breath. The other anaemic angels stammered in low voices to explain that one of their number had fallen tragically in love with the curved blade of the coarse-toothed saw on the other wall, but it had shown no interest in him. The third angel was all in a flutter trying desperately to say something, but failed because a fourth angel was squeezing his oesophagus for fun as the poor fellow gaped and belched for a full two to three minutes. A sorry sight they were indeed, sallow and covered in fungus, all huddled in a corner with less space than the sheaves of rye. I poked at them with my pitchfork and threw them out into the sun. Then, telling the farm hand to give them a cup of hot tea and some biscuits, I cautiously inquired if they could remember the goal of their forgotten mission.
(Tirana, 1 January 2002)
[Engjëj në krizë. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
* * *
Do you remember that other sky – so fathomless and foreign,
The shifting crowds in the streets, the cars,
And the snow swirling down upon us, covering
Like a glittering veil all the noise, visions, seasons – but
Above all – the shiver-white naked bodies
Of desperate loves.
Whatever happened to them? Where is the enigma
That dissolved in the purple of their fleshy lips?
Inevitably then, like a maimed carousel, the lame fragments
Falter frozen in landscapes and interiors,
Daubs of phrases, vows in the dark… Suddenly and forever
The perspective is severed,
As if some retina had burst behind the canvas -
From the inhuman glare at the tunnel’s end.
(Vienna, September 2005)
[Ty të kujtohet... Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
Inferior song
You are something releasing memory
and fusilladed marsh steam in dawn.
You are the gentle morn landing gently by parachute,
with gods waving napkins, lances
through the heart eternally reddening in Yesterday,
that deep wail of a black mineral
After you
After you, as after a great war,
in "before" and "after" halted my time:
losses are modest on official lists
and the nearest temple replaced the hospital -
a year ago. Most likely, forever.
I grieve while I crouch and rind-shaped I pray
consoling myself that my misery
is not new, as the rear of every victory -
not to mention last year's. Forged hopes!
Winter's black market, where pricier than bread
are your pictures, letters, past’s snowstorms
and a forgotten heaven's sliver in fields!
While you hurried, you forgot the sky-blue scarf
in my lobby, where dust is sleepless.
Someone said: "Only pure souls don't rush when in love".
Our souls, ancient as hundred empires -
and just like empires fall through years, months,
while they make way to the hateful crowd,
souls stare how a far off passion
fill the acropolis with broken statues
Lucky are the unbroken; all the same in bloodbath:
a broken arm one, another a leg
lost ever since
after you, as after e big war,
I got back for good. And praised be God!
Albania
Albania is huger than its land,
Than sky beyond its mountain peaks.
It's a ship's grey-haired dream -
A yacht kissing the abyss
With wings it aims to heal the bloody wounds
While it writhes cut in halves.
It is not a piece of planet, but a star
The very tear shed from God's eyes
1991
Orpheus
Your life – so well imprisoned,
so fitly and fearlessly enfolded
with the twisted leaves of an onion.
Immolated, ah! its soul
with the final mysteries –
when the knife’s blade shone
steadily, chopping
your moist heart –
blunted from fictive eruditions.
The tears of Eurydice in the kitchen
have no other reason
else than the fact
that you are the only lachrymatory ingredient
in the ordinary family salad.
Out
You wake up in the morning
and remind you don’t know where you’ve left the eye.
Forgot you left one in your back
and the other has dropped from the tap.
Then, you remind you just woke up
and all has been a happening without eyelashes.
The conditions mature
and respect flows as cataract over the past skull.
It seems to you that you’ve always
have cut trefoil and
a soft consecration overfilled of chlorophyll scent
cultivate your agricultural guess-works.
Lucid childhood,
regularly happened and no obstacles, -
like every useful thing, without whom
wouldn’t exist the ellipsis and metaphysics,
the flights and falls, the loss
of Liburn ships
in the gelatinous and practical body of man...
The past memory with the present one,
how beautifully suiting together!
Translation: Elvana Zaimi
The Regulations at the Catholic School for Girls
The fine fragrance of writing hovered in their midst:
One could hear the arid crackle of mice munching biscuits,
Yet, it was a weary winter
That found them unprepared,
My majestic lovers.
All day long they aged in the classroom,
Salting their tender bowels
With talk of love. Vanished and
Forgotten was that distant day in April...
My chance appearance in the library
Came, it seemed, to a sad conclusion.
And in the end, the snow blasted and blew in all directions,
Every day a new storm.
They woke and rose, those wretched maidens,
With time unmoved in their beds.
I spread word of a distant age,
But where,
Where was I at that moment of crisis
When the dreams of my lovers
Turned tiresome and troubled?
Misfortune pelted like a hailstorm,
They found me nailed to my bed
In the most obscure of military hospitals in that town.
Now it was too late,
With poisoned milk in their breasts
They told me their tales in haste
And they cursed any future joy I might have,
Making tiny crosses on the cards
With their faded fingers. According
To my lovers (though pale their faces)
I would never be able to leave the hospital,
And yet, I did,
And found them blithe and all with child.
I saw their bellies like fresh tombs
From which wafted a fine fragrance of writing
And rustled to no avail
The licit sound of mice
Still revelling
With dry biscuits in the grass.
[Rregullat e Shkollës Katolike të Vajzave, from the volume Rrethinat e Atlantidës, Tirana 2002, p. 69-70. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]
The Proof of the Land
The year had twelve seasons all summer long.
Fowl fled...
The lone, elegiac poplar
Signed a contract with the grass.
Entered a man with a hatchet
And sampled some of the pale poplar's pith,
Yet, it depends on how he filched it.
At any rate, with some pain in the flesh.
But the man is no longer,
Nor the grass,
Nor the poplar.
In all this struggle of annihilation
The grass wins out over the tomb.
The dead man now comprehends
That it isn't a question of pride, but of existence.
Yet, he sighs for posterity.
How many seasons will the springtime have?
God only knows what will happen with the light...
God only knows what will happen with God...
And the lord continues his undoing.
The rains fall stagnant, salacious
To affirm in grandeur their denial.
Ponderous, the proof of the land.
Old Stanza for a New Love
for Elvana
When we, without a word, lie down for the night
You will be the River, I will be the Log
And hardly will you be able, with your lips pressed on mine,
In squirming and quivers, to detach from my body...
Nowhere will you spill a crumb,
And I will envy neither the living nor the dead.
Then, they will baptize us... Yet you, unwearied
In the flow... You will be the River which bears the Log,
One day promised to five oceans.
I will be a banner for those tribes.
And if we find no fair names
I will perhaps call you Anna.
As if borrowed, the years which never return
From winter to winter will tumble to their fate.
Light and long the road we embark on,
Like every vehicle which strays from its goal,
The frontiers will appear in the end,
Though we have journeyed but half the way.
I will be naked, you will be bare,
The two of us crossing hills and vales.
In the law of the flow we will willingly leave
That land, where we never had foes,
And mighty hands on other banks
Will one day meet in that dry bed.
Tirana 2000
[Stancë e vjetër për dashurinë e re. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]
Translated from Robert Elsie
And the light has emerged, each of its rays
Breaking and shattering like a crystal flute upon the rocks
Swelling in colours all its own.
Forth pours the light, rising
Like dough from sombre troughs.
Moist is the soil, overcast the sky,
At brookside gorge ghostly figures of soldiers
Tousled by rosy fingers.
Streams long gone dry
Gurgle now in a rave of murmurs.
And the light has emerged,
Bales, their golden hay tumbling gently
’gainst the tiny cottage windows.
Hastening, the sunlight touches,
Hastens and touches,
Kisses the bell at dawn
With its painted lips.
With sobs of apprehension, I gush:
“Praise be to God for the light
Given unto us, greater than the Illuminator himself!”
Wave after wave, wave after wave,
Its licks with its tongues the body of Aphrodite,
Sweeping night away
Until the sun has seized the summits.
[Elegji për dritën. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
Orpheus
Your tears – so well disguised –
Enveloped and finely fitted
Within the curved peelings of an onion,
That sacrificed – alas – its very essence
Hidden in the core
When it was stabbed by the gleaming blade
That minced your tender heart
Sleepy with fictive erudition.
Eurydice’s tears in the kitchen
Have no source
But you,
The only lachrymogenic ingredient
In the prosaic family salad.
(Moscow, 2001)
[Orfeu. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
Angels in Crisis
… I had just returned from the last war. My hands were longing for the plough as I headed for the shed. I pushed open the door and, when I got used to the dark and the damp that reeked of mould and mildew, I was overcome by the vision before me – a bale of angels sneezing in the corner. One had swollen glands and couldn’t swallow, another gasped and struggled for breath. The other anaemic angels stammered in low voices to explain that one of their number had fallen tragically in love with the curved blade of the coarse-toothed saw on the other wall, but it had shown no interest in him. The third angel was all in a flutter trying desperately to say something, but failed because a fourth angel was squeezing his oesophagus for fun as the poor fellow gaped and belched for a full two to three minutes. A sorry sight they were indeed, sallow and covered in fungus, all huddled in a corner with less space than the sheaves of rye. I poked at them with my pitchfork and threw them out into the sun. Then, telling the farm hand to give them a cup of hot tea and some biscuits, I cautiously inquired if they could remember the goal of their forgotten mission.
(Tirana, 1 January 2002)
[Engjëj në krizë. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
* * *
Do you remember that other sky – so fathomless and foreign,
The shifting crowds in the streets, the cars,
And the snow swirling down upon us, covering
Like a glittering veil all the noise, visions, seasons – but
Above all – the shiver-white naked bodies
Of desperate loves.
Whatever happened to them? Where is the enigma
That dissolved in the purple of their fleshy lips?
Inevitably then, like a maimed carousel, the lame fragments
Falter frozen in landscapes and interiors,
Daubs of phrases, vows in the dark… Suddenly and forever
The perspective is severed,
As if some retina had burst behind the canvas -
From the inhuman glare at the tunnel’s end.
(Vienna, September 2005)
[Ty të kujtohet... Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
Inferior song
You are something releasing memory
and fusilladed marsh steam in dawn.
You are the gentle morn landing gently by parachute,
with gods waving napkins, lances
through the heart eternally reddening in Yesterday,
that deep wail of a black mineral
After you
After you, as after a great war,
in "before" and "after" halted my time:
losses are modest on official lists
and the nearest temple replaced the hospital -
a year ago. Most likely, forever.
I grieve while I crouch and rind-shaped I pray
consoling myself that my misery
is not new, as the rear of every victory -
not to mention last year's. Forged hopes!
Winter's black market, where pricier than bread
are your pictures, letters, past’s snowstorms
and a forgotten heaven's sliver in fields!
While you hurried, you forgot the sky-blue scarf
in my lobby, where dust is sleepless.
Someone said: "Only pure souls don't rush when in love".
Our souls, ancient as hundred empires -
and just like empires fall through years, months,
while they make way to the hateful crowd,
souls stare how a far off passion
fill the acropolis with broken statues
Lucky are the unbroken; all the same in bloodbath:
a broken arm one, another a leg
lost ever since
after you, as after e big war,
I got back for good. And praised be God!
Albania
Albania is huger than its land,
Than sky beyond its mountain peaks.
It's a ship's grey-haired dream -
A yacht kissing the abyss
With wings it aims to heal the bloody wounds
While it writhes cut in halves.
It is not a piece of planet, but a star
The very tear shed from God's eyes
1991
Orpheus
Your life – so well imprisoned,
so fitly and fearlessly enfolded
with the twisted leaves of an onion.
Immolated, ah! its soul
with the final mysteries –
when the knife’s blade shone
steadily, chopping
your moist heart –
blunted from fictive eruditions.
The tears of Eurydice in the kitchen
have no other reason
else than the fact
that you are the only lachrymatory ingredient
in the ordinary family salad.
Out
You wake up in the morning
and remind you don’t know where you’ve left the eye.
Forgot you left one in your back
and the other has dropped from the tap.
Then, you remind you just woke up
and all has been a happening without eyelashes.
The conditions mature
and respect flows as cataract over the past skull.
It seems to you that you’ve always
have cut trefoil and
a soft consecration overfilled of chlorophyll scent
cultivate your agricultural guess-works.
Lucid childhood,
regularly happened and no obstacles, -
like every useful thing, without whom
wouldn’t exist the ellipsis and metaphysics,
the flights and falls, the loss
of Liburn ships
in the gelatinous and practical body of man...
The past memory with the present one,
how beautifully suiting together!
Translation: Elvana Zaimi
The Regulations at the Catholic School for Girls
The fine fragrance of writing hovered in their midst:
One could hear the arid crackle of mice munching biscuits,
Yet, it was a weary winter
That found them unprepared,
My majestic lovers.
All day long they aged in the classroom,
Salting their tender bowels
With talk of love. Vanished and
Forgotten was that distant day in April...
My chance appearance in the library
Came, it seemed, to a sad conclusion.
And in the end, the snow blasted and blew in all directions,
Every day a new storm.
They woke and rose, those wretched maidens,
With time unmoved in their beds.
I spread word of a distant age,
But where,
Where was I at that moment of crisis
When the dreams of my lovers
Turned tiresome and troubled?
Misfortune pelted like a hailstorm,
They found me nailed to my bed
In the most obscure of military hospitals in that town.
Now it was too late,
With poisoned milk in their breasts
They told me their tales in haste
And they cursed any future joy I might have,
Making tiny crosses on the cards
With their faded fingers. According
To my lovers (though pale their faces)
I would never be able to leave the hospital,
And yet, I did,
And found them blithe and all with child.
I saw their bellies like fresh tombs
From which wafted a fine fragrance of writing
And rustled to no avail
The licit sound of mice
Still revelling
With dry biscuits in the grass.
[Rregullat e Shkollës Katolike të Vajzave, from the volume Rrethinat e Atlantidës, Tirana 2002, p. 69-70. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]
The Proof of the Land
The year had twelve seasons all summer long.
Fowl fled...
The lone, elegiac poplar
Signed a contract with the grass.
Entered a man with a hatchet
And sampled some of the pale poplar's pith,
Yet, it depends on how he filched it.
At any rate, with some pain in the flesh.
But the man is no longer,
Nor the grass,
Nor the poplar.
In all this struggle of annihilation
The grass wins out over the tomb.
The dead man now comprehends
That it isn't a question of pride, but of existence.
Yet, he sighs for posterity.
How many seasons will the springtime have?
God only knows what will happen with the light...
God only knows what will happen with God...
And the lord continues his undoing.
The rains fall stagnant, salacious
To affirm in grandeur their denial.
Ponderous, the proof of the land.
Old Stanza for a New Love
for Elvana
When we, without a word, lie down for the night
You will be the River, I will be the Log
And hardly will you be able, with your lips pressed on mine,
In squirming and quivers, to detach from my body...
Nowhere will you spill a crumb,
And I will envy neither the living nor the dead.
Then, they will baptize us... Yet you, unwearied
In the flow... You will be the River which bears the Log,
One day promised to five oceans.
I will be a banner for those tribes.
And if we find no fair names
I will perhaps call you Anna.
As if borrowed, the years which never return
From winter to winter will tumble to their fate.
Light and long the road we embark on,
Like every vehicle which strays from its goal,
The frontiers will appear in the end,
Though we have journeyed but half the way.
I will be naked, you will be bare,
The two of us crossing hills and vales.
In the law of the flow we will willingly leave
That land, where we never had foes,
And mighty hands on other banks
Will one day meet in that dry bed.
Tirana 2000
[Stancë e vjetër për dashurinë e re. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]
Translated from Robert Elsie
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