Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2003 - Ljudmila

IV
(ALL YOUR NIGHTS)
In this night contained are all your nights
All your being similar to a random
Order of hours, months, years. Time lost forever
Is hard to mourn.
To extinguish life persistently - obviously somewhat easier.
Once long ago you at least believed in some illusion
Burned for some poem or woman. Today
Even more distant seems that era. Now you are just
In another episode that, so it would seem,
Has lasted for years. In another daily act of life's termination.
Your every action is already foreseen.
In vain also that this sadness
Is the nearly the same on all meridians, courts
And dens. Because - you are nowhere!
You have only invisibly risen from your solitude.
It was a moment, it was life.
JUSTIICATION
IV
I have been preparing the ingredients of my own hemlock
Since a long time ago. I deny no detail;
Do not give up - although it is hard to get used to
The monotony of speech. Thus every fragment
Has its role and complies with different time frames.
I have taken pleasure in every little bit
Of the poison thus mixed since a long time ago. Truly,
Many want to call this writing poetry.
Some complain that they heard these words before.
But I continued listening to the silence,
To assure myself that dead poets are being cited again.
In the end, it came out that there was no flood,
Closed remained the books with pictures,
In which blind people seek meaning of the mirror's existence.
All that I want is to lessen the enthusiasm
Occasioned by gazes in to the bottom of emptied goblets.
And this because every gaze sets on the final
Touch of the world. They say that before committing seppuku
The Samurai left farewell poems behind. Right now,
As the day is withdrawing, I am thinking how
Every poem is in fact a poem before death,
Every effort interpreting the mirror - seppuku.
176
Writing
Again, I am thinking in verses,
Delivering words no fault of my own.
I accept all complicity provoked by writing.
Writing the open, under an open sky,
After despair and sickness, but with the same passion.
Salvation every writing.
On stone, on the closed and the unknown,
Even though all words are equally unknown.
Writing on all the year's seasons,
Apocryphal, already mastered signs.
And on all meridians,
Writing on the margins, dangerous writing.
And, that without reason - as is, again, all writing.
On the kilometres along which lonely
We think how to close the emptiness of paper,
How to write-in the world.
Salvation also those pauses between writing.
On pages already written upon,
The writing of the first lines of the next poem...
The magic of creation. The creation of the seductive
Writing -
Always a chivalry in vain.
177
Translated by Nikolai Jeffs