Olga Sedakova

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

Nje nga zerat me te fuqishem te poezise kontemporane ruse, fituese e cmimeve prestigjoze Europiane ne letersi, Olga Sedakova shquhet per filozofine e thelle, spiritualizmin dhe frymen tradicionale.

The Nothing

Feeble
completely feeble
like the nothing
that creating hands haven't yet touched,
the hands of hope,
and to its lure

a sprout rises up from a tilled black field
a four-day Lazarus rises
tied hand and foot
in his burial shroud
that is deader than death

the nothing
the absolute nothing
my soul! be silent
until it touches you.

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

I just wanted to say
"Come visit me!"
But winter is at an end.
With hieroglyphs of bushes and trees,
they write and write
now pressing on their pens, now not.
Ah, on wet paper
with an invisible brush,
on soft, rice-like air
it is sheer pleasure to write--
you can't restrain your hand.

Like Khlebnikov, the airy book writes:
some root-verbiage
wells of chance occurrences,
golden gypsy necklaces of what has come to being.
But you'll see it when you come.

The sun emerges--
from the storeroom of winter,
from the closet of night,
I wonder how it fit inside it.
The sun has nothing to do, so it warms us up now.
It has to illuminate
something important,
something endearing...
Come, don't delay.

No matter how much a person
would be illuminated, written up, and flown about,
no matter how much brooks would paint
the mountains and hollows
of our plains,
no matter how much birds would say
that the sky surrounds the earth
with the thousand-handed azure,
with the azure, that soft-speaking beggar,
it is still sad to thing that no one comes.

Don't you know when it's too late?
The way snow melts,
you'll look for us,
but we're no longer there.

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

When in the east the nocturnal abyss is about to blaze,
the earth begins to shine, returning

the excess of the delicate bestowed light that it no longer needs.
The thing which answers to everything has no answer itself.

Who will answer you in this vale of tears,
the simple greatness of the soul? the greatness of a field

which neither before an onslaught nor before the plow
Conceives of defending itself: one after another,

all of them who pillaged her, trampled and plunged
A plowshare into her chest like a dream after the dream disappeared

somewhere into the distance, in the ocean where all, like birds, resemble each other.
And the earth sees them without looking and says: “Lord forgive them!”

after each one.
This way, I remember, an old woman in the Monastery of the Caves
fits a candle into the hand of everyone who descends to the elders

as though into the hand of a small child who goes to the fearful place
where God’s glory dwells, and woe to those whose life is not the Bride

where one hears how and why the sky’s breathing.
“God save you” she says to the ones who don’t hear her.

…perhaps to die is finally to kneel?
And I, who will be earth, look at the earth in amazement.

Purity, you are purer than primordial purity! from the field of bitterness
I ask the reason for forgiveness and refuge,

I ask: can you, raving one, really be happy
for the ages to swallow insults and to bestow rewards?

Why do you like them, in what way do they please you?
“Because I am,” she answers.
“Because we all really were.”

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

The main thing is the grandeur of the concept, as Joseph says.
--From a letter of Anna Akhmantova’s.

1.
Staring into the sky,
into empty features,
into the straight as a brace
azure of blindness,
the way a gaze absorbs
into its soaring smoke
goods and chattel, a spurned bequest, thin wear,
everything that is before him

the way the lap of a lagoon,
the sound, smell and view,
sepulchral strings
of the sisters Pierides
absorb, penetrating
into the singer’s silence
and the edge
of exile, beyond the edge of the end.

2.
This way a dead man,
having slammed his book,
carries away that late autumn
with the name “in his presence,”
that tower, that arch,
that wondrous entryway,
that Square of San Marco
where the three of us walked.

3.
Not a friend, not a traveling companion
(not a brother? Not a brother-in-arms?)
holding
in the reverberance of consonances
his own musical scale
like one
who has decided before hand
that life
will not entice him
and death
will not lead him astray,

the way a navigator
holds a rudder
a rider-a bridle
the way travelers
keep the angle
of the earth with a star:

missing it and growing smaller:
a chapel, a marketplace…
Sound is a strange thing: Me-
-lchior. Balthazar.
Border outposts. Plateaus.
A secret union,
sound is strange sorrow:
service to the Muses.
What was he looking for,
the spirit that abandoned everyone:
a horn that has faith in Charlemagne?
the smoke that searches: upward!

4.
A rower in gallery,
Koshchei the Deathless chains,
a convict in transit in the
endless steppe
would place all their longing
into what burns everyone:
upward:
it’s unbearable here
without this: upward!
Otherwise,
swallowing our eternal: “No!”
nothing is left but your cauldron and knife,
Shame, you are a Cannibal.

5.
Like the doors of a cage
opened for a forest bird,
like a heart
adverse to earth’s gravity--
a raft untied
from all gravitations.
Who will be able to remain
when it floats away?

6.
That is not the smoke of fires,
of mountain raids,
of villages exhaling
Their soul into darkness,

of decomposition,
of ashes, of fiery torments
Smoke is an evening of prayers
it is hundred-armed like Shiva.

7.
Staggering at first
on cotton legs,
curling, stumbling,
meandering its bushes,
and over all the damage
Over the valleys of tears

O, Lord, thanks
To You, the fire has started at last

it kneels
like the heart of the kings,
the blessed smoke
of earthy altars.

8.
…The evening sea,
Sappho’s delight,
star after star,
verse after verse…

There no one will remember
who is dead, who is alive.
And weary hired hand
releasing the oxen…

What is purer than what
has burnt to the ground?
the bottomless chasm,
the countless stars…

9.
As children say when they play:
“Mine, The first one’s mine!”
at the edge
of the created world, in the land beyond sight--

the poppy of oblivion,
the mead of remembrance,
whoever should leave first,
let him take it with him--

to the place where
the surf meets us like sisters,
where there is sky, where there is an island,

where you hear: sleep my dear!

---------
As the reader can hear immediately, the model for verses of this piece was Akhmantova’s “The Way of the Whole Earth.” The reader can also hear Tsvetaeva’s constructions. I wanted these two Russian Muses to participate in verses dedicated to Brodsky’s memory. Brodsky himself in his poems on the death of T. S. Elliot took Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” -- Olga Sedakova.

[nimf]

Don't you know when it's too late?
The way snow melts,
you'll look for us,
but we're no longer there.

I like : )

[Leila]

E mbajta mend vetem sepse perktheu "Horace" ne Rusisht.


Rain

"It's raining,
and still people say there's no God!"
So Granny Varya,
an old woman from round us, would say.

Now the people who said there was no God
are lighting candles in churches,
ordering masses for the dead,
shunning those of other faiths.

Granny Varya lies in her grave,
and the rain pours on,
immense, abundant, relentless,
on and on,
aiming at no-one in particular.


Old Women

Like an old patient artist,
I like to look long at the faces
of pious and nasty old women:
their mortal lips
and the immortal power
that has drawn those lips together,

(as if an angel were sitting there
and setting our money in piles,
five-kopek coins, lightweight one-kopeks…
“Shoo!” he says to children,
birds and beggars,
“Shoo,” he says, “Go away;
can’t you see what I’m doing?”)

I look, and sketch in my mind:
like, as it were, myself before a dark mirror.

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

leila, por ne shqip kur do na e sjellesh? :)

Nuk di te jete perkthyer e plote ne shqip, por me duket se Agron Tufa ka perkthyer "The Chinese Travelogue" (kur te kem kohe do ta postoj kete) por mu duk sikur kishte shume "discrepancies."

If you could dull its perspicuity, free it from chaos, limit its gleam, liken it to a grain of dust, then it would seem to exist clearly. --Lao Tse

[Leila]

leila, por ne shqip kur do na e sjellesh? :)

Nuk di te jete perkthyer e plote ne shqip, por me duket se Agron Tufa ka perkthyer "The Chinese Travelogue" (kur te kem kohe do ta postoj kete) por mu duk sikur kishte shume "discrepancies."

If you could dull its perspicuity, free it from chaos, limit its gleam, liken it to a grain of dust, then it would seem to exist clearly. --Lao Tse

Jam pak... si ta them... "mentally unavailable" keto kohet e fundit :D
S'po mund t'i pervishem shkolles tamam. Sinqerisht me ka humbur truri. Me perpara te pakten vinte kur e therrisja. Tani... hmm...
Ja dhe nje foto te Olga Sedakova. E kam kerkuar online, por gjithnje me jepnin nje Olga tjeter.