LITERATURE EXPRESS EUROPE 2000

ON LEAVING

It is time
to gather all my years
(to pack them neatly, not mix them up)
to insure the house against far-off misfortunes
to gather in all the mountains and the confluences
to fold up the false frontiers
(to memorize all signs and then destroy them)
so as somewhere—in some other time—
to reconstruct my I.D.

I depart decisively
not knowing in whose dream this journey happens
asking myself: What is this life
if not a painful setting off into the unknown
beyond the sunset and the rainbow's end
outwith the borders of consciousness and knowledge
towards the secret of what we are not,
into a dream of falling stars
whence the winds
bring us
new islands
uninhabited
like cells.

|to the top|


LAST SUPPER

I take my place as it were
alone with the fractured images of my day
My secret is untouchable
my plans for the crime are laid
I mouth meaningless pleasantries
for silence is an awsome abyss
between two beats of the pulse
where we plunge into our own trap
How hard it is to bear her gaze
upon my conscience
I splinter into a thousand syllables
stammer those meaningless pleasantries
that multiply into nothing
diasappear...

I proffer my hand

|to the top|


READING

I stammer before
the g-g-gates of Babylon
want say
can't talk

My voice cracks
multiplies
under my tongue
the words spawn

And I wonder
did I utter this word
or it me
we'll deceive each other ever
as we have forever
since the word go
since our first babel-babble

What an ef-ef-fort to recognise ourselves
in this wilderness of mirrors
in the womb of this va-
cant world, clam-shell
the p-p-pre-pre-pre-pre-
existence of the echo.

|to the top|


For Aunt A.K.

The countryside
fills your eyes with age.

Therefore
you need to cry, it's advisable.
The rooting and sprouting in you
reaches for rain.
(you need to cry)
There is neither wine
nor fledglings in the blood
that wing toward the heart.

When the sun sets
the mountains
appear unreachable and icy.

Therefore
you need to cry,
like a prunned vineyard in Spring,
you need to cry,
(it's advisable)
because
crying
fills your eyes with childhood.

    Translated by James MacKinley and the author

|to the top|


PAX OEDIPUS

Here I am
like an Oedipus
who sees all
but sees nothing
in a landscape that ends up underground
I coolly changed the corners of the world
and ever more successful
ever more sure
set out for Thebes, for you
But where is that Prophet
that I now should meet,
who sucked a black sheep's blood
who confused my senses,
to show him my path
past the bedevilled Dog
back to Hades?
Ah, where is that Prophet
who mixed my mothers up
shattered my heavens
and let me loose in this fix
they style – the Skin

|to the top|


HERE
    for Goran Stefanovski

Here, we do not dream at night
as night is both reality and dream;
we remain squirming in the light
which casts no shadow;
the arctic cold sucks
the marrow of our summer bones,
we hide in fields of silence and fear,
where tribes neither listen nor talk,
fight their decisive battles
on lands that cherish
forgotten groans and cries.

This home
built upon dung-hills of civilisations –
is a mental asylum – a project
where the whole world generously
invests arithmetical pain
with geometric progression –
ad infinitum.

Here, history
is a nightmarish coma,
a chaos which even Goedel could not comprehend.
And life –
a momentary wakefulness,
a seizure of consciousness
where daily we attack
our own conscience,
so little of which remains.

Here, hysteria
assaults the present,
like an unwelcome guest who undoes
our numbness
and silence.
Like unaware Samaritans,
like people of the world,
we open our gates to everyone
not knowing the plot,
conspiracy,
or betrayal.

Here, the future
is tied like a collar around our necks,
and we train according to patterns
imported by fleecers
bankers
and warlords;
it is surounded by a Schengen wall
from where they do not shoot
but spit, spit at you.

That is why
even the dead look
so angered and offended;
that is why we start weddings
with a minute of silence for the unborn;
that is why my heart is burning
like Moscow's Red Square,
and frightfully thumps
like a machine-gun burst at Tienanmen;
that is why I slave in a worthless hole
waiting for accurate Sarajevo snipers,
trapped in this oasis of despair;
this European bantustan,
a deftly amputated hand
whose fingers shrivel in the Aegean
crawl along the Mediterranean bed,
seeking asylum in the dark depths –
passages and straits –
towards the Ocean's peace and infinity.

    Translated by Sudeep Sen and the author

|to the top|


MY LITTLE ME

When I fenced in my little me
and said to myself This is mine
It grew,
became my dictator –
handsome and greedy.
Now I prepare for rebellions,
ambushes;
I plot evil,
I hire traitors, assassins.
But in fact
as the lowest of all serviles,
I grovel before its feet
and flatter, salivating at its throne.

    Translated by Sudeep Sen and the author

|to the top|


halfVERSES

I see

some halfGods halfCircle halfEurope
and stay for halfDay
halfHour
in halfDarkness
halfDream
halfPeace

torn between
halfLegal halfStates

then halfDead
halfMad
in halfVoice     offer
halfSolutions

to the halfDrunk
halfLiterate
halfAware
but angrier than ever

halfSavages
halfCultured

Ah,
half–
half–
everything crumbles in half
halfOffal

    Translated by Sudeep Sen and the author

|to the top|

Zoran ANČEVSKI (1954):

Graduated in English language and literature from the Faculty of Philology of Skopje University where he currently teaches British and American literature. Received his M.A. in American literature from California State University, and PhD in literature from Skopje University.

Has published three books of poetry, Journey through Broken Images (1984), Strategy of Defeat (1994), and Line(s) of High Resistance (1998), which were well received and highly acclaimed (the first received an award as a first volume of poetry, the second and the third were runner-ups for the National Poetry Award). His fourth book Translating the Dead is forthcoming this year.

Selections from his poetry have been translated into English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew, Galician, and Turkish, and published in various magazines and anthologies at home and abroad.

Translator and editor of many literary works by such authors as W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Yehuda Amichai, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Toni Morrison, Kenzaburo Oe, Makoto Ooka, etc. Likewise translator of many Macedonian poets into English.

Member of Macedonian Writers' Union, Literary Federation for World Peace (member of the International Advisory Board), and a secretary of Macedonian P.E.N. Address: Vlae 35, 91000 Skopje, Republic of Macedonia, tel. (+389 91) 33 98 29.

|to the top|

ON HIS POETRY:

"Zoran Ančevski's poetry is the fruit of a complex, compound, polyphonic and – if you like – brutal lyrical atmosphere. Here the question of 'the world and me' is irrelevant; rather the question is that of 'me in the world'. It is a case of his existing precisely in this world, as there is no allusion to his belonging to some other world, whether better or worse... The fundamental feature of Zoran Ančevski's poetry is a discreet, self-ironic, stylised tone... at times classical mythology makes its appearance but Anchevski removes from it all trace of any patina of the pathetic and shows it instead in all its rustiness."

Atanas Vangelov

"Zoran Ančevski's poetry... is a brutal detection of a time which can 'boast' only of its crisis of identity in which reaching for the 'dead quote' from the past is the only compensation of this culture... According to his choice of mythological matrices (most often from the ancient Greek mythological paradigm) and according to the cynicism and bitterness of his conclusions that today's world is but a perverted, poor paraphrase of the heroic, mythical childhood of mankind, Anchevski's poetry aligns itself with the most significant poetic discourses in contemporary Macedonian poetry... Zoran Ančevski demonstrates, however, his own differentia specifica which, from a broader point of view, is a general feature of post-modernist poetic discourse; this lies in his semiotic exaltation which in the end becomes a semiotic resignation, a radical scepticism in the potential of the signifying systems."

Venko Andonovski

|to the top|

all contents © Macedonian P.E.N.