Three World Poets in Translation

Ingredients:

This is a 3rd video recording I took from an excellent and free reading-of-world-poetry-in-translation event I went to yesterday. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG9WUQysPD8

Directions:

Mbarka Mint al-Barra' (Mauritania)

Poetry and I

http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/292/Poetry_and_I

The sin is that I wasn't a stone

     And the troubles of the world make me sleepless

And I shield myself with poetry

     And it keeps me company when I'm far from home

And poetry is my satchel that I will always carry with me

     It holds the taste and fragrance of the earth

It holds thickets of prickly branches

     It holds palm fronds loaded with dates

It paints all the stories of love in my language

     Its colours form the spectrum from grape to dawn

And I said bring the most beautiful of stringed instruments

     So the universe may know how music flows

And play its soothing melody

     That brings justice to those who are in love

Letters burden this world of mine

     Trouble leeches ink from the quill

Trouble leeches ink from the quill

     When I read of the longing of lovers I burn

~*~

Reza Mohammadi (Afghanistan)

Drawing

http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/348/Drawing

There was a voice and it coursed

from a pair of parched lips,

drawing me out of my body.

The voice was despotic, uncurbed

as a horse dragging my soul

across rocks and up scree.

I don't know why the voice,

the maker, drew me as unroofed,

as a vagrant, a fool,

or why it split me in two

and then drew me from you,

sliding the earth in between us.

It sketched a door of death then

and depicted me nailed to the door -

but that wasn't enough so it rubbed us out

and started from the beginning,

drawing us in the likeness of doves,

caged in separate cages.

It wasn't enough

so it drew me with neither wings nor feathers

but it wasn't enough

so it dashed us to pieces

and drew me as your son, you as my father,

and a moment later I was a stone

and you were a star shining down on me,

making me into the most precious thing...

It wasn't enough.

It drew you as a desert and me as a breeze

on the long wander through you.

It wasn't enough. It erased us

and sketched me as a cup of tea,

full of good and full of evil,

and made you the sugar that sank in me

and got dissolved and finally we

were lifted up to a pair of parched lips

and drank

~*~

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi (Mauritania)

Dream

http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/32/Dream

Poetry - may you be a green body.

May you be a language

in which I wander

with my wings and my self.

Be the inspiration of my tongue,

so that I may pasture

the tribes of my voice - though they are silent.

Sleepless

and alone, I see

you will not be

a green body.

You were neither

a good master, to be bought,

nor the muse.

My longed for delirium, my memory.

A Body

http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/255/A_Body

The body of a bird in your mouth

breathing songs.

Raw light spills from your eyes,

utterly naked. 

You must breach the horizon, once,

in order to wake up.

You must open window after window.

You must support the walls.

I let alphabets cling to me

as I climb the thread of language

between myself and the world.

I muster crowds in my mouth:

suspended between language and the world,

between the world and the alphabets.

I let my head

listen to the myth,

to all sides praising each other.

And I shout at the winds from the top of a mountain.

Why does my tongue tell me to climb this far?

What is the distance between my voice and my longing?

What is there?

A body transcending my body.

A body exiled by desire.

A body sheltered by the wind.