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(m)other words
Another one of those forbidden words ...
Another one of those forbidden words
if you weren't an angel i would have loved you
would swallow your body and explore every corner of the earth
if you had a body
then you would be much too close you wouldn't be an angel
oxygen burns
you burn yourself with nitrogen which doesn't burn
angels burn
you get burnt by people who don't burn
pathos is indeed old-fashioned
pathos and angels fit well together
if you weren't an angel I'd have loved you
aggressively in the way women love men who aren't angels
women do that and they do it over and over again
liquid nitrogen is always a challenge
in fact it isn't material has wrinkles hurts
becomes fog becomes vapor becomes dark will suffocate
yearning don't disappear
['noch eines der verbotenen worte' was first published in the anthology Verbotene Worte in 2005. Translated from the German by Zaia Alexander at the Villa Aurora, 2005. (c) Tzveta Sofronieva, 2005]
Homeland or Caught in Light
often i ask myself in the dark whether you feel
the glitter of words and see their souls unfurled
around me fall flags and stones while stars are
pouring down around you in my house children cry they'll
never learn the taste of milk on the islands of my soul
play torture me the words shadows the souls of my tongue
untranslatable into verses or into your tribe's tongues
to you i am coming into light far from myself
to be exiled does it mean longing for god who is light
is god not words my tongue wanders inside me
we are alone my tongue and i and we are locked in light
i wish you could understand how much i miss its freedom
for the darkness of the deeps the drowning one is thirsty
Journey to the West
for Margaret Atwood
A word in an unknown language.
I know there must be a sense,
must be a meaning.
It's probably marginal.
Maybe a preposition
or a noun.
Either used often or
too strange for the ear.
Learning all languages
I listen attentively
to the springs of their speech.
I follow the air in the circles
of the vowels coming to me
from mouths of people
close to me and far away;
search for a language in which
I am a word.
I am already acquainted with it. It's foreign.
I have no idea about its syntax and morphology.
Even after studying the grammar for a long time,
I do not appear in the right place in the sentence.
Foreign in my own language, too,
in the Bulgarian spoken on the streets of Sofia
and used in my mom's letters.
What a funny accident - right now,
history sits at my parents' tea-table.
In Bulgaria words slowly acquire
their old meanings.
Between
security and chaos
calmness and desire
peace and the unreachable
security and creativity
peace and dreams
others' dreams
and my dream
the permitted dream
and a piece of the dream I always dreamed. empty
Between.
Choice is somewhere else.
Somewhere where there's no choice.
No choice exists
in a room called "Between".
[The three poems above were first published in the Bulgarian collection Chicago Blues in 1992. Translated from the Bulgarian by the poet herself in Joseph Brodsky's masterclass. (c) Tzveta Sofronieva, 1992]
AM I
A traveler, I wander between
suitcases and somewhere to belong.
A life lived in bags and bundles
like a person learning to love jazz,
like the lonely, dreaming my own life
I am a soul whose music is a mix
of confused sounds, new, unpredictable,
drunk, tired, murmuring, grumbling,
loving, falling, loving, traveling sounds,
do I change souls when I change the places I inhabit?
[This poem was written in English in 1992 and first published in the Bulgarian collection Conceiving Memory in 1995. (c) Tzveta Sofronieva, 1995]
On happiness after reading Schopenhauer, in California 6.
And while we're on happiness - what a word ! - reread Schopenhauer.
My analysis is comparative, not objective.
Happiness has its lacunae, the English word luck with its u like an a, lacquer
that conceals, a layering.
In Bulgarian happiness is schtastie, you choke on it, all that ch and t, all that cht,
silence, there is silence in happiness,
but also plenty of st, a fear that sets in, stagnant, static, stigmata, steppe, stop.
The phenomenon of schtastie, of things that stick in the throat,
is pleasant to consider.
Not the tortured longing of happiness but an honest stammering
is what surfaces in other languages.
Happiness totters on its p,
Glück bubbles in the gullet,
kasmet, or more exactly kismet,
curdles and goes bitter if you leave it out of the fridge,
you don't want to swallow it and you stutter convulsively
when you pronounce the a, that is to say the i.
For happiness to keep you need the right container.
['Über das Glück nach der Lektüre von Schopenhauer, in Kalifornien' is one part of a cycle of poems written in German at the Villa Aurora, and was first published by akzente (Heft 3 / 2007). It was translated into English by Rufo Quintavalle, 2006, working from Jean Portante's translation into French and in discussion with the poet. (c) Tzveta Sofronieva, 2005.] ..................................................................................................................................
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Editor's note: Tzveta Sofronieva writes her poetry in Bulgarian, German and English. She has self-translated several of her own poems, sometimes working together with native-speaker editors. Some of her poems have been translated directly from their original language by a translator(s), others have been translated by a translator(s) working from a translation in an intermediate language, and in discussion with the poet. We have endeavoured to give as much information as possible about the provenance of individual poems here.