Temporal
Silence
To Dim. Svetlin
I’ve kept silent – years unending –
with thoughts tearing my brows,
today out of this silence-keeping
I come as if out of a grave.
Hovering above my spirit still
is the void unnamed
of days and nights instilled –
same as the death unblamed.
And numbed with anxiety hot –
albeit this time free! –
the thoughts still cannot
take off the cage and be.
As someone up from illness,
my verse makes little steps,
but my words void of wellness
are full of anger and distress;
and just as brief as writings
on the wall – written in a blast
of daring by a convict in his last
steps to face the shooting squad.
1964
TRANSLATION FROM BULGARIAN April 2011
And the Heart at Long Last Dies
The rapids of the years all flushes out.
And the heart at long last dies – or!?! –
With indifference you pass your enemy by,
you stop to yearn and look for more.
And if you meet her that you once loved,
not a thing to tell comes to your mind.
The beggar even, decomposed,
his rough hand before your gaze withdraws.
1956
TRANSLATION FROM BULGARIAN April 2011
=== insert follows === 30 August 2011 ===
ONE BELIEVES THE TREE LEAVES ARE TURNED YELLOW by the fall,
and only later – when one ponders, one understands
that the fire and passion of the summer have done this.
[252 – Atanas Dalchev, Notes /FRAGMENTS/]
“Novelette”
Atanas Dalchev (1925)
and only later – when one ponders, one understands
that the fire and passion of the summer have done this.
[252 – Atanas Dalchev, Notes /FRAGMENTS/]
“Novelette”
Atanas Dalchev (1925)
The windows – closed and black,
and black and closed – the door,
but on the door – a sheet with these words:
“The owner’s gone fishing.”
[“The owner’s gone to America.”]
And I am the very owner of this house
where no one [ever] lives,
but I have not gone anywhere
and I have not returned from anywhere.
I never go out of the house
and years are my only visitors
and many times the gardens have turned yellow
and now I’m probably the same no longer.
All the books have long been read
and all the roads of reminiscence are covered,
and behold – it is as if one hundred years
that I’ve been talking to portraits only.
And day and night, and day and night the clock
is swinging its sun made of metal.
Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror
so I may not be always lonely.
And climbing slowly up the wall
and burning down up on the ceiling are my days:
without a single love, without a single happening
my life is passing out without a trace.
And it seems I have not ever lived
and my existence is but an evil fiction!
Should someone chance to enter the house,
he would find no one there;
he would only see the dusty portraits,
the insidious and empty mirror,
and the sheet turned yellow on the door:
“The owner’s gone fishing.”
=== RED insert follows === 14 December 2011 ===
“Man was made of dust ...”
Atanas Dalchev (1930)
Atanas Dalchev (1930)
Man was made of dust but
today the world’s of iron.
Hard time for the soft-hearted!
I nearly died of kindness.
So now, my mouth locked in silence,
with hands clenched in an angry fist,
I’m living and diligently teaching
in evil my good-natured heart.
1930 /‘The Angel of Chartres’/
“The Room”
Atanas Dalchev (1925)
Atanas Dalchev (1925)
In this room – you would say,
no one has long lived,
long locked has been
its door, for years.
A smell of shabbiness is in here
and dust on all the things,
the time is turning slowly here
everything to listless dust.
Unnoticeably growing in the corners
the evening twilight, dusk
and the autumn sun is fading
on the carpets on the floor,
but shining – yellow winter quinces
arranged onto the commode
like a big prayer rope
of amber grains.
What reflected faces
keeps the mirror jealously?
It may well be a window,
open into another world of past.
The clock has now fallen silent
and lying in its black coffin
are the hours – dead,
and the pendulum sleeps motionless.
Portraits of women – who
have departed from this world,
hang – now yellow by the sun,
onto the wall;
steadily asleep onto the floor,
the silence dreams amid the dusk
and all that room of sadness
fades slowly into the eve.
1925 /AtanasDalchev/
“EVENING”
Atanas Dalchev (1930)
Atanas Dalchev (1930)
I’m roaming the street alone. And slowly
behind the roofs and also red,
the evening fades somewhere into the West.
And with my eyes fixed on it I am recalling.
The evening also glows now over Naples.
The windows on the top of buildings,
as if put on fire, are all ashining.
All the Naples’ bay is gleaming.
Like grass swayed by gentle breeze
the green waves slowly roll
and in the noisy smoky harbour they –
like a cattle herd at evening, moo
and steamships weightily return.
Standing on the quayside people –
brightly dressed, bless the end of day
so fully spent and free of care,
But now I am no longer there.
It’s glowing right now over Paris, too.
They’re closing the Luxembourg Garden.
A trumpet calls – passionate and drawn by it
the darkness lightly covers alleys white.
A group of children follows the uniform,
and listen in a trance, innocent and happy,
the rapturous call of the trumpet’s brass,
each one trying to get closest
to that wonderful trumpeter.
Through the wide open gates
people stream out – noisy, gay,
but now I am no longer one of them.
Why can`t we – at the same time, be both
here and there – and everywhere where
life throbs – continuous and hard?
We’re always dying, slowly disappearing
once from this place, later – from another,
until in the end we fully vanish altogether.
1930 /‘The Angel of Chartres’/
“SNOW”
Atanas Dalchev (1929)
Atanas Dalchev (1929)
Over these roofs of iron
and these boulevards of asphalt
won`t there just for once start
snowing from the skies as white
and radiant angel? I don`t think it will.
In this city, black as charcoal,
the winter will be back, as well,
and unseen – the angels and the snow.
And if some day snow falls, with no pity
it will be cruelly trampled upon
by the boots of policemen and tarts,
its white feathers will go black
by the smoke from trains and chimneys...
White shall only be the snow in gardens
where playing have been children.
1929 /‘Paris’/
=== END of RED insert === 14 December 2011 ===
Ugo Foscolo
translated in Bulgarian by Atanas Dalchev (1925)
NEVER AGAIN SHALL I SEE THY HAPPY SHORES
translated in Bulgarian by Atanas Dalchev (1925)
NEVER AGAIN SHALL I SEE THY HAPPY SHORES
Never again shall I see thy happy shores,
where my childhood body rests,
Zakynthos, oh my dearest, mirrored in the waves
of the Greek seas, where the beautiful
Venus was born, and bestowed thee all so generously
with her first smile, that not you forgot
the shadows sheer, the sky serene,
the verse immortal of him who extolled
the fateful waters, on whose saddest paths
after a long wandering, all burdened down
Ulysses kissed the rocky Ithaca.
In this world expect thou nothing else
but a desolate song, O mother earth,
by thy son, for the fate
has allotted us an unwept grave.
/translated in English from the Bulgarian translated version by At. Dalchev/
/One forgotten letter draft/
“Dear Lit. Front [Literary Front]
Dear Mr. Ganchev
I would appreciate if you now find room on your pages for some of Atanas Dalchev’s notes.
I suggest to your attention those under [ref.] numbers: 8, 15, 16, 31, 53, 55, 68, 59, 63, 68, 105, 114, 117, 155, 166, 195, 223, 244, 284, 326, 328, 335, 351, 363, 367, 374, 426, 427, 432.
/“Atanas Dalchev” Works in two volumes, volume two, Prose, printing house “Balgarski Pisatel” [Bulgarian writer], Sofia 1984/
05/16/90, respectfully yours: Vladimir Djambov”
And here they are:
[8] We must adhere to the specific things. They protect us from the general phrases and from the big but empty words.
[15] People are more interested in the result than in the reason. This is probably why many make no distinction between funny and witty.
[16] Man is resourceful. When one cannot be free of some flaw, one begins to cultivate it consciously. And the very fact it is now desired renders one’s disadvantage – for both oneself and the others, some kind of a quality.
[31] People often owe their moral suffering not so much to themselves but rather to the environment they move in. How many of us – when they chance in some other society, in another environment – become tremendously lighter or completely depersonalized.
[53] Rhetoric – the timber, which gives only foliage.
[55] Many of our views and statements would not have been as definite and extreme, were it not for the people who think different than us.
[58] It’s so nice to be indignant: at the same time you feel the others guilty and are aware of your own superiority.
[59] At one table, where everyone is drunk, the one sober is – no doubt, an unpleasant witness.
[63] The error of any poetry that wants to instill a feeling, rather than understand and express it is that while trying to infect the readers with it, it inevitably exaggerates and falsifies it.
[68] Condescension is a sign also of bad conscience.
[83] THE TREE
This was a gray several-storey cooperative house with numerous small balconies of cement and paint-peeled window frames, one of those human hives, the offspring of both thirst for property and poverty. Every day at the bottom of the street I saw its dark, worried facade. Almost every day I happened to walk past it. My steps that died away unto the walls suddenly became more resounding, when they aligned with the entrance. Still, I would not have learned anything about this house’s tenants, if a little chance, an instruction by an acquaintance of mine from the country had not made me step over its threshold.
I started climbing up its stairs and at the landing before I got to the fourth floor, I stopped. My eyes fell on the staircase window. I saw an empty inner courtyard, fenced on all sides by buildings and in its middle – one big tree, yellow by the autumn.
The appearance of that lonely tree, whose existence in this place, behind those blocks of apartments, shocked me. I was standing, leaning on the window and watched how from time to time a leaf would fly away from its branches, falling onto a balcony or hitting the buildings’ walls and then running almost straight down.
Then I remembered that I had seen that [very] same tree behind a board fence. Big and slender, spread, with its branches running high, it pleased the eye of passersby. But they started to build a cooperative house and one day it suddenly disappeared.
There are patients with a severe incurable disease, who – confined to bed, never leave the house for years; their acquaintances are at first surprised and then they forget them. The tree has long left the people and the world, and now - alone in the narrow and gloomy courtyard - it was dying, forgotten by all.
[15] People are more interested in the result than in the reason. This is probably why many make no distinction between funny and witty.
[16] Man is resourceful. When one cannot be free of some flaw, one begins to cultivate it consciously. And the very fact it is now desired renders one’s disadvantage – for both oneself and the others, some kind of a quality.
[31] People often owe their moral suffering not so much to themselves but rather to the environment they move in. How many of us – when they chance in some other society, in another environment – become tremendously lighter or completely depersonalized.
[53] Rhetoric – the timber, which gives only foliage.
[55] Many of our views and statements would not have been as definite and extreme, were it not for the people who think different than us.
[58] It’s so nice to be indignant: at the same time you feel the others guilty and are aware of your own superiority.
[59] At one table, where everyone is drunk, the one sober is – no doubt, an unpleasant witness.
[63] The error of any poetry that wants to instill a feeling, rather than understand and express it is that while trying to infect the readers with it, it inevitably exaggerates and falsifies it.
[68] Condescension is a sign also of bad conscience.
[83] THE TREE
This was a gray several-storey cooperative house with numerous small balconies of cement and paint-peeled window frames, one of those human hives, the offspring of both thirst for property and poverty. Every day at the bottom of the street I saw its dark, worried facade. Almost every day I happened to walk past it. My steps that died away unto the walls suddenly became more resounding, when they aligned with the entrance. Still, I would not have learned anything about this house’s tenants, if a little chance, an instruction by an acquaintance of mine from the country had not made me step over its threshold.
I started climbing up its stairs and at the landing before I got to the fourth floor, I stopped. My eyes fell on the staircase window. I saw an empty inner courtyard, fenced on all sides by buildings and in its middle – one big tree, yellow by the autumn.
The appearance of that lonely tree, whose existence in this place, behind those blocks of apartments, shocked me. I was standing, leaning on the window and watched how from time to time a leaf would fly away from its branches, falling onto a balcony or hitting the buildings’ walls and then running almost straight down.
Then I remembered that I had seen that [very] same tree behind a board fence. Big and slender, spread, with its branches running high, it pleased the eye of passersby. But they started to build a cooperative house and one day it suddenly disappeared.
There are patients with a severe incurable disease, who – confined to bed, never leave the house for years; their acquaintances are at first surprised and then they forget them. The tree has long left the people and the world, and now - alone in the narrow and gloomy courtyard - it was dying, forgotten by all.
[105] Contrary to poetry, which is based on compassion, on our merging with the people and things, irony always involves a certain alienation. In order to deride someone one needs not know him well. Just the contrary, it necessitates to not know one very well.
[114] Six years – the age when deciduous teeth start to fall: the childhood’s old age.
[117] People are more often penalized for what they would do, rather than for what they have done – for their future rather than for their past.
[155] One principal that wants to absolutely explain everything is in real fact explaining nothing.
[166] The part is less than the whole, but may be more beautiful than it.
[195] After all it’s filth – how are worms not to eat this flesh!
[223] THE CHILD AND THE MANIFESTATION
The child saw the manifestation from a window on the second floor and of all the motley procession remembered only the posters that were swimming over the river of men like sailboats’ sails, and the buttons of the railwaymen – a big metalline shower of buttons which made his eyes go dim.
[244] My children often ask me: “What writer are you, Dad? We never see you writing.” I myself feel this bewilderment: I am embarrassed when someone turns to me with that byname: in the midst of my “co-fellows” I feel uncomfortable as a stranger. And indeed, among so many authors of thick books and voluminous works what writer can I, the author of sentences, be?
[284] When you get older, you return to your first years, remembering your feelings and impressions of the olden days, you meet with the crannies.
Life is very much like the stay in a foreign, unfamiliar town. One [early] morning, you arrive at the railway station, you see the square in front of it, the car waiting for the passengers, the crowd; always peculiar at this place, the porters, the railwaymen. Those are your first impressions. Later, you settle in that town, you start moving in other places and other things attract your attention. Weeks and months go by. And lo, there comes the day of departure. Once again you go to the railway station, and once again you see the square with the cars arranged that you have forgotten. You see the same people. What was in the beginning repeats again before you and you understand the end has come.
[326] DO NOT TRY TO MAKE THINGS UP...
Do not try to make things up: tell the truth without fear! People are so accustomed to lying that nobody’s going to believe you.
[328] WHY I DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN LITERARY CELEBRATIONS
Some people wonder why I am not taking part in literary festivals and celebrations. How am I to explain to them? I simply have no festive poems.
I resemble a poor man, who finally sees himself invited to a great feast but does not go there because he has no suitable clothing.
[335] IF YOU WANT THEM TO BE ALIVE
When talking about artists of the past, it seems so, we too inadvertently adhere to the ancient maxim: for the deceased either good or nothing! And if we really want them to be alive, we must exit this deadening reverent attitude and argue with them as with our contemporaries. We maybe even need some arrogance.
[351] LIKE THE DOG
Having been in futile puzzle over one and the same issue, one has to abandon it in order to attack it after some time from another side. In this way a dog let for awhile the bone so as to later catch it stronger.
[363] CRITERION FOR TRUTH
He is even not trying to present arguments. He is satisfied to only point out to you that your understanding is not his. It simply is that you are not right because you do not think like him.
[367] CRITICISM DEVELOPMENT
Several years ago he preached that criticism was imagination; now he claims that it is a function of politics. Nothing wrong with this change. One is not born with one’s beliefs but works them gradually out gathering experience and wit. Of course, rather than imagination it would be better for criticism to be a policy. The bad thing is that even now he understands it too narrowly – as personal policy, remaining true to his self-serving nature.
[374] INDEED A PERSONALITY HERE MEANS NOTHING
[cf. Nikola Vapzarov’s ‘The Struggle Is Unmercifully Cruel’, “I fell – another shall replace me. What is a personality to this?!]
“Who are you to express such views?” These words you can hear very often in disputes. But they are no objection.
The truth or untruth of a proposition depends after all not on the personality of the one who said it, but on whether it conforms or not to reality. The significance of the one, who uttered it, or the awareness he has of his significance, may here be rather an obstacle: as he would comply for fear of not losing one’s significance. In Andersen’s fairy tale the child – who has no social status, said that the king was naked.
[426] SKILL AND “IN HIS OWN WRITING”
He wrote symbolist poems when symbolism was in fashion; [he wrote] books about the war when published in this country were [Erich Maria] Remarque, [Henry] Barbusse and Ludwig Renn (the pen name of Arnold Friedrich Vieth von Golsseneau); biographical novels during the fictional biographies period. One day they will [be able to] recover the tastes and fashions in our literature after him. I do not know whether one may talk about “one’s own writing” with such motley works. They remind me rather of those print-house catalogs, where the client finds all the fonts available to the print house.
I am amazed by writers who are capable of anything, but I do trust those who can do only one thing.
[427] THERE SHOULD BE THINGS BEYOND REPAIR
There has been of late some crack in their relationship and he felt that more and more something in her was irritating him. Was it her foreign education, or this “snobbery” that he discovered every day in her character – he could not say, but he clearly saw that their love was gradually vanishing. Earlier they used to understand each other in everything and now they were constantly of different views and disputing over trifles.
– You know – she said one day – my teacher from college who was widowed, married her friend from the student years. In youth they were much in love. But she married and he remained a bachelor and – it seems, awaiting her. Now, forty years later, they are finally together. What great love! Don’t you find it beautiful?
– Not only is it not beautiful – he said – but it is ridiculous and outrageous. In his place I would not agree even were I dying for love [of her]. And if I were deceived by chance to marry her, I would shoot myself on the day after the wedding. How can they get together as if there had been nothing in between them! Who would return his youth, all those forty years? And what is that Grandma good for him? I do not understand this desire in people to smooth out their mistakes, to revert to old solutions and to cheapen everything. One must know that every moment is unique and he decides once and for all. There should be things beyond repair. Otherwise life would become an offending farce.
[432] [STÉPHANE] MALLARMÉ OR HOW QUANTITY PASSES INTO QUALITY
By increasing, the quantity only becomes bigger quantity. Only by reducing therefore by denying itself can it imperceptibly turn into quality, it already is quality. === 30 August 2011 === end of insert ===
и малко на български
(Преводи от английски - translations from English)
(Преводи от английски - translations from English)
сърцето ти нося със мен(в сърцето си
го нося)никога не го забравям(където и да
ида идваш и ти, мила; и каквото и да сторя
само аз е и твое дело, скъпа моя)
няма съдба
да ме уплаши(защото ти си моята съдба, преблага)никой
свят не искам аз(защото моят свят си ти прекрасна, вярна моя)
и става тъй че ти си онова което луната винаги е означавала
и онова което слънцето ще пее винаги - си ти
тук е най-дълбоката тайна която никой не знае
(тук е коренът на корените и на пъпката пъпката
и небето на небето на едно дърво наречено живот; растящо
по-високо отколкото душата се надява или умът би могъл да прикрие)
и това е чудото което държи звездите разделени
сърцето ти нося(в сърцето си го нося)
Edward Estlin Cummings
ДЕ ДА БЕШЕ [или “АКО”]
Да бяха лун́ичките прекрасни, а денят да бе нощ,
да беше морбилито хубаво, а лъжата – не лъжа,
То животът би бил удоволствие, -
Но нищо не би било наред
Защото в такова тъжно положение
Аз не щеше да съм аз.
Да бе небе земята, а сега да бе по-сетне,
И миналото да бе настояще, измамата да беше истина,
Би могло да има смисъл
Но аз бих недоумявал
Защото под такъв един предлог
Ти не щеше да си ти.
Ако страхът бе смел, а глобусът – квадратен,
И чистичка да бе калта, сълзите да блестяха радостно
Всичко би било тъй справедливо, -
И все пак всички биха се отчайвали,
Защото, ако тук бе там
Ние не щеше да сме ние.
Превод от англ.
Edward Estlin Cummings- i thank You God for most this amazing day
Благодаря Ти, Боже, за най-чудния тоз
невероятен
Благодаря Ти, Боже, за най-чудния тоз невероятен
ден: за скачащите зеленикави дървесни духове
и синя истинска мечта небесна; и за всичко
което е естествено, което е безкрайно, което е 'да'
ден: за скачащите зеленикави дървесни духове
и синя истинска мечта небесна; и за всичко
което е естествено, което е безкрайно, което е 'да'
(аз, който съм умрял, съм жив отново днес,
и това е рожденият ден на слънцето, това е рожденият
ден на живота и любовта и крилата: и на веселата
велико случваща се безгранична земя)
и това е рожденият ден на слънцето, това е рожденият
ден на живота и любовта и крилата: и на веселата
велико случваща се безгранична земя)
как е да вкусиш докоснеш чуеш видиш
вдишаш всяко-повдигнато от 'не'-то
от всичко що е нищо-човешко просто съществуващо
(вечно) съмняващо се невъобразимо 'Ти'?
вдишаш всяко-повдигнато от 'не'-то
от всичко що е нищо-човешко просто съществуващо
(вечно) съмняващо се невъобразимо 'Ти'?
(сега ушите на ушите ми се будят и
сега очите на очите ми се отварят)
сега очите на очите ми се отварят)
2013, August 7
