Rebkong
Burn the offering of incense, blow the dharma conch.
You are a blue altar for incense,
You are a dark fairy tale from long ago.
O Rebkong, black fort of history
Where my father’s bones decayed,
My mother’s vital spirit scattered.
Sometimes you are like the cool breeze
Streaming through the high mountains,
Sometimes like the clear water
Sluicing through the low valley.
Precious to the king’s heart like its heartblood boiling,
Is the glittering Rongwo monastery
A black tent resplendent amid blue grass?
Or a line of young wild yaks on mountain crags?
O Rebkong, fatherland.
Famed Rebkong of history where the dust has not yet settled.
You are a song to sing, a dance to dance,
Where the poor dream joyful dreams,
The rich display coloured turquoise and corals
And the lonely down their drinks in one shot.
Every morning and every evening,
The red valley is wreathed in a belt of smoke,
Like the chest of a freshly slain yak,
As the smoke rises, curling into air.
Where there is cause and effect,
Whatever the season or the time of day,
When I bind my pain and gaze at it,
You leap at times into the sky, an eagle,
At times fall into the water like an autumn leaf.
This may be the sinful
Karma of your unhappy deed,
The divining sign
That your soul-stone will disintegrate.
No matter, O Rebkong,
From the clean drizzle of spring rain,
The soft fragile shoots of green grass –
This leaf, like your smile:
This leaf is your love.
Rebkong, you cannot be
The string-less dragon-headed piwang,
You cannot be the round moon with no shade.
No matter who catches cold,
You give the first sneeze.
No matter in whose kitchen there’s a fire,
You are where the smoke rises.
Rebkong, is it the Guchu river that falls as your teardrops,
The heart of your history cut open?
Now the Guchu knows no waves or billows, no pristine transparence.
At the source of the Guchu, a self-deceiving
Mirror bobs in the water,
A mirror to piece the locals’ hearts,
Bobbing, gently bobbing.
O Rebkong, you who are a Great Mother to me.
When the rocking mirror no longer reflects me,
Your artistry, your intelligence, your ancestors –
Who will care for them? Who will fly
The windhorses to bring us fortune?
O Rebkong, spring fled long ago
From the teeth of months and years,
Why are you deep still in winter’s sleep?
Do the villagers, done breaking up
The new year’s fried khabseys,
Now prepare, without doubting
The weather, to pick caterpillar fungus
At the base of Jhakyung Mountain?
Is it the caterpillar fungus that gives you
Energy for body and spirit
Neglecting neither soul nor marrow?
Even if Grandmother’s stories ignite a butter lamp in you,
Even if Grandfather’s plough animals give you confidence,
Even so, you are not the skinless dark rocky mountain,
Nor the giant who shores up the glory of the sun and the moon.
NOTE: Piwang is the two-stringed Tibetan fiddle; Khabsey are fried homemade biscuits.
NGARMA
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi
Ngarma is a young and emerging poet,from Amdo in north-eastern Tibet. The poem was published in Gedun Chopel in 2011. Ngarma also wrote the lyrics for the song ‘New Generation’ by the Tibetan rock band Yudrug, which has become an anthem for Tibetan youth in both Tibet and in the exile diaspora around the world. Ngarma is the pen name of the poet Jigshel Kyab. Tibetan writers often use only pen names and the word Ngarma means ‘the angry one’.
An Old Man’s Present
Only twenty three and a mountain range of regret.
What is this? What is this?
From the door I invite a drop of light.
Dust particles
Assemble here.
The tea has long grown cold.
Much that has cooled cannot be warmed again.
All these various incomplete drawings can’t be erased.
I can’t forget unfinished works.
Breaking the three unbroken arrows on my clock,
I disarranged the twelve numbered hours,
In the morning, hid from myself wrinkles on my forehead.
A vehicle drags a tail of black smoke,
Rushes east at dawn and returns west at night.
Near the highway
I see a couple kissing happily,
I see in my mind
Not my past but their future.
Only dreams plumb the mind’s depths.
The forgetful mind
Makes me feather light.
One day, as you see me flying –
That’s an illusion,
But another carrying me –
That’s real.
My hair fell and grew.
My eyes popped out of the dark.
As the thorn-bird loves the thorn,
So I love the world.
My steps grow smaller,
My body bends.
One by one I forget names
Inked in the letter sleeping in this desk
Facing me.
Those brought away by guardians of the dead must be dead,
I have received no response from my friends.
In another place, at another time,
In a smoke-filled bar, they ponder
Country and neighbour, regret
My late arrival.
The darkness is like closely-laid black bricks.
I recognize everywhere as my home.
And in my home, there is no fire even in winter,
No flowers even in summer.
Various objects in the distance
Burn in the distance.
Images I can see have their essence,
So do my birth, growth, sickness and death,
An essence that is interlinked.
How do they connect,
Smells and sounds that can’t be touched,
That collapse and scatter,
And the root of my soul scattering?
How do they connect, my soul
And clouds that glide overhead?
The owl swooping in the armpit of night
Lands on wingtips of white light.
This town is the inner heart of chaos.
I have spent my days and nights
On its streets and shops and bookstores.
With an old key from my front pocket,
I open an old door, lay on an old bed
Dreaming old dreams. The news is today’s
But I feel like yesterday.
Right now even an hour is a single rosary bead refusing to move,
Rolling my thumb is all the duty I can manage.
Just now there can be an afterlife.
Or there can be no afterlife.
LOUISE LABÉ
Translated by Olivia McCannon
Who could resist the sonnets of Louise Labé? The tone of voice is immediately compelling, weighing face-to-face directness with fully rounded wit. These are poems which speak to everyone – candid
ly assertive, warmly human – as if five hundred years were nothing.
Louise Labé’s life – like the lives of so many women of talent – has frequently received more attention than her work. It has been shaped into a scandal (she was a courtesan), a legend (she rode to war), and most recently, a sham (she was a man). But perhaps she was just born in the right place at the right time: to an enlightened father who gave her access to the same education (fencing, riding, poetry, other languages) as her brothers; in Lyon, thriving cultural crossroads of the Renaissance.
The importance and pleasure of the work, notably the 24 Petrarchan sonnets she published alongside her Débat de folie et d’amour, in 1555, seem indisputable, at least. Labé’s language is limpid, uncluttered; each line often a unit of sense, a clear foil for the aural underpinning of the logic, or argument, of its sonnet: rhyme, alliteration and assonance chime and fuse with unmistakable authority.
It seemed to me that I needed to hold onto, or recreate, that clarity, and cohesion, if I was to have any chance of capturing the bravado and enterprise of the sequence as a whole. These twenty four sonnets explore the way the imagination unlocks sensual pleasure; they enact, through form, an elusive reciprocity; they reclaim ring-fenced areas of language and culture.
In short, Louise Labé rewrites the male Petrarchan tradition, giving it a blast of positive, debunking energy, a strong female voice and an intelligent physicality.
Sonnet 16
When thunder and hail have beaten down a while
On high Mount Caucasus and its smoking thief
The day turns fair, dresses itself in light.
When Phoebus has blazed his ring around the earth
And speeding down into the sea, sinks back:
His sister rises, pointed diadem first.
Once the Parthian has fired his parting shot
He runs away, and lets his bow fall slack.
Seeing you cast down, I gave you consolation
Despite the sluggish flame of my own fire
But now you’ve fanned it, pressing consummation
And I’m at the point you wanted me most at
You’ve gone and doused your flame in water,
Are colder than I was, when you tossed your match.
Sonnet 18
Kiss me again, kiss me, kiss me more:
Give me one of your most mouth-watering ones
Give me one of your most smouldering ones
I’ll repay it with four, hotter than any embers.
Weary, you say? Here, let me find a cure:
I’ll give you ten, all different, of rare softness.
Then as we mix up happiness and kisses
We two will please each other at our pleasure.
Now you and I will live our lives twice over
Once inside our self; once in our lover, and
Love, if I dare think this thought aloud,
Living in reserve makes me impatient:
How will I ever satisfy my ache,
Unless I rouse myself to seek, astride.
Sonnet 19
Diana, finding herself deep in thick woods
Paused – having slain a raft of beasts –
To drink in cool air, garlanded by nymphs.
I walked, deep in thought, as I often do
Barely taking care: when I heard a voice
Call out to me: Clueless nymph, Diana
Is further in, you’ve lost your way. Curious,
Seeing me without bow or quiver, she asked
What did you encounter, friend, on your path,
Who has stripped you of your arrows, your bow?
I was stirred to action, I said, by a man who passed,
At him I desperately fired my arrows, the whole
Lot and the bow after. But he just picked them up
And shot them back, piercing a hundred holes.
Sonnet 20
Someone once foretold that there would be
A man – and they described his face so I
Could see it, clear as the hour when it came –
Who would, one day, unshakeably, love me.
But seeing him fall in love so inevitably
Made me take pity on his doomed adventure,
I even forced and chivvied my own nature
Until I loved him back as passionately.
Who’d have thought this offspring of the joining
Of Heaven and the Fates, could do other than thrive?
But when I see such sullen clouds gathering,
Such bitter winds and such spiteful storms: I
Can’t help thinking some remote infernal decree
Must have ordained this shipwreck, of you, and me.
CHRISTINE DE LUCA
Arne Ruste in Shetlantic
Arne Ruste holds a special place in contemporary Norwegian poetry. Since his debut in 1973 he has been a distinctly sensual, image-rich poet. His poems are immediate and warm; rich in knowledge of human attachment to religion and history, nature and landscape. Kretsløp (2012) is a fine ‘New and Selected’ collection from Tiden. He is an expert in rendering the big concerns of existence into apparently simple poems, often with reference to the natural world of which he is a keen observer.
Ruste and I have enjoyed mutual translation of our poems over the last decade, using English as a bridge language but, in both cases, keeping a keen eye on the Norwegian or Shetlandic as there are many similarities of sound and rhythm.
The English versions of these two poems were made by Olav Grinde, who lives in the US. Interestingly in ‘Welcome’ he shifted Ruste’s Byens terminal (the city terminal in Oslo) to Grand Central Station in New York. I used Kings Cross where a Scot coming off the London train can feel strangely foreign. The poem fell into Shetlandic reasonably effortlessly: some words like overstadig translate easily into Shetland’s owresteer (rather excessive behaviour) but perhaps the line spraglete utenlandsk og fremmed nå is the closest spricklit, ootadaeks fock, fae fram noo. Quite distinct from the English ‘foreign and strangely speckled’.
The coming of Spring is a frequent theme for poetry but Ruste’s ‘Robin’ is particularly apt and endearing. Some phrases like ‘perplexed polyphony’ and ‘pubertal’ have no direct Shetlandic equivalent so I had to take a tangential approach to get at the core of meaning (cabbi-labbi and yallicrack are somewhat onomatapoeic; and the phrases filsket scriechin and slippit onkerry hopefully embody the rather gauche physicality of youth). By way of balance there are other words and phrases where the Shetlandic and Norwegian share a sound quality or rhythmic similarity, particularly the final line.
Photograph © Dawn Marie Jones
SHETLANDIC
Wylcom
An dan der stirleens
in a stowin dunt
Da muckle oak is foo o stirleens
Kings Cross
Bön aa owre, new notts i der trots,
spricklit, ootadaeks fock, fae fram noo
– wi sun apö fedders
an waarm vowels
a speechil birthday
But i da haert o dat mird, aa his lane,
sporrow
een o da aald baand,
screchin full-trapplt
Owre-steer
glafterit or mad swaerie-wirds
hit’s aa da sam
Geng du, peerie speug!
(CDL)
ENGLISH (BRIDGE)
Welcome
And suddenly there are
starlings
The big oak is full of starlings
Grand Central Station
Well-travelled, heavy accented,
The Great Flight Page 3