but the room on the second floor stays damp and cold, vacant.
My aunt shows a scar on her knee
from her youth, caused by a nail on a wooden staircase—
she tells the same story over and over again.
I never understood what she was looking for,
those summer evenings on the roof,
but I imagine the sad creaking on the stairs, her solemn descent,
her cadence, like all other cadences, without nails, without wounds.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Dusk. The moon glides over abandoned houses
that stir like sleeping babies. Smoke still puffs out of
three or four chimneys. A dog’s unanswered bark.
A gate closes. The light on the porch flickers from a sneeze.
Behind windows
you can see the shadows of a few people stuck between two epochs
like words lost in translation.
The closest school is now two hours away.
The church even farther;
it’s useless to burn incense for just twenty souls.
Those who have left never return.
They only send letters slippery like butter.
They say they’re doing fine.
Maybe they work on a farm there, too.
And anyway,
it’s easier to blame a foreign land.
Autumn retreats
like a satisfied wolf;
she hides half of her prey under the first snow
certain that she’ll find it untouched when she returns next year.
“Loneliness” you could call it.
But you need a second person to confirm this with a nod,
and the nearest barber is four hours away.
When he sees a crow fly away alone,
he whispers simply to his wife
back turned to her: “Winter will be harsh.”
Nothing to blame here.
You can’t find a more suitable landscape than this
to hang in the corridor
or inside a tired heart,
smack in the middle of blue, red, gray, ocher
or even white lime-washed walls.
A PERFECT DAY
This probably happens somewhere in Provence, doesn’t it?
You wake up late, not in a hurry,
you open your window, and the heavy smell of earth
sprinkled with red poppy seeds floods in.
It could be May, and the cherries are in bloom.
The phone rings. It’s your father,
letting you know that he’s well and misses you.
(What’s wrong? You’ve never heard those words from his mouth?
Weren’t they so much like fruit without a pit?)
Then a warm bath to admire your body
as if in a Renaissance oil painting by François Clouet.
You go back to work in the studio—write nothing
or simply jot down some words. A single word would be ideal.
A single word, a need,
that puts your whole body into action, hands and feet,
like an old Singer sewing machine.
Buzz, buzz. A bumblebee’s nest in the garden. Nothing to worry about.
For lunch coq au vin accompanied by a glass of Minervois,
just before the uproar of children released from school.
In the evening, the love of your life takes you out to a terrace café
to show you how the sun sets,
its delicate exit, never turning its back,
like a baritone at the end of the show.
You happily talk to each other.
You wonder how much of the present is still unexploited:
“Such good wine!” “You look so lovely in that dress!”
“How many years do you think that old couple has been together?”
Then you get a little carried away with the wine …
You’ve got only twenty-four hours; no reason to feel guilty.
Then what? What happens next? I don’t even know
and God damn it, the days are so long in May.
Perfect, yes.
But something makes you uneasy,
embarrassed, predictable,
like a winner’s speech in your pocket:
what everyone knows you have
even though you may never use it.
ONE’S DESTINY
To this day
she keeps her dead sister’s identity papers, still active,
her official name, date of birth, ID number.
Everything went wrong and nothing could’ve been different.
It was the other one’s destiny
she slowly grew used to
as if a hotel room:
“What beautiful wallpaper!”
“What sad slippers on the carpet!”
Nothing was hers—this place simply temporary.
That’s why she added no furniture and didn’t plant anything on the balcony.
Letters that arrived to her door
were left unopened, tied together with string.
But someone else’s destiny has a perfect pitch.
You can hear what’s inside your head
as if sitting in a Greek amphitheater
where in a few hours, a cheerful mother
will transform into Medea.
Now that her end is coming and she’s ready to return the keys,
something hurts in her chest:
How could she not open one of those letters?
How could she not leave a single ironing mark on the bedsheet?
But at least she has her own alibi for her absence.
What is your excuse?
INSIDE A SUITCASE
The first time I traveled by bus
it was June. Torrents of rain and vomit
streamed across the window,
fastening the landscape to my mind
with paper clips.
Inside the wooden suitcase
between my knees, a few things rattled
as they slid from one side to the other.
There was no bigger shame—
the whole world knew what I was carrying.
I took that same journey many times.
In fact, it went even farther,
my own skin turning into a suitcase,
packed full with things, as if relocating to another life:
cotton things, synthetic things, truths, alibis, objects and shadows,
without the terror of the rattling emptiness.
If I try to remove certain things to get below the weight limit,
my skin thins, droops, and withers,
as if due to an extreme diet.
And after each return,
unused things fill other spaces
in my shelves, drawers, and imagination …
Only a few of them remain under my skin all year long.
But where can the knees of that nine-year-old be found?
Where are the brave sphinxes who protected
that suitcase, that small little empire of wood?
THINGS I LIKED ABOUT HIM
The way he approached the bed that first time,
somewhat tired, without turning to look outside
at the July afternoon full of cotton traps.
The way he switched off the light with a single touch
and unfolded the sheet with such certainty
as if he’d done it for a thousand years.
Like a large ship returning to port
with its last cargo; ready for the scrap.
It didn’t matter anymore what it stored inside—
bags of coffee, porcelain, or tropical fever.
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Two dear mentors, Rosanna Warren and David Gullette, have helped me through the years by reading portions of these translations and noting corrections of idiomatic expressions. To Rosanna, for first steering me toward literary tra
nslation—a process of textual excavation, deep play, and ongoing faith—and to David, for continuously nudging me to see better. I am deeply grateful for their friendship.
To Banff International Literary Translation Centre and to Omi International Arts Center, for allowing me time and space to work on this book from start to finish.
To the NEA and English PEN, for their financial support.
To my parents, for unwavering faith in all my endeavors.
To Jeffrey Yang and Neil Astley, for their patience, kindness, and astute final edits of this book. Your help has been invaluable and I deeply admire your linguistic and poetic expertise.
To Mieke Chew at New Directions, for working like “a noiseless patient spider” answering all my emails in the final stages of this book.
To Luljeta, for trusting me to engage deeply with her poetry and for the generosity and freedom she gave me to create and re-create these poems. Everything I have learned about translation comes from my experience with her words.
To Albania, where I first discovered my love for words and language.
To my numerous translator friends and the entire 2015 BILTC family—your labors of love inspire me daily and I treasure you all.
And to the editors of the following publications, in which some of these translations first appeared, sometimes in different forms: Agni Online, Ploughshares, World Literature Today, Two Lines, Seedings, Pangyrus, Asymptote, Tupelo Quarterly, The Plume Anthology of Poetry 3 & 4, Catamaran Literary Reader, Liberation, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Plume, and 3:am Magazine.
Thanks also to Matt O’Donnell at From the Fishouse (www.fishousepoems.org) for sharing some of these translations and an interview with Luljeta Lleshanaku in their audio archive.
Copyright © 2012, 2015 by Luljeta Lleshanaku
Copyright © 2018 by Ani Gjika
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1407) in 2018
Design by Eileen Baumgartner
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lleshanaku, Luljeta, author. | Gjika, Ani, translator.
Title: Negative space / Luljeta Lleshanaku ; translated from the Albanian
by Ani Gjika.
Description: First American paperback edition. | New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2018. | “A New Directions Paperbook Original.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2017041788 (print) | LCCN 2017049842 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780811227537 | ISBN 9780811227520 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Lleshanaku, Luljeta—Translations into English. |
Albanian poetry—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PG9621.L54 (ebook) | LCC PG9621.L54 .A2 2018 (print) |
DDC 891/.9911—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041788
eISBN: 9780811227537
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
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