Serendip's travel book
Azita Gharehman
Serendip's travel book Azita Gharehman translated by lars palm
swirl editions 2015
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cover photo by Petra Palm aka social photgrapher
these translations were not done from the original persian but from swedish translations made by Kristian Carlsson & Sohrab Rahimi. i did translations from these versions then me & Azita compared them to her original poems, i adjusted my versions & we reached the translations presented here Azita Gharehman is author of several books of poetry as well as translations. she was born in Mashhad in 1962 & has lived in Malmรถ since 2006. recently, in 2012, a chapbook size translation titled simply Poems (tr. by Elhum Shakerifar & Maura Dooley) was published by Poetry Translation Centre
Nobody was hidden in anybody's darkness I must leave the boat to repair again The sea must enter the story through another door The trip must be the sloping denial of my role and on the curtain we may write: Adi贸s!
Come on over to the last leaves of autumn on this side! The road curves so you may keep warm It's december Darkness has bowed over us Our happy imprints lie in the red coffee cup A little cloud is glimpsed on the edge The shadows by the tree hold their arms around each other's throats but only in this scene Suddenly it starts to snow Below the snow in the glow of the moon and the words this is our recollection
I dreamt the Majnoon Islands were an enormous bird You fell to the side like a trunk I hoped to be able to find you beyond the palm grove, in the sultry painting on the beach or among all the goods in the market crowd The star particles and telescopes flung my mood away hundredfold I stood naked The winds whirled in my head You dropped and set the room on fire
I was in love with a woman called Salma Instead of covering her face she put on a pair of eyes and went out She had silver bracelets and an invisible mouth and raised the dust beneath the palms When she stood by the street with gloves and a hat the red rings hid in the years
Here in the time-zone of the seas hours are deep and blue and the wind is louder than the flag facing the mirror Nedjma spoke with In the pigeon's breast there's a narrow opening According to her sketch of the view the sea is closer than before You are the only passenger in the book Therefore I show myself naked in good conscience before you drown
Now it's yesterday again but seven years later The kind of day when I will fall in love with you All your faces are still the same, your hands are the leaves on this tree, your slopes are the direction of the sea I will cry over your name in every language At least talk to me sometime, Uzzรก
I lie in a brass bed and they ask for your names They ask about what the cut off blood-vessels are called by turns The laughing eye intended to kill me We are tightly strapped They cut us open with needles and scalpels You part my legs Roughly they dragged me right through your warm skeleton I will never forget this erosion is now you
They stitch the wounds masterfully I have fainted You get up and instead of with me you're in love with four absent men Naked and tired you despairingly look for them behind my back I roll inside your body and dream that someone calls Nedjma to me from the other side of the bridge
She wrote a strange line from you across the stones Your shadow lies outside the lines We never got back to the first letters Leila! In this desert I miss the walks along the edge while the alphabet howled in my head while you laughed at the fingers of the wind Without you the nights were so simple and the moon could sneak into the clock
My hair covers another woman's head and ages My heart lies in her chest and sings for you but the chaffinch's throat trembles in my voice The woman turned her gaze from your face Now Salma is blind I lead her by the hand Where are you?
The soldiers march you have to run a little faster in this story The city holds your name and your address The white bird is your emblem Through the window I saw the same road and the same arched sky Now the sentences settle on the soil then one of us returns to sleep to keep loving you
I cut the houses to tiny pieces with a scissor Trees and boats switched places I struck out the humans The holes are deeper than before on the invisible game board – I stand alone in this delusion to be your address in escape
Over the paper on the table heaven, earth and wind united I am confused Writing poetry scares me away from your gaze The gravel under my tongue makes it hard to speak In this dark distance I could only hold you It doesn't matter if you are the same or if it's me who is Salma I love you with your mouth It kisses both our lips
Your sleepy blood covers the cold earth Your senseless blood rushes in the branches Leave the fear to the ground's own roots Turn me into a tall tree to a figure at the road's end to a poem you may write You must again return on your own We are the white cedar leaves We are hills of ash where it still snows
It's too late to reach some distant destination so I wait in the town where snow has fallen Instead of another woman waiting for you with someone else's hands instead of yours on a strange bed in an invisible room... I wait Someone puts my arms around you I look at you and your arms are always warm
You have a black beak You have glowing black pupils The tyranny of silence sets the night on fire For a thousand years you have been looking for my hands between these letters Your dark wing flashed and the rain fell The ground stared at us with your eyes
Death clumsily stitched her body to somebody else's skin I stood between strange and light pines The wind was the shining fingers of rotating twlilight The wind was a white bird heading for the sea's field of view The pigeons flew slowly over Uzzรก's chest In your voice the waves laughed again
Just so you never wake again, Nedjma! Just so we never confess to living Just so there's never cause for crying in such weather You may find a false path in these outfields where fog lies thick Beneath Salma's eye lids our name and origin is one and the same You have killed me as often as love and I fall in love as often as you become the death of me and it no longer matters from which direction light enters the book or from where in the apple the worm watches the world