Poetry Parnassus: Amina (Egypt)

Poetry Parnassus is a project of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, hosted at the Southbank Centre in London. It ran from June 26 to July 1, featuring 145 poets from around the world. Here is the Guardian’s interactive map, where you can click on a country and read its poem. I will be posting them on a semi-regular basis until they’re done.

Amina, by Iman Mersal (Egypt)

You order beer by phone
with the confidence of a woman who knows three languages
and who weaves words into unexpected contexts.

How did you find this sense of security
as if you’d never left your father’s house?
Why does your presence provoke this destructiveness
that is completely free of intent,
this gravity
that releases my senses from their darkness?
What else should I do
when a shared hotel room offers me
a perfect friend
except to lump my unrefined manners and fling them
at her face as a crudeness I have contrived?

Go ahead, amuse yourself.
I am fair.
I’ll let you have more than half the room’s oxygen
on the condition that you see me beyond comparisons,
you who are twenty years older than my mother.
You wear bright colours
and will never grow old.

My perfect friend,
why don’t you leave now.
Perhaps I’ll open the gray wardrobes
and try on your stylish things.

Why don’t you go
and leave me all the room’s oxygen.
The void of your absence may lead me
to bite my lip in despair
as I look at your toothbrush,
familiar… and wet.

• Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa.

• ‘Amina’ from These Are Not Oranges, My Love (Sheep Meadow Press, NY, 2008).

Poetry Parnassus: They remain lying on the earth… (Benin)

Poetry Parnassus is a project of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, hosted at the Southbank Centre in London. It ran from June 26 to July 1, featuring 145 poets from around the world. Here is the Guardian’s interactive map, where you can click on a country and read its poem. I will be posting them on a semi-regular basis until they’re done.

They remain lying on the earth, by Agnes Agboton (Benin)

They remain lying on the earth
the dark bodies of men
after a useless death
and in the hidden heart of the
others
the flame of hatred is still
burning
ignorantly awake.
Useless hatred.

Inside a calm refuge
of beautiful walls
all has changed;
two important men have smiled
to each other,
they have shaken hands.

Again, all is useless,
the struggle of the living,
the death of the dead.
Again, all is useless,
the hunger…

• Translated from Gun into Spanish by Agnès Agboton,
and from the Spanish by Maya García Vinuesa.

• ‘They remain lying on the earth’ published in Wasafiri 56 (Winter 2008),
by permission of the author.

I don’t know if this is the poem above – probably not – and obviously I can’t understand the words, but it’s good to hear the spoken rhythms that are lost in translation. Sometimes hearing how someone speaks tells a whole story.

Poetry Parnassus: Free as a Bird (Liechtenstein)

Poetry Parnassus is a project of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, hosted at the Southbank Centre in London. It ran from June 26 to July 1, featuring 145 poets from around the world. Here is the Guardian’s interactive map, where you can click on a country and read its poem. I will be posting them on a semi-regular basis until they’re done.

Free as a Bird, by Elisabeth Kaufmann-Büchel (Liechtenstein)

Unattached
With no roots
With no barrier

Free as a bird
I want to be

Despite the fears of freedom
Despite the vulnerability of the unattached
Despite the unfamiliarity of the unknown

Free as a bird
I want to be

Woven into the warmth of the evening wind
Swaying on the willow tree’s branches
Carried by the breath of the stars

Free as a bird
I want to be

From here to there
Never missed and never expected
Never recognised and never attached

Free as a bird
I want to be

• Translated from the German.

• ‘Free as a Bird’ from Mille Fleurs.

Poetry Parnassus: Prologue (Luxembourg)

Poetry Parnassus is a project of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, hosted at the Southbank Centre in London. It ran from June 26 to July 1, featuring 145 poets from around the world. Here is the Guardian’s interactive map, where you can click on a country and read its poem. I will be posting them on a semi-regular basis until they’re done.

Prologue, by Anise Koltz (Luxembourg)

Life is no long quiet river
but a bloodbath

Yet you ask me for
poetry decorated with flowers
with little birds

I’m sorry Ladies and Gentlemen
each of my poems
buries your dead

*

I advance without a net
from one star to another
sliding through black holes
I leap from moons to suns

I rock at the edges
of the earth
already no longer belonging to it

Because this poem is a lie
it has the right to be beautiful

• Translated from the French by Anne-Marie Glasheen.

• ‘Prologue’ from At the Edge of the Night (Arc Publications, 2009),
by permission of the publisher.

Poetry Parnassus: Elegy (Ethiopia)

Poetry Parnassus is a project of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, hosted at the Southbank Centre in London. It ran from June 26 to July 1, featuring 145 poets from around the world. Here is the Guardian’s interactive map, where you can click on a country and read its poem. I will be posting them on a semi-regular basis until they’re done.

Elegy, by Bewketu Seyoum (Ethiopia)

The fall of every leaf diminishes me,
so when I hear a rustle
I send my eyes out of the window
to look at the trees in the yard.
Alas! where there were woods,
now I see flag-poles standing.
Men have swept nature’s nest away
to build their cities.
The melody of the nightingale
has lost its immortality
and I am sitting on a dead land,
writing my elegy in the sand.

• Translated from the Amharic by Chris Beckett.

• ‘Elegy’ from Modern Poetry in Translation by permission of the author.

Poetry Parnassus: Your dance is like a cure (Jamaica)

Poetry Parnassus is a project of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, hosted at the Southbank Centre in London. It ran from June 26 to July 1, featuring 145 poets from around the world. Here is the Guardian’s interactive map, where you can click on a country and read its poem. I will be posting them on a semi-regular basis until they’re done.

Your dance is like a cure, by Kei Miller (Jamaica)

In this country on a Saturday night
you are usually the best dancer;
it was not so back home.
Here you can dance
dances that have fallen out
of season, like mangoes in February
or guineps at Christmas. It does not matter
in this new country;
they do not know Spanish Town Road,
have never danced into the headglights
of early morning buses… though,
neither have you; you were never skilled
enough back there. You never entered
the middle circle – like a Holy of Holies –
where only good dancers dared venture.
But in this country, you move like fire
amongst the cane, you move like sugar
and like ocean; they say – you are the sharp
swing of a cutlass, they say –
you are like ointment in a deep wound.
They say your dance is like a cure.

• ‘Your dance is like a cure’ from There Is an Anger that Moves (Carcanet Press, 2007).

Poetry Parnassus: Entering America (New Zealand)

Poetry Parnassus is a project of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, hosted at the Southbank Centre in London. It ran from June 26 to July 1, featuring 145 poets from around the world. Here is the Guardian’s interactive map, where you can click on a country and read its poem. I will be posting them on a semi-regular basis until they’re done.

Entering America, by Bill Manhire (New Zealand)

A line of men, tipped forward, stumbling.
They are taking off their shoes.

This is how you enter America:
under a gun and a stare.

Where a bastard is free to be a big bastard!
You can be sure of a welcome here!

And these men all in line,
coming home in their suits,

with deals in their pockets, with phones-beyond-phones,
whose tired feet have swollen their way
soared through the heavens –

are made to show the occasional toe,
not to mention their socks,

with those little designs at the ankles,
often, I believe, called ‘clocks’.

• ‘Entering America’ from Lifted (Carcanet Press, 2007),
© Bill Manhire 2005, 2007.