Forgive me for all those words
Forgive me for all those words which I rudely relayed to you forgive me for all those words that I whispered to others softly forgive me for the complicated immense moments which I secretly gave you for the brief and toneless days which I gave to others openly You are the half-finished cuneiform etching on the leaf of a palm tree You are the plenitude of power of my times which like Indian arrows darted without a trace It is the everyday feast, Always unusual in our meeting From this low and narrow bed of mine I shall write lullabies on the walls of night in order that with untroubled brittle sentiment you come to me again and with mortal sinful and reed-plaited fingers I reveal your etching’s new meaning you sing the merry tune of your newly budded palm tree you breathe my body with wild words like arrows that rise translucent foam to my blood’s eruption And you love again and you forgive once more
There will be silence in the museum and phantom of death
There will be silence in the museum and phantom of death and delusion of life in the tranquility the past speaks mutely self-confident as if the present does not exist and the future even in this present turns into past museums reign with lights But my museum is dark noisy like a sunset like a street that neither ceases nor petrifies like an immense heart that can palpitate with pure blood like a memory that blunts neither in pleasure nor suffering you are everywhere in my museum And when I am here every moving thing becomes definite voices break in more intense more binding and ungraspable I turn the lights on lights of words lights of metal lights of blood What do you want from me? that under the colorless eye of the lamp one moment you are dead one moment alive from me what do you want? with the painful gaze of a cripple you gaze around you
To explain without words
To explain without words I used words To relate without stumbling I used a ladder To cry out loud I used laughter Someone saw me crying he has laid down now I descended to his arms and on the inexplicable nakedness I drew the cover of words On the palms of my hands he played with Rene Magritte’s three apples Paul Klee’s centrifugal letters and Salvador Dali’s self-absorbed third eye I covered him too with soul-searching smile and with woman’s densely-lit ambiguous advice The rain went deeper into the night the night became pregnant with voices With domestic voices venomous unapproachable that turn the soul violent and then, with bloodthirsty knives the three apples gave me my unshut eye and then, I caressed the braille letters of life and the gallop of the hands was a wind-blown ciphered night on the dark pillow was born this savage scintillating femininity
The ruins call intensely with their stubborn
The ruins call intensely with their stubborn gaze they bury all novelistic forms they bury the epic the bread the wine the song the drought fertility the anthills multiply under the sun live these strong-winded ruins like an insoluble truth drop by drop they ooze their heart to the earth while the breeze like a startled herd passes from country to country as if a cursed legion far-off the Eye hiding its sins submerges into the cerulean instability to tell the rest of the myth the Eye opens and millions of people drop by drop are descended to the earth the tribes multiply like fate arranged side by side and absurdly tourniqueted and we wait for somebody to murder the spies of pain
The problematic nature of translating poetry—of transposing formal and semantic configurations from one language to another, hoping to give an afterlife to a poem—already finds a deeply sensitive home in Tekian’s poems, as they grapple with the flickers of meaning that envelop us from the un-patterned chaos of life. What better way, then, to honor the poet on the occasion of translating some of her poetry than by weaving a poem that is literally, formally and genetically attached to it?
Karen Jallatyan