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Ivan Hristov - "Bdin" |
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Dear mother,
* The medieval name of the town Vidin
As I was walking
Continue dreaming,
Dear father,
The river. She runs and sweeps away our walls, dikes, bridges, and dams. The river. She demolishes and desecrates our buildings, shrines, statues, and pedestals. The river. She drags away and effaces our family portraits, family trees, domestic relics. The river. She opens up and resurrects pantheons, museums, mausoleums, and graves and our living bodies she locks in stifling berths. And our ships sink, and we scream but our throats fill with water and in the depths our Voice dies away… O, the river! She is so inconstant, light and ethereal, yet how badly it hurts when she kills. And we don't have a chance, since she is everything to us, our Death, and our happiness, our Eternity
We must think of good things of good and beautiful things. Sometimes I get ahead of time. Sometimes I hear a Voice: "Wait, don't rush, Ivan, when the speed of time passing exceeds human dimensions, it is equal to zero." Most likely those who have experienced stress are inclined to bad thoughts. I don't know how the historians measure time, but I do know how one can age twenty years in a single second. "Wait, don't rush, Ivan…" We must think of good things and know that they will happen.
The dump in Bdin has a peculiar characteristic, namely that it never ends. How long have I been walking and walking and walking… It is the beginning and the end, the endless horizon of waiting. Here you can find anything: from scraps of plastic to clippings from old newspapers, unused train tickets, pictures of unknown girls, crippled hobbyhorses, bottles of Coca-cola, busts of Lenin and Stalin, used condoms, swastikas and broken crosses, books from Mark through Marx to Marques, from the crescent to the hammer and sickle… Sometimes I meet other poets, too, but they speak foreign languages and belong to foreign literatures, thus we cannot establish contact. Sometimes I lie inside a cardboard box and feel like a child in the womb, I dream that I am flying… Sometimes the dump is warm and breathes. Sometimes I think that the people here live like migratory birds - from North to South from warm to cold and back. Thus every forty years. I smoke a cigarette butt and have nowhere to toss it.
I like to stroll and breathe the fresh air at dusk, in the park, among retirees, lovers, and drug addicts among those who have no future
Sometimes at dusk I stop on the bridge and your face to me looks enormous enormous like the river itself
Sometimes I meet other poets, but each lives in his own time, thus we cannot establish contact. Once I met a poet and wanted to tell him how I would like to live during the time of the Renaissance… or at least during the Bulgarian Revival.* I wanted to tell him about the similarity between the female body and a bottle of Coca-cola, about how one night I dreamt that one of the caryatids on the Acropolis broke free and started coming towards me. When I woke up, I found myself hugging a coke bottle. But he said that he lived in the Middle Ages and that for him woman was the Devil's spawn and with that, our conversation ended * The Bulgarian Revival refers to a period of socio-economic, political and cultural development, which began with the first history of Bulgaria, written by Pajsij Hilendarski in 1762, and continued for more than a century, culminating Bulgaria's independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878.
I stood on the balcony, smoked, and enjoyed the noise of the streetcars. I met people with a smile, fed the birds with yesterday's bread. In flowerpots I tended beautiful flowers, nourishing them with living water. I warmed the burning stone in my heart, but when I turned around, I was met with a blank brick wall.
Under his umbrella he does not acknowledge summer fall winter he sells books on his boat alone in the middle of the ocean of people yet his boat - his typewriter of course is named "Chekhov" I'm not sure whether he is an old hippy or a watchman of cherry orchards But today I saw Chekhov himself ask him with a wink did he have Tushkov's book
hroo hroo hroo hruh hruh hruh hrah hrah hrah hray hray hray hree hree hree hree hree hree hray hray hray hrah hrah hrah hruh hruh hruh hroo hroo hroo
this holiness this holiness this holiness how it spills over and is so pure and bright this holiness this holiness this holiness how it spills over and is so translucent-cold / like breath on glass / this holiness this holiness this holiness how it kills me and is so silent and silent and silent
"It was a dream, the quiet courtyard was just a dream,
they were just a dream, the white-blossomed cherry trees!"
Do you remember, do you remember…
Writing is a good cure
for loneliness.
You speak in the darkness
as if someone were waiting for you.
Do you remember…
That night,
it was excruciating…
So much prolonged, mute time
drips
drop
by drop
into the canal.
It was rain or snow,
it was breath
on glass.
Then I
listened to Albinoni
for a long time
for an excruciatingly long time,
and since I later realized
that Biology is stronger
than meaning,
I gorged myself on antibiotics.
It seemed to me
that I was already dead,
yet I woke up…
Going Beyond
is so easy -
a question of the angle of the light
click and
my mother with split lips -
my father
click
my father beating my sister
click
here comes my turn
click
my father - the heart attack
Going Beyond
is so easy
Sometimes I wonder -
what was
all of that for?
Do you remember?...
The eternal water sleeps, infinite Water - bottomless, Our insomniac eyelashes will turn to kiss our wordless lips. The eternal water sleeps, infinite Water - bottomless, Exhausted brows will stroke, will caress our shivering bodies The pre-eternal water, all-eternal Water - crystalline, It melts the stone, turning its Angel into steam
My love, I am writing to you from a city that I would never wish for you to visit. Night here is carmine black. If you touch someone, in an instant he turns to dust. Moreover, I don't recall day ever having dawned. I wander often through the muddy streets, mute and solitary, and my heart screams in the cold autumn: Air! More air! In fact, this is a city for exiles. Otherwise, constant immutability has turned out to be my constant characteristic. The doctor said: "I'm not exactly sure which is better for a person: to drown oneself in a muddy river or to hurl oneself off a balcony." I am still incurably ill and continue to hear voices in the night. Today, while I was smoking, I heard the voice of a refined poetess (imagine her as a classical vase): "It just doesn't work for me" "It just doesn't work for me" But, madam, would you like to hear my music… "So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul should be resurrected only among friends" The light passes through me as through a crystal glass. I washed the windows, poured some tea… I stand here and wait for you, useless, filled with silence… I would like to resurrect the soul of Chopin for you alone… It just doesn't work for me It just doesn't work for me
Everything attains significance afterwards Afterwards they attain significance words meetings faces But when one rises towards the heavens he sees his loved ones and smiles and then everything attains significance afterwards everything attains significance
1.
How can you tell a banana republic? The bananas hang high, but the monkeys - down below! The monkeys sit and wait. A single banana breaks off and falls! Yet another does not! And all this at subzero temperatures.
Farewell, my friend!
The battle awaits you -
for the home,
which you will live in
as a renter,
for the woman,
who is constantly unfaithful,
for the future,
which has forgotten us.
I am staying.
The river
flows into the sea,
the sea
flows into the ocean
the puddles
darken and dry up.
Heads grow heavy with carelessness,
mouths become pits,
words take on a bitter taste.
Our life runs on
like a hollow orgy.
Your ship awaits you!
Farewell,
to the other shore.
"Which way are we going, boys?"
"To the top, Johnny!"
"And just where is that, boys?"
"From the highest point - a little bit further up."
(Bdinian folk song)
Every day, when I get off the streetcar in the quarter of the hopeless, not coincidentally named "Hope", I meet John Lennon: Hello, Johnny! Hello, sir! How are you, Johnny? Very well, thank you, sir! Always with that pale English face, always with those glasses and that hair - John Lennon lives in "Hope" and sells bicycles. Every day: Hello, Johnny! Hello, sir! How are you, Johnny? Very well, thank you, sir! Yes, John, here there is no danger of some lunatic flying over and shooting.
You, most likely, are now walking around, hands thrust in your pockets, in that city, bigger than our entire nation and somewhere amidst the rumble of subways and elevators, amidst the glitter of shop windows and advertisements our music dies out… And most likely you are solitary, as before, most likely you, too, are a stranger in your own homeland… Yet funny how a walkman can be a breach in space and the wider the distance the greater its insignificance. You and I we lived anonymously, listening to our own voices, looking at our own faces… Now I stand in this large white room, mute and solitary, filled with silence, and write to you, despite the fact that you have already known all of this for a long time: In vain it flashed above us, my friend, the enormous axe of time.
Today, March 18th, was a sunny spring day. Today nobody killed anybody, nobody offended anybody. I entered the church to pray and heard the voices of all the dead. Rain fell from the eyes of God.
Dear Dad, you are probably watching from above and seeing how I have become the laughingstock of fools, how they parade me through the streets in a cage hung with the sign "Free," You are probably seeing how diligently I am learning to sell gold coins for copper pennies… Now I am riding in a streetcar as cold as a tomb and feeling as if I just got out of some hospital… Don't grieve, that's the only thing I wanted to tell you.
My love, I paid with my liver and spleen for the feeling of freedom. Idiot! - would say the clever ones. Idiot! - would say the wise ones. My love, I paid with my liver and spleen for the feeling of love. Idiot! - would say the clever ones. Idiot! - would say the wise ones. But the feeling is worth it… But the feeling is worth it.
Muddy landscape snow cherry blossoms snow cherry blossoms snow The impulse towards death the drive towards self-destruction Most likely we, too, have to kill that which we were, in order to give birth to that which we are not… Most likely the reason for "Revolution" is mutual misunderstanding… I am leaving now. I leave behind the graying faces of buildings and people with graying facades. Somewhere there, among the rough Asian hands, the poor tender heart of Betsa* - former student of history - is silenced. And there is the river. From it drift the voices of misunderstood poets: Of the poet shot through the heart**, of the poet who drank lethal poison***, of the poet, who, despite being one-eyed, was strangled all the same****… "Onanists!!!" - will say the lady on the left. "No! Communists!" - will say the gentleman on the right. I am leaving now. Farewell!!! Gurgle!!! Gurgle!!! Gurgle * A female name, used here as a pejorative address towards the Bulgarian state, following Konstantin Pavlov's poem "The True Story of Betsa the Revolutionary." ** Hristo Botev, a poet and revolutionary, was killed in battle during the national liberation uprising in 1876. *** P. K. Yavorov, a symbolist poet, committed suicide by drinking poison in 1914. **** Geo Milev, an expressionist poet, lost his eye in World War I; in 1925 he was arrested and strangled.
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български
deutsch | Gologan © 2006. Last updated: 20 September 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
