As I Am Writing My First Lyric and Other Poems— Liljana Dirjan

Jun 27, 2024 | Poetry | 0 comments

TRANSLATED FROM THE MACEDONIAN BY LJUBICA ARSOVSKA WITH PATRICIA MARSH-STEFANOVSKA

AS I AM WRITING MY FIRST LYRIC

Dirty dishes in
the text and
footnotes of symmetry
points of view, pure
runic poetry – perspective
lives in sequels
passwords of beverages, alcohol
combinations with lemon yes please
and again, yes, yes, yes,
tables and chairs with no identity
interlocutors from last night and
the interior for intimate use
scant and the beetle bears down
on the boundary crawling vertically
like the soul and the rust
the rust, yes, yes,
to the doorknob, glasses, the instruments
of the mouth
as I’m writing my
first lyric

ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE

The oyster is,
(oh, my open eye!)
an isle of shell and sea content
closeness, exchange, seen, touched
sucked and re-established
balance
stolen, separated solitude
a rare food for thought and palate
(oh, the combination screams out)
and the hungry ones say, more
(you’re asking me, how are you?)
and the voice of the sea roams around in my ears
my flesh throbs in the pulse of my eye
so I don’t hear, don’t see
what it was
while I keep to the bottom with the shell
the muscles and the fluid grow
enlarged and alone
I disappear in a bite
open
I can no longer tell
mother-of-pearl from
sheet of ice

AESOP’S DOGS

One day they had discovered a body floating in the sea.
They observed it from the shore. They thought and thought and decided
they would drink the water, reduce the distance,
walk to it over dry land.
They drowned.

Thus I was approaching you with my thirst and
my speech, drinking the road, the water, the direction…

The sea drowned in me. I spat out
the ones swallowed.

WHY NOT, A LOVE POEM

We sit face to face. In the vicinity of the eyes excitement too. No, a little higher up.

WITNESS

She saw his tears

And after that fawns
ran down from his eyes at night
and a fog had descended
all across his pillow
and rime had covered all
even the trees around, in the hills
had frozen
and his teeth chattered
in the dead of the night
and nobody heard him

He saw her tears
and after that in the winter night
she was running away to the hills
and slipping on her own
frozen tears
and every time she fell
back on his pillow
and sniffed with her muzzle
his frozen breath
with her frozen breath
and it was the dead of night
and nobody heard her.

MELANCHOLIA AETERNA

Not I
but my time
remembers you

Also, read Claiming The Sky, a book review by Oudarjya Pramanick, published in The Antonym:

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About Author

Liljana Dirjan (1953 – 2017) was Macedonian poet, storyteller and journalist. She graduated at the Faculty of Philology in Skopje and spent one year in Paris as a grantee of the French government and the Gulbenkian Foundation. She published the following poetry books: Natural Occurrence (1980), Live Measure (1985), Wormwood Field (1989), Heavy Silk (1997), Private Worlds (2007) and The World, my Brother (2009). She has been included in many anthologies of contemporary Macedonian poetry and has been translated in several languages including the books “Champ d’abisinthe” (1996, in French) Heavy Silk (1997), “Schwere Seide” (2000, in German) and “Cocoons” (1999, in English). She was the first woman to win the Miladinov Brothers prize at Struga Poetry Evenings in 1985 and was one of the founders of the Independent Writers Association of Macedonia. Ms. Dirjan was also a journalist working at the women’s magazine “Žena” where she was editor-in-chief and director.

About Translator

Ljubica Arsovska is editor in chief of the long-established Skopje cultural magazine Kulturen Život and a distinguished literary translator. Her translations from English into Macedonian include books by Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and plays by Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Ronald Howard, and Tennessee Williams. Her translations from Macedonian into English (most of them in close cooperation with Patricia Marsh Stefanovska and Peggy Reid), include works by Lidija Dimkovska, Liljana Dirjan, Risto Lazarov, Tomislav Osmanli, among others.

Patricia Marsh Stefanovska is a linguist with an MA in General Linguistics from the University of Manchester. She is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, author of The Scribe of the Soul, Not in My Philosophy, and The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto, and translator of a number of plays and poems from Macedonian into English, as well as a variety of other non-literary works. She has also edited a large number of translations of all kinds. She lectured in English at the University of Skopje for eighteen years before returning to live and work in the UK in 1992.