Myth of Arrival

Around five years ago, while living in Las Vegas¹ I fell in love with Carcharodon carcharias, the Great White Shark. It happened in the same manner other people fall in chocolate, Jesus and pet rocks "Obsession," might be a better word. Sharks appeared in my dreams, my poetry, even my magazine subscriptions. I began to plan a way to go on one of those shark diving tours where you go in the little cage into the cold ocean and wait until the sharks are swimming all around you and then stick out your hand and pet them. It is a well known fact Great Whites fall into a stupor after getting their noses rubbed; that their ampullae de lorenzini, which permits them to detect electromagnetic fields emitted by the movement of other living animals, somehow goes crazy and the shark appears to fall asleep and float away for several minutes. The more I studied their behavior, the more similarities I found with my own house-cat. I even found an on-line database Fishbase with dozens of regional and vernacular names for Great Whites; fueling my imagination for weeks:

"Cação-anequim" in Brazilian Portuguese;
"Canavar baligi" in Turkish;
"噬人鯊" in Mandarin Chinese;
"Devorador de hombres" in Cuban Spanish;
"Grand requin blanc" in French;
"K'wet'thenéchte" in Canadian British Columbian Salish;
"Karish lava" in Hebrew;
"Kelb il - Bahar Abjad" in Maltese;
"Peshkagen njeringrenes" in Albanian;
"Rechin mancator de oameni" in Romanian;
"Σμπρίλιος" or "Skylópsaro sbríllios" in Greek;
"Weißer Hai" in German;
"Tunnu palamitu di funnu" in Italian;
"Witdoodshaai" in Afrikkaans;
"Zarlacz ludojad" in Polish;
"Tiburón blanco" in Mexican Spanish.

One of the best books on the subject of Great Whites, Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker, The Great White Shark (1991) is both easily accessible to the beginning Weißer Hai aficionado or the life-long Carcharodon carcharias geek. There is not, curiously enough, very much poetry on the subject of sharks². There's Herman Melville's The Maldive Shark; E. J. Pratt's The Shark; and The Great White Shark Poem by Queensland poet Michael Sariban: "Twenty fathoms below, sexier/ than the squid, more celebrated than coral,…"

I am, of course, limited in what I can personally translate. Knowing only one other language, Eastern Armenian, and marginally at that, I questioned whether translating a poem concerning an animal that there isn't even a word for in Hayeren³ made sense? Spanish tiburón sounded wonderful to my ear; however, shark is "շնաձուկ" in Armenian — "shna'dzook" phonetically — "great" is "մեծ" and "white" is "սպիտակ" but is "Մեծ Սպիտակ Չնաձուկ" Armenian for Great White Shark? I asked my ever-patient tutor, Lucine Petrosyan (Լուսիմե Պետրոսյան), a cello player at Michigan State University and she said I should stick with the general term for shark.

Note: these are the stanzas we've worked out so far of a much longer poem. Updated 10/2/05 to put the original and translation side-by-side - hooray for learning html!!

1. home of the world's biggest man-made shark reef [back]
2. Except for a few verses penned in the late 1970s and looking like someone sat through one too many viewing of Jaws [back]
3. What Armenians call their own language, as in "du Hey es?"/ are you Armenian? [back]

I turned on my local NPR station, WKAR (our motto: "Nostalgia for 1965 is Not a Crime") a station I was raised on and which I love, only to find another bitchin' harpsichord solo underway. Why, Gurus of Classical Music, with the wide range of exquisite, carnal, mesmeric classical music in the world, does Public Radio feel compelled to play harpsichords?

If classical music has fallen out of favor with the younger generations I hold East Lansing's WKAR, and in particular, Mark Schwitzgoebel and Jody Knol, personally responsible. I mean, come on guys, there's Prokofiev's The Alien God and the Dance of Evil Spirits from Scythian Suite. There's Khachaturian's Dance of the Mountaineers from Gayne Ballet with that impish Sir John Barbirolli conducting. There's Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt. There's Tan Dun's Bitter Love featuring the splendiferous Ying Huang. There's Oni Buchanan. But no, nothing that might raise the blood pressure or bring duende to the listening audience. No, today we will be listening to yet another harpsichord solo.

All this talk of high blood pressure and the Arts brings me to this morning's mail. Waiting for me in my In-Box when I woke up was a letter from Bravissimo, the Detroit Opera News.

WANTED: Super Studs with Buff Bods; Must be willing to Pump and Flex for Thousands of Adoring Fans

Michigan Opera Theatre announces an urgent open casting call for the upcoming production of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma.

Local aspirants with a lifelong dream of performing on the opera stage, or those who simply want to flaunt their pecs and abs, can fulfill those desires in one of opera's most dramatic works, Norma. No advance preparation is necessary. Interested men should possess exemplary physical strength, an imposing physique and similar, 'studly' attributes, as selected men will portray Roman soldiers.

That would be fantastic! I love opera and I would love to be on stage in front of "adorning fans." Granted, it would be nice if it was for my poetry, but as the canny Scott Engineer of the tramp steamer The Inchcliffe Castle, Colin Glencannon , put it, "beggars can no be chewers." Sadly, being vaguely Jewish, I doubt I'd pass as a Roman.

Speaking of gentlemen with walrus mustaches, perhaps we need to address a subject that plagues both Glencannon and poets alike (plague being too strong a word, I think, co-existence much better) that being delirium tremens and the tendency of poets being some what out of shape around the middle.

Now, I am not saying a life-time of alcohol abuse leads to being out of shape. Glencannon had his Duggan's Dew of Kirkintilloch, or as Guy Gilpatric himself put it: "[that] most gorgeous of all liquids that ever dripped golden from the nozzle of a still to mingle its perfume with that of the heather in the cold highland mists." On a complete sidebar I find interesting, the author of the Glencannon series, before he began writing for the Saturday Evening Post, was famous as:

[in the 1930s] an American ex-aviator living in southern France, pioneers use of rubber goggles with glass lenses for skin diving … In 1934 Gilpatric writes of his Mediterranean exploits for The Saturday Evening Post, and in 1938 publishes The Complete Goggler, the first book on amateur diving and hunting. Among the book's readers: a French naval lieutenant named Jacques Cousteau.

But, for poets and their connections with booze¹ poet Sharon Olds says: "There are some fine books and essays about [poetry and alcoholism]. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die."

And die we do! The poets who have died in September seems to fill up half of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. E.E. Cummings (3, 1962); Pablo Neruda (23, 1973); Dante Alighieri (13, 1321); Alabama Poet Laureate Elbert Calvin Henderson (15, 1974); Paul Blackburn (13, 1971); Arnold Weinstein (6, 2005); Robert Penn Warren (15, 1989); Robert Lowell (12, 1977); John Greenleaf Whittier (7, 1892); (and because Brigette at work told me his lyrics changed her life and who can say no to nurse aides?) Tupac Shakur (13, 1996). Maybe that is where today's villanelle should begin?

you're pretty/ but you got to die one day/
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ/

It occurs to me that something should be done about poets and death (note how we craftily shifted from one subject to another? That, my friend, is due to a serious lack of caffeine). In light of this, one of the philosophies that has fallen out of style of late is the Post-Modern concept of the artist as both creatively fit and physically fit. Or was it Sparta that came up with the idea? — no matter! The whole idea that our art is linked to our souls and our souls and bodies are one and the same is an old idea. "And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?" asks the Good Gray Poet, Walt Whitman. What indeed?

you're pretty/ but you got to die one day/
when you touch/ down upon this earth speak/ these
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ/

as dance halls dim/ fall away/ our dismay
at pang given freely/ like the bee's knees/
you're pretty/ but you got to die one day/

strum that on your lyre, boy/ now you obey
this priapic boy/ these, his Orphic please:/
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ

over and over/ scratching then replay
of kismet/ fate/ hap/ a song: all in threes/
you're pretty/ but you got to die one day/

my: you're pretty/ you're pretty/ you're pretty/
Eurydice, love!/ lost love in dark/ Hades'
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ

till I bleed/ afterbirth of pang, blood, clay/
after/ words haunting me/ words like disease:
"you're pretty/ but you got to die one day"/
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ

1. Quick Quize #34. Question: What do Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz all have in common? Answer: Confessional Poetry and Gin and Tonics! [back]

It was about a year ago I started my search for the Armenian Sonnet. It was a description of the work of Vahan Tekeyan (1879-45) by Diana Der-Hivanessian, poet and translator, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: "… his painstakingly honed sonnets have earned him a reputation as a visionary" (page 100) along with a translation of "We Shall Say to God" (1917).

The thought that moved me was less to do with Tekeyan's work, and more with the basic question: "What makes an Armenian Sonnet different from all other sonnets?" Is it simply written in the language, and thus Armenian? Had it something to do with the ending of Armenian words and thus followed a different beat or rhyme pattern than the sonnets I knew? The more research I did, the less I learned. I e-mailed Armenian Literary professors at the University of Michigan, Fresno State, Stanford and UCLA. I learned nothing more than a little chiding for my use of the Armenian phrase, "bari luis" (բարի լուս); literally, "good light." I was told in no uncertain terms that it never goes at the end of a letter, always the beginning; this coming from a doctoral professor.

This got me thinking about my time spent in Armenia, from 1995 to 1997, as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It is strange how memories will trigger certain things. I worked in an orphanage for mentally and handicapped babies and witnessed many of them die due to a lack of medicine and proper care and I went insane. Literally.

But that was almost ten years ago. I have Bach's "Die Kunst der Fuge (Art of the Fugue)" on the CD player. A mug of hot chocolate is by my elbow. Life is still good. Still, in a letter I sent to a friend today, I wrote down as many memories as I could find:

Peace Corps can Medi-Vac (Medical Evacuation for short) a Volunteer if the regional medical services are not up to modern standards — in other words, getting sent to Washington DC for a week so you can get root canal is a lot more fun than normal. In Peace Corps slang, the Psycho Vac was the Medi Vac for Volunteers suffering under great emotional distress and unable to function at their jobs. Three days before my 27th birthday our Peace Corps doctor came for me and asked if I wanted to be sent home for a while to de-thaw and reassess my situation. You see, somewhere in the second year of my tour of duty I had broken down and was so miserable I didn't even know I was in pain.

It was the day one of the nurses I worked with showed me a photo of where all the babies were buried after they died … the town dump. I had slowly realized to my horror than the orphans under my care were not even considered human by the locals, that they were considered "things" and it was better if they died sooner than later. But it was that photo that did it to me — the realization that the children I had been caring for over a year and a half would die and be buried in the town dump. It was middle winter and the snow was everywhere. Armenia is high up in the mountains; Gumri, the earthquake-devastated city I lived in lay between a mountain range from Yerevan, the capital. I recall walking out in the middle of a blizzard and just starting to walk (this was November 1996, I believe) to Yerevan; 150 kilometers away. A priest who didn't speak a whit of English (and my baby-talk Armenian was pitiful) picked me up half way there but I walked until my feet bled and my hip creaked in its joint. I remember seeing things in the whirling snow, shapes and voices and strange forms. I ended up three days later at a fellow Volunteer's village on the outskirts of Yerevan, Karpi, where I promptly fell asleep for three more days.

After that it was only a matter of time before Peace Corps Administration saw me a hazard and put their gears into motion to do something. They sent me to DC for a month where I stayed in the Peace Corps hotel with all the other medical evacuated volunteers (80% of Medi Vac volunteers are female and of that I'd say 90% are there because they are pregnant and have to decided if they want to have an abortion or drop out of Peace Corps). My first meal (I arrived on my actual birthday itself) was a pint of chocolate milk and cottage cheese — the two things I couldn't get in Armenia.

After a month of hearing therapists tell me it wasn't my fault that the babies all died and that yes, I could return to finish my tour if I made sure I wasn't in an isolated city with no support system and working with an infant population with a high mortality rate, I returned to Armenia. I lived in Yerevan for the remaining half year of 1997 and helped train the new set of Volunteers.

That's one way of looking at what happened to me in Peace Corps. But I don't mention any of my friends, or the adventures I had (wandering the hills one summer night and coming up a hidden Russian nuclear base and getting chased by robot security drones; driving with friends by the Armenian-Azerbaijan border and finding ourselves surrounded by Azerbaijan troops who had snuck into the country, etc.) or my work teaching English at the Lord Byron English School or the Teacher's Pedagogy School (both in Gumri) or even the food. Though Armenians cook heavily with salt and pepper, they make a lovely grilled sandwhich wrap called "hori'vatz" (հորիվատս) … on a cold day you could buy steaming sandwhich wraps on the corner for 50 cents. But for years my Psycho Vac had been the all-consuming feature of my Peace Corps experience. I defined myself¹ as … not necessarily a failure, but … being one who had gone insane; I now had returned, ready to talk.

As to what makes an Armenian sonnet purely Heyeran², I am still not sure. In the autumn of 2004 I began work translating Federico Garcia Lorca's Sonetos del amor oscuro (Sonnets of Dark Love) into Armenian. The collection I used was Obras (1981), though the poem can be found on-line. In effect then, I present one version of an Armenian sonnet, a sonnet translated into Armenian, though not what I was originally looking for.

Since my Spanish is malo I consulted Willis Barnstone's Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet (1993) and Christopher Maurer's edition of Garcia Lorca's Collected Poems (2002), though the English translation is my own. I include all three versions here for simplicity's sake.

“El Poeta Habla Por Telefono Con El Amor”
“The Poet Speaks with His Beloved on the Telephone”
«Թանաստեղծը խոսում Է Հեռախոո իր Սիրելիի Հետ»

Tu voz rego la duna de mi pecho
en la dulce cabina de madera.
Por el sur de mis pies fue primavera
y al norte de mi frente flor de helecho.

Your voice watered the dunes of my chest
inside the sweet wooden telephone booth.
South of my feet was spring
and north of my brow ferns sprouted plumed crests.

Քո ձայնը ջրում էր ավազաբլուրն իմ հոգու
փայտյա թաղցրավետ հեռախոսակրպակը:
Ոաբերիս հարավում գարունէր
և փթթուն հոնքնրիս հյուսում բողբոջում էին փետուրները:

Pino de luz por el espacio estrecho
canto sin alborada y sementera
y mi llanto prendio por vez primera
coronas de esperanza por el techo.

A pine tree of light in the narrow space
sang with no music of dawn, no seed bed,
and my lament learned to calm and soothe,
hung crowns of hope above the roofs.

Լուսպփայլ սոճին նեղ մակերեսում
երգում էր առանց լուսաբացի մեղեղու կաարծես սերմն առանց մարգի,
և իմ հառաչանքը սովոր է հանդարփվելն մերմանալ,
տանիքներըի վերեվում կախվաճ իուսո թագերի պես:

Dulce y lejana voz por mi vertida.
Dulce y lejana voz por mi gustada.
Lejana y dulce voz adormecida.
Lejana como oscura corza herida.
Dulce como un sollozo en la nevada
¡lejana y dulce en tuetano metida!

Sweet and distant voice poured out for me.
Sweet and distant voice I tasted.
Sweet and distant swooning voice.
Distant like the dark wounded deer.
Sweet like a sobbing where a snowfall spread.
Sweet and distant placed in the marrow quietly!

Քաղցր և հեռավոր ձայնը հնչլմ էր ինձ համայր:
Քաղցր և հեռավոր ձայնը, որ համտեսում:
Քաղցր և հեռավոր ձայնը, նվաղումով:
Հեռավոր, սարճես գորշ վիրավոր եղջերում:
Քաղցր, կսարճես հեկեկ անքըձյան:
Քաղցր և հեռավոր հոգուվ անդորրու:

1. I have been reading Tara Birch's The White Tree Poems while thinking of all this. Her last stanza from While waiting for a single stone to be placed sticks in my head: "My sister says I've known worse/ and I don't argue the point./ But it's not the blow of the hammer/ when what shatters is glass. [back]
2. The Armenian term for Armenians [back]

Self-portrait at 35. After many years of spiritual beggary and lackadaisical destitution I recently saw Akira Kurosawa’s Ran again. According to the DVD box the title translates into chaos. And why should chaos interest us? We value order, or at least the idea of order, and yet it is chaos, easygoing and detached, but chaos irregardless, that fills our art. Our poetry keeps pointing to a vast schism we all immediately identify with but have yet to pin-point in words. Words being the tool we turn back to, to try to explain this rift, schism, rupture of the soul. I think we buy into this conceit too easily. In the May 2005 issue of Poetry, Jane Hirshfield writes in Assay Only Glimpsable for an Instant:

Moment. Moment. Moment.
…….

Insult to mourn you, you who mourn no one, unable.

Without transformation,
yours the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens.
The living step forward: choosing to enter, to lose. (page 135)

As I write this a letter is delivered by snail-mail, post; it is almost one o'clock in the afternoon and I must be getting ready for work. It is from the Carnegie Museum of Art, and for reasons beyond me the outside reads like a found poem: "it was the 1930s/ the heyday of radio/ the birth of swing/ it was epic movies on sultry nights/ it was gershwin, cole porter, duke and bing." This constant looking back, reassessing¹, fictionalizing. It was the age of "epic movies on sultry nights," it is "the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens." I have kept wanting to write a momentous, epic, monstrous poem, a thousand pages of villanelles or sonnets or haiku, a vast sweep of ordering/form/pattern, create whole mythologies with the back of my hand, yet all I have are fragments. I feel drawn to these fragments, yet something deeper feels insulted by them. They are devoid of emotion, of sensation and libido. There are artists who can take those fragments, though, and string them together. They can make something bigger out of the ruins. David Ng writes in his review of Ran:

… [the film] is that rare epic picture, at once enormous and intimate, simultaneously melodramatic and nuanced. The superlatives that seem permanently attached to its name (magnificent, grand, breathtaking) betray its very nature: this is a quietly pessimistic movie, one that peels back the layers of deceit in its characters to find a Godless universe. Weaving together momentum and stasis, Kurosawa fashions a nimble motif of juxtaposition. Visual formality masks emotional anarchy. Like so many of its characters, Ran seems to be one thing but soon proves itself infinitely complex.

Let's say it again: we live in a nihilistic time, our art "peels back the layers of deceit … to find a godless universe."² If this is nothing more than: "Moment. Moment. Moment," as Hirshfield puts it, where does this mystique, creative impulse, splendor, negative ecstasy come from? I am not even going to argue about some sort of supernatural father/ patriarchal divinity that certain tyrannical religio-politicians believe in and are actively engaged in inserting into our Constitution. Rather, in the face of Hirshfield's rationalization that: "… [we] step forward: choosing to enter, to lose;" I say that there is no loss, destruction, no sacrifice. None except what we decide to sacrifice.

See here, though; I am not advocating the tiresome journey to some far-off Arcadia, the "et in Arcadia ego,"³ that poets who are dissatisfied with their current surroundings seem to hanker for. Why make things better now when we can drown in nostalgia for a world we've never experienced? No, why don't we start with something simple, something almost reflexive? Yes, let's start here:

this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/
recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/

That is the poem I want. After all, at the end of Ran, at the end of all the destruction, the viewer is still left, both passionately and passively watching, but still, the viewer remains. We are not King Lear or the old warlord Hidetora. We are the viewer, as you are the reader of this, passive yet alive, "the chorus, to whom nothing happens.” Can we not reach back into our past, our "heyday of radio," and pull something forward? Like DJs who take disco music from twenty five years before and add a new twist to the beat and call it rave? Can we not go back, before the World Wars filled us with horror? Before the Genocide of the Armenians? Before Cabaret Voltaire wrote: "We [have] lost confidence in our culture. Everything [has] to be demolished. We [will] begin again." Before Modernism and Nihilism and that willingness to say we choose "to enter, to lose"? That is the poem we will write.

Line one (A1) this air/ once sung long ago/ in our land/
Line two (b)
Line three (A2) recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/

Line four (A2)
Line five (b)
Line one (A1) this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/

Line six (A1)
Line seven (b)
Line three (A2) recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/

Line eight (A2)
Line nine (b)
Line one (A1) this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/

Line ten (A1)
Line eleven (b)
Line three (A2) recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/

Line twelve (A2)
Line thirteen (b)
Line one (A1) this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/
Line three (A2) recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/

As I wrap this up to get ready for work⁴ I have put on Rossini's La Cenerentola, it will be played next year at the Detroit Opera House. Rumor has it Rossini wrote it at age 25 in about three weeks. I would very much like to see it. It is in the style known as "Opera Buffo." Where are our poets who write Poésie Buffo? Why has the joy of laughing fallen out of style? Everyone is so serious and those who aren't are terrible to read. As Allen Ginsberg put it:

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me …

"Everybody's serious but me." Yes, I think we buy into this swagger of seriousness that is suppose to lead us to rapture, ecstasy, possibly even beatification; but simply masks our woebegone souls all too well. I call to all the Poèts Buffo in the audience: "We have a challenge at hand." Can ecstasy and comedy be interlaced? Is it possible to remember euphoria, joy, delight in our words? Won't that lead us to a new Arcadia? Somewhere closer to the Latin transcription: I Tego Arcana Dei (Begone! I know the secrets of God)?

this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/
filled all this/ recall, body/ simple things/
recall, soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/

our lips/ breath on our flesh/ pleasure demands
little/ sprinkling on our flesh/ shavings
of air once sung/ long ago in our lands

we marveled/ at air/ how each lung expands
for glee/ simply to expand/ my cravings
to recall, soul!/ joy of moving my hands

over my body/ lush hair/ pulpy glands/
flesh/ dew/ glorious!/ pump lungs!/ find blessings
in the air/ sing long ago/ in our lands

we were filled/ glorious air!/ what withstands
such air?/ when did we neglect/ bare teachings/
let there be/ great joy in moving our hands/

our lips/ breath on our flesh/ fever commands
us to/ recall, soul/ we rave/ our ravings
for this air/ sung long ago/ in our lands/
recall, soul/ the joy of moving our hands/

1. Were critics in the 1930s asking of themselves: "this feels so 1892″? [back]
2. Or, as Whimsy Speaks put it, the School of "Evocation by Juxtaposed Imagery." I am rather fascinated with this website; the author is funny, organized and extremely well-read (it staggers my mind the number of new books of poetry I am missing out on! Thanks Whimsy Speaks, who ever you are!) [back]
3. As the radio sings: "Oh bondage up yours" [back]
4. Ah, the "honorable" life of a nurse aide; which should read suspiciously underpaid and unethically understaffed. [back]

One of the aims for this website is to generate a new home for translations. The whole concept of the power of good translations was brought home to me during one of the conversations held at the 2004 Dodge Poetry Festival at the Duke Farms. I attended "The Mysterious Life Within Translation" at the Mud Lake Tent. The conversation was presided over by the Greek poet Adonis, Marilyn Hacker, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Khaled Mattawa, C.K. Williams and others.

A question was asked of Marilyn Hacker whether it was better not to attempt to translate a poem if the translator was not an expert in the field — or whether a bad translation was better than none at all. She pondered for a second and said:

"it depends who you are translating … we probably don't need another Rilke or Baudelaire translation … there are hundreds of them already … but if you are translating a poet who has never been brought into English … even if the translation is poor … perhaps it will inspire another translator with a better grasp of the language to work on the poems …"

This is the spirit I want to approach these tranlations, done by myself and others. They might not be perfect, but it is the spirit of communication between languages and poets of different cultures that is important.

These are translations of a poem I wrote in 2002, based on the myth of Narcissus. I had been writing to Maja Kleer, a German student from Essen (near Düsseldorf), who agreed to try her hand at bringing the poem alive in German.

"Narcissus' Lament"

You can't look
at yourself in these
waves, everything
moves so fast. My
face, marred
by floating
sea flowers.

«Narziss’ Klage»

Du kannst dich
nicht in diesen
wellen anschauen, alles
bewegt sich so schnell. Mein
gesicht, ruiniert
durch gleitende
seerosen.

The South African artist Sarah Hillman did a brilliant job of translating it into Afrikaans:

Jy kan nie,
in hierdie branders,
na jouself kyk, alles
beweeg so vinnig. My
gesig, stukkend
van dryf
seë-blomme.

Zozo McCarus from Kinshase, Congo, worked the poem into French:

Tu ne peux pas te regarder
dan les vagues. Toute
chose va tres vite. Mon
visage est cicatrise
ou abîme par
les fleures qui flotte
dans la mere.

This is my own translation in Eastern Armenian:

«Բու Չես Կարող»

տեսնել քեզ այս
ալիքների մեջ, ամեն ինչ
շարծվում է այնքան արագ:
իմ դեմքն այլանդակված է
լողացող ծովային ծաշիկներով: