the memory of the duduk/ դուդուկ
Apparently in early September the "Seven Things I Plan To Do Before I Die" list was circulating the poetry blog world as I keep finding more and more people posted it. Artichoke Heart's #6 wish is: "See the Jellies: Living Art exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium." I like that; it calls up endless hours of listening to the Dead Milkmen in my bedroom as a lad: "jelly fish heaven/ is full of dead jelly fish."
Memory seems to be a running theme of late. "call this memory. memory call this/ back to me, I forget;" I wrote in my last villanelle. It is true, my memory is full of holes. I cannot tell if they are imposed holes, or naturally constructed, but either way it bothers me. Just trying to explain simple things feels beyond my grasp at times; a color, a mood, a taste. Music! I can compare things, like I did yesterday while working with my Armenian tutor Lusine. We were hard at work with a translation of a poem that had appeared in the Hawaii Review back in Fall 2000. Why I had not bothered to translate my own poems written about my Peace Corps experience when I was busily translating Mariyln Chin, Philip Levine and Federico Garcia Lorca, I am not sure. Perhaps it is easier to translate someone else? Some established author whose work has stood the test of time? Perhaps, but I think it might also be I simply loved the poems I was working on.
"It's a poem about a duduk," I explained to Lusine as we began. Or more exactly, it was a poem about a sound that I once heard from that mysterious wood-wind instrument, "music of rocks crying."
I tried to explain to her why the poem came to me in the first place. But the more I tried, the more tongue-tied I became. I rubbed my temples in frustration.
"Perhaps this is good," she said, "many people have heard its sound in movies but not many know what it is."
I just claimed my memory is full of holes, but through the act of translating these meanings from one source to another, suddenly I was able to recall small things; a color, a mood, a taste. Music! I recall the first time I heard the duduk:
The earthquake which destroyed the Gumri region and in turn brought me to Armenia some seven years later struck on December 7, 1988. Ever since the day is marked as one for mourning and families go to the hillside cemeteries that ring the city to pay their respect to their dead.
The days leading up to December 7, 1995 were unusually cold, snow lay heavy everywhere and that constant sharp wind that seems to start somewhere on the other side of the world, pick up strength as it rushes across that great Turkish plane with nothing to impede its speed until it lashes over Gumri and finally comes to rest in the circling low mountains was guttural as ever. December 6, however, saw a sudden warm snap, the sun showed itself briefly and when I awoke the next day a heavy fog lay upon the city. It was a bewitching winter fog, being both sunny and phantasmal1 at the same time. Then, just as the clocks struck 11:41 a.m., the moment the first 6.9 quake rocked the region, every speaker and boombox, every radio and stereo began playing the same haunting duduk melody. I have no memory as to what composition it was or who played or worte it; but wondrously, simultaneously, that distinct slow beguiling music of "rocks crying"2 was issued everywhere.
I must give special thanks to Ron Silliman's review of Ubuweb where I found a fanastic essay by Jerome Rothenberg on the perils of translating poetry. Mr Rothenber writes of translating the Navajo Horse Song into English, but I feel the experience he describes can be applied to a much wider range of translating experiences:
It was the possibility of working with all that sound, finding my own way into it in English, that attracted me now … It was, I think, that the music was so clearly within range of the language: it was song & it was poetry, & it seemed possible at least that the song issued from the poetry, was an extension of it or rose inevitably from the juncture of words & other vocal sounds. So many of us had already become interested in this kind of thing as poets, that it seemed natural to me to be in a situation where the poetry would be leading me toward a (new) music it was generating.
"Leading me toward a (new) music it was generating;" fascinating! It is from that memory of a sound, that shard I retrieved, this poem comes from and now returns to a language I cannot speak but started this whole event.
| The Duduk | «Դուդուկ» | |
|---|---|---|
|
The sun not half full but trying shattered in the river. The rocks in the river The river running through Running through arid |
Գետում խորտակվել փորձող կիսակլոր արևը: Արևով կիսաողողված Չոր լեռնաքարերի Վազելով չոր լեռնաքարերի |
- It was a Brigadoon fog; simply walking to the market four blocks from my hut disoriented me; sounds were amplified and neighbors suddenly appeared at my elbow, staggering blindly at mid-day just like myself. [back]
- Even though the instrument has many uses and faster dance-tunes are used at weddings, I cannot separate its tranquil lyrical moan from anything else than a lament. I was asked later by a friend when I tried to describe the music and the best I could do was say: "if I were a mountain in pain this is the song I would sing." I am listening to "I shall not be sad in this world" by Djivan Gasparyan as I write this and getting goosebumps up and down my arms at the memory. [back]