Post by moira on Oct 15, 2008 23:19:46 GMT 2
Amanda Aizpuriete
introduced by J. C. Todd
Amanda Aizpuriete (b. 1956) Widely published poet and translator. Since 1980, she has published 8 books of poetry and one novel in Latvian, with books published in translation in Sweden and Germany. Her poetry and prose has been published in anthologies in Scandinavia, the Baltics, Iceland, France, Germany, Russia, Canada and U.S.A. Eric Funk has composed a symphony with text from her “This Eventide Seems Spoiled.” She has translated Georg Trakl, Joseph Brodsky, Virginia Woolf, Ken Kesey and John Updike. She received the prestigious Horst Bienek Prize from the Bavaria Academy of Art (1999); the Latvian Poetry Prize (2000) for Bâbeles nomalç (Outskirts of Babel); the Latvian Book Prize (2003) for translations of Anna Akhmatova.
Amanda Aizpuriete
from Outskirts of Babel
Put out the lighthouse beacon!
Let the sea be black.
Anyway, ships don't sail by here now.
Switch off the nightlights!
Anymore, children aren't frightened by dreams.
Take down the scatterbrain flag from the peak of the castle turret.
Anyway, its bright stripes will fade
when black waves unmoor our island tonight.
from Windfall of Poems
At the end it becomes simple: to write letters to gods
when everyone else has changed their address,
when the postman no longer stops at my doorstep,
when the last scrap of paper must be torn in half
because one half is needed for a last will and testament.
The air smells of peppermint
or more crudely — of menthol.
The open window lets shadows in.
So simple — to write letters to gods:
to scatter a handful of bread crumbs moistened with wine
on a scrap of paper offered to the birds outside the window.
When an intoxicated bird sings, even gods take notice.
from The Last Summer
My life as a letter to You
I am writing. In the white-garden bed, I plant
mud-roses and howl-lilies.
My life as a letter to You
I will show to no one.
(Poems are only sails
of daydream's ghostly ships
in some storm shared by all.)
My life as a letter to You
I will leave tacked
on summer's windless cross.
Sharp as a knife
the pungency— mud-roses and howl-lilies.
* * *
You will remain in my memory
like a four-color tattoo in skin—
with the same stabbing pain and simplified line:
like a sea wave from blue pinpoints,
an enchanted forest from green pinpoints,
a red strobe in eyes that are closed,
like the blackest poem, allowed to be shown
only to fire.
Translated by J.C. Todd
Published in The Drunken Boat, 5:III-IV. Ed. Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com/aizpuriete.html