With permission from the publisher

 

WILDCARD

A light-hearted lullaby this, not much happens 
that doesn’t already happen somewhere else: 

a garnet-red baby opens wide its tiny jungle mouth. 
Familiar to all who read them, lullabies are 

about kisses, jealousies and parents / keepers. 
Raging in the pillow, rising like a statue made of ash. 

A parent is a house. Gooey goo-goo. Food, milk, 
lalala. A lullaby disentangles love. 

Be joyous and light touch. Filter light, 
the air is of an invaluable purity. 

Compared to wellbeing I daresay it’s cloud-cuckoo. 
Parents / moods / components of the growth machine: 

baby’s first, baby’s own, baby’s living it up. Joyous, 
carefree bellowing in a sun-drenched nursery. Done. 

Hearts plead, hearts steam: Adonai — 
give me back my stalemates, my singular days, my intact membranes.

ISLAND MOUNTAIN GLACIER, PART IV

Even when I, in this minute of my kingdom, in this household of seasons (jan steen), in this 
temple (breath), leave it all to you (here sweetie, for you) I elevate your thin meat to a spectacle. 

 

Even when I touch the memory of your hips, your hands tiger my uh-huh parts 
ingest me (tongue chest lips) and I read my gape from your lips or should that be gave.

 

 

 

Selections from the Appendix 

 

Appendix 

               Just like a poem, a translation emerges out of its own possibilities. It is built up of layers, alternate states that enter the work and flow through it. Options, possibilities, stabs, trials and errors, interpretations and choices are made, discarded, brought back, revived, knocked about, improved and transformed.
               I got to dissect and study Anne Vegter’s craft as I worked on these translations of her poems. This was a gift. More than a reader, a translator becomes the work’s mechanic. I dismantled each poem, uncovered its particulars, brilliance, magical flurries, flaws, oddities and the syntactical, semantic, sonic, rhythmic bones and muscles that hold it together. On my desk, the poems to be pulled apart, experimented on and reassembled in the new language. Like twins wearing different outfits and sporting different hairstyles, the original and the translation are intimately related yet distinctly separate entities. 
               Translations are like poems, a work in progress. It is nothing more complicated than that. And then, of course, it is. This appendix shares my process, isolating my choices and keeping the layers of possibility visible for the reader to create their own arrangements and, where necessary, to improve the translations. For I am but one of what I expect will be many more translators bringing Vegter’s writing to an English readership. 
               Astrid Alben, 2021

TRAMPS

You spoke of an emotional chill, below zero you said it was between 
my thighs in the departure lounge. After your bag we hugged heart to heart, 

I could’ve joyfully sucked you off. Are you even listening? 

We resembled wiry birds; you designed a deathblow on paper, 
had yourself a little after-fun with your boredom. It got tricky finding reasons that way. 

When the glass slips from your fingers you go find a cure for cracks and salt. 
The carpet grins. Will finally someone stand the fuck up and hold me?

TRAMPS

 

You talked about air temperature, below zero between my legs you said in the 
departure lounge. After your bag we hugged each other coeur à coeur, 

man I could have blown you I was so happy. Are you still listening. 

We reproduced rigid birds, a deathblow’s what you designed on paper 
had a little after-fun with your boredom. It became tricky to find reasons that way. 

When the glass jolts / jumps / leaps from your finger you look for a cure / remedy against cracks and salt. 
The carpet grins. Will finally someone stand the fuck up and hold me.

VAGABONDS

 

You talked about instinct-heat / emotion-temperature, you found it below zero in the 
departure lounge. After your bag we hugged each other coeur à coeur, 

happy as a lark ready to blow you. Are you still listening.

We faked / forged / imitated rigid birds, you designed a deathblow / deathly fall on paper 
had some after-fun with your boredom. It became tricky to find reasons [in] this way / method / manner. 

If the glass leaps from your finger you look for something / a cure against cracks and salt. 
The carpet / rug / runner smirks. Will someone stand the fuck up and hold me.

 

 

This mouth 
grows in it a forest
born from the spit
of the gods
of my land;
chews a wildfire
that blackens the stumps of my teeth;
hums the serenade
of our greatest hunters. 
This mouth can utter to life
the many names of our ancestors
the conquerors could never
wrap their tongues around,
the ones they spat with regret
as their teeth disintegrated,
choking on the sharp
inflections of the names
of our oceans,
mountains,
warriors.
Oh, to speak
of love and freedom 
is cruelty
to a colonizer’s tongue. 

 

My days come and go, their almost motionless river is swept with traces, am I in the river’s current or on the edge? I see the shores of Lethe. The river repeats itself unchangingly, on and on, endlessly until we heave ourselves, the river and me, out.                     The garden is This Garden. This garden is populated with an indefinite number of presences and visits. Seated on a bench, This Bench, I almost don’t notice a furtive future thought that thinks: I was sitting on This Bench, at the corner of the house where the cat goes out of sight, where Eve my mother, seen only by my hallucinating eye, sits in her usual chair under the strawberry trees.                     Memories? No memories, no reproductions of visitors in an album frozen in time but waves, glints of reflections, of instants, bits and pieces, allusions, syllables, sometimes just letters, but capitals, a swarm of winged motes, the dead are not dead, all my old cats go by, hurried thoughts between the paths of present cats, a characteristic of this populace is incessant movement, I do not know what drives them, is it the wind, the spirits, the gods, my beating heart?                   –No one is dead as long as I am here to greet and traipse after them                   –Do you remember my sonnet 81? Shakespeare says, the sonnet that has kept me company from May 26, 1954 to this day May 26, 2020, we’ve never been apart, today is the same May 26, between us immortality reigns, a love which does not alter                   that’s why we are able to remember a sonnet, inscribed in the magic stone of the book: I open Shakespeare and the young sounds of the sonnet prophetic of our mysterious future memories are written on its paper lips. ‘Your monument shall be my gentle verse, / Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read.’ I have never been able to read these lines in vain, sixty-six months of May readingreading   from ‘Rêvoir’ , translation forthcoming 2024 from Seagull Books.

 

 

 

 

 

CEMETERY OF THE DROWNED

To my shipwrecked brothers on the island of Inhaca

 

As your hymn hangs above the mouth of the castaway I call out your name, I call you with this tongue whose words are more than just a soft murmur, a sob, a liquid wound, a widow’s voice, an estranged orphanhood beyond words. I run the winds of September, the unburied mast of longing, the flower that is your unformed body and I write out the syllables of every tear, here, in this country that you departed and never left. So show me the corolla of waves, the whiteness of a tissue that only you know, an echo, say it to me now. Out here hands dig hollows in the insides of your absence: your mother, my mother, every mother is but one mother when the ship that carries every afternoon returns and an inexplicable rudder leads to a memory of your face. What substance does your body breathe beneath the waters, with what burst of gill? How do you adjust the clearness of the tide, the moss, the plankton, the flora of your exile? Ours is still a body made of flesh, blood and fear and debt growing in unpayable leaps and bounds (and so I write with the fatherland of knees with which one prays, searching for imaginary coins). Tell me of those winds that I have heard only the briefest rustle, of that city where death is a mirror, a spectacle that one paddles across, a shipwrecked dissent. A friend you departed and never were, tell me that the sun will make bloom again the fauna in your eyes (unerasable in the night like in the dreams of fish). Oh, how I too wish for this calmness, your home/ocean where you dream with open arms and set aside the flesh because after all, this is what life is: ephemeral circumstance! So tell me your little lies because here the truth is a revolt held down: fear’s weight on the back of the world, above the books, above the tables worn away by hunger, above the life you chose on that submerged edge of cloud: the stronghold of liquid things.

 

FACTORY OF SILENT THINGS

 

Just as the teacher gleans from time his essential tool, I manufacture silence, this loom of words unheard, with the same fire that weaves together the angst of an unfinished life; and yes, from silence we come and to silence we shall return, its fretful whisper soaks my body, and the tree of childhood shadows me with its parched leaves, or the dead landscape of some unnamable season, the September winds sweeping away the summer. Silence, the substance we mine within forgotten verses, how it reminds me of that woman split between farm and phallus, the dewskin above the back of each morning. Like a stone, a graph-paper line, I sharpen silence, I tune silence, and the voices sizzle between its burning blood, calling forth this animal that cannot be slaughtered, the bull slowly chewing its root, I mean, its rage, and they both flow back to its mouth like a blade, a metal whose fire only he knows.

 

 

 

1.

On your back you bear the distance that separates you from your own birth! What voices do you bring, oh recital of time? The flesh burns – animal of space and water – it beheads thirst in public squares of glittering metal. There is no cure for the gangrene in this season of moons and udders, not the blank slate of oblivion, nor the translucent fruit of forgetting. We vibrate in the craters our hearts remake, serpents of wind for hands, gloomy and transfixed, surrendered to Goya’s ashen rifles. Blood condenses where love condemns us – this is the body’s hard burden.

THROUGH THE LAKE, THROUGH THE WATER

The beeches stand there, imposing, untouched,
steeped in time: I wander
through tall yellow hall of leaves
and listen to the open
chords: October, whoever cries here
cries inwards,
the wood bridge has sucked the salve dry.
The underworldly bamboo flutes resound

through the lake, through the water, the wind is
lead poured into stone molds.

I happen to end up
on that strip of beach
where you and I made love one summer day
in the short dry grass.
There’s a you in every poem,
a courage or a great fear, there are
constellations carved out right here, 
spokes of blue in the eye of the migratory birds, the words
you laughingly taught me to pronounce.
And the Black Portuguese
spoken in Mozambique
is still the softest language
I know.
To my ears, all your words sound round and powerful,
like our “love”
or “freedom.”

Days when I
stand with my eyes closed
and feel around. As if by a hard
kick, as if by a caress.
Your short, light-blue summer dress
fluttering away through the burning foliage.
The weather changes sex. The dark lake
solidifies.

NON-IDENTIFIED FEMININE OBJECTS 

 

Cinematic princesses escaping from an Eastward facing convent have long known the limits of where they can go 

Fatigued from hours of forest walking, they have taken refuge in a haunted house, abandoned since 1972, they now know that at any moment the story could stop 

The film could disintegrate, and they will go back to their well-to-do families in Beverly Hills or to one of the luxurious, seaside subdivisions of Santa Monica 

For the moment they chew their wild strawberry bubble gum, listen to Dubstep while wiggling in the bronze corridor, lying on old mattresses spread out over the hard dusty floor 

Corn flakes caked on the kitchen table since 1972, the box is draped in spider webs, the advertisements hold the faded colors of the time 

We sense something vaporous in the atmosphere, ectoplasms searching for their story, bodies trying to infiltrate other bodies 

We do not know what is being woven here, any explanation would be incomplete in light of the breadth of the invisible debates, the voice-overs intermingle: 

Where are the memories of which you have no memory?

 

 

 

CINDY SYNDROME (SUPPORT GROUP NEARING EXTINCTION OF VOICES)

 

Cindy

 I’m happy you’ve suggested I be you at first I took it for a vampirization of energy (a modern day masquerade) like an Ali Baba’s cave full of cement receiving its notifications by way of jackhammer but you are not one of those passive aggressive people no one remembers I already possess your voice one day I’ll have access to the kingdom of Olympus through a phonetic wing 

 

Cindy 

Her tessitura is currently frozen in the Museum of famous voices after staying in an empty box, a tape recorder from 1972, those machines that look like safes whose inaudible cassettes I’ve kept (I remember the thin magnetic strips I would rewind with my index finger), between the forward and advance buttons we can sense the acceleration of time, “noise reduction” becomes back to the future 

 

Cindy 

I presented the thing to myself like that, Cindy spluttering over the translation of another Cindy with a softer voice (Cindy 2 cloned during a marathon of ectoplasms where her paranormal friends met) Cindy in two copies with one small difference that one righter of wrongs and the other ethereal singer had the idea of making a shapeless cake that looked like Cindy 2 we will never know if she force-fed it to disconcerted geese or begged for crumbs of it by the front door 

 

Cindy 

It is good to flee condescendence at midnight in glass slippers even if the road is muddy I didn’t force anything side B mixed with precepts and pills from another side A metallic serves as my eyelet lace for king size needles, sewing up an exorcist doll into sound and rags will do

 

Cindy 

Cinderella in her original cardboard box slides up under the fifth wheel of the carriage is upset she mis-steered her project this new definition of the ambiance surrounding the name Cindy amputated by two syllables paper-knife in her mouth reborn before midnight of her cinders is an oracle in immersion please provide the upkeep notice to move up in her heart when the little ghost girl curses the packaging inside herself she must be provided in addition to the survival kit with an expression like on the sly 

 

Cindy 

These flowers hung on the back of the waterlily I could plant them out with bluebells my story lends to it half-witch half-sparkling orangeade with a bronze-colored stamp that vacuum-packs you but being there to spread the fire of banalities when poem erupts something other than this other thing that you would like to remember

 

Cindy 

It’s me again too intense before the mirror of dolls drenched with hope they all fit into the frame they search for their reflections in vain we call a princess grown old a queen of carnage well under every relation does not look her age and the mirror turns into a paragraph

 

 

 

WRITING TIME (AND ON THE EXPRESSION “TO TURN THE PAGE”)

Here is the little girl folded over like a page

You open her you undress her you take her with you

You feed her with a fork you slice her 

Lengthwise

 

You entrust her with a page she spreads herself out and wraps herself up with the page 

You crush her by closing the book

In theory she is not dead yet she unfolds herself with words

 

The house of liquid sentences is her main address

A ray of light fastens itself more to the houses/voices than to the invertebrate subjects

Like an eel the little girl lets go of a cry but retrieves it

 

It’s poetry reduced to black powder then reworked in living dough with a little water

Each pause in a given universe gives off a mystical odor

That we extract without tweezers from a temple above time

 

I became aware of it – I did not become aware of it –

In sinking my heart like a fork into a fixed memory

In sucking up the features of the guests present during the final scene

 

Slightly tipsy, walking out of Hongbin Tower. Two hearses appear

on the bike lane. The invisible corpse, shut in a hand-pushed metal box covered

with black brocade, jingles, bangs and clatters, squeezing through the onrush of head-spinning traffic. 

Tightly-packed pedestrians scatter loosely in the smog, all eyeing him, intent on helping him find an opening.