Poetic-Verses from ATHANASE
In The Private Room (English)
to Aunt Eugenie who lost her only son and her husband in the Second World War
'A man who is drunk and full of grief finds in the tavern a treasure that a hundred spiritual teachers with their hurried fervent prayers will never find.'
Fahr al-dîn 'Eâqi Hamadâni
When night, with its feverish fingers,
moves forward the hands of the clock on your chest of drawers,
when terrifying solitude comes
on tiptoe and fills with a steel-like despair
the innermost recesses of your home,
then, with a thousand precautions
to avoid disturbing the gods of the threshold,
soft, light and trembling as a shadow,
you will enter
your private room.
Slowly you'll approach the old photographs,
kissed so often by the breath of the passing years they're tinted with amber,
the old photographs, O Aunt Eugenie,
where you see again, among the armfuls of white lilacs gathered from your
courtyard,
days of bright smiling youth,
the tender pictures that have become for your racked soul
icons of grief-filled devotion;
then you'll fall on your knees onto floorboards bare as misery and,
striking your frail breast with your withered hands,
you'll recite the names of the beloved men who never returned,
and bathe the threadbare tablecloth
in the passionate blood of your tears.
There, almost insubstantial,
you'll remain, unable to move or speak, for a long time,
with your face pressed to the floor
your vague thoughts taking an unsteady path down the autumn avenue of
memories
like a beggar who's been turned away from the door!
And your heart, your heart, Aunt Eugenie,
will scatter into thousands upon thousands of yellow leaves
on your broken pillow.
While outside, outside,
the streams that run and talk to the darkness
will pierce the roots of the rosebushes,
and rise right up to the leaves,
then evaporate and carry to the sky
the words that your grief dare not pronounce.
No, no, no
Aunt Eugenie, they must not, they cannot die,
those whom your heart has cherished with so much love!
Stars in the heavens now,
they will live for ever in time and after time has ceased
in the smile of the springtime roses,
in the joyful cooing of young turtledoves,
in the sunlit song of grasses and rivers!
And eternity in its great mercy
will make their limpid shadows gradually grow smaller
until they become like
stars sailing the invisible river
of divine Peace!
Then, when your sorrow has turned to pure light,
you will be able to echo the words of the immortal 'Erâqi:
'When the air takes on the colour of sunlight, darkness disappears.
When night and day mingle,
they present us with the colour and fragrance of a new dawn...'
translated from the French of Athanase Vantchev de Thracy by Norton Hodges
31.10.07.
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In The Private Room (English)
In The Private Room (English)
