Thursday, April 12, 2018

Nenad Trajković writes


A CONVERSATION WITH A.



if you forget time
how old are you then
                  in the ears you accept music
                  only in a certain place
the voice you wait for
at the end always kills you
there is nothing new for you
you rotate by the law of sweetness
and so you create more lives
the fiction that you exist somewhere else as well
it turns you against me

something is painful in Divano bar* 
lots of antique clocks
with different numbers and needles
have weightlessness
                  the room is empty
                  (a waiter should not exist)
                  still life
                  and the swaths of
                  withered flowers
                  heavy fumes
                  for easy life
                  take you back to axiom topics
such knowledge does not give much hope

do you think sometimes about Poe
his dark world
did not leave secrets

                  everyone loses wife
                  and dresses her again
                  using the measures of the previous one
                  in this world no one is innocent
                  in dot of fogging  
                  we become incomplete and outraged

when you find a dream
it turns off after some time
like the little candle in church
you've lit because of it 
you see
eyes turn
circle cracks
irregularity leads



*A cafe in the town of Vranje, Serbia


--tr. Danijela Trajković

 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 'Angel Footfalls', illustration of 'The Raven' by Edgar Allan Poe, 1848
Angel Footfalls [illustration of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"] -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

2 comments:

  1. I asked myself — “Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death — was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious — “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

    --Edgar Allan Poe

    ReplyDelete
  2. When Edgar Allan Poe was 27 he married his 13-year-old 1st cousin Virginia Clemm (she claimed to be 21). She was named after a 2-year-old sister who had died 10 days before her own birth. When she was 7 she met Edgar 4 months after his 1st discharge from the army. (He had enlisted as "Edgar A. Perry" and claimed to be 22 though he was actually 18; in 2 years he had attained the highest noncommissioned rank but revealed the truth about his identity in order to get out of his 5-year enlistment and go to the West Point military academy instead. But after 6 months he pleaded not guilty to charges of gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, or church -- he knew he would be found guilty and be dismissed. But his court martial allowed him to pursue writing as a full-time career, the 1st American to do so successfully.) His publisher claimed that Poe's "love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty." However, after a decade of marriage, as Virginia's health failed, he began a flirtation with a 34-year-old poet, Frances Sargent Osgood who was at the time estranged from her husband. He temporarily gave up alcohol to curry Osgood's favor, and the 2 wrote poems to each other. They may have had a child together, who died when she was 4 months old. The affair led to a fistfight between the poet and Osgood's brother (which they both claimed to have won), and the relationship ended when the Osgoods reconciled. When Virginia's tuberculosis made her an invalid Edgar claimed, "Each time I felt all the agonies of her death -- and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive -- nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity." She died at 24 in 1847 after 5 years of illness and Poe began drinking again. He died 2 years later, 4 days after being found delirious on a street in Baltimore, Maryland.

    ReplyDelete

Join the conversation! What is your reaction to the post?