The Great Flight

by Sasha Dugdale

  foreign and strangely speckled

  – with feathers catching the sunlight

  and warm vowels

  An extra birthday celebration

  But in the midst of that flock, one solitary

  sparrow

  one of the old faithful, you can hear him

  squalling full-throated

  Excessively

  joyful or angrily cursing

  doesn’t really matter

  Carry on, sparrow!

  (OG)

  NORWEGIAN (ORIGINAL)

  Velkomst

  Og så er det stær

  plutselig

  Den store eika full av stær

  Byens terminal

  Verdensvant gebrokkent,

  Spraglete utenlandsk og fremmed nå

  – med sol i fjærene

  med varme vokaler

  En fødselsdag på si

  Men midt i skokken en enslig

  spurv

  av de trofaste gamle, for full

  og skrålende hals

  Overstadig

  begeistret eller fly forbanna

  kan være det samme

  Heia spurven!

  SHETLANDIC

  Robin

  Yallow-trappled warbler,

  gairden warbler, mavis,

  jaunty blackie, spricklit

  stirleen an snappy flycatcher; a chorus,

  a cabbi-labbi, a yallicrack,

  an if truth be telt, kinda lippened

  dis filsket scriechin, dis slippit onkerry,

  while we wait apö da cuckoo

  i da trang haert o wir voar

  noo an dan harkin

  for da wheest whan der sittin

  But suddenly der a vimmerin

  a peerie mövment

  i da bushes an trees,

  aff a leg an on a leg

  flittin fae branch ta twig ta spade-heft

  ta mossy steyn,

  apö meek fit,

  apö cannie wing

  An dan der robbie-redbreist,

  red-trapplt, come

  back again,

  flitterin peerie-wyes

  fae branch ta branch

  his wine-red flag, wan laef

  fae da hidmist hairst, liftit

  bi a baff o wind, a brave haert

  in sherry-coloured breist, an dat

  pricks oot unseen boondaries

  rings his hametoon

  o wheest.

  Ta ken, aal o a sudden,

  dat hit wis dis, jöst

  dis we waitit apön

  robin, inklin

  Robin, robbie-redbreist

  i da callyshang o coortin,

  Amontillado-breistit,

  a banner flittin peerie-wyes

  trig-lik an half-hoidin him

  atween branches, aald

  laefs, new buds

  tracin his territory

  o silence;

  wan mintie, first

  sure

  inklin o voar

  (CDL)

  ENGLISH (BRIDGE)

  Robin

  Icterine warbler,

  garden warbler, song thrush,

  sanguine blackbird, speckled

  starling and snappy flycatcher; a chorus

  of perplexed polyphony,

  and truth be told rather trite

  this pubertal roaring of the senses,

  while we wait to hear the cuckoo

  in the midst of our busy spring gardening

  sporadically listening

  for the quiet

  when they’re brooding

  But suddenly there’s a light

  motion, a gentle movement

  in the bushes and thicket,

  cautious shifts

  from branch to twig to the handle of

  the shovel to a mossy stone,

  on meek feet, on

  wary wings

  And then there is robin,

  red-throated, returned,

  quietly moving

  from branch to branch

  its wine-red flag, one leaf

  from last fall lifted

  by a wind gust, and this brave heart

  in its sherry-coloured breast, who

  stakes out the invisible boundary

  around its domain

  of silence.

  To know, suddenly,

  that it was this, just

  this we waited for

  robin, sign

  Robin, red-throat

  in the midst of the noisy nesting season,

  Amontillado-breasted,

  a banner carefully and

  precisely moved, discreetly

  between branches, old

  leaves, new buds

  tracing up its territory

  of silence;

  one small, the very first

  reliable

  sign of spring

  (OG)

  NORWEGIAN (ORIGINAL)

  Rødstrupe

  (Erithacus Dandalus rubecula)

  Gulsanger,

  hagesanger, måltrost,

  sangvinske svarttrost, spraglete

  stær og fluesnapperen; et kor,

  en fortumlet polyfoni,

  temmelig fortersket, sant å si,

  det pubertale bruset i sansene,

  mens vi venter på gjøken

  midt i onnestria,

  og sporadisk lytter

  etter rugestillheten

  Men plutselig, en lett

  rørelse, en nett bevegelse

  under busk og kratt,

  forsiktige

  flytt fra gren til kvist til spadeskaft

  til mosesten,

  på saktmodig fot,

  på varlig vinge

  Og så er det robin,

  rødstrupen, som er vendt

  tilbake

  og forflytter lydløst

  fra gren til gren

  sit vinrøde flagg, et løv

  fra i fjor, løftet omkring

  av vindblaff, et modig hjerte

  i sherryfarget bryst, og som

  prikler ut usynlig stakitt,

  ringer inn sitt rom

  av stillhet.

  Vite, plutselig,

  det var dette, bare

  dette vi ventet på

  rødstrupe, vink

  Robin, rødstrupen

  midt i hekkelarmen,

  amontilladobryst,

  en vimpel forsiktig,

  avmålt forflyttet, diskret

  mellom grener, gammelt

  løvverk, nye knopper

  stipler opp sitt revir

  av stillhet;

  et lite, det første

  tilforlatelige

  vink av vår

  RĀBI(AH AL-BAȘRĪ

  In a version by Clare Pollard

  Rābi(ah al-Bașrī was an eighth-century Sufi mystic. Tradition has it that her caravan fell into the hands of robbers, who made her into a slave. She would perform her arduous tasks and then stay awake all night in prayer, and her master – on witnessing this – realized it was sacrilegious to keep her as his servant, and set her free. After this she became an ascetic, whose only possessions were a broken jug, a rush mat, and a brick she used as a pillow. She turned down numerous marriage offers, instead becoming a respected teacher with many disciples. Rābi(ah al-Bașrī is considered the first Sufi to have set down the doctrine of Divine Love.

  I discovered a handful of her poems last year in the excellent Islamic Mystic Poetry (ed. Mahmood Jamal). I found them really compelling in their razor-sharp purity – my first thought was of Sappho or Emily Dickinson. And so, as usual these days, I began to trawl internet bookshops and blogs looking for more. Although she is highly respected in the Islamic world (she’s apparently been the subject of several movies in Turkey) the only other things that I could find in English were fragments – ra
ndom quotations, unaccredited (Google?) translations on new-age sites, etc. It soon became clear that she wrote nothing down, so all lines attributed to her are fragmentary and doubtful anyway, but many of the scraps still contained something so interesting that I collated them, and started work on these new versions. They reveal a side of Islamic culture very different to that portrayed by the western media – Rābi(ah al-Bașrī was a revered female philosopher and saint who, in direct contrast to fundamentalists, questioned everything.

  Lines after Rābi(ah al-Bașrī

  •

  In love there is nothing

  between heart and heart.

  Words ache after truth.

  Only tasting is knowing –

  an explanation is a lie.

  How can you describe

  the thing that wipes you out

  and is you

  and tells you what to say?

  •

  If I bow because I fear hell,

  burn me in hell

  and if I pray for paradise,

  lock the door of paradise

  but if I love you for yourself,

  let me look at you.

  •

  My soul is a shrine,

  mosque or church

  where I kneel

  at a blank altar.

  Love is the place

  of powerlessness,

  of blazing loss –

  rapture pours into itself,

  its own drain;

  its wings beat me

  brainless,

  bodiless.

  I am a shrine,

  a mosque, a church

  that dissolves, that

  is eaten by

  God.

  •

  In one hand, a flame,

  in the other, water.

  I am torching Heaven,

  extinguishing Hell.

  It is time to tear this veil down

  and see the real God.

  •

  Take the badness

  mixed up in this prayer –

  or take my prayer, badness and all.

  •

  Death is the most intimate act.

  Knowing who I’ll kiss when it comes,

  I consent to a thousand deaths.

  •

  Sisters,

  I recommend reclusion.

  With my beloved

  I’m peaceful,

  nothing human

  can compare –

  he is where I struggle

  and turn

  and if I die of desire

  and have not satisfied

  my love,

  well, poor me –

  he is the craving and the cure,

  existence, ecstasy…

  I’m shunning all

  this being for

  the melting point –

  BHASKAR CHAKRABORTY

  Translated by Manash ‘Firaq’ Bhattacharjee

  Bhaskar Chakraborty is a poet who hears and writes silences. There is a ghostly ambience in his poems that reverberates with a strange depth, where the obscure is familiar and the familiar, obscure. Like almost all other poets from Calcutta, Bhaskar is a poet of the city, but unlike them, Bhaskar does not grapple with the sweat and toil, the hustle and bustle, of city life. He breathes and walks a different time, where the city is transported into memory. Calcutta is Bhaskar’s nostalgia and nightmare. The absence of sentimentality in the poems adds to the emotional maturity of the poet’s engagement with the city. Bhaskar is an imagist, and his poems constantly offer surprising and even shocking juxtapositions of imagery. It creates the strange ambience of his poems, where intimacy is often struck by unfamiliarity. His poems are also a constant conversation with death. It is crucial to read Bhaskar through the state of his illness, and the hallucinatory element it adds to his poetry.

  Winter

  Your hair is flying in the air – in your left hand you hold

  Your telephone

  In the light of winter, I have again come to your room

  I see your cat; it isn’t as lithe as before –

  The power of your fur; I see it go rolling – rolling

  Beneath the tilted bed –

  I sit quietly – your cat yawns quietly

  The fountain of winter repeatedly calls us and recedes

  From Life

  I had no idea, life would end like this, be spoilt like this. On days only meant for roaming, I used to see the double-decker bus swimming and rushing through Calcutta – in parks and restaurants, boys and girls are floating and kissing each other. I had a colourful shirt in my boyhood. I had a river veiled from life that sang the song of eternal life. I used to think I had thousands of happy days – I used to think I wasn’t born to die just like that… Someone on top of the hill has rolled a huge stone down over my life… I now see from inside a broken train, black clouds have massed over my head, and water from that old river is crashing over the many boats tied to my bed – ‘Float, float, float away’ – as I return silently to my little house.

  Illness

  Did I desire the increasing presence of friends

  By my bedside,

  Ash falls from the cigarette at dawn

  I need to do something

  This lying and sitting down, this aimless wandering

  Would it be good for me to move away

  From a draught of wind

  Did I want life to be ornate

  From a dry window, the light of dawn is falling

  On an empty pair of shoes

  Did I want all that, brother

  Did I want this

  WANG WEI

  Translated by Ned Denny

  This remake of Wang Wei’s famous sequence of short poems was done several years ago as an experiment in what might be termed anagogic or hieroglyphic translation (by hieroglyphic I refer to the true function of sacred writing, whereby an image and its associations are allowed to resound in the mind – centrifugally but not arbitrarily – like the ripples of a stone thrown into a still pond). Another way of characterizing this approach would be to speak of an instinct for transcendence, something quite natural in people not subject to a process of systematic distraction. I made use of several English renderings – including G.W. Robinson’s excellent Penguin Classics version – and a poet’s audacious and perhaps unerring ignorance to produce something that may be closer ‘to the cosmic bone’, as Frank O’Hara said of Léger, than more correct versions. Or maybe not. The fidelity that concerned me was to what I feel and know and dream in my own bones, however obscurely, and also to the absolute solitude and perilous leisure that is both the curse and source of power of any genuine poet or free human being. My hope is that something of this perennial spirit, remote from both atheist and religious dogmas, has been evoked here. An occasional literary or cinematic allusion parallels the typical T’ang incorporation of fragments of classic poems, songs or chants, the one explicit borrowing being from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Poem On His Birthday’ (‘psilocybin’ in that same section referring to the liberty cap or magic mushroom, which fruits like the bramble in late summer and early autumn).

  Wheel River

  after Wang Wei

  I

  We have made our residence on the brink,

  where the willow is living and dying.

  Grave scholars who read us will never think

  that the dead inherit everything.

  II

  Birds take themselves off into the stillness.

  October glows as if painted on glass.

  I stroll up the hill with my loneliness,

  secure in the knowledge that nothing lasts.

  III

  The hazel’s lichen-freaked trunks are my walls.

  My great leaf-roof whispers God’s hundredth name.

  Alive in the woods, I cook up a storm

  that will whirl to the cities. A real rain.

/>   IV

  Arterial trees reflecting in waters

  hang downwards, suspended over a void:

  we are dark heaven’s thin sons and daughters,

  rooted in soil we strive to avoid.