Nadezhda Radulova

You may know Nadezhda Radulova mostly as an English translator. She worked on books by authors such as Philip Roth, Garth Greenwell, Raymond Carver. Against this background, she has been publishing poetry since the early '90s. Her eighth book, "Small World, Big World" is in bookstores from "Janet 45", which marks a strong summer for books with poetry. In "Small World, Big World" she skilfully turns everyday moments and thoughts into symbols of the world we live in and hints at how possible the one we aspire to is.

The ones torn out

Right where the knife made the cut

the walls have grown in crooked, open,

a wind comes in, disease and dust,

and daylight plays an icy jazz.

The empty beds still hold a pulse,

a memory of their slight hearts,

the selfless January coils,

a warmth that melted all the snow.

They didn’t linger long enough

to sink their teeth into the house,

till blood rang out, until smells shook,

a magic never caught on film.

They’re in the clean infinite gloom

rid of the metals of the blood -

selenium, nickel, lead, and mercury

but also lymph, phlegm, fury, bile...

This side is plowed, no memories

or signs of struggle left behind,

between the roof tiles, shaken loose,

sadness swept the chimneys clean.

But where the knife made the cut

the walls have grown in crooked, open,

a wind comes in, disease and dust,

and daylight plays an icy jazz.

LetMe Tell You About Maritsa

after Schubert and Dorfman

The thing that walks each morning

along the dike, among the early joggers,

is neither dream, nor shadow, but a memory

unstuck from me, returning

to that spot, right there, where goosebumps

gather, and childhood breathes

its last.

But let me tell you more about Maritsa.

I’m a tall man then, silent and hunched over,

in love with poetry and fishing,

I have a wife and kid, my parents live in town,

but I also have a shanty by the river,

so come and look, my hand a hook —

and yes they bite, they seem to bite,

but their eyes are nothing like the sun, and coral

is far redder than their lips’ red,

those damned goldfeathered fish,

harlot-eye and strumpet-tail,

let them die!

But let me tell you more about Maritsa.

I was an ordinary tortoise then,

an ancient epic hero,

meditating in the mud all day, but once

I caught the whiff of blood, the sky

was low among the rushes,

I saw arms and ankles, flash of bait,

the moon bellyflopped and mesmerized

Ich bin nicht wildthe waves were rocking

Ich bin noch jung! Und rühre mich nicht an…

And police searchlights cut the silence

into stripes and circles.

But let me tell you more about Maritsa.

I am in tenth grade then, nothing

that would merit grief or verse… The moment comes,

I pick the day and time, and I attack

that quiet fisher-poet in the back with hoops and hooks,

I whet my first words, my first

rhymes against the stone of his tin tongue,

and then I sever every dangling participle

from his incoherent prattle and

I swallow every yell with triumph,

I scrape this day down to its bones.

I am the cello, the river is my quartet.

The girl’s alive, the poet’s dead!

What do we do with something

that has come in the middle, or at the very end, without

asking us; has entered without an invitation,

straight from the street, muddy and starved,

some old nothing, wrapped in newspaper,

jumping right into our most tender sheets,

clean chimneys, tall bright hearts.

What do we do with something, which has come,

the way a wet cough comes with fall,

slides down, cuts the ethereal body in two,

trembles in the vein of the voice and I spend

the rest of my days watching

as your brilliant heels walk across

the sky while you’re asleep.

But what do we do with the thing,

a hardened and colder something, not quite dead,

but a thing dug up from the land of the dead,

which gets stuck between lips and lips,

belly and belly, breath and breath,

and all of this happens simultaneously,

and simultaneously to us.

Can we love this guest, this other, this third,

who never was among us when we discovered

loving. And what is this thing that

has come, and what is loving itself, and if

the thing that has come is in loving,

then what do we do with the love that

has come, or is already gone.

Before the Cold

The moon steps forward, filling out

its left half.

It’s Sunday, no work will get done,

but where are all the festive clothes?

The master gathers all the farm hands in the chapel,

and counts them, they are few.

Suddenly rivers full of apples

stream down toward the fault.

Behold, tiny white worms crawl out

of earth’s autumnal yarn.

and stitch by stitch, stitch by stitch, undo

the solemn tapestry of the year.

And all the walls are cold as ice.

Suddenly, two days before the end,

Mary began to weep. No one in the house

suspected that forty eight

hours of salt

would be more than enough

to eat through the hardwood floor below us, so

nobody

put an end to it. Old men told

tales in tongues; words fell

like twigs into the fire and stoked it, the mothers and fathers

cleaned the soot, coughed, and at the same time the boys

played outside, passing

a rubber ball and

when

the salty rain

fell, and

the waters of this world broke, and

another world wasn’t coming, and

the feet of the last ones dug up

the soggy anthills, trampled

the chicory, and cracks opened up

underneath two cubits wide, and

you could hear trumpets, and

it was a time to—

then I saw

how she —

my Mary —

spun herself around her own wet hair and

pulled herself up into the sky,

a pillar of smoke from my throat,

out of my stomach — rose twisted

around her wet hair and

look, she’s gone now, I can’t feel her, she’s gone —

I tell the woman in the bed next to mine

who’s eating crackers and watching 24 Kitchen — and

now the weeping stops, and now the rain stops,

and the earth is once again

unnamed,

without form and void, a blind hollow of

mole tunnels and

sand and ashes and

dust upon dust upon —

end upon end upon —

So who exactly created this whole thing and why?

The woman in the next bed is sleeping.

I pull the remote out of her hand,

change the channel.

Translation from the Bulgarian by Maria Vassileva