Dennis Maloney
(USA)
4
A dictionary explodes sending words
fleeing towards the borders,
chased by those without name
toward a great unknown destination.
Words are refugees smuggled in hidden
train compartments, walking obscure paths
through farm fields, forests, washing
up dead on shores, lost at sea, crawling
under fences and over walls built to keep them out.
Words are on a clandestine voyage seeking asylum
in an unknown language, their passports thick from
collecting official stamps over centuries. One
can’t overestimate the amount of accumulated baggage.
5
for Fouad El-Auwad
The Syrian poet entered Germany at sixteen
and now reads his poems in both
the sonorous Arabic and the harder
German cadence. Both beyond my understanding.
After the poems come audience questions
not about the syntax of the poems
and their wild unpredictable lines
but the fractured country he left decades ago.
A country shattered into shards like
a precious porcelain Chinese vase
hitting the floor, hard. They ask
how can the mangled lives and broken
cities be put back together again?
What is the poet’s answer? That
a storm is gathering over the world,
that there are no victories,
that we must learn not to be afraid,
that we all must learn to speak a new language.
6
On dark nights when I have no words of my
own, translations calm me, let me
jump deep in letter by letter
soaking up the dampness of the words.
I hear a whispered sigh like the sea
in the dark, as both poem and self
exist in a constant state of becoming.
What draws us as a translator to seek
an equivalent music from one
tongue to another? Affinities, a vibrancy,
listening to meanings that reside, flowering,
beyond the thickness of dictionaries.
Nibbling at the edges of the poem, we give
contours to shadows. How do we translate
the silence that lives between the lines?
I am a nomad searching for a language
in which I am a word unbound,
wandering between the world
we inhabit and the one we create.
from Border Crossings
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Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including The Map Is Not the Territory: Poems & Translations and Just Enough. His book Listening to Tao Yuan Ming was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2015. A bilingual German/English, Empty Cup was recently published in Germany.
His works of translation include: The Stones of Chile by Pablo Neruda, The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado, Between the Floating Mist:Poems of Ryokan,and the The Poet and the Sea by Juan Ramon Jimenez. He is also the editor and publisher of the widely respected White Pine Press in Buffalo, NY. and divides his time between Buffalo, NY and Big Sur, CA.