Lidija Dimkovska
(Macedonia, 1971)
Lidija Dimkovska nació en Skopje en 1971. Además de poesía escribe ensayos, trabajos como traductora y edita la macedonia literaria revista Blesok / Shine en internet. Dimkovska estudió literatura general y comparada en Skopje y tomó un Ph.D. en la Universidad de Bucarest, donde impartió clases de lengua macedonia y literatura. Vive en la capital de Eslovenia, Liubliana.
Poemarios de Dimkovska:
The Offspring from the East (1992), The Fire of Letters (1994) and Bitten Nails (1998). In Rumania she published a collection of translated poems, Meta Hanging on Meta Lime Tree (2001).
BUSCADORES DE ASILO
El más grande centro de buscadores de asilo está bajo tierra.
Son los suicidas, los emigrantes al otro mundo,
inaceptados, reprimidos y torturados en este.
El centro de buscadores de asilo subterráneo ofrece libertad de movimiento
desde la periferia hacia el centro y viceversa,
tres comidas al día y un permiso diario para dar una caminada.
Los buscadores de asilo tienen una etiqueta de tamaño estándar en sus pulseras.
Pero mira, los muertos normales inician una huelga de hambre
contra el exceso de suicidios que les rodean.
Ellos no quieren a los buscadores de asilo cerca de sus pulcras casas,
no quieren sogas en todas partes, frascos vacíos de pastillas,
huesos rotos de caerse y vientres hinchados por ahogamiento.
En lugar de espantapájaros ellos siembran cruces en sus verdes jardines
para aquellos que murieron contra la voluntad de Dios. Los buscadores de asilo
están confundidos y enojados, con un pie arrastrando todo el tiempo.
Algunos han olvidado dejar un mensaje, otros besar a su hija,
algunos han dejado un traje en la lavandería, otros no han hecho sus testamentos,
algunos no han cancelado sus viajes, otros no hicieron una cita con la muerte.
Y ahora están aquí. Con intérpretes en el pasillo
y carpetas en las manos, esperan ser vistos por el oficial del asilo.
Nacionalidad, sexo, religión. Muchos tienen padres,
pero no patria. Algunos son alérgicos a la tierra arada,
y sin poder besar su suelo, tuvieron que partir bajo tierra.
Algunos fueron fugitivos toda la vida de ellos mismos,
sin nadie que pagara las pastillas para dejar de envejecer.
Algunos han malgastado su desgracia también, no sólo su buena fortuna.
Otros no han hecho el amor con el amor de su vida por años.
Algunos han sido asesinados por sus cercanos y más querido no con
un cuchillo, sino con aguja o fórceps.
Entre ellos hay personas que están vivas sólo después de su muerte.
El centro para buscadores de asilo está lleno, cercado con alambre de púas en el mundo de los muertos corrientes.
Llegué ayer. Obtuve dos entradas.
Durante el día, estaré en el centro de los buscadores de asilo,
y por la noche en la casa de los muertos comunes.
No sé de cuál de los dos no voy a volver.
Traducción de H. G. Leogena, a partir de la traducción inglesa
de Ljubica Arsovska y Margaret Reid.
THE POEM AT THE BEGINNING
Brodsky got scared, he got scared he might be hit
by a bomb, a watermelon or the evil eye of a Struga maiden,
and back then we still didn’t have e-mail
for him to ask me in the Subject line: Is there a war going on in Macedonia?
so he didn’t come. And those four days, they say,
the University of Michigan was being painted,
and at home the cleaning lady, Sevda from Bosnia,
had spilled some bleach in the living room and a terrible stench
spread all over the place.
Brodsky opened the windows and went out into the night
and had nowhere to go until the apartment was aired,
until the Department of Literature was painted.
For four days Brodsky wandered through Michigan, he went from church to church
(and when sad, they say, entered only the Orthodox)
and suddenly he came across the small Macedonian church
raised by old man Ilija in memory of his mother Petkana of Struga,
and just then it was Vespers, and two singers chanted in Macedonian:
Mother of God, rejoice, birthgiving Maria.
Brodsky listened and his hands got sweaty on his trousers
and every time they made the cross he choked
as if swimming in the waters of Genesis.
The Mother of God saw the collar on his shirt start crying,
then an old woman approached him with boiled wheat and told him:
Take some son, this is in memory of my mother-in-law Petkana from Struga,
God bless her soul, she brought up my children.
Brodsky then searched his back pocket and took out the letter
about the Golden Wreath for Poetry ’91. But the old woman
just kept on offering: Have some, son, have some of this wheat,
you’re pale, take care you don’t get sick, and as for wreaths —
God forbid, it’s too early for you!
We the old must have our turn fi rst!
Brodsky ate and cried, gulped and choked,
and on Monday, when the University opened again,
gave his literature students the following topic for their essays:
“What percentage of a man lives when he’s alive
and what percentage dies when he dies?”
And for two hours he read and re-read
Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End.”
DECENT GIRL
I took my perspective of the future to a thrift store
but nobody would buy it. The net is prickly
and there are no more heroes. Sorrow is purely physical pain.
If there’s no water, let the eye-fl uid hanging on the glasses drop.
If you wear no glasses, pretend you are Chinese
(one eye looking eastward and one looking westward
equals écriture féminine in a male society).
The fashion of the Orientals
comes back in a package of diet food.
And bless me while I’m still a decent girl.
Tomorrow or the next day I’ll lose my sinful ways,
I’ll wear embroidered blouses from the Ethnographic Museum
of Macedonia, and someone will have to pay for them.
To survive, we’d best turn the lector’s apartment
into a gallery. We shall exhibit
varicose veins, dried umbilici, retinas
and broken hearts in direct proportion
to South American soap operas
(tell me why you left me and married my sister),
and sorrow is purely physical pain
cured in my country by surgical operation.
Here I recognize it by the pain in my index fi nger,
crucial in the expansion of mobile phone networks.
I don’t know why my uncle didn’t beat me in a sack.
At this age it’s best if somebody else
cuts your umbilical cord,
and I am not afraid of Virginia Woolf,
I fear Lidija Dimkovska. Have you heard of her?
A woman not wholly christened,
whose friends have all taken the vow,
the bodiless woman and all those she’s loved remain unmarried.
That almost completely non-woman of yours
(likely sponsored by Soros to become tender?)
almost to the negation of the idea of Medea, of Judea, of her.
No, I’m not afraid of the numbers 1, 4, 7 in the eye clinic,
or of mortgages on religious holidays,
what I’m afraid of is the existing attitude of God,
the God who does not exist, and I’m afraid of his great eyes.
Alas, what a multitude of words! Dictionaries are a lucrative job.
You sit at home and play: Something beginning with ...!
From now on I shall speak in onomatopoeia,
Or better, in metaonomatopeia.
Be that as it may, it was nice meeting you, Father.
Were I not a woman you could’ve taken my confession.
But I don’t mind this either.
We’re having tea, biting each other’s nails
and licking our lips. Chirp chirp! Metachirp metachirp!
NAIL CLIPPERS
Since I took their nail clippers abroad with me by mistake,
my family’s nails have been growing out of control and unevenly,
their toes and fi ngers are lengthening rampantly
and breaking out through their shoes and handshakes with strangers,
and the horrifi ed neighbors no longer try to eavesdrop.
I call them from far away wishing, between two surges of shouting,
to mollify them, singing them popular newly-written folk songs,
begging their forgiveness with the great thoughts of small nations.
So what are long nails compared with my thirst for the truth,
don’t you see you’re becoming immortal already?
But you take it so hard.
The nail clippers gape at me from the bedside table,
just as unhappy with the change of environment.
This is madness, I scream, I’ll mail them to you,
but then they all shriek on this and that end of the line:
“No way! Customs confi scates nail clippers!”
When crossing the border, I hid them in my right sneaker.
My family threatened to cut their nails with the kitchen scissors.
No matter what, they weigh on my conscience like a plaster collar.
All night I dream of them with bleeding fi ngers and fainting.
The next morning I woke up with hemorrhoids,
and desperation plugged my spirit.
Claustrophobia is more powerful between a nail clipper’s blades
than among people who have forgotten God.
The rainbow colored peacock on the clippers
murmured in a human voice:
“Life is the choice of nails, hair and skin,
but manicuring, that’s the choice of divinity.
You’ve been biting your nails all your life,
but brought me here just to spite me. Get me back.
I don’t care how, you godless no-nail, or get your family here
to trim their nails like human beings.” And come they did,
and never even looked at me, but settled cozily on the bed
and trimmed and manicured their nails with the clippers,
throwing the parings on the fl oor and smiling contentedly at the peacock:
“A little while, and we’ll be going home.”
Translations from the Macedonian by
Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid
