II - About Love to the land one's born

Here I am, an adulterer before you, my life. One day you took me to the altar with your best formal dress. I swore eternal love to you under a linen and shroud flag, the victor's mourning. You didn't give me the chance to choose. A hand that wasn't mine brought your chin to me, and when you kissed me you didn't realize that it wasn't me who was kisssing you back. My path was decided. Now I look at you and I still love you, but without nostalgia. Along the way, others offered the hospitality of their blankets to me, their dawns' warmth, the inviting smell of their kitchens. I 've brought you inside of me. Despite my unfaithfulness, I've been loyal. Unconditionally, I've gone to sleep in some bedchambers and woken up in others. Whenever I laid my hat I shared you without realizing that you were sharing me too, whether you wanted to or not. Without guilt, I can't offer what a part of you is asking of me. Understand that if someone calls me I should go, the same as when you used to call me. I won't allow you to lock the door, I won't withstand the egomaniacal chants of your greatness, despite the fact that you gave me more than the others did. I love you,... but I do it in my way.

I - About Love and Time

We often deny seeing love as an hourglass, as precious as time and as fragile as glass. Not even handling it by its slimmest part makes it possible to count its grains. At best, we crush it with the hope of injuring the fingertips enough to lose feeling in our hands. In the end, our memory fails and we fall off the wagon. I consider love as time, if you force yourself to get anchored to it, it becomes the long waiting before the disaster. To want to survive love seems like waiting to climb the flow of sand when it is coming to an end: Ashes as the only company looking up from the bottom of a narrow abyss. It seems impossible that so much hope and desperation, every glance and every horizon fit into such a small hole. In that state of mind, anxiousness and euphoria make us blind to beauty outside the glass: "I forgot about Dali because I only remember the surprise on your face" or " I wrote the poem that your lips dictated to me" are just two examples of the trikle of grains that spirits us away from transcendence.

"Tonight I want to drink", Haris Alexiou

A friend of mine who also has a divided soul gave me a cd two years ago. That cd contained this theme. As I'm still translating some episodes of my life into English which will be published here in the following weeks, I want to share this song with you, my friends. Sthn geia soy, Pake.



I want to drink tonight
so as nothing to remember
I want to trap myself in smoke
and fear no consequences.
I want drink tonight
and surpass my limits
I want to confess my lost dreams
covered in a smoke's veil.
I'll light up with cigarrettes
and burn out with liquor.
Now that I've been taken fright,
may everything turn into ashes.
I want to drink tonight,
erase everything and everyone.
I want to dissapear in smoke
and look back never again.

"Praise to a Freedom Combatant". Poem by Erich Fried

To read it in Spanish, click here.

Not long after the end of the Vietnam War, the blood of the dead still warm, Erich Fried's 100 Poems without a Country (winner of the I Premio Internacional de los Editores) was published in Spain. At the moment I have in my hands a copy which was lend to me by the sculptor Mariano Poyatos ten years ago. I got on touch with him to give him the book back. I hope his mind will be as sensitive as his hands, but in any case I'm ready to accept his complaints. In order to deflower this blog I've decided to translate this poem full of irony. E. Fried (Viena, 1921-Baden Baden, 1988) always mantained an exceptional sensitivity. He denunced social matters in a poetic voice, using aesthetics and irony in the same way as Brecht. When he was seventeen, he and his mother were forced to go into exile just after Fried's father was killed during questioning by the Gestapo. In 1963 he became a member of Gruppe 47 with Böll and Grass. According to Pacifism and Marxism, Fried was able to show the current situation trough a perennial poetry. Many of his poems are based on the conflict in Vietnam, and they may be applicable to later atrocities as Iran-Iraq, Yugoslavia, Gulf wars, and others. I'll try to make a proper translation of his poem:
When he was asked
what he felt watching and listening
every detail of the war,
he fixed his glance on the one
who was questioning him
-Michael Carlton-,
and answered:
Nothing.
Nothing in face of the dead,
when listening
women's wails,
tortured prisoners' groans,
and nothing when the sound
of the mutilated children's crutches
banged on the floor.
Nothing at smelling
the boamboo mats covering the corpses,
nor listening to his comrades' rasping breaths,
black and provincial men recruited
for the great bach.
Nothing.
Oh, perfect warrior,
the goal of the personal strategist
finally achieved.
You are free of weakness,
always available!
Wihtout you,
These decisive wars,
remote wars far away from the fatherland,
would be impossible.
What do you feel?
Nothing.
Hero from this world reduced to a thing:
The one like you
also will be able to throw
children to the dump
or to the gas chamber,
less painful death than napalm.
Happy, the General
who uses you:
He'll be free of limits,
He knows you are free
of femenine scruples.
In order to become perfect you miss:
Nothing.
A monument should be built,
you, still alive,
still shooting,
still throwing grenades,
still being paid,
giving yourself pleasure
on Saigon bordellos.
You're as hard and constant
as those stone and bronze men.
So, you feel nothing,
what could disconcert you?
what could warn you?
what could save you?
Nothing.

This post was published on Kostas Vidas in Spannish on May 21st, 2008.