TO MY EX-YUGOSLAV FRIENDS FROM FYROM *

 

How will we meet again, my friends? Will we recognize our­selves, how we are what we always were?

 

It startles me, for example, to see your faces in the newspapers and journals that are still available here, with articles about or by you. How much older you've become in these years, how changed by all the meanwhile, mostly war.

 

Each of us knows it in a different way. Hiding in a cellar, exposed to some internal opposition. Only time accelerates in space, fragmenting all our borders. We are bastards in the quarrel's wake among our European stepfathers in world capi­tals, as our forefathers were: coteries of tribe, nation, state... We speak our monologues to God or to the grave.

 

God, how my own face, grown old, pulls the broken bits together like a magnet. You can't see me, perhaps - perhaps you never will.

 

We have eternity to catch up with each other and our work.

 

Will we face each other on Judgment Day and blink our eyes in disbelief, drinking at the club named Who Was Right?

* FYROM is an acronym for the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Mace­donia

***

CLASSICAL POET, BETTER OFF DEAD

 

For the poet Izet Sarajlic, member of

the Bosnian Academy of Arts and Sciences,
wounded in besieged Sarajevo

 

You have written all you will write, said all you will ever say. It seems time they put you in deep freeze to save the word from decay, and you from the superfluous.

 

Poet, you are yet another product

in short supply, your word's price frozen by market pressures... if yields increase much further, there'll be riots and looting, and belief police will pick us off one by one.

***

THE SEED

 

 

With all the past's weight,
we have become so light;
we may simply disappear.

 

All history seems an epitaph,
our seed so long suppressed
its roots grow numb...

 

Some other time or place,
perhaps, we'll see the trigger
pulled, the anchor cast away,

 

and we might root in earth,
 to spring up like Janissaries
at our neighbors' throats...

 

Straight up through the soil
like exotic plants whose tendrils
escape the potted boundaries.

 

The clay is cracked...
the earth is scorched
and cleansed again.

 

After such pasts
what sort of future?

 

Bogomil Gjuzel is probably Macedonia’s most important living poet, son of the Macedonian philosopher Dimitar Hristov Gjuzelev, who was a founder of the Macedonian Youth Revolutionary Organization, therefore sentenced by the Serbian court to twenty years imprisonment. His sentence was commuted – thanks to international support – to four years.
Bogomil Gjuzel graduated from the Cyril and Methodios University of Skopje in 1963 with a double major in English language and literature and pursued further study at the University of Edinburgh. He translated Auden, Dickinson, Eliot and contemporary American poets as Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, as well as several works of Shakespeare such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream etc.

In 1999 he became –an internationally most appreciated – director of Macedonia’s most prestigious international poetry festival, the Struga Poetry Evenings. Despite the ravages of war, the festival at Struga – thanks largely to Gjuzel’s efforts – continued to be a flourishing event. Bogomil Gjuzel is extremely active poet with an international reputation. He published over twenty collections of poetry, three books of prose and two dramas. The above poems have been selected from “The Wolf at the Door”, published with an introduction by Charles Simic by Xenos Books, Riversite, USA in 2001.

(tr. from German by Germain Droogenbroodt) Ahmad Schamlu, Iran 1952 - 2000 is together with Furugh Farrukhzad one of the most important poets of modern Persian poetry. He has been imprisoned several times and live as well in exile. This poems has been published in POINT no. 11 "When they torture me" poems by poets who have been imprisoned, exiled or killed.