Dr. Tin-wen CHUNG Co-Founder, WAAC/WCP


THE SWIMMER
IN BACK STROKE


Oh the Space
Boundless and bottomless
An ocean of planets-twinkling stars in darkness…
Here is our world :
As a swimmer in back stroke.
Her body submerged, only her head out of water,
Her head rises up, her cheek bones jut out, and
Her rugged face in sadness，full of sweat and tears.
She hardly breathes,
Because of restless, hard labor.
Her giant forehead is the continents, from Europe to Asia
Her long nose is the plateaus, from Pamirs to Himalayas.
Her two cheeks－
One side in the shade and the other side in the sun
Are Africa and America
Her rugged face was cut into states, nations and regions
And used by human beings
As nests of ants or hives of bees.
We are fighting and shedding blood for our land,
And also sweating blood for cultivation.
We were involved in fightings, in the name of
Color, color of skin, color of collar, even color of colors…
Year by year.
The weapons are developed--
From stone to steel and further to nuclear.
In battles on the ocean, the technology of warfares are upgraded
From canoe to Viking and then submarine
In battles in the air, the technology of warfares are progressing
From falcon to jet fighter as well.
With all our wisdom alertness and cruelty
We develop the technology of warfares
Into super fine arts.
We train our children to turn them
Into arts or bees.
Wearing uniform, to cover their soldiers’souls in blood.
In our generation, a half of a century.
The world was washed in blood twice.
Due to congestions of the brain, the forehead of the giant
Turned into red with evil mind.
Someone climbed on the top of her nose,
Discovered the last mystery at the summit of Everest--
There stands a huge statuary by an unknown artist
Who carved in petroglyph to show:
Jesus Christ on the cross;
The death-mask of von Beethoven;
The head of an executed hero and
The half buried Sphinx in a desert…
The Globe, the head of the swimmer in back stroke
Floats in the starry ocean, eternally
Facing the South, where the compass is always pointing,
Because there is the only source of lights
Of the Universe, embracing us,
With love and warmth.


By Dr. Tin-wen CHUNG
Translated by the author, 1954

***********************




Tomas Tranströmer, leading Swedish poet, poet
laureate of the Struga Poetry Evenings, planting a tree

Allegro

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on the world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag – it signifies:
'We don't give in. But want peace.'

The music is a glass-house on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole.

********

April and Silence

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.
The only things that shines
is yellow flower.
I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black box.
The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker's.

© Tomas Tranströmer
Translated from Swedish translated by Robin Fulton


********************

Dr. Milan Richter, vice president of the WCP,
excellent poet, translator and publisher from Slovakia.

AT 96° C

the sauna furnace automatically switches off,
the last wave of sweat bursts from your pores,
your hair is on fire, you don't feel your limbs,
in the smallest of them you wouldn't draw blood if you cut it,
even though your eyes still hang hungrily
on the narrow slit in the flesh that's sticking to the wood,
chastely covered by a dirty-blond tuft,
small breats that have suckled
two children and two dozen Finns.
Onerva rises,
the birch twigs remained in the Middle Ages, with them
the lake below the castle walls, where
Vasa knights chilled down after won battles,
Onerva descends down twenty steps,
her behind like a mirror, I have nothing
to flick, to arrest that image.
And when
a little later our bodies revive
under the icy shower, our senses already
are so sober that none of us thinks
of love-making...

But at the sight
of the slim Polish girl, who, legs apart,
bends down over the sauna furnace, sprinkles water on it
and the black painted eye
winks at us between her thighs
with tears on its edge...

Translated from the Slovak by Ewald Osers

**************

STRAY DOGS IN GRANADA

they stroll in the square, where the poems' staccato
gives way to the rhythms of trumpets, harmonicas, drums,
Godoy and costumed beauties, barefoot dances,
dog after dog passes before us, sinuous
and unhurried, his narrow face glides into dark
like a dream, yes, these dogs are our dreamed dead,
eyeing us sidelong, while they silently
pass about us, they do not halt, they disappear,
and as soon as rhythms, dance, beauties overwhelm us,
straight they are here, by the same route returning
in front of us, fur and sex glittering
as if in the dark they'd piddled in the dew, proudly
they move bare-footed over the square's warm flags,
you sense in their narrow faces the secret whispered
in the dark, in another world, yes, these are the souls of our
dead, who for the instant have found living shape,
straying beings, not close-clinging, not at all,
faces without tears, mutely I whisper Helena, mum, Peter,
Gerhard… Eta… Rick… I know they will not stay,
for if they stayed I would understand suddenly
and entirely the secret whispered in dark,
I, amidst them straying, a stray dog
somewhere at that other end of being.

Granada, Nicaragua, February 2008.
Dunajska Luzna, May 18, 2008

© Milan Richter
Translated from the Slovak by John Minehane