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There’s Blood Down There

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There’s heavy blood down there
beating all the way up from the ancient world.
It thickens and dulls the mist on this sharp ridge.
It lies like a scar in a wound.

There’s heavy blood down there. There’s blood.
There’s dark blood down there, thick as pitch,
with thirst of a dragon unslaked.
There’s old blood naked and black.

It waits and burrows like a mole.
From door to door it tunnels deep beneath us
as precise and as certain as death.
It throbs into all the empty spaces.

There’s heavy blood down there
drumming its code,
‘follow, follow, this way,
don’t go out of range.’

There’s awful blood down there,
a terrible awe,
There’s this heavy blood down there
beating all the way up from the ancient world.

Aco Šopov, Not-Being (Небиднина), 1963
Imitation by Roderick Jellema from a translation by Graham W. Reid, in Reading the Ashes, An Anthology of the Poetry of Modern Macedonia, 1977.

Down Below There Is a Blood

Down below there is a heavy blood,
left over, you might think, from an age long gone.
Up here in the sultry mists it is invisible.
Like a scar it lies cursed on top of the wound.

Down below there is a heavy blood. A single blood.
A blood that is black as pitch and as thick.
An insatiable blood with a primal thirst.
There is old blood below, naked and black.

It lies below and burrows like a mole.
Threshold to threshold, it burrows through the mind.
Unerring as death and as inescapable,
it seeps into every last space and void.

Down below there is a heavy blood,
a single blood repeating constantly:
Follow and obey me, follow me first,
never must you be divided from me.

Down below there is a terrible blood,
more terrible even than the threat.
Down below there is such a heavy blood
you might think it was left by an age long dead.

Aco Šopov, Not-Being (Небиднина), 1963
Translated by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, 2022