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I Seek My Voice
I seek my voice in the wild silence of the sea—
the sea turns to stone.
I seek it in the autumn’s yellow desert—
the desert turns green.
My hands are not my hands
(my hands are fingers of moonlight).
My eyes are not my eyes
(my eyes are eyes for distance).
My word is the hard jawbone of time,
with teeth of seed that sprout in the fields.
Aco Šopov, Merge with the Silence, 1955
Translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer and Rawley Grau, The Long Coming of the Fire, Dallas, Deep Vellum, 2023.
In the line "with teeth of seed that sprout in the fields", Šopov is probably alluding to the Greek myth of Cadmus, who slayed a dragon and sowed its teeth in the ground, from which fierce armed men then sprang. Cadmus provoked them into attacking each other until only five were left standing. With these, he founded the city of Thebes. There are two reasons why Šopov may have been particularly interested in the Cadmus story: first, because Cadmus is credited with inventing the alphabet, and, second, because he is said to have journeyed in his later years to Illyria, where he founded the city of Lychnidos—today known as Ohrid, on the lake of that name in Macedonia. – Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, in "Notes on the poems" in The Long Coming of the Fire, 2023.