{"id":103251,"date":"2024-08-19T08:24:01","date_gmt":"2024-08-19T06:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/reading-room\/poetry-shelf\/%d1%82%d1%83%d0%ba%d0%b0-%d0%bc%d0%b5-%d0%b4%d0%be%d0%b2%d0%b5%d0%b4%d0%b5\/"},"modified":"2026-01-17T12:09:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T11:09:24","slug":"here-my-providence-has-led-me","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/reading-room\/poetry-shelf\/here-my-providence-has-led-me\/","title":{"rendered":"here my providence has led me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\t\t\there my providence has led me<\/em>\t<\/h2>\n\tLeave me here, my good black friends-
\neven if I had been looking for it, I would not have found this place
\nwhich I discovered by accident.
\nI was led here by my primordial passion for searching
\nthe dark twists of history,
\nby my eternal thirst for the sources of our universal ancestry
\nand by my hunger for the unhappy youth of humanity.
\nI was led here by my atavistic instinct
\nand its unmistakable whisper telling me that everything is the same,
\nalthough hidden in different forests and plants,
\nregardless of what they are called: baobab, oak, or birch.\nAround the baobab gather all the villages of a people;
\nthey circle it but cannot encompass it,
\nbecause buried upright in its trunk are the dead, conducting
\na secret spiritual conversation with their descendants,
\nand no one has yet managed to encompass the dead.
\nAround the oak, young ivy twines and dances,
\nand its juices intoxicate the tree with eternal youth,
\nand no one has yet managed to dry up the juices of the ivy.
\nAnd around the birch, beautiful girls, like northern Signares,
\ntell stories of a love as wide as their land
\nand as deep as their soul,
\nand no one has yet managed to hear love stories to the end.\nLeave me here, my good friends;
\nhere my primordial passion has summoned me
\nto discover my archetype,
\nwhich is lost in the dark twists of time
\nbut alive and strong as inspiration.
\nLeave me, leave me here. Here my providence has led me.\n\tAco \u0160opov<\/a>, “The Light of the Slaves<\/a>” in The Song of the Black Woman<\/i><\/a> 1976
\nTranslated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer and Rawley Grau,\u00a0The Long Coming of the Fire<\/em><\/a>, Dallas, Deep Vellum, 2023.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

here my providence has led me Leave me here, my good black friends- even if I had been looking for it, I would not have found this place which I discovered by accident. I was led here by my primordial passion for searching the dark twists of history, by my eternal thirst for the sources…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":98423,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-103251","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/103251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103251"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/103251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103629,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/103251\/revisions\/103629"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}