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Reader of Ashes
Burn out, song, in the fire you have struck.
Your flint has split the word and burned it to ashes.
Reader of ashes, do you see in the ashes the fable
which rises from deep in that gray?
Song, I broke you off from the birdbeak aflight in my blood,
from the red sky of my fired veins, strung
from pylons charged at opposite poles.
I broke you off from red and black anger icons,
from the thunder in the warrior’s stone-tipped spear,
from dreams of men who are taller than their dreams
and rise again from their ashes.
It has split the world in two, its sides clash
in a winless war, knife against knife.
Who loses? Who wins? Who will make sens
of the sunrise of wounds?
Burn out, song, in the fire you have struck.
Aco Šopov, Reader of the Ashes (Гледач во пепелта), 1970
Imitation by Roderick Jellema from translation by Graham W. Reid, in Reading the Ashes, An Anthology of the Poetry of Modern Macedonia, 1977.
Reader of the Ashes
Burn out, song, in the fire you ignited.
The word explodes, disappears, into ashes of flint.
Reader of the ashes, did you note the primordial drama
arising from the depths of this dark origin?
I snatched you, song, from the beak of the bird flying in my blood,
from the red sky of my veins inflamed and pulsating,
from those wires from two irreconcilable worlds,
those sunrises with their indecipherable phases.
I snatched you from the wrath of icons, from those illegible gammas,
from the thunder off the spear of the stone-fused warrior,
from the dream of those loftier than the dream that betrays them
those who are reborn after once having perished.
Now we are two worlds, two adversaries, two warring sides,
now we are war with no exit, dagger to dagger.
Who loses? Who wins? Who, with the dawning of wounds clarified?
Burn out, song, in the fire you ignited.
Aco Šopov, Reader of the Ashes (Гледач во пепелта), 1970
Translated by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, 2022