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The Wind Carries Beautiful Weather
The wind carries beautiful weather. All that’s lovely is bright but changes, But then again grief plays light The wind raves within us, then resounds. Imitation by Roderick Jellema from a translation by Ivanka Koviloska-Poposku, in Reading the ashes, An Anthology of the Poetry of Modern Macedonia, 1977 The wind carries beautiful weather. The beautiful is beautiful and passes. Sometimes we are touched by the sadness like a quaking aspen, The wind is raging and moaning. Translated by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, 2022 Aco Šopov, The Wind Carries Beautiful Weather (Ветрот носи убаво време), 1957. First published in Macedonian in Sovremenost, VII, 8, 1957
It raves within us, then resounds.
It carries beautiful weather.
and grief remains.
Sometimes grief stretches inside us,
lies down in our eyes
and thickens the layers
that dim the lights we watch.
Then an aching of awe
blows cold and lost, unknown inside us,
haunting us deep.
as breeze in a trembling poplar,
light as a net of mist on the river
that we watch thoughtless and mute.
In those moments all things legend themselves
and we say: how impossibly bright it all is.
The wind carries beautiful weather.
It rages, it moans in us.
The wind carries beautiful weather.
What remains is the sadness.
Sometimes it slowly engulfs us,
laying itself on our eyes
and thickly, layer upon layer,
darkening our view.
Then something torments us, terribly heavy and painful,
something large, and ours,
to others inconceivable.
like a lattice of mist above a purling river,
which we stand beside staring out aimlessly, mutely.
Then all things have the look of a fairy tale,
and we say: it is all so impossibly beautiful.
The wind carries beautiful weather.