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Suneeta Peres da Costa

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Suneeta Peres da Costa is an award-winning writer whose work includes the bestselling novel Homework (Bloomsbury), stories, essays, and poems in local and international journals and anthologies, as well as numerous productions for ABC Radio. The pieces that appear here are taken from a collection of short, experimental fiction. She currently lives in Sydney.

 

 

 

The Changed Woman

Had she changed, she wondered? For though there were some visible signs of her transformation what was difficult was that the more significant changes had happened inside her and therefore could not really be seen at all. Often, she tried to remember and make the gestures of her old self, and while this might have reassured the others, she herself knew this old self was merely a sheath, an elaborate and outmoded disguise. When she discarded it, however, it seemed these people, much beloved by her, could not recognise her and spoke disapprovingly of her new ways. Despite her efforts to win them over, they were unwilling, or else incapable, of understanding her. They went about their lives, faithful to their old habits, while she grew restive and weary of it all, dreaming of circuses and caravans and distant lands. Eventually she devised an escape plan. The heartbreaking thing was she could not say goodbye for if she so much as looked into the eyes of these familiar people, now virtual strangers, she was sure her resolve to leave would itself break forever. So on the appointed day, she rose at dawn, placed a few possessions—heirlooms and relics as she already considered them—in a bag and made her way to the end of the valley and up through the mountain pass. The sky changed, the vegetation changed, but somehow, despite the heavy cloak she wore for protection from the elements, she felt a sure-footed lightheartedness.

 

The Mirror Man  

Was shy, retiring, but his problem was he shone and gave a bad impression despite his every effort to go unremarked. He would try to be still, so as not to upset the careful geometry of others’ existences, but if he was knocked by the smallest force—a gust of wind, say, or a loud noise—he shimmered and glowed and peopled shouted and raised their fists at him. He would have liked to disappear, and yet he was everywhere, or so it seemed, reverberating and reflecting. At other times he would have liked to speak, to recite a poem, whistle, or even sing, but he was alas imprisoned by an intractable muteness. On certain moonlit evenings, if he became tangentially aware of what it might be to know another, to identify, it nevertheless remained a kind of abstract knowledge, unable to be put to good use. The birds would descend from the trees, catching the coquettish reflections of their bright wings in his silvery glass and then fly up to the sky away from him. No one actually touched him, though beautiful women spoke through him, as though to an ancient oracle, of such things as their longings and dreams. Occasionally, overhearing the cries of neighbourhood children, he was so lonely, so envious of their games and easy camaraderie, the Mirror Man would hope that their ball might crash though and even shatter him—as often happened to a local window.

 

 

Chen Li

Written by mascara on . Posted in Translations.

Chen LiChen Li was born in Hualien, Taiwan in 1954. Regarded as “one of the most innovative and exciting poets writing in Chinese today,” he is the author of 14 books of poetry and a prolific prose writer and translator. He graduated from the English Department of National Taiwan Normal University. With his wife Chang Fen-ling, he has translated into Chinese over 20 volumes of poetry, including the works of Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Wisława Szymborska, Tomas Tranströmer and Yosano Akiko. The recipient of many awards (e.g., the National Award for Literature and Arts, the Taiwan Literature Award) in his country, he is the organizer of the annual Pacific Poetry Festival in his hometown. His poems have been translated into English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Croatian, among other languages.

 

 

Translated by Chang Fen-ling

Black Sheep

Dropping out of senior high and fooling around, my youngest brother is the black sheep of us three brothers. Although he has a blue dragon tattooed on his leg, his heart is as gentle and weak as our mother’s. Mother, who has been riding a bike to and from work all her life, has been paying off debts all her life. She has wished her youngest son to stop going astray. After the several motorcycles and cars she had bought for him were all gone, she borrowed money and bought him another car without my knowledge. That was a white car, white as the morning fog on winter days. That morning when I returned to Shanghai Street, I saw her, with cleaning cloth in hand, sneaking toward the white car parked on the roadside and wiping its body forcefully but gently, as if to rub the black sheep into a white one. She rubbed and rubbed, because she knew the white car might soon be gone, and she had to sew the white skin on quickly before the black sheep woke up.

 

 

The Tongue

I left a segment of my tongue in her pencil box. Consequently, every time she opened it to write a letter to her new lover, she would hear my mumbling words, which were like a line of scribbles, chafing among commas with the movement of her newly sharpened pencil. Then she would stop writing, not knowing it was my voice. She thought that I, who had never spoken to her since we last met, had kept silent for good. She wrote another line, finding the Chinese character “愛” (love), which consisted of so many strokes, was carelessly written. She handily picked up my tongue. Mistaking it for an eraser, she rubbed it forcefully on the paper, leaving a considerable drop of blood on the spot where the character “愛” disappeared.

 

Fatima Bhutto

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul in 1982. Her father Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan’s former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima graduated from Columbia University in 2004, majoring in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2005 with a Masters in South Asian Government and Politics. She is the author of two books: Whispers of the Desert, a volume of poetry, which was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press, Pakistan when Fatima was 15 years old. 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005, a collection of first-hand accounts from survivors of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, was published by OUP in 2006. Her third book, Songs of Blood and Sword, will be published around the world in 2010. Fatima wrote a weekly column for Jang – Pakistan’s largest Urdu newspaper and its English sister publication The News – for two years. She covered the Israeli Invasion and war with Lebanon from Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and also reported from Iran in January 2007 and Cuba in April 2008. Fatima’s work has appeared in the New Statesman, Daily Beast, Guardian, and The Caravan Magazine. Her latest book, Songs of Blood and Sword, will be published by Jonathan Cape in Australia this spring.

Photograph: Benjamin Loyseau

Karachi air
Breathed in through the lungs
Is sickly sweet
Like honeycomb left out to rot
In the warm, unrepentant heat.
Or else,
It is thick, smoky
Like mesquite
The evening scent of  garbarge burning
At the first break of dusk’s early light.
Mynah birds and ravens caw
A jealous chord
Singing to the street.
At midnight
I can hear the poor sweeper man
Sweep sweeping
The moonlit littered roads.
I sleep in bed
Covered in a sheet of sweat.
There is no electricity now
In this deadened August night

 

I trawl
Middle Eastern airlines, terminals and luggage belts
Stuck alongside students,
Honeymooners in black robes and white thobes
And slave labour, working through the night.
Hiding my name on my boarding passes,
A thumb obscuring the sight of letters, destinations and foreign nights
And inventing new fictions,
Identities
And family trees.
My legs are close to clotting
And my bags unnecessarily heavy.
Qatar, Etihad and Emirates
I count them off as lovers
I use in desperate times of need.,
Flying  out every month
Pretending that I’m free,
Subsisting on airline meals.

 

Parting from Karachi
At departure gates
And onwards worldwide.
I wish it well
My love unkind.
Good riddance,
Farewell.
Memories are dulled as the pilot starts the plane
Nostalgia side swept as stewardesses buckle belts and enquire about meal time.
Nauseated
Goodbye.
From above,
Even our city’s lights
Look bright.
Even the noisy traffic
Seems mild,
The congestion meek,
The airwaves clear.
From the sky,
From a passenger plane,
Filled with labourers
Dressed in January sandals
And drinking whisky
They’d never get otherwise,
Neat
And singing ghazals
To lull them to sleep,
This mangled city,
This wretched, wretched home
Loses so much heart.
But,
Three days later
My chest hurts for a sound
Of something familiar
An exhaust broken on a motorcycle.
The smell of the salty, smoky air.
The taste off a broken beetel nut
I’d never eat at home
And I imagine
It’s worth
Love
Some of the time.

 

He moved my body
continents,
Pressing gently
On the underside of my knee.
It was winter
When he sold me,
Seventy five degrees
I sleep on tarmacs
Eyes half closed.
I have become an exile
With an open home.
My valise holds all my shirts
And coats
I’m packed for winter
Wearing summer clothes.
I left behind a country once,
I can’t remember when.

 

Underneath it all
I’m bare boned
Afraid
Very simply alone.
On white ironed sheets
I wait,
Cold.
A knock on the ceiling
A boot against the floor
Sticky remote control at the foot of the bed
I cower
Concierge
Bellhop
Fire escapes winding under my window
And an alarm reminds me
I ordered room service way too long ago.

 

In nine years
I hardly wrote a red line
The crawl inside me subsided.
In the car,
Sunday, past noon,
The freeway pulled me down
And drudged up my lines.
I spoke for him,
For his embrace,
Coated with warm sweat
In a parking lot,
For the kiss,
And the scrape of his beard
As I breathed him in
One more hurried time.
So, I wrote him these lines,
Meaningless,
But mine
I go,
Leaving him,
My only memories
Inside a kiss,
Held in by his lips
In a claustrophobic garage
In which our farewells were disguised.

Christopher Kelen

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Christopher (Kit) Kelen is an Associate Professor at the University of Macau in south China, where he has taught Literature and Creative Writing for the last seven years. The most recent of Kelen’s seven volumes of poetry Eight Days in Lhasa was published by VAC in Chicago in 2006. A volume of Macao poems Dredging the Delta is forthcoming from Cinnamon Press in the U.K.

 

 

Free translations from Xin Qiji (1140-1207)

water dragon chant #3

the horses of heaven
float back from the south

the elders of the central plain
wish to attack the north

nothing changes

around the Prime Minister’s villa
the party goes on day and night

fragrance of flowers, songs
with birds singing, it’s always
‘let’s raise just this one more cup’

those officials meant
to protect the country
empty it of what’s worth saving

how efficient they are

the northern tribes will never come
knowing there’s not a thing
left for them

 

congratulating the bride

I can’t help it but I’m getting old
I don’t travel much anymore
old friends are fewer
white hair is more
you laugh at the world
or you cry

what is there makes an old man happy?
not weddings so much I’m sorry to say
but I look into green mountains
among them lies always the smile of a valley
the mountain and I this way alike

a glass of my favourite brew by the window
and waiting for a friend to come
I think of Tao Yuanming’s poem −
the motionless cloud −
that’s me

those who wish to be famous
drink on the other side of the river
discover deep meanings
in dregs of the wine

I turn my head now
to roar with the wind
I’ll never regret
having not met the heroes
though I could do with
one or two here right now

what worries me
though
is just that
they’d trip
over my beard
if they came

second poem to the slow tune of ‘lily magnolias

down now I’m old
libido less
at banquets I fear
how merciless time

autumn’s coming
moon’s bright and round
but it won’t shine on my next reunions
the Yellow Springs are too far

if the emperor asks me
to pen him an edict
I’ve already worked out
what I will say

my wish is to wake
from wine into autumn
play over
its empty strings

the river cares for nothing, for nobody
follows the west wind

and whether they’re king’s
or whether they’re commoners’
that wind
blows boats away’

 

god of water

I laugh at the water god
wonder what angers him

I laugh at the goddess
now amending the sky

no paths to follow
through this weed, this mist

I take a walking stick
to the dark green moss

was it I who asked for this wind
for this rain
all these thousand years?

the shepherd boys here
started a fire
sometimes oxen and sheep
will lock horns

spring on the rock
like a drop of fresh milk
now and then jade blossoms there

four, five pagodas
singing and dancing

water god, goddess
both laugh at me now

peasants call
‘don’t think too hard,
just join in’

 

how can I get Spring to stay?

how can I get Spring to stay?
tonight there’s nothing in my cup

the five hours −
each has its own dream

paws up in sleep
but each dream runs away

morning − the birds here
sing the sun up

behind closed curtains and closed lids
I let the jade screen’s story run