PAD Day 6: Spring in the War; A Swedish Lesson

 Today's prompt from Write Better Poetry: Write a "smell" poem. I don't have a lot of time to write for the next few days, because Easter is a big deal in my family. We host a big Easter dinner, but even before that we make Italian stuffed Easter breads all day on Good Friday. It's a bit of a cottage industry - in one day we churn out at least a dozen loaves for friends and family. Our other big, more long-range project is that we are sponsoring a family to come to the US from Ukraine. This includes renovating and furnishing a house for them to rent. So finding time to write these days is a juggling act. I wrote several poems on the topic of the War in Ukraine last year, one of which was published in an anthology. Here is a new one, a tanka:

Ukraine April

the war's second spring
flowers emerge defiant
blooming everywhere
 
their scent almost overcomes
the smoke of today's bombing

The prompt from NaPoWriMo today is to find "a poem in a language you don’t know.... Now, read the poem to yourself, thinking about the sound and shape of the words, and the degree to which they remind you of words in your own language. Use those correspondences as the basis for a new poem."

This is what is called a "translitic" poem, and it is one of my least favorite writing prompts - I always struggle over it and never seem to get a good result. But I gave it a go. It sounds a bit like "language poetry," with its surreal associations and syntax, but interestingly, I seem to have correctly guessed the general meaning of several of the foreign words. My source is a poem by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer: 

nattboksblad

Jag landsteg en majnatt
i ett kyligt månsken
där gräs och blommor var grå
men doften grön.

Jag gled uppför sluttningen
i den färgblinda natten
medan vita stenar
signalerade till månen.

En tidrymd
några minuter lång
femtioåtta år bred.

Och bakom mig
bortom de blyskimrande vattnen
fanns den andra kusten
och de som härskade.

Människor med framtid
i stället för ansikten.

 

 Here is my "translitic translation":

Night Book's Blood 

Yes, landing on Main Street,
I am the skylight of mankind,
The grass and blooms through gray,
many often grown.
 
Yes, glad, up for sliding,
I then forge into blind night,
the middle of vital stones
signaling till morning.
 
In tides
ninety minutes long,
fish or bread.
 
Oh, back on my
bottom the bliss comes, and water,
fanned down under crust
of some hardscrabble.
 
Man's core made frantic,
I stall for answers.

 

 And here is a "proper" English translation of the original poem:

a page of the night-book

I stepped ashore one May night
in the cool moonshine
where grass and flowers were grey
but the scent green.

I glided up the slope
in the colour-blind night
while white stones
signalled to the moon.

A period of time
a few minutes long
fifty-eight years wide.

And behind me
beyond the lead-shimmering waters
was the other shore
and those who ruled.

People with a future
instead of a face.