Three Afrikaans Poems

POETRY Ilse van Staden is a writer, artist, and veterinarian. Though most of her published work (poetry, short stories, and a novel) is in her home language, Afrikaans, she has now also published two novels in English. Peter Constantine’s recent translations include works by Augustine, Rousseau, Machiavelli, and Tolstoy; he is a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the PEN Translation Prize as well as a National Translation Award. He is professor of translation studies at the University of Connecticut. Visit worldlit.org to read Peter Constantine’s interview with Ilse van Staden. Three Afrikaans Poems by Ilse van Staden return oh, that fish could swim through my garden again! Stately as whale sharks, speckled pacifists, or goldfish freed from small glass domes like marigolds between creepers maybe a coelacanth or two— millennia back there was a lake here, a sea, if one believes the history of the rocks rock, house, origin, everything goes back an eternity I gaze like the old, old philosophers forward into the past and over my back break waves of tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, some year, amid the earthworms gathered there among the skeletons of leviathans, serpents, and bones of other obsolete animals, finally mine too. door you who are holding the hammer in one hand say you blatantly and unashamedly say that this opening should be achieved with caution no bullets through churches open sesame is good enough because wood like trees still understands words softly spoken the magic of a word of doubt without ax or chisel. traveling by house toward death as the orchestra apparently continued to play, it is fitting I share with Mozart the moment when the house suddenly raises anchor and pulls away from the rock the chains break birds fly off indignantly worms go tumbling through clumps of earth and carefully the house points its bow past shed and rock garden through the portholes I can see the old karee willow meekly fluttering its eyelashes at our once-in-a-lifetime maiden voyage. Translations from the Afrikaans By Peter Constantine WORLDLIT.ORG 37 PHOTO BY SEAN THOMAS / UNSPLASH

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