Three Poems by Lidija Dimkovska

Translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh

Hump

In front of me a man is pushing

a barrow full of empty plastic bottles.

The path is narrow, I can’t overtake him.

I follow him, watch him.

Worn-out trousers,

furrowed hands,

a pair of mismatched slippers,

and under the ragged T-shirt

—a hump, marked with pain

as with a Star of David.

He’s the same age as me,

of a time long past.

In vain has he memorized

the short poems about the fatherland,

unnecessary like theory learned by heart

but never put into practice in this world

where today he has

neither father nor fatherland.

Has someone underwritten his life

in black and white,

or do only these bottles rate him among the living?

The bottles bounce,

he leans into the rhythm of the barrow,

I hear his stomach rumble,

and a sigh escape his mouth.

The path is long, we tread one behind the other,

I in the beat of his gait,

he in the cadence of the three wheels.

I feel that out of my heavy-heartedness,

from the uneasiness of my senses,

hope, future and aim evaporate,

the liquids leach out of my organs,

the air is squeezed out, my weight dissipates,

I no longer have content,

I’m turning into an empty plastic bottle

that gets smaller and smaller and then throws itself

among the other bottles,

I take the least room in the cart,

and the man, sinking into his own deepest place,

only now begins to sweat,

wipes his face first with one hand then with the other

while the barrow topples

and he stops, takes off his T-shirt

and dabs the streams of sweat running down his neck,

turns his head left and right,

but sees no one behind him,

only the tip of his own hump,

marked with pain as with the Star of David.

Behind the Door

When I took the gun off the nail,

the cracked plaster behind the door crumbled,

an imprint of emptiness opened up in the patch.

How many people can one kill with it?

And how many without pressing the trigger?

In a dream, or with a curse, with a leer

or with eyes to the ground, without a word?

With a sneer, with poisonous laughter,

with a swearword, with a thought, with a forethought?

How do the snipers from the last war

spend the peacetime?

I disarmed myself, buried the gun in the ground.

Then I hung Dürer’s hare behind the door,

stuffed, with a small mirror around its neck.

The draught in the house

turned it now to the door now to the patch,

like a pendant hanging from the rear-view mirror,

and it kept beating itself in the little mirror

believing it was hitting another little hare.

In its dream all people were hares,

and all hares people. They waged wars with my gun

till sunrise, undecided, but with casualties.

One day I found my front door gone,

someone had taken it away with him, to his grave or to the market.

Cracked and crumbled the wall gaped,

no gun, no hare, no past.   

What else could I hang on it

but the little purse with the key without a keyhole,

with basil tucked in its bow,

and under it a calendar with no year

with tombstone photos

of us all, neither alive nor kicking.  

SUMMA SUMMARUM    

It takes nine months for the fetus

to develop into a human being.

And then a childhood, youth and old age

to be one.

And whether it will develop into a human being worthy of the name

no one can tell.

A whole life might not prove long enough

to become a proper person.    

And it takes just a second for a body

to turn into a corpse.

You live for yourself, and die for others

so they can’t live without you.

Even when forgiven with good

evil is remembered as evil.

But good is never remembered for good

turned into evil.

You can wash your face a hundred times,

but never your honour.

When washing your face you wet your sleeves,

and rubbing clean your honour soaks your conscience.

You need soap and water for your face,

your honour needs the conscience of the blood.

And now

who will gloat more:

The Nobody and Nothing who has become Something

or the Something that Nobody and Nothing

has turned into?

Lidija Dimkovska (b.1971, Skopje, Macedonia) has published six books of poetry and three novels, awarded and translated in more than 20 languages. In the States in 2006 Ugly Duckling Presse from N.Y. published her first collection of poetry in English Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers, in 2012 Copper Canyon Press published her second book of poetry »pH Neutral History« (short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award 2013), and in 2016 Two Lines Press published her novel A Spare Life (long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award 2017).

Ljubica Arsovska is editor-in-chief of the long-established Skopje cultural magazine Kulturen Život and a distinguished literary translator from English into Macedonian, and vice versa. Her translations from English into Macedonian include books by Isaiah Berlin, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and plays of Lope De Vega, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, and Tenessee Williams. Her translations from Macedonian into English include works by Lidija Dimkovska, Dejan Dukovski, Tomislav Osmanli, Ilija Petrushevski, Sotir Golabovski, Dimitar Bashevski, Radovan Pavlovski, Gordana Mihailova Boshnakoska, Katica Kulafkova, and Liljana Dirjan, among others.

Patricia Marsh is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, author of The Scribe of the Soul and The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto, and translator of a number of plays and poems from Macedonian into English. She lectured in English at the University of Skopje for a long period before returning to live and work in the UK in 1992.