Zorhan Anchevski. Photograph courtesy of the author
ZORAN ANCHEVSKI (b. 1954) — poet, translator, essayist, and scholar — has published ten books of poems. His awards include: Studentski Zbor, for best first book of poems (1984); the international poetry award Giacomo Leopardi in Italy (2004), The Miladinov Brothers, the most prestigious national poetry award (twice) for Celestial Pantomime (2019 and for Puzzled Compasses, 2022); Grigor Prlichev Award for a long poem (The Lives of the Horses, 2022), and the Macedonian Writers’ Association Atso Shopov Award for best book of verse (for the same book, 2023).
He has also published a number of essays, reviews, and a book-length study in literary theory and criticism, Of Tradition (2007). He is the editor and translator of several poetry and short story anthologies in English and of many major British, American and Macedonian poets and prose writers into Macedonian or English. For his work in translation, he was awarded the national translation award Grigor Prlichev (2001). Selections from his poetry have been translated into more than twenty languages and published in various magazines and anthologies at home and abroad.
He is currently a vice-president of the Macedonian Writers’ Union, two times secretary and president of Macedonian P.E.N., former president of the Organizing Board of the Struga International Poetry Festival (2002-2007). The poems here (translated from Macedonian into English by the author & edited by Tom Petsinis) are reproduced, with the author’s permission, from the Puzzled Compass (winner of the Miladinov Brothers Award for a best poetry book in 2022). Zoran lives and works in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia.
Ars Notoria
The Words
I can’t give up my eternal ‘me’ – poetry.
‒ Matsuo Basho, 17th c.
Seldom has language embraced you like true love
when you needed to deposit with equal care
the syllables of silence
to the hungry corners of the house.
At times, you sensed the whiff of words as a drift
of brisk snowflakes that refused to fall in line
in harmonic order
on blank music sheets.
At other times they seemed like boulders
that couldn’t rumble down to the mild valleys
like nomads galloping on wild horses
along the steppes.
Often they threaded themselves painfully through
a needle’s eye that always desired to embroider
the dowry linen
with the seasons of the year.
Sometimes like swift pigeons they rose
to infinite heights and then plunged down
to the earth to unite lustfully
with their dry shadow.
Once they hobbled along cobbled streets chained
with heavy manacles and shackles, later they danced
with the slender legs
of a passionate Maenad…
The words have neither age nor expiry date.
They still live in houses with no roofs and windows
and every night they dream
of being wide awake
so at dawn, like falling stars, to start a journey
riddled with ambush and danger, only to learn
never to return to false homes and the soft bed
of silence covered with a blanket of shuddering moths.
*
Beauty
Is there a greater beauty, I wonder,
than the inner one,
once it received in itself and strengthened
the outer one?
If so, the air above this deaf kingdom
is purified of ugly curses and droll dirges
and finds easily answers to all questions,
a man starts his quest for a man without fear.
Then your heart sinks to your feet
and makes them follow its rhythm,
a youthful brook warbles beneath your skin,
and the song cannot wait for a better day.
Then even the entrenched hostile armies
wave white flags rimmed with wisdom,
and the poor, accustomed to their poverty,
see the field as a loaf of freshly baked bread.
As the world’s axes begin their sprightly dance,
and the oceans and continents move closer,
only then can we read the unit of measure
that lies between birth and death – life.
*
A Song – An Iceberg
With one peak crested and bright,
you meander along the widespread blue.
Three quarters of your meaning is hidden
for better times and bolder looks.
Thawing and freezing daily,
no one can measure you – no one can hug you
and feel your heart beating or beaten:
you wander alone in mist and bitter cold.
We stroke the words that have been with us,
but you are out of reach – you melt at a touch
and turn into a cold current that floods dreams
and freezes the body of mud to endless vigil.
You have neither youth nor age –
but as a white whale dreaming of both,
glide through darkness and time,
making us learn your unmapped path by heart.
You numb our minds: whether a vision
or a waking dream … We follow you, and you – us.
*
The Song’s Hearth
The song’s hearth turned into a cold dungeon
of oblivion. Yes, the words are the tinder for its fire,
but the mold that silenced them after long years
denies them bringing forth a single morsel of a meal
when lavish toasts go swiftly round in brimming cups.
Cries and screams instead echo in the blighted air
where birds have no right of passage, nor beauty thrives –
it shrank like a sickly spring, its blood-flow clogged,
a werewolf drinks it and waves its tail with a rusted snarl,
snatching all that makes sense, its golden fleece dense.
The song’s hearth speaks with those who carry
their own marble funeral busts on their backs,
and we lack courage to say a modest “thank you” to them,
to breathe out a whiff of courage unto their quiet quills
and scare off sorrow and silence from their auras.
You stand before it and summon the good spirits
of the word, reviving the cold flames of their frail wings –
newborn monarchs winging from behind the cold stars.
*
A Song – A Live Fire
He who made you, stole fire from the gods.
A pagan, even an alien to you, to us a parent
whose scream froze in the snows of the Caucasus
though destined to thaw for offspring to come.
All memories of the distant past seem to be your birds
born of ash that smells of lilac and immortelle.
The address that you passed on from generation
to generation is not the same – does it exist at all?
Alone, you are a human voice broken by the desert –
the most sorrowful of all invented instruments,
but also a spark that rolls like a grain of sand
and gathers others of its kind to a common purpose:
touching and rubbing on their way, they ignite a fire
with volcanic passion and desire that create
new pumice islands in the ocean of blue silence.
*
Prophet
for Bogomil Gjuzel (1939-2021)
No, I am not an ancient prophet, you say,
who could tell the future with ease,
nor was it ever my intent to be.
I am a man who sits at a crossroad
waiting for a young poet to pass by,
not so much to profess his path,
as to nod at the one he’s already taken
and not say a single word.
Such a prophet I am, you say.
I can’t make the impossible possible,
but I can for a fleeting moment make it
accessible at least and then for ages
calmly wait for the end of the past
so I might read the last messages
inscribed on bones blanched by dust…
and then – not say a single word.
No, no – I am not an ancient prophet, you say.
My days are numbered, a handful of darkness and milk
splashed on the parched soil thirsty for offspring.
My words swarm in the last heavy drop,
sizzle and crackle like hot oil in a pan.
Now I stand shameless before pure time,
with open palms bearing the inscription
of the greatest illusion on earth and sky:
Reality is all.
*
The Old Woman Says
for Vanja Lazarova (1930 – 2017)
The old woman says, songs are sung with a hungry heart
in barren years of dried stalks and deaf seeds,
with cracked feet and a trickle of blood on a sharp sickle –
though not as sharp as the words that feed the singer.
The old woman says, I part the songs with wicker walls
for they fight off the floods of ugly words
that threaten to rush from one song into another
and unleash a deluge on the holy world.
Then, I say, the seas will turn into oceans,
lakes will swell, bogs will seize the reeds,
frogs will turn to rhapsodеs and sing in hexameters,
so try to count their feet, rhymes and rhythms…
The song is sung for reasons that make the wheel turn
and scoop water from the millrace to the thirsty furrow.
I part the songs… But can I protect them from harm?
The old woman says, if our sun and moon set for long,
we’ll harvest only short barley and forever mourn aloud
the bygone songs sung with a hungry heart.
*
Dialogue
We talk about the poem
as if skilled sculptors.
Our lips are chisels
burrowing through language
and discarding needless words
like stone chips.
In the end
only silence remains –
the perfect sculpture
of speech.
*
Poet
Pauper and sinner,
miser and executioner,
still carry the outline
of a rainbow
in their soul.
But the one who rises
above the rainbow
exchanges
misery for wealth,
sin for virtue,
malice for wisdom,
crime for beauty –
and becomes
a poet.
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