Lyrikzeitung & Poetry News
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57. In your language
A Preliminary Sketch Concerning a Language
By Afzal Ahmed Syed
In your language every line begins from an opposite end. The pronunciation of its words changes from day to night and their orthography changes with the change of seasons. A new word enters it on some special day and on some days a familiar word is made obsolete. The shape of its letters changes with your change of clothes. You make no effort to put together words that are crushed under feet from your carelessness, because your language is the world’s richest. The first kiss, the second kiss and any count of kisses are all identified in your language with separate words. If anything ever causes you to become tearful, all the books in the whole world written in your language become drenched.
translated from the Urdu by Musharraf Ali Farooqi
from: Asymptote. Issue Oct 2012
Afzal Ahmed Syed
has translated works by a number of East European poets including Miroslav Holub (Czech), Yehuda Amichai (Hebrew), Dunya Mikhail (Arabic), Tadeusz Borowski (Polish), Zbigniew Herbert (Polish), Jan Prokop (Polish), Tadeusz Rozewicz (Polish), Wisława Szymborska (Polish), Aleksander Wat (Polish), Marin Sorescu (Romanian), Osip Mandelstam (Russian), Orhan Veli (Turkish), as well as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jean Genet, William Saroyan and Jonathan Treitel. His website can be found
here
.
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Lyrikzeitung & Poetry News 
überhaupt sehr spannende zeitschrift. ich fand sie auf der suche nach rosmarie waldrop. hier ein frühgriechisches fragment:
Alcman
3b
Her sweetness isn’t empty:
Astymeloisa is coy
and quiet. She lifts
the garland high
like a star that falls
from burning sky,
like an incandescent
branch, or goose down
soft and fluttering:
her glance melts
limbs like desire,
her glance dissolves
like sleep or death.
http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Poetry&id=116&curr_index=1&curPage=Poetry
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