Ivan Landzhev

You and I

in those sneakers

and dirty t-shirts

with ready-witted messages

stamped on them

with narratives

smeared on them

are ourselves

on the asphalt of Sofia

striving for biography

we spread bad influence

we saunter

you and I

are poets

we’re trying

we are bored by people

and impressed by man

man is not in the city

here are just the people

but we need the city

especially at night the noise

while we’re writing by the window

we need it

like live music

we need it

like religion needs a miracle

we need the city

like lust

alcohol and other stuff

we need the city

like the city itself

needs conflagration

deluge

pandemic

corruption

and mindless tyrants

like it needs the timely disasters

all the trash and tar

thus we too need the city

the streets the bars

the intervals

the dark

and the other more common

causes for poetry

you and I

where will we go

and what will we write

what will we shout about

if we are not along with the city –

pastoral stories or

some idyll?

Why this when we could –

hard and undiluted

all the living that we drank –

just tell of

Translations: Ivan Landzhev

While alive, I was:

needless

fireworks and gambols,

unnecessary movements

on the guitar frets,

on stages,

movement of heroin

from the plunger to the elbow,

movement –

through the veins.

While I was living, they didn’t understand my raving.

They said: “Suicide, that’s just not fighting,

and to fight, that’s suicidal.”

Well then, you think of something new.

I’ve decided for myself. I shot.

Now I’m a stump,

dry, leafless.

Allocated to the middle ring of the Seventh Circle.

Since I’m a tree I never move against my will,

I feel stable and perpetuated.

I’m in the uncut version of the bonus track.

In Song 13.

I remember in the albums they were 12.

Always.

Hell suspiciously sounds like a song from Nevermind

and inside me there’s a bootleg copy:

Inferno, not with nine, but with three times nine –

precisely twenty-seven –

annual rings.

Imagine

how many sinners

fill each one!

Classics all around me:

Hemingway and Mayakovsky,

to the right and from the left respectively,

are my two neighbor stumps.

And just as the lyrics go

there are Harpies nesting in the branches

(one Harpy’s name is Courtney)

Behind me there are more junkies and artists,

I look around:

Yes, in view of all this universal poetry,

I am too grunge.

I don’t fit in at all in Hell’s perusal.

The crowd is chosen,

all popular blokes.

I can hardly impress them:

with my twigs, I couldn’t catch a chord,

I couldn’t play even my simple riffs.

Briefly, this is Hell.      

I just hope that they could make a top-notch Fender

out of all this wood

and that a red-haired kid would practice with it

in Seattle,

Sofia,

or maybe Sliven,

teen spirit would smell like resin

and everything would be the same again.

Translations: Ivan Landzhev

The strong man is having breakfast

every morning at the same specific time.

He looks at birds out the window

and all of them he sees as game.

If it so happens that he reads,

the strong man reads

                                Heidegger

and never Novalis. There’s

nothing romantic about him.

Here:

The same woman calls him every night

to go to a bar, where she is sitting and

she is admiring most deliberately

the shoulder of another strong man.

But the strong man never finds out.

Of course – he simply doesn’t go.

Yes. And while these and those rules last,

and the laws are being forged, I just sit there.

(Inside the attic

studio it’s night-time).

I put ice, not more

than I would need.

I listen hard to music,

made by fragile people.

Half of them are still alive,

but when I think about it, most

                                             of them are not…

Outside is raining, it’s drumming against

the skylights, the city is pained by the drops.

A grey screen, cankered by

signal disturbances.

When the track is over, you start

and you call, you signal me about yourself,

and how you just annoy me – I know,

again I’m not your first choice.

Inside – all the knowledge in my head,

outside – disturbances, while I

once more put on my clothes

and I arrive

again!

To see

you

and all that which

the strong man

spared himself.

Translations: Ivan Landzhev

I was looking through the city guide,

reading about who’s going to play

at the “Swinging Hall” today.

Soon enough

a black cat

crossed my path.

I knew her,

she was from a mediocre

poem.

I told myself, this can’t be good:

а black cat crossing my path

for a second time.

What could that mean

оn a day like this

but one thing:

that me and her

aren’t in the same

direction.

Translations: Ivan Landzhev

“I want to live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook”

Robert James Fischer

The confidence of the maestro

who moves easily and naturally

his sixteen pieces – I know all about it.

It’s true.

I have a self-opinion.

You have yourself an opinion.

What a grand difference

in a single interval – from here

to me.

From Brooklyn

to Reykjavik.

Well,

haven’t I deserved it

upon such a distance,

mister opponent of mine,

ubiquitous erudite, you?

Haven’t I deserved it:

to climb the spiral stairs

up top and seal myself

inside my rook-shaped house?

Translations: Ivan Landzhev

On the other side

of the Great Chinese Wall

which this Sofia bar is,

among fortposts of empty glasses

and boggy areas of spilled beer,

she is secretly watching me –

my favorite barmaid.

Being in love with a barmaid

is as almost as an insipid cliché

as writing a poem about being in love

with a barmaid.

But poetry is still safe

because I’m not in love,

she’s engaged,

and this poem

concerns some matters of astronomy.

It also concerns the stockings, which the barmaid’s wearing.

They are much more than a trap for customers.

They are the endpoint of the living poets’ cunning plan –

leaning elbows on the bar, they saw her today, refracted

through the greenish beer bottles.

They finish by her hips (the stockings, that is)

and between them is all

that I want to remember from life

and from the laws of astronomy.

I watch her on the chair like that:

the face,

              the back,

the face,

              the back,

                            the breasts…

Аbsinthe-colored, she’s swirling

and loftily fuming

the  e n t i r e  her is smoking!

I’m watching her, I’m thinking:

„And yet she moves”.

Translations: Ivan Landzhev