from SAMAČKI HOTEL: Studijsko putovanje u rodni grad (2023) [“Single Men’s Hotel: A study trip to your native town”]
Translated from the Montenegrin by Will Firth
THE TOWN THAT DESERTED ME
No one in the City saw me, though everyone knew me
That is my place of birth
and the beginning of my death.
As a rule,
that is the cartography of one’s homeland.
There will be no more such wonders.
I pile heavy books
and feel I’m happy.
(I’m nine again,
an eager browser upstairs in the Mladost bookstore.)
Wherever those days go, I go with them—
unbeknownst to today’s inhabitants,
to the sfumato of my early pictures.
I observe the City through the eyes of a person departing
and gauge it with the step of one who returns,
of one who sees farther
—that City on the maddened water.
Look how its vowels slur
and melt away
into the unseen,
into what we cannot hear.
It came and seemed a storehouse of lives,
the nearest thought,
albeit an imaginary narrative
from the books I return to.
No one saw me in the City
because that place
deserted me way back then.
TRAITS OF THE CITY
If cities have their winds—
here it is a late gale.
If they have the time of day—
it is a delirious afternoon.
If they have sounds—
they are frayed echoes of a bell against stone.
Aquatint goes with May,
cinnober with October.
If anyone asks about colors,
you’ll find fossil hues of the end.
And if they think about the waters,
they’ll be carried far away.
We’ll be consigned to the living earth again,
to be buried alive once more.
IF YOU GO TO THAT ESTRANGED CITY
A man of correct insight among those who are duped and
deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the
clocks in town give the wrong time. He alone knows the
correct time, but of what use is this to him? The whole
world is guided by clocks that show the wrong time.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
(tr. T. Bailey Saunders)
If you go to that estranged City
you won’t find anyone you know, anyone close.
Distorted faces will await you on empty squares
preaching the hopelessness of things.
All are turned to face one another and won’t understand you.
Those artful orators of faint-heartedness
will consider you worse than a barbarian,
tell you you never belonged there,
and that your family tree never rooted in that town.
If you go to that estranged City that was once yours,
you won’t find anyone or anything that belonged to you.
So if you decide to go
to that familiar City
—even today,
don’t forget you arrived long ago
in that town without clocks.
The multitude don’t know
when they see you wandering the town,
seeking the contours of the space where you always appeared
at the wrong time.
THE EQUATION OF THE CITY
An equation of silence
Everything of duration becomes
a trip to your native town.
I don’t know where I came into this world,
but I have a good idea where I grew up.
I tamed my voice
even before I got to know language.
Being unaccustomed to loudness
made me live within words.
To recognize silence through sound
is one of the few things left to me.
And equally that people know who speaks that silence,
and to whom I say nothing.
What sense of hearing goes with this poem?
Now, when words supersede us,
we bond in puerile ways.
That’s how it is
when life becomes an equation,
an equation of space...
URBAN FOOTNOTE
Is the City trying to find its genre?
I’m writing you a substantial footnote of sorts,
a guidebook for the intentionally lost.
It’s my way of returning the round-trip ticket
you generously meant for me.
Declare it invalid, like a poem.
And don’t worry—
everything will be as if I’m dealing with it for the first time.
As if this poem never went beyond the City.
Pavle Goranović was born in 1973 in Nikšić, Montenegro. He has an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in Literary Theory. Goranović writes poetry, fiction and essays in the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, now more inclusively termed BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian). From 2003–10 he was an advisor to the president, in 2015–16 Minister of Culture of Montenegro, and from 2016–17 a parliamentarian. In 2013 he was made a member of the Montenegrin Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Will Firth was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1965. His focus is on contemporary writing from the Serbo-Croatian speaking countries and North Macedonia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. He lives in Germany and works as a freelance translator of literature and the humanities. He translates from Russian, Macedonian and all variants of Serbo-Croatian (aka BCMS). His best-received translations of recent years have been Tatjana Gromača’s Divine Child and Andrej Nikolaidis’s Anomaly. www.willfirth.de
World Poetry Review 