Galsan Tschinag
The Stone Man
At Ak-Hem
Poems
Translated by Richard Hacken
From
Galsan Tschinag, Der Steinmensch zu
Ak-Hem
(
Return to: The Poetry of Galsan Tschinag
Let this book be dedicated
To Sualak and Arabrab,
the tireless and noble-minded couple
from the spirit-folk ten thousand strong
holding and molding me.
Warmth and
Light
Warmth and light
Were
Tucked
Into my cradle
By mountains
Of the very stone
I am
And by men
Who are those
Mountains
Morning of
Storm
Morning of storm, November’s end
On the branch of blue aspen crashing
Hangs one last leaf
Quaking, robbed of breath, big-eyed
A child clutching the back
Of its murdered mother
Premonition of terror
Flashes lightning-like through
All who see it
Veins and arteries shrivel
To frost-encrusted wires
The storm
Meaning winter
Is the whip
To sting us all
All Trees
Grow Skyward
All trees grow skyward
Each laying a wreath
At eyelid level to encircle my sight
And the flicker-lucent green shadow
Kindles the morning as it sparks
With my help
Into flaming day
All rivers float
A seventy-throated joviality
Whose far extremity
The silver spheres
Leap within me
Winking, all stones run
Towards me
Pushy, stub-nosed questions
Each awaiting the answer
That will dash back at it
Seated, a white foal
Ingrown with its mother
Nomad
Nomad is
The quick breath of a name
For a person
Who dwells with difficulty
It is the look lightly cast
At a world
That exists with difficulty
Everything difficult
Is beautiful as well
Beauty remains
A mystery to itself
It is
The flaw that others
Discover in me
The voucher that I
Sign for myself
Unconquerable those
Who know how to tame
A curse into a blessing
Between worlds and ages
I commute
Believing myself
At home everywhere
Traveler at a standstill
My paths are strewn
With worms of doubt
That hollow me out
A refugee, falling
From advantage to advantage
In the weekend worlds
Of washed-out time rails
A Bigamist
I Live
A bigamist I live
With a passing
And a coming age
Each a trap
Scarcely in the arms
Of the one
I begin to yearn
For the other
With each I create
A paradise
For the other
A hell
Each has her boundaries
Running
Along me
Dividing the other
Sow me here
Sow me there
The sproutling always
Grows me
A fate which I could
Wish on nobody else
But which I myself
Refuse to relinquish
Like a Dog
in Heat
Like a dog in heat
This city-world
Sneaks and squirms and flees
Into every hiding-place
Morning after morning
I leave the cave that I
Have shared for one more night
With the loneliness beast
And continue the search
For faces
To shine on me perhaps
And thaw out
A nest of ice eggs
From my many lonely nights
But I am pushed away
Into exhaust fog
Suspended in emptiness
I pine away
For human beings
Watching the mannequins
Move past me
I feel
My face
Freeze into a mask
And the rest of my body
Right down to the pit for prey
My stomach
Shrivels into
Geometric, skillfully
Shelved replacement parts
Memory
The camel had a set of antlers
Legend tells us
The deer borrowed it
For a wedding
And hasn’t brought it
Back to this day
The celebration must
Still be going on
The legend concludes
Deceptive intent is
Not an issue
So the deer still needs
To show up and
Return
The unaccustomed decor
The camel waits
And waits
His eyes scanning
The distance
While he drinks
Animals have
A long, gentle memory
To Eva
Strittmatter
We have nothing to explain
To each other
We’ve swum
In the same stream
We’ve tripped
Over the same rock
And now drift
Stripped of bark
Two bodies of spring water
And have kept in sight
That bay
So kind
As to take us in
Vita
At the vague, shallow beginning
Of the way I think I was
An entity with wings
A bubbly, bright sparrow
That had slipped away from the
Mushroom-round, fleecy-felt nest of my yurt
Without wings I could
Never have escaped
The talons of the mountain steppe
And its centuries-
Backward age
Above the world of things
I flew about
Long searching for a landing spot
Nowhere did I find it
The earth was
Paved shut with hard stones
Every interstitial space
Sown thick with sightless beings
I flew all
About
Until one day
The wind in my wings was spent
So down I plunged
Under me
Metallic sounds and flashing sights
When this occurred
I was a different entity
Without face or pain
By Night I
Rested
By night I rested
On waves
That once again carried
Me away from the castle
Protruding
At massive angles
From the round body
Of earth mother
Gray houses pushed hard
Against blue distances
Lugging and tugging
And rubbing me round
In the flame light
Of fluttering grasses
Whose roots I knew in me
Like quivering veins
Pathways pressed
On the chapping wound
That once, defying the gravitational
Pull of my mountain steppe
I had inflicted on it
A Stone
Lets Go of the
A stone lets go of the mountain peak
Flies down, aiming for the slope
With its rambling rivulets
Strikes, wounds it and
Forces an embryonic river
To stop for a few ticks
The bright vein pattern
In the black rock
Is, who knows, the pardon
For wounds gouged
Into the mountain body
Rumors rampage
From clear skies
In my temple beats
The blood disrupted in the river
Time bomb
Set to my measured life
It will lie there
Holding me in its power
And eating away at me
Until a kind and welcome word
Arrives
To defuse it
Invocation
Clearly I am
A narrow, fragile
Arrow, let fly
From your broad and powerful
Thumb, O Sky
All the more quickly
Do I fly, willing
Now that I’ve been launched
Never to tire
Before the goal has been reached
O Father
When the
Blue Rain
When the blue rain
Courses to gray and
The tear-shedding shrub
Weeps out its sparrows
Longing overtakes me
After the snowstorms
And the rowdy herds
All my inner strings
Are pulled forward
Dragging me to winter
The growing child
I carry beneath my heart
Storm Hour
The coming day of a passing age
Rises up and blows to a storm
Elements leap from their tracks
Congregate at a run and
Instantly turn to flame
Pelting and clattering
Screeching and howling
Whistling and raging
A world crumbles to rubble
The birds in you flutter wildly
Threatening to break apart the nest
They force you back to yourself
You put out your feelers
Awaiting and aware
It is the birth hour
Of a poem
Crosswise
Slicing
Crosswise slicing
Through the storms of time
I hold tight to primordial
Surroundings
Before me the exemplar mountain
Survives and rises
Unshakeable, standing
In this winter night
He sees his children
The stones
To safety
Taking every storm
Upon his back and
Therefore being
Mountain
A Tiny
Ring of Light
A tiny ring of light
I wandered
Through the rain-day
In certitude
Of lighting up many more
Rain-wet autumns with you
I allowed myself
To settle in at several spots
Splicing and bundling myself
I kindled my increased light
To a flame and touched it
To the skin of the one
Crouching at my knee, so he
Might catch fire
Might flee
From the niche of lonesomeness
And blaze a corridor
Into twosomeness
It Is
September Still
It is September still
Tomorrow at the latest, the time-sparrow
Will nest under another’s roof
And will weigh more heavily
On the grove of aspen that has grown
Without peril for months
But whose yellow flames for days
Have mimicked approaching dread
Inevitable passing hangs in the air
The passion
That I haven’t been able to tame
That you haven’t wanted to quench
Is it mortal
As well?
Two
Dark-Colored Yaks –
Two dark-colored yaks –
Trembling kidneys of the steppe
Beside the sky-path populate
The slopes of my homecoming thoughts
The dew-moist morning air bubbles blue
Streams with bright veins and floats them
Towards me
As I, heroic knight of my
Own self-crafted life epic
Rolling the heights down and the horizons up
Rush home
Foreign, pointy-roofed worlds lurk beneath the sky
Poking their barbs up
Tearing and shredding the shroud of heaven
But the healing wind
From my luminescent brow
Blows shut all wounds
Currents of air pick up speed
And the yaks glide
One skyline closer to me
I spur on the steed
One more clump of steppe
Turning myself inside out
I hold ready the nesting places
For the trembling kidneys
Just as a mother
Holds open a warm lap
For her freezing children
Fleeing: A Ballad
The clouds
Are in flight
Shadow-choked land
Is the ghastly track
Of their fear
Understanding
Is in this eye of mine
That never tires of watching them
Scatter apart
Only to fly together again
All the while continuing to flee
I stand here exhausted
Having a hard time filling
My time-quota on earth
Early I saw the nakedness
Of aggressive dealings
Now I’ve had my fill
Of slimy soft-peddling too
I’m at my end, I am
The two-legged, bullet-spewing animal
That exalts itself to crown of creation
Ultimately damned as slave
To an unappeasable stomach
Loathe to destroy
Little leads me to preserve
Those things crumbling apart
This ball of earth is, as everything on it
In flight
I have fled
Since the hour of birth
From the truth called end
But it has finally caught me
I realize
It took a long time
To convince me
Of the pointlessness of my venture
To note that the cloud moves
The river flows, the wind blows
Is merely the work
Of our double-tongued speech
Of circumlocution
Every thing flees
Ends in flight
I endure, give myself over
Agree to exit
The tottering stage
Of the prank called life
To the
Stars
First Canto
In raging snowstorm winters you were to me
Grazing antelope on the broad meadow of heaven
Under your blowing breath on the resounding steppe
I guarded my freezing herd and
Poured out some warmth to them
That had fallen down on me
With the nights you pricked apart
And laid vanquished foes at my feet
I saw you grow to lanterns
That led me along a lighted path
Through the years of dark time
At decisive battles you were
Blazing letters that formed encouraging slogans
To encircle my endangered head
In the clear coolness of approaching autumn now
I recognize in you those
With whom fate wove me cell by cell
I see father and mother, brothers and sisters
Gone and lost one by one
Now shining brightly in celestial heights
Beside them the yurt, my ragged little warm nest
That I never found again on my return home
Slowly I doze off
At some time I was among you
In the shimmering swarm of futures
Scarcely recognizable, just a milk splash
And I know, in the enticing midst of those
Who received the red juice of life
With me from a common navel
Is the place appointed me when I
Ignited as light
Return to the sky
To the
Grasses
Second Canto
One does it with gold
The other with silk
Others still with paper
But I have it with you
You grasses of my steppe
Once again you have
Completed the miracle
Paying proper heed, growing
You have come to me
In different years, different bodies
The flames of wind that
Blow through you
Are dreams of their ancestors
Still dreaming, I plan to
Plant them in my grandchildren
The ocean of light that
Streams off from you and
Eases the world of blindness
Is by one tiny trifle
My work as well
For night after night
I heat up
From longings
And give myself over to the pain and pleasure
Of burning
To the
Steppe
Third
Canto
At last the storm subsides
The raging and crashing sea is gone
Having disappeared into the blue-yellow steppe
But the peace has not
Returned to me in any way
The forces still hold their mutual deadly grip
Fear stands ram-rod alert in me
Pain cauterizes through my diaphragm
And I know what it means to be the steppe, o Mother
I thank you and I thank you
For each gravel-stone lying
And for each blade of grass standing
Are you asleep?
Perhaps
But likely not; you’re thinking and
Collecting yourself for the next battle
With a shriek I address the storm
Raging inside me:
Here I stand and face my fate
To be a sequel to the steppe!
Fate of a
Guest
Bittersweet the bread of graciousness
On the banquet table of a world
That you, little prodigy beast,
Only allow yourself to see
In your Sunday state and when the mood is right
You trip
over habitudes
That manifested themselves in your absence
And that lurk with malice now
Beaten down by friendliness
You behave charmingly to no avail
While often thinking vengeful thoughts
About the nakedness
That others must have as well
Not invited as yourself
You are the stray
So don’t spoil the strange game
Join in, take
Whatever comes
Chew and swallow
The sweet cud, slimed
With the tear of rancor
Stuck in your throat
Smile, nod and talk of gratitude
Pay the going price
Poetry
Making
The wall clock strikes four
As if tossing
Dead hours
At my feet
I understand the rage
That gurgles in its cogs
And snatch myself
Away from the cordial cuddle
Of sleep
Thus for the rest
Of this day at least
Long since flown
Past
I can squeeze the udder
Of time
Determined
To get at the
Milk from which
A spirit
Can be distilled
To numb
Mortality
Keeping
Still
In the smug larder of life
Where everyone knows it all
And therefore feels
The need to talk
Or permission to bellow
Be still
The stone man at Ak-Hem
Has been silent four thousand years
And has written history
With his silence
He will begin to speak
When a world
Of liberty-taking
Falls to ruin
On
its own prattle
To the
Rain
This putrefacting body
Stewing in its own gall
How gladly would I have
Turned it inside out
And hung it open
For streaming water
To wash the bruises out
Once and for all
From thousand-fold
Mutilated tissue
Targeted by blows of blind rage
And to mix this slippery shallow age
Into the communal swill
As seasoning
I, the
Pulsing Blood
I, the pulsing blood of the Altai
Circle the earth
In reverse orbit to the missionaries
Who invade my steppe and my yurt
Breaking through the lockless door
To shake foundations
I ripple through a hypothermic body
With unspent heat I work
My way to its heart
Opening up a blocked artery
Here and there
I flow through soulscapes
And should a demon plotting against me, a desert,
Cross my path at any time
I counterattack immediately with my congenital
disease
Of fraternal friendliness
My Land
My land
With its heights and depths
Its gaps and strictures
Like my life
My life
Furrowed and pock-marked
Flecked with blue and gray
Like my land
Light
In both
Encircled by shadows
Shadows in both
Infused
With light
Confrontation
In the middle of nocturnal steppe
The gray wolf
Stands a sudden five paces away
Measures me
With a devil gaze
And bares his teeth
Five paces from him
I cower-squat, measure him
With a hunter's gaze
And click my tongue
With strategem
Both of us burn with murder-lust
But neither has
The tools
To bring about
The other’s death
Through a pane of glass
We stare
At each other
For a protracted moment
And each then lets
The other go
And so the two of us
Remain alive
Taking note
Of our common fate
Trusting
The Quiet
Never trust that hour of quiet at early dawn
In the winter steppe
Death crouching quietly
Wind-chill claws grabbing
Hold of you from every side
Time and again a pale shroud
Awkwardly falls across you
Specter beams peeling away
From moon-ice
Keep vigilant and show the steppe
You are its child
Shake off
The burial shroud
Go for the monster’s throat
Chop him and crush him underfoot
Drive your will through the herd
Awaken and sharpen
Hoof and antler on every limb
Once you have succeeded
Then you’ve seized the moment by its scalp
You have escaped
Death again
And have another day before you
To peel open the skin
Scarred shut
To get at
The sweet juice of bliss
The spicy meat of euphoria and
Make love to life
By Your
Side
By your side I live luminous
Kin to the sun fire
I burn and radiate
Unsparingly to all
In need of light and warmth
At your side I foam up
Against those years
On course to drown me
I divert the stream of time
And drift to my beginnings
At your side I am a child
That makes me holy – and often foolish
And deliberately I forget
The free game that I am
With a retrieved simplicity
For the sake of others
The Path
to Your Yurt
The path to your yurt
Is strewn with stones
Roughhewn but talkative
From them I learn
The way you stand in the swivel-wind
That blows from all sides
Lashing you
With rancorous rumors about me
And from the way I take that news
They recognize me and
Grant me leftover sparks
From the sun of a million eons
Sealed in embers
Lying awake in them
Spark-wielding, I take the wind
By storm and duel
That windstorm
To stoke myself
To fire, to flame
That’s why I come
To your door
Glowing and flaming
Morning
after Morning
Morning after morning
On a side street you chase
A nocturnal dream
Gray strips of asphalt
Spool beneath your wheels until
My heart, hung high
From the traffic light for you
Winks and flashes back
You wait for the red blood
And watch expectantly
For a wound at the spot
Where our paths once crossed
A thousand mornings pass away
But on the thousand and first
Borne by a dreamless night
You find that traffic light gone
You drive on, gliding painlessly
Through the scarred intersection
You’ve recovered from me
I Can Show
the Luster Sheen
I can show the luster sheen
But not the stigma scar
That sky-colored velvet
Threaded with silver
Heavier than chain mail
Pressed down on me
I live more nakedly than ever
May grass grow tall
Along the road to my success
To fill the potholes
At whose cost
You have
Come to me
Forlorn
and Forgotten
Forlorn and forgotten
Here you are again
A thin broth
In the dog-dish of life
Incapable of imagining that any mutt
Could come up and
Give you a lick or a lap
Entangled
Entangled
In the gears of time
I fly
To the constellations
And chase
One star
Past planets
Whose proximity in me
Always awakens new landscapes
From sleep with a jolt
Each
Each sunrise
Over the steppe
Is a miracle
Worth noting in my ledger book
For I am
The beating heart
The praying lips
Of mother earth
Old men of time have
Done their work on me
At the tips
Of my ten fingers
You can see their marks
Compiled as ancient scripture
Each cipher
Burned into me
By the sun
The mother of light and fire
The wishes
Of a prince with the
Stamp of earth and sky on him
Must never go unfulfilled
All success on earth
Blows
His way
Ballad of
Ana Jechai, the Nomad-Bride
Toward the end of your 80th and middle
of my
Not yet exfoliated nomadic autumn
You, flower Ana, coming from great distances
Set foot on grazing and hunting grounds of the high
Altai
Beyond the boundary of nations and ages
My shepherd eyes and hunter sense comprehended you
At once, you flaming-maned mare, you spark-tailed
gazelle
I crept up to you, threw my lasso
And had you – zap! – in a loop of rope
Up ran the botanist, who has dealt so many times
With herbs, at times mature, at times dried and
limp
Now this was a true flower in front of our noses
Forget about 80, you weren’t even 18
That insistent way you smelled, Ana!
With you, my catch, I faced a trilemma:
1.
The shepherd
mounts the mare
2.
The hunter
shoots the gazelle
3.
The botanist
plucks the flower
The longer I stood, the less I knew
Each of my characters, tough as nails, refused to
give you up
And so I had to wake the chieftain
With hooves, the stallion with horns, the wise buck
A man of standing and steel
And he was the one to make the decision: you were
Renamed Ana Jechai and chosen to be a bride
One night in the midmost month of autumn
I took you on, the steppe was our bed
It was the field of race and harvest, the battle
mat, for I was
The shepherd, hunter, botanist, everything
permitted a chieftain
I protected, slaughtered, shot, dissected, plucked,
enjoyed you
With knife-sharpened eyesight, pan-heated skin
With all the ranges and racks of my insatiable
senses
I climbed your hills, crept into your hollows,
examined you
The creator must have been confused
So much of you was stuck in the wrong spot, but
your glands
Were anatomically correct, separating water, milk,
blood, honey, gall
In the proper sequence and proper amounts
May-the-heavens-damn-us-both if a single pore
Of our united body gave cause for deception that
hour
When we two stones crashed into each another,
striking a spark
We two woodpiles stoked one another, kindling a
flame
You were the most fiery mare imaginable, most noble
of gazelles
Fragrant-most of flowers, Ana; you were, are, and
will always be
Irrepressibly wondrous thing, milk white – sun
yellow – sky blue
Still I know: none are divorced in these latitudes
and longitudes
Widowed perhaps, no more or less than elsewhere
But raised up to virgin glory!
The
Library at Tuva
Tip of
the hat to the Kanjur, the Bible, the Koran
Tip of the hat to whatever it is man sanctifies
My people’s shrine is called Altai
Whose scriptural scribes are wind and sun
Multi-summered water, multi-wintered snow
And callused innumerable living extremities
With names like: feeler, claw, paw, hoof, sole…
The Altai with its white mane is our land register
Whose memory reaches back quadrabillions of years
With stony pages in whose inmost fabric
Tracks and traces slumber with frozen fatigue
Sky is
the name of our textbook
The Altai’s discourse and scholarly gradation
Where letters glow like stars and a passage
Awaits when terrestrial fruits are ripe
And pollen dust has shaken off
Like a kindly
father, the sky takes pigtail grasp
Of transient shapes poking through the pores of planet earth
And pulls them up
So ancient basic substances can overwhelm and etch them
Their tracks spread cell by cell
To cracks and ridges, welts and fissures
Until they flow out as lines of commentary
On stories undeniable
All opened to the same chronological page
The
writing of wind and sun and water
Feeds on beauty recumbent in the ages
Wisdom and wit emanate from the collected works of time
Whether by hand of man, beak of eagle, or crown of tree
Each one a book cross-sectioned with annual rings
Embossed ever deeper the more the wind blows across them
Tip of
the hat to the Bible, the Koran, the Kanjur
Tip of the hat to any book stored in shelved compartments
As for me, I live in a weather niche free from irrelevance
And recognize in my earth and my sky that library of antiquity
Visible to every eye, palpable to every nerve ending