Galsan Tschinag
Cloud Dogs
Poems
Translated by Richard Hacken
From Galsan Tschinag, Wolkenhunde
(Frauenfeld, Switzerland: Waldgut
Verlag, 1998)
Return to: The Poetry of Galsan Tschinag
The
Greater and the Lesser Yurt
My yurt throbs and pulses in the steppe
Which is my other grand yurt
The twisted smoke thread
From the lesser
Rising up through the greater
And spiraling into the clouds
Is my umbilical cord
I the common task
Of Father Sky and Mother Earth
Have made a home for three horse lives
At the restless nomadic hearth
And will at some far hour
Migrate across to the
Stones, grasses and cranes
To swim back across
On the great circular river
Toward the waiting,
watching threshold
Of my greater and my
lesser yurt
Obliquely
Obliquely
A beam of sunlight lies
Upon the glacier
The storm bends it
Pelting me
With needles of ice
As I watch
With an eye full of cloud scrap
Drifting toward the beam of light
I pull myself together
Into all my pores
Winter invades
The Wind
of Gray Geese
The wind of gray geese
Rushing over us
Here at dawn
Was still warm
With the smoke of your yurt
The summer- grazing meadow of my dreams
All winter long
In the bird wind
Like a pale shadow
From the heights of dying stars
Lingered a subdued sigh
Of the animal in you
The
Grasses Stand Motionless
The grasses stand motionless
Surrounded by solitude
And listen
The horizons stretch
Totter and escape
The talons of linearity
The steppe flows out
Pushing the mountains
Toward all the winds
Which wander afar
Blue And
Bluer
Blue and bluer
Expanses flutter
High above us
There we see the sky
That watched over you and me
And permitted us
To assault two worlds
To create our single one
We fear
A relapse
Be aware
We will draw the sky
Even deeper into dishonor
Than ourselves
Chechenia
Chechenia means in my language
The wise man
No-one can escape
The truth
That the man with power does not like it
When the powerless man is wise
A child from Samushky
Painted houses that are
Tanks and their windows
Burning tearful eyes
Passers-by have cannon stumps
Aimed at each other
In place of arms
Where the fingers should be
Are bubbling fist-clouds of smoke
From which
Bullets fly
Seeking out
The burning houses
And their windows gone blank
The foreigner will not leave
I know
He’s been inside my house
A hundred years and could live and die
Here as easily as there
I know this
Since I am the last poet of a people
That will not pass on without a struggle
Something On Earth
Something must have happened
On earth
The clouds
That towered
For days and nights above the steppe
Pushing dents
In my winter-tired tent
Are bursting apart now
Moving on in gray clumps
Perhaps a knot loosened
From the great tent whose roof struts
Are beams of sun, moon and wind
Or it was you who sent a bright thought
This way or lured from a hiding place
The dream which
Long expected
Only arrived last night
And which I
Hunkered in hope
Passed on to the coming day
Your Letter
Your letter descends
From its high arc of flight
Striking me
In the midst of my disciplined life
Frightened I fold
The piece of paper and try
To lock it back away in its envelope
Too late
The gunshot words
Have torn gaping breaches in me
Cartridges of efficiency
Lie spent
In my castle courtyard
At The
Hour Of My Fervor
At the hour of my fervor
I was
Flung out as a breeze
Into the wide world
Now full-blown
I’ve grown to a wind
From height to height
For a long time
I’ve been aiming
At the pinnacle
From which I shall rise up
As a storm
If You
Leave Me
If you leave me
I will turn to stone
On the north face of life’s mountain
Exposed to the dust of time
I will hide myself
Burrowing into the soil
Dreams from past ages
Iridescent lichen
Will cover me with their growth
The Brake
Always
I am the brake
On the tracks
That carry you from me
Your landscapes
Now that I’ve set foot on them
Just lie there
Scarcely traversable for others
Even the streams
Flowing past you
Transmit my waves
Inescapably you crouch
In the web
That you spun with me
In frenzied fever
Overnight The
Overnight the forest
Has fallen silent
The maple floats in fog and
Fades
At gray borders of the cold damp meadow
If I know
How the dream ends
That has possessed me
For a thousand nights
Then today I will
Rip it out of me
Along with my own blood
Thrust it
Into the day without evening, without night
And so
Slip past
The rabble without tears
The land without sky
A refugee, a victor
The wind of my steppe
Comes sneaking up
Behind me
With the moon and the stars
Which it has blown my way
Night after night
Breezing in a circle around
The spaces that I fill
It erases
The foreign traces from me
Evening after evening
I reach out
For the maternal hand
That can wash from me
Any vulnerability to be wounded
Your Face
Your face
Is the book in which
Others read us
Your skin
The sheet on which the years
Night out night in have lain
Fading in your autumnally light
Is the trace of a scar
From the flank of surreptitious happiness
Which at some point
Broke out in us
Your lips
Still pucker resolutely
At the advent of autumn
Your eyes
Alternately offer me
Your honey and your salt
The shadow
Falling now and then
On the outline of your cheeks
Is an accusation against me
And the blush beyond
Is my acquittal
Your face
Is the book in which
Others read us
And write further books
About us
The white peak
Of life’s mountain
Hovers above time
Its mane ripples towards me
Fluttering around me
I stand here beneath it
In chronological distress
Goosebumps are
My armor
Against the imminent winter of life
Leafing
Through
Leafing through
The family album
With the faded photographs
You realize
You were a mushroom
That grew to a tree
Now underway
To stone
Nothing can tear you
Out of the earth
From which you’ve grown
The inscriptions of the mountain steppe
Glisten in you
Underway to stone
Is your way home
The instrument
On which the raven blows
As he comes and goes
Must be of top-grade timber
A scrap of night
Darts through the day
Scaring muteness
From its pores
And filling its skin
With rattling vibrations
That simply cannot be
From death
The angry sea
Pours out
Like a curse
Splashing down
On the crooked
Black rooftops
Life glows
Hidden away
In fortresses
The lonely
Stare dementedly
At the blank eyes of walls
Nibbling with mousy courage
And sharing the love
With dogs and cats
That was rejected by humans
Outside sprawls
The city-world
Lame and tame
Sawn asunder
Without pause or mercy
By boxy-tin vehicles
Which rip its clogged arteries open and
Thundering towards each other
Drift past like ghosts
I must
Light
All the fires
Inside me
To withstand
This penultimate day
On earth
The Wind
May the wind
That rocked me to sleep
Shake you awake
It’s easy to trust the power
Of the distance
From me to you
To rouse the breeze to a storm
And so I wish you
The boldness to face
Whatever rushes your way
As its equal
The cloud dogs have
Once again swallowed up the day
And the anxiously awaited
A pickling flank of mutton before you
Evening overtakes the yurt
Nocturnally black
The shadows compress
Blacker than all nights
Of winter combined
The tilting eyes of our cooking grilles
Contort into gaping throats
Spitting and baring their teeth
The lantern glows, flickers and hisses
It must be the black hunchback
Sitting in the wick
Who will not allow the tallow to burn
The flame, that flickering blue cap
On the dwindling crooked head
Threatens to fly away
Once Again
You
Once again you were
The patient soil on which
Lightning struck from the sky
You sat mute with fear
A young girl
Before the abyss
Of my blind outburst
Anticipating a counterstrike
I quickly fanned white-hot embers in me
But the strike was not to be
Instead I viewed a medley mood
From a pleading pair of eyes
I saw that and learned
That kisses are no master key
For a body
Locked away
The lesson came
With a beverage on the side:
The water from your eyes
Quenched my thirst
So I lay there drunken wet
As the night ended
Not knowing if ever or how
To lure out the pains
Barricaded
In your locked-away body
And that was the victory
You won in the dark night
At the valley floor of the tall town
Prior site of your frequent defeats
Do you hear, my spotted pony
What the magpie is jabbering?
The suitors
With drinks and bridal offerings
Are on their way
While the slender maiden
With the great dark eyes
Awaits
Whoosh, more quickly
If you can get me there
Sooner than the others
Then I will consecrate you on high
For the winds of the Altai alone
Will ride you
And some day your equestrian skull
Glacial white
Will rest on a mountain peak
But if you fail
I will chop off
Your neck with its useless mane
Along with four unfit feet
And leave the bloody items
In a heap of hair and muck
For scavengers to pick at
Along with the slender maiden
With her great dark eyes
Still filled with tears
So that the man who undeservedly flies to her
Might die miserably
And the rotten flabby skin
With its sweet and tender patches
Might stick
In his throat, in his thighs
Your four slender sinewy feet
With wing-like pasterns
Carry fate for us both
Ride on, fly
You companion, you carcass
Where Were
You
Where were you, dearest, where was I
At the hour those gentle lights shone
Across our steppe?
It seems to me, they broke away from
Our assembled fire and
Hurried on ahead of us
Interlaced
With the waving blades of grass
They flickered towards me
When I arrived there, drunken with you
And then while they
Flashed past me
With the fleeting antelopes
They pointed to a spot of earth
I understood
The struts of our yurt
And the soles of our children
Will trample them awake
The Person
Nesting
The person nesting
In the hollow
Of your left arm
With whom you
Crumple the heights and
Roll out the expanses
For whose sake you
Carry the morning across
And even an hour or so
Into evening
The person
Whose sun
Rises and sets in you
Whose river
Flows through your pond
Floating away the grit
The person who
For you and your heart
Is a yurt
Inside which
Rime frost of the ages
Blankets you gently as dew
Exalting you to a mountain
Evening
Sky
Something is missing
In the evening sky
Gleaming across at me
Between the poplars
I think of a star
Flickering with tears
Whenever I grow conscious
Of where I am
Seven sun-hours distant
From everything that’s mine
A sparrow without nest or sky
Under a shrub of eyelids
To My
Stone Companions
How can your touch
Be so cold and damp
You stones, my companions
You too are tear-stained
Children of my mountains
Playmates of my ancestors
Everyone looks up and
Marvels at us
To them we are
Simply a feast for the eyes
But who cares to
Understand enough
To remove our
Joys and pains
Who cares
To recognize in you
My partners
And in me your brother
Distant is the steppe
Your mother and mine
Who sends
Her sun across to us day by day
Her moon night by night
The dream
That I’ve jolted into life
Has joined forces with you
I see
Tell it
We ourselves are a dream
We have radiated our light
And will return
To Father Sky
Who dreamed us up
To My
Mountain
Every stone has
Its place
On your body
What will I do
If someday I find
No more space
In the hollows
Of your stony slopes?
Likely I shall
Dissolve in the wind
To howl around you
With the hungry wolves
And the dismissed grasses
Of
summertime
A Shout
A shout
Came to me
By night
It was wistfulness
Wrapped in sound
The wind-bent grass
Of the steppe
Lived inside it
Buzzing and blazing
Welcome, you yelping bundle
Of Igrit race
Breathe your milky breath into my yurt
And ready yourself here with your grandfather
You’ve been awaited on an earth
That has hosted me all told
Tolerably well for eighteen thousand days
At the hour of your advent
No doubt a foal arrived as well
Out there in the steppe
Horse and rider now
Can race together toward maturity
In the wooden cradle
Too wide for you today
Once lay your ancestors
For whom the world
Was often too narrow
Hurry, small stone from the great mountains
On you I impose the duty
Of carrying on the nomadic race
By living me forward
Sky over
Curtain of lead
Lining the path of quick flight
For a nomadic child
Sky without sun
Man without a shadow
Knowingly
People look at each other
Knowing how to be silent
In the company
Of others
Flexible
Flexible
I have become
Like the wind
I conquer distances
Climb the heights
Sneak around corners
Wend my way
Mountain-downward
To the valley
Passing through eyes of needles
Blowing across fields
Where foreign honey ripens
Flexible
I have become
Like wind at the hour
Of autumnal twilight
And just as
Lonely
What Is
That Rushing Sound?
What is that rushing sound
Across the mountaintops
At the hour
When day follows night?
The wind
Says one
The forest
Claims another
It is time
Scattering sulfur dust
Across the tracks of life
My blood pulses
My skin twitches
From the flickering
Half-light of dawn
The arrow of a clock hand
Flies at me
Poking and piercing me
Over and over
I crumble to sand
Rustling and running
Away
The Great
Wind of the World
The great wind of the world
Lives in my Altai
Hunting in a herd
Of swirling wind-
Horses
Morning after morning
Riders splinter off
From the group
To sweep across grass and stone
And slit the steppe open
At numerous horizons
Threads of dust
Pull wind-foals after them
Whinnying and thundering
As they grow to
Lightning mares and storm stallions
Each morning we return
To our entitled places
In the salary office of life
Smudging away time
So that no doubt remains
About the salt eating at us
Heart-Shaped
The print
That my light burns
Onto leaves
Of the freezing Ginkgo tree
Must be heart-shaped
The steppe in me
Shakes off the rime frost
Even before sun
Rises
Craziness
Today I will
See you again
Foothill
Snow
My thoughts of you
Rest on whiteness
In the foothills of the Altai
It snowed meters deep
The light of your words
Reached out to me and
Screened me off against the night
That you and I now share
At two ends of the land
What do you see
When you no longer see me?
The blue flames of snow
Into which I bundle my thoughts
As they swirl around me?
They seem to be coming down
Extra quickly now,
Plunking down at your feet
With the sweet smell
Of moldering grass
Pale Light
Wind sifts
Pale light
Sand rambles softly
Through the space between worlds
Landing in folds and gaps
Of a nameless day
I know the forest beyond many mountains
Is stiff and mute
For the trickling of time
Has settled on its branches
Somewhere an unfulfilled soul
Stares into the void
And spits on gravel
In which ashes have slept
Extinguished for millions of years
Life has moved beneath
The fingers of death
Forget-Me-Not
Misshapen sky-colored stains
Announce imminent summer
Hill after hill
Unfolding across every horizon
Where dust clouds
From departing riders
Float up with butterflies of the sun
To silently descend
Like dew
At our feet
A bridge of speechlessness
Spanning from me to you
On which we move
Towards an eternity
Just begun
Look Up
Look up
See the snowflakes
Floating down
They are travelers coming home
They inhabited this earth
Before you and me
They are ancestors, brothers and sisters
Companions in time and space
Then sand, wind, stars
That rested, blew, flickered
Many of them
Perhaps we knew
Lived with them
In harmony
But often in bitter
Discord as well
Now they have
Become clouds
And return home as snow
Listen to
Their rushing sounds
It is a whispering
About you or me
Be silent
As they are
Fearing
To wake us
From the dream
Called life