Galsan
Tschinag
Beyond the Silence
Translated by
From Galsan Tschinag, Jenseits
des Schweigens
(Frauenfeld, Switzerland: Waldgut Verlag, 2006)
Anthology
incomplete: Translation still in progress...
Game of
Fate
The pouched bag of fate
No doubt resembles
A third stomach compartment
Whose slimy-rotting cud
You were just trying to pick clean
It kept us hidden from each other
In its clever creases
For so long and only
Set us free and together
In an hour of laxness
Seeing you
Devotedly squat
In the darkening hut and pluck
Busily at the steaming goo
As at the slippery seam of salvation
I try to weigh
What our common campfire
Mattered and whether
It might stand up to the invading
Storm of winter
Milky Way
Milky Way in view and
Mother in mind
I send out wishes
In every direction
Bright, soft and warm
Continuation
Of an interrupted deed
Morning after morning
The pudgy, weasel-quick woman
Ceremoniously arrayed and erect
Stepped up to the incense column
With the milk bucket in her left hand
And the juniper-root spoon with thirteen vents
In her right
Sprinkling the udder-warm milk
To sun, mountain, steppe and river
Showers accompanied
By rhyming couplets that often
Grew long and passionate
At evening we saw the traces of what
Had happened here below that morning:
The Milky Way
Still flowing along
Just a touch grander
Annunciation
I will be coming
But for now I send
These words before me
The settled dust
Of my spirit
So that
Warm as souls
It can meet the flighty ovum
From your innermost nest
And fertilize it
For the time has come
For you and me
To have our child
And may it be
As the children of others
Round and warm as a heart
Soft and solid as kidneys!
Words of
Gratitude from a Threatened Man
Now rising up
Now subsiding
Your fire-breathing
Hydrophobic pulse
Beats along with me
As I live beyond
Mountains and steppes
And whether it throbs, whether it whispers
I always accept it
Precisely and gratefully
With all my
Senses
Sharpened by desire
Tempered by abstinence
The blood from your heart
Runs through my veins
In the attempt
To keep a body long surrounded
By marauders of every kind
From giving way
To destruction
Lines from
the Sky
We unwind degrees of latitude
At both ends
And hurry towards each other
Me on wings
You on wheels
And the place we meet
Will hang somewhere
Between heaven and earth
Right where the travel-weary dreams
Land for now
Will we, two dreams
Of whatever substances ourselves
Drop off and away?
Or united as one
Rise up anew to the stars?
11/16/2003, in the sky from
To the
Nomad Boy Who Had to Learn How to Use Eating Utensils
From the quarry of time I knock off nuggets
Strip them down to years and months,
Peel away the days and hours
And the youth who stamped them into the pit, the
stone
On his way to hill, the red-cheeked
Nomad boy, comes to light, wakes
And stands, trembling and sweating
Invisible to outsiders, next to me.
I hill
Now closer to mountain than stone for years
Jut out protectively over him
I father, grandfather
Of my own being, dwell in the
Front room and at the festive tables
Of the continents I have conquered
And know how
To break open so many hard shells
To extract the fruit
And to intoxicate myself
On its sweet-bitter flesh
Yes, my boy
You were a sinless sinner
Who had to endure the pains of hell
In a world that knew not what it did
Now comes my late revenge
For you against the healed scars
By implementing everything apart
Knifing and forking eggs, cake and pudding
And brashly announcing my readiness
Before the rolling camera to crack
Nuts with those extended metal fingers
But then with my hands and mouth
I work as if in my own yurt
Grabbing here, ripping and biting there
And then licking and smacking my lips
Fear not, my child
Since you were not permitted this and would
Have quickly been looked at askance
To wild man me
it is now permitted
And such will even force out words
To serve my dignity
Ah yes, such was the world created
Into which you ventured out
And to which you relinquished
Your youth as tuition in the
Heady hope of one day being granted
The crown of King.
Berlin-Bad Lippspringe
11/19-22/2003
Morning
Sun on December 5th
Per Maria di Merano
Lovely, when in December
Over snowy woods and fields
The sun blossoms to life like summer
There and here splintering off in sparks
Now and then breaking out in flames
And pouring out intensified, purified light
Along the paths and passageways
That you and I
Wandered up and down
In blazing consciousness of so much life
And such solid human harmony
Twice as lovely to know
The sun-fire will
Track down and tie together
The dizzying dash of two pairs of footprints
To set their wavering paths ablaze
So that the wetness trapped in ice
Might finally rise up
Returning
To breath-warm, tear-bright water
And seeping
Into soil joyful to conceive
Loveliest of all
If on a May morning
A deer child or a human fawn
Agitated in the brimming chalice
Of a young and modest heart
Were to stand still
Right in front of a footprint nest’s occupant
The sky-blue forget-me-not
And were to recognize its illuminated gaze
It is one of the endowments
Granted and left behind by us
For all animated life forms
And now the
recipient
Comes face to face with one of them
12/5/2003, Michelangelo Express, Bolzano-Munich
Novemberliness
Fog pressing down
Rain
drizzling
So novemberly
There and here bent
Treelike
beings
Weep
Oily-carboniferous tears
From
eyes unseeing
Under heavy lashes
I, novembering along
Through
inner countrysides, know
The
sources of unseeing and unfeeling
The souls slipped away
When
their bodies
Damned to achievement
Were beaten black and blue
Now form after form
Comes
into view and swells up madly
Strangling viscous and superfluous
Mucus shapes out of its own innards
I who had
My outer
layer polished
To
hasten through the day
Might here and there
Take
hold of one of the oppressed
And
whisper to him
You still have it better, my friend
Than
many others on the treadmill
In
this labyrinth of delusion
You may show yourself
As you
are
You
are permitted to weep and do
Not have to play a role.
November 2002, 11/19-20/2003,
Reporting
on the Situation
The breast hills
Over which the wind
Of many winters stumbled
Drift my way, staring at me
In the firelight
Of the sinking sun
With the weight
Of developing mountains
Rising up to my full height
I present myself and sense
Peace in me, surrounded
By bright coolness
Of the glacier’s peak at my back
And I recognize the situation
I a mountain
Stand tenaciously
In the cross storm
Of jealousy and greed
And of their misbegotten child
Blind hate
A terrestrial formation myself
I watch
With celestial circumspection
While stones fly at me
And I do not forget
To suffer proper pains
When they beat
Against me
Zagaan sar
in the Year of the Red Mouse, 2/19-25/1996;
1/7/2004
Song of
the Hedgehog
Laming
The winter cold
Taming
The daily burden
Claws gape open
Threatening to snap shut
Your prince
With his family seat
At the altar of bliss
Is forced
To flee
From the skin of a child
Into that of a work ox
And to curl up into a ball
Like a hedgehog that will stay
Until you appear
To release him
Spring
Cemetery
of the Altai
The last larch
At the foot of the eagle’s nest
Has fallen
Now this side valley of the Altai
Lies stark naked in the path
Of sand- and snowstorms
Perfectly resembling
A cemetery
Tree stumps
Jut out silently
Like shadows, gravestones
Burden
Tear has its taste
Mourning its look
Parting its language
Knowing
That the wound-etched
Blinded and
Mute are beside me
I don’t know
What to do
Oppressed with weight
The invisible sack
With foreign burdens
The shoulders
A Line of
Farewell
What use are words anymore?
The threads have long since
Pulled loose
It is not given
To you or me
To re-knit
The pattern from our
Aches and joys
Here apart, there together
Let the carpet, once woven
Stay as it is
Allow the bed linens of love
The honor
Of becoming a burial cloth
Of separation
That Early
Autumn Day
That fluttering ribbon
Of an early autumn day
Striped pink at the one end
Spattered red at the other
Blue yellow white in the middle
And from hour to hour
In a richer light
Of sun storm behind
The bursting clouds
Constantly a new
Riveting bounty
You and I sat
Wedged into each other, silent
And so we left time
For our senses to be
Alert all their way to their edges
And to blaze wide awake
In the face of a portrait
Painting itself
And framing itself
Within the flaming horizons
Pilgrims
Two pilgrims, each
On a quest toward himself
The sensed unknown
Meet again and again
Halfway
Each serves as a skylight
To the prize for the other
The view leads
To meditation or embarrassment
Creating a dilemma:
A communal stretch
Or each continues his pilgrimage alone