Guide to the Underworld5
Someone said: —I saw a dancing man on the shore of a green dream with a swell moving in under the surface In the sunset the dancer glowed red He dusted his body with meal from ground bones mixed with crimson from herbs crushed with brick-shards What meaning had his dancing on the shore among all those blindly staring in the sun? It means that he was dead or soon should die And you who once have seen such a wondrous man dance you shall never dance again neither in love, nor hope, nor despair All of you are long since dead, and gone from the section entitled EARTH WATER in Guide to the Underworld by Gunnar Ekelöf (1967), translation © 1980 Rika Lesser. All rights reserved. 
Future Green Integer Edition?
For her translation of Guide to the Underworld, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1980, Rika Lesser received the Harold Morton Landon Poetry Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets. The edition has been out of print for over a decade. Douglas Messerli, of Green Integer, has long planned to bring it back into print. 9 A shadow said: —My name was Khalaf-al-Akhmar I had no peer in the art of Recalling! I recalled every word spoken in the desert, in the tents, in the city every song of love and every song of battle and all the tales of The Days of the Arabs I could imitate every poet who hitherto had existed and call him my equal. So huge was my memory. Then I was smitten by the sword of conscience, at a ripe age I sang the Koran from morning till evening. I abjured all I declared that others before me had written Everything that came out of my mouth was utterly falsified The traditions I claimed to remember were new and of The Days of the Arabs I knew less than nothing Then I went forth, in the Square, for the people of Kufa and confessed publicly how much I had falsified— The crowed fell silent, someone cried out Finally all cried out at once: We thought better of you when you lied to us than now when you speak truth! After that cry I set off for home, brooding and from the depths of my thought’s thought rose thoughts’ thoughts Stammering I said: Henceforward you will speak Truth! Something that was given to you has been taken from you, something has been given Be you Heathen, Jew, Christian, or a Submissive: Of the Prophet, blessed of God, I know nothing, and in the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful of him I know, by God Almighty, less than Nothing. * This we have heard: A holy man, Khalaf, surnamed the Red lied half his life, understood, and thereafter spoke Truth His, or Someone’s tomb lies close by here, of stone four-sided, with a turban, but if it is he who rests there we do not know. —I went there, to the tomb of the truth-liar at dusk, and sat a while. Then, in the distance I saw a pregnant woman come and with her nails scratch a bit of mortar, a few particles of stone, which she raised to her mouth Then she walked away, her head bowed over her belly, as if whispering: May you be like him who spoke truth when he lied, and who lied when he spoke truth from the section entitled EARTH WATER in Guide to the Underworld by Gunnar Ekelöf (1967), translation © 1980 Rika Lesser. All rights reserved. |
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