Wil je dat
de kussens van je kinderen
roze openbloeien,
wens je wiegen
met zijdezachte dromen te omringen, wit als sneeuw,
wens je dat hun wikkeldoeken
van regenboog gemaakt zijn en
dat ze pop mogen spelen met
het hart van de messias,
wens je
je wijngaarden vol vruchten,
wens je dat de zon drinkt
van de stortvloed van je vreugde,
wens je dat  de zware wolken
boodschappen van groen naar je velden sturen
en je van lentes slaperige oogleden openen,
dan verlos-
verlos de vogel die nestelt
op mijn tong.

If you wish
your children’s pillows
to bloom pinks,
if you wish to surround cradles
in silky dreams white as snow,
if you wish their swaddling clothes
made of rainbows and
that they might play doll with
the heart of the messiah,
if you wish
your vineyards full of fruit,
if you wish the sun to drink
from the floods of your joy,
if you wish the heavy clouds
to send messages of green to your fields
and to raise the drowsy eyelids of springs,
then liberate—
liberate
the bird that nests
on my tongue.

4.6.1972
Kurdistan
*

Voor ik je kende ,
was ik egoïstisch, een kind.
Ik dacht
de open hemel was een tent
alleen voor mij opgezet,
de Aarde was een eiland na overstromingen achtergelaten
om door niemend dan door mij bewoond te worden.

Plotseling arriveerde je liefde
en verwoestte mijn citadel, haar muren,
alle kleuren verwisseld
en kieperde alle wetten om.
Ze veranderde de grote wereld in een kooi
voor mijn eenzaamheid.
Ze leerde mij tevreden zijn
met het halve kussen.

Before I knew you,
I was self-centered, a child.
I thought
the wide sky was a tent
set up just for me,
the Earth was an island the floods left behind
to be inhabited by no one but me.

All of a sudden your love arrived
and devastated my citadel, its walls,
altered all colors
and upended all laws.
It turned the vast world into a cage
for my solitude.
It taught me to be content
with half the pillow.

1.12.1973
Voronezh

From ‘Dictionary of Midnight’. Deep Vellum. Copyright © by Abdulla Pashew. Translation copyright © by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse. Nederlandse vertaling: Gmt

With a foreword by National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollmann
Dictionary of Midnight collects almost 50 years of poetry by Abdulla Pashew, the most influential Kurdish poet alive today. Pashew’s poems chart a personal cartography of exile, recounting the recent political history of Kurdistan and its struggle for independence. Poet-translator Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse worked with the poet to select and translate his most iconic poems, balancing well-known, politically engaged contemporary Kurdish classics like “12 Lessons for Children” with the concise love lyrics that have always punctuated his work.

Abdulla Pashew, or (Kurdish: Ebdulla Peşêw), is a contemporary Kurdish poet. He was born in 1946 in Hewlêr, Iraqi Kurdistan. He studied at the Teachers’ Training Institute in Hewlêr (Erbil), and participated in the Foundation Congress of the Kurdish Writers’ Union in Baghdad in 1970. In 1973 he went to the former Soviet Union, and in 1979 he received an M.A. in pedagogy with a specialisation in foreign languages. In 1984 he was granted a PhD in Philology from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. For the next five years he was a professor at al-Fatih University in Tripoli, Libya. He has lived in Finland since 1995.

He published his first poem in 1963 and his first collection in 1967. Since then he has published eight collections. The latest, Berew Zerdeper (Towards the Twilight), was published in Sweden in 2001. He is fluent in English and Russian and has translated the works of Walt Whitman and Alexandr Pushkin into Kurdish.

Schilderijen van Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
https://lithub.com/author/abdullapashew/