Kasia Krenz

A FEW DRAWINGS BY FEATHER

translated by Zuzanna Pełczyńska-Ananiew
Gdansk-Weimar, InPrint 1999
 

 KILKA RYSUNKÓW PIÓRKIEM 
Ein paar Skizzen mit dünner Feder

Cool mint of loneliness.
Sea of cool yearning.

Lonely coolness.  Sea.

Salty scent of mint.

Dark love like a night flame.
Heart’s flame which burns like the desert.

A river of stars flows at your feet, yet you...

you do not see it wandering the milky way of the sky -

The waves of my music break
against the high cliffs of your fatherland.

Only dance can unite them...

...weave them like two bodies -

In the chase for the horizon’s chord
I become prisoner of free spaces.

Distance still keeps me at an arm’s length.

I swear one day I will catch the fleeing world...

A thread, a bond, love flowed through veins
like life, like wine - blood.

Reeds tangled in hatred’s wind.

Without Heloise - pain and death.

Away from the turmoil, far from life
separated from the garden by a frosted window

I hold a small salamander in my hand.

We are still awaiting a prince’s kiss.   Bells of silence are quiet.

Tell the truth, my sensible Sir,
I shall, but only from the beginning:

at the beginning there was the word and it will tell the truth

for me

*  (French)  Actually beautiful traitresses are unfaithful translations in which the translator tries to better - and embellish - the author’s style.

Brown grains crunch in the mill
like a quarter note in C major.

I loved you music, when you played inside me.

I am slowly dying in a world without taste or smell.

I want your mist that is more white than milk.
I want to be a yellow sail on your boat.

Don’t give me the apple’s blossom...or a tear -

- mine is a thousand seas deeper.

Winter day and river woven from sticky mist.
So hard to say a word which will not pain.

Harder yet - all remaining words.

River, friend of mine, why are you silent?

Icicles of stoned grass.  Water crystals with no current.
Curled up partridges of the cold - nothing will warm me.

To exist in non-existence.  To wait awaiting nothing.

Music. Music. Music.  Comes to me from afar...

I want to.  No, I don’t know.  Yes, I really want to.
Do I really.  Do I want.  I think not.

But maybe.  White or silver.
White?  Silver?  The green one with polka dots!

For you, my love...

- One night I dreamt
of wandering through the sea’s sleepy jungles...-

He touched the palette with a beaver paintbrush at dawn.

And sang the song of songs in the blue.

In the cosmos’ amphitheatre beneath a snow banner
flows a voice as powerful as Saint Peter’s Sunday bells.

An aria.  At noon a shot of sound blinds the shade.  Urbi et orbi.

I summon angels.  Give me your wings.  And there was light.

Here am I the spindle of time
I am my own helm, map, root.

I am the etui for the river of blood, I am the cradle of death.

Ecce homo - a lonely dervish.

In the misty morning air
the rain cuts out defenceless paper figures.

One of them stops astonished:

a tower of little wires has sprung from the middle of the city.