Poetry/translation Us $16.00 R e m n a n t s o f A n Remnants of Another Age o “Nikola Madzirov’s Remnants of Another Age is aptly titled, as these poems t seem to spring from elsewhere in time, reflective of a preternaturally wise h and attentive sensibility. As we read these poems, they begin to inhabit us, e PoEMs by NikolA MAdzirov and we are the better for having opened ourselves to them. Madzirov is a r rare soul and a true poet.” — Carolyn ForChé A With an introduction by carolyn Forché g “Madzirov’s poems are like Expressionist paintings: filled with thick, e energetic streaks they seem to emerge from the imagination and to return to it right away, like night animals caught in the headlights of a car. Nikola N Madzirov succeeds in convincing us, ‘We are the remnants of another age.’ i k We better watch this talented poet!” — adam Zagajewski o l “There are times (now) when we long after exactly this kind of purity. a Poetry doesn’t develop, it starts over and over again. Why this sounds M fragile, gentle and fresh is beyond our understanding.” — TomaZ salamun a d z “Nikola Madzirov’s poems move mysteriously by means of a profound i r inner concentration, giving expression to the deepest laws of the mind. o Their linguistic ‘making’ is informed by a vivid evidence of a serious v self-making, soul-making, and heart-making. We are lucky to have these English incarnations of Nikola Madzirov.” — li-young lee B o a e D it io Cover ArT: “Untitled” by Colleen Buzzard n AUTHor PHoTo: Thomas Langdon s, l TranslaTed by Peggy and graham W. reid, Cover DeSIGN: Sandy Knight tD . magdalena horvaT and adam reed R a a emnants of notheR ge Cc ОСТАТОК ОД ДРУГ ВЕК [  ] [  ] Remnants of Another Age Poems by Nikola Madzirov C Translated from the Macedonian by Peggy and Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat and Adam Reed With a Foreword by Carolyn Forché C c BOA Editions, Ltd. Rochester, NY 0 [  ] Macedonian Text Copyright © 0 by Nikola Madzirov English Language Translations Copyright © 0 by Peggy Reid, Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat, Adam Reed All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition     7 6 5     For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail permdude@ eclipse.net. Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 50 (c) () of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the County of Monroe, NY; the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. Cover Design: Sandy Knight Cover Art: “Untitled” by Colleen Buzzard Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn BOA Logo: Mirko Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Madzirov, Nikola, 97- Remnants of another age / Nikola Madzirov ; translated by Peggy and Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat and Adam Reed. — st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978--9-50-7 (alk. paper) . Madzirov, Nikola, 97—Translations into English. . Macedonian poetry—Translations into English. I. Reid, Peggy (Margaret) II. Reid, Graham Wightman. III. Title. PG96..A7R6 0 89.8'9—dc 000967 BOA Editions, Ltd. 50 North Goodman Street, Suite 06 Rochester, NY 607 www.boaeditions.org A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (98–996) [  ] CONTENTS Foreword 7 After Us 5 When Someone Goes Away Everything That’s Been Done Comes Back 7 I Don’t Know 9 Shadows Pass Us By  The Hands of the Clock  Many Things Happened 5 The Sky Opens 7 What We Have Said Haunts Us 9 Flying  When Time Ceases  The Shadow of the World Passes Over My Heart 5 Things We Want to Touch 7 Revealing 9 It Was Spring  Perfection Is Born  We Reveal the Times 5 Awakening 7 Fast Is the Century 9 I Want Only That 5 I Saw Dreams 5 Presence 55 Ruined Homes 57 Thoughts on the Weather 59 Everything Is a Caress 6 What Is to Be Done? 6 [ 5 ] Usual Summer Nightfall 65 New Lands 69 Towns That Don’t Belong to Us 7 From Every Scar on My Body 7 Before We Were Born 75 Eras of Longing 77 Two Moons 79 Light and Dust 8 Returning 8 Outside of Time 85 Days When One Ought to Be Alone 87 Silence 89 A Way of Existing 9 An Involuntary Conquest of Space 9 The One Who Writes 95 Home 97 Separated 99 Acknowledgments 0 About the Author 0 About the Translators 0 [ 6 ] FOREWORD It was September 007, and Nikola Madzirov and I we were walking through the old bazaar on the eastern bank of the Vardar in Skopje, on a cloudless late summer afternoon. This was one of our earliest days together, so he led me to the Isa Bey Mosque and the Church of St. Petka, then through the stalls of the trinket sellers, the old Turkish baths and ancient caravanserais, all the while whispering about poetry. We whispered out of respect for these sacred places, but also because we were walking through one of the world’s ruined cities, a city that is again a thriving metropolis, but with a curious silence observed at its center even now, a silence that befalls shoppers and bicyclists, lovers, and students when they reach the epicenter of the earthquake that leveled Skopje in 96. The clock hands on the ruins of the rail station are still stopped at 5:7, the dawn hour when the station collapsed upon hundreds of school children departing for a holiday. This hushing of voices interested Nikola Madzirov, as did the legibility of the ruins. He is not from Skopje, but from Strumica in the eastern part of the country across the mountains, near the Bulgarian border—but knowledge of the destruction of Skopje ten years before his birth had been imparted to him in child- [ 7 ] hood. Strumica is, after all, also built on a river, also on a fault line in a region of seismic shifts, geothermal springs, and the violent ruptures expected at the crossroads of Europe and Asian Minor. He was schooled in this remote region of Macedonia, a country bounded by Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Kosovo, where mountain roads are still torn up from NATO tanks rolling toward Kosovo during the war. Madzirov’s is a voice aware of provisional existence on the periphery of Europe in a land tiled by ancient mosaics still un- der excavation, aware that he was born in the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, a nation that no longer exists, at the time still under Marshal Tito’s rule. As many young Central Europeans would say, tapping to let fall the long ash of their cigarettes: and so on, and etcetera. But Madzirov is not given to cynicism or despair, and much less is he interested in sim- plistic ideological constructs that offer a future only, without present or past. His poetics spring from a deeper source: if from Strumica, then when the town was called Astraion, the “starry” place, found in the works of Ptolemy and Pliny, and later, the Strumica of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, a place of medieval monasteries and frescoed Orthodox churches, ancient necropoli and third-century Roman baths, with their early saunas and fridigaria. In the old city, magara cups have been unearthed, inscribed with motifs from Homer’s Iliad, along with plates depicting Artemis and other deities of the hunt. There are also remnants of an early Christian basilica, a feudal tower, and a maiden’s well. These are the Remnants of Another Age, in the writings of Strumica’s twenty-first century poet, along with all else found is these masterful lyric poems: the dog’s attitude toward refugees, the moon’s view of execu- tions, the credibility of the dead. Madzirov calls himself “an involuntary descendent of refugees,” referring to his family’s flight from the Balkan Wars a century ago: his surname derives from madzir or majir, meaning “people [ 8 ] without a home.” The idea of shelter and of homelessness, of no- madism, and spiritual transience serves as a palimpsest in these Remnants, at times clearly legible through the surface of other apparent subjects: fast centuries, usual wars, and also bloggers and e-mail and the musical scores of Arvo Pärt, coterminous with walls of fortresses and snow-covered basilicas. “History is the first border I have to cross,” he writes, this poet who “inherited an unnumbered house.” His brief against history is clear: “They write about the fall / of empires and epochs but not / of the old man who looks at a toy / dug up by a bulldozer.” The world remains, despite its fragility: there are “bumblebees / that carry pollen / between two warring states, and the footprints of our childhood / are covered / by the wheel- marks of a cart.” Shelters are distant, as are “moments” and “all the houses I am dreaming of / . . . the voice of my mother” and also “reality,” and “we ourselves, we are distant.” So Madzirov gives up rootedness and becomes the poet of chance, of fortuitous encounters, of meetings “like a paper boat and / a watermelon that’s been cooling in the river.” These are what allow for the unfurling of the human soul in its “secret / migration,” calling us to the wilds of fleeting existence, where we wait as if “we’re waiting for the wind / like two flags on a border.” However, the flags aren’t waving, nor are the saints silent, and the borders suggest that we need to be as suspended as snow falling, “snow that doesn’t know if it belongs / to the earth or to the air.” He writes: “Be a dream, a mezzanine, / sesame seeds at the bottom of the package, /a ‘deer’ sign by the road, an alphabet / known to only two people—” He advises us to be light, homeless, suspended and awake, warning us that the bright-lit cities of our innocence exist only in atlases. We can move through strange towns, he writes, “unnoticed / . . . like a second earthquake that merely / rearranges what is already ru- ined.” It is good advice for the twenty-first century, where all is not what it seems—where “the rare bird” is not in the branches, [ 9 ]