The Poet’s Tongue: “White Nocturne,” by Stefan Tsanev

January 9, 2013 in Poetry

“White Nocturne” is a beautiful and somber winter/love poem, written in 1966 by Stefan Tsanev.  He is a Bulgarian poet, playwright and historical novelist. I met his poetry first at the age of 15, when in the morning break from school I strolled by a bookstand and saw the thin booklet entitled The Season of Illusions, Love Poetry. I opened randomly and read part of a long poem. I liked it. I bought the book. When I returned to class after the break, a friend of mine saw the book and exclaimed, “Oh, yes, that book. It’s very stupid. The poems are hardly readable.” I blushed and felt utterly embarrassed. “I will read them, anyway,” I decided. When I came back home, I opened the book again. I saw the poem I had read at the bookstand and liked it again. I opened on a different page and started reading another poem. It was different. One by one, I read all the poems and was disappointed. They were hard to read. They did not rhyme, nor did they follow a particular rhythmic pattern, or “step,” like those we had studied at school by then. I myself tried writing poetry and always took great efforts with rhyme and rhythm. The time to change that had come. Most of the poems in the booklet were free or blank verse and followed their own internal rhythm directed by ideas and images, by the reader’s emotions and perceptions. Needless to say that by the time I graduated with an M.A. in English Literature from University, that booklet had become one of my favorites,together with its author, who, by the way, is more popular for his plays, essays and historical novels. For me, Stefan Tsanev is a poet first.

I hope you will enjoy this “White Nocturne” of snow, silence and loneliness as I do. I must admit that I was not able to keep all the rhymes, nor was I able to keep the number of syllables per line as they are in the original. Bulgarian is a Slavonic language that has a syntax system and word-order rules different from English. Needless to say, intended puns are very hard to pull off.

WHITE NOCTURNE
By Stefan Tzanev, translated by Mariya Koleva

Snow, snow… Silence like aluminum foil.
The horizon is simply a round whitish moon.
The roads are white. The air is white.
Trees are hardly discernible
like the beards of saints on old frescoes,
splattered in whitewash by bearded barbarians.

I am silent. And there is so much to tell.
So much is eating us. We are silent.
Letters are obituaries of our feelings.
What is “I love you” in seven days?
Or “I am sad” in seven days?
Or “Goodnight” in seven days…

***
Do you know what loneliness is? -
It is sleeping on your own shoulder…

Of course, despair is always too soon.
And always too soon is the coming of death.
And always there’s something you didn’t quite say.
And always there’s something you didn’t quite do.
Snow.
Lovely and white, and silent.
The roads are white. The air is white.
And always there’s something not quite…

***
Snow, snow… The aluminum silence
is crispy. A stanza of helmets
marches across the white sheet of winter. The band
              playing silence – the snow has stopped the ears
              of all the brass instruments.
The drummer sketches a profile on his drum,
                              the snow covers it, the drummer sketches
              again, the snow covers it again.
The white eyes of the rifles look up quietly,
              like blind beggars, oh!
The soldiers march, they march in silence and
                              slowly, they walk by, they march, walk away,
              the snow swallows them as if it’s a blotter.
The town’s asleep, the villages beyond the white field are asleep, the white bones of
                              the fathers are somewhere asleep, the mothers with white hairs are also asleep
                              and through the white walls of their rooms walk
                              the soldiers, marching in silence and slowly,
              walking away, the band playing silence…
Oh, loneliness in freedom’s name!

***
All night the door clattered
As if someone was coming home all night.
But they never did.

In the morning, the wind left on tiptoes.
I tiptoed out of my room.
I put a roof tile on my head, instead of a hat
and stood at the corner like a caryatid:
              I am my own house,
              I am my own inhabitant –
              No one leaves,
              No one comes home…

***
Good morning, citizens, having your breakfast
upright, like statues by Polykleitos!
Please, let me have breakfast with you. You know,
when one remains alone,
one gets very sociable.

I toss myself
in the abyss of gazes,
ready to grab at the life-saving ring
of any smile!… Come,
lay your head on my shoulder–
like an epaulette.
I need none other distinctions.

***
Snow, snow… Silence like aluminum foil.
The horizon is simply a round whitish moon.
The roads are white. The air is white.

The snow is covering my steps.
Did I, or didn’t I walk?

That happens to time, too. Events like birds of prey
rush on us:
the large ones pluck at our names,
the middle-sized – at our words,
the small ones pluck at the millet of full-stops.
Feelings turn white. Thoughts also turn white.
Silence.
And we ask ourselves:
Have we lived? Or not quite?

© 2012 Mariya Koleva, translation from Bulgarian

***
Mariya Koleva is Bulgarian and writes poetry and fiction in English, though she is not a native speaker. She teaches EFL, English literature and translates for a living. Writing simply came along. She had some poetry and short stories published in Three-Line Poetry, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure and the Mouse Tale Press. You may follow Mariya at her blog, on Twitter, or on her Facebook Author Page.

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