Poppies in Translation

Sujata Bhatt

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781847770202
• eBook ISBN: 9781847774903
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua - many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt's many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal and the allegorical, certainties are undone in an open-ended quest. A Chinese cook ignores a predatory snake, Gregor Samsa's sister proposes a different sort of metamorphosis, a woman hears her daughter's voice in birdsong - and the poppies in translation mutate according to the languages and histories they inhabit, ultimately persisting in a space beyond language. At times, language itself is injured by history: Bhatt reimagines the haunted undertow of post-war German as experienced by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Meanwhile, the poppies are ever-present, with their black souls in the wind.

I

A Different Incarnation

Today

The fourth candle has been lit.

How can you be in exile

when you live with the one you love?

Our Chinese Schiller stands by the window.

Outside, three crows ignore a snowman.

The fourth candle has been lit.

These flames make us linger,

these flames slip into our words –

Today, it’s Händel on the radio –

and the northern sun is still strong.

Truth is Mute

Truth is mute, she says,

but you need words to find it.

A bull’s head in water, a mermaid’s split tail –

centuries in silt, and the words that came down to us:

a blue spell of longing, now translucent on paper.

Is filigrane the sound you want

or is it watermark?

How many dictionaries

do you need for the words you seek?

Remember, she says,

instinct is wordless

even as it lives within words.

Remember, she says,

love will be silent with love.

Mother tongue, father tongue –

when the child started to speak

she used all her words at once,

at once in a rush: pani, water, Wasser.

When the child started to speak

she meant fish and Fisch.

How many languages must you learn

before you can understand your own?

When she lived on a mountain

among people whose language

she did not know, her own language turned

into a festival of fruits, and a festival of birds.

When she lived on a mountain

oxygen-deprived, near ice-covered rocks,

she only dreamt of the sea

night after night – algae and seaweed.

Will oxygen determine the meaning of your words?

Remember, she says,

love will be silent with salt.

Remember, she says,

truth is mute, and love will be silent.

Another Muse

Four a.m. and brightness already –

Today, the sun begins as a white rose,

a white rose tinged with silver and blue.

Still hours before I’ll see

any pink or yellow –

Windows open all night –

My dreams want me

to believe they are true –

This morning smells of a newborn infant’s skin

in those moments

just before the newborn mouth opens –

This morning smells of wet grass,

full moon drenched grass –

A restless sweetness, pungent – a sweetness, dense

and thickening with snails and worms –

Each blade tense with w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• I: A Different Incarnation
• II: Where is Your Silver Dream?
• III: Magelang Morning
• IV: A Captain’s Confession
• Notes
• About the Author
• Also by Sujata Bhatt from Carcanet Press
• Copyright