Geert van Istendael

Sorabian songs
Cries of owls -
at night
the villages speak that way, how can I say,
so that you'll hear me,
Sorbs, the strangers are coming,
they say:
you are a dead people, you are
few, learn to be silent,
stretch in your graves.

- Johannes Bobrowski, Weather sign




For Jurij Brezan Sorbian writer

The owls know, the willows.
The streams, too,
but they are treacherous.
Turn over their messages, some good advice.
No, rye fields rather, that singing
for buzzards and for beeches,
that great word:
'We know where the whispering people live.'

He who is starving,
swallows his own words.
He who bites the dust,
spits out his words
with silicate and roots.
Beyond the plains
language evaporates.
For ages it used to be mist
and black smoke.
Or on the hilltop
the luring fire.
Language smells, language feeds, language soothes.

2.

At night Krabat crawls out of thin, hot mush.
No creature observes him.
Nobody calls his name. The fires have been put out in moonlight.
The weasel whispers like Krabat.
He stutters
like stones skipping on the creek.
No raven,
no otter knows
Krabat's ways.

The tower cleaves the moon disk, which he loves.
Krabat embraces the pole of the plague,
gropes after words
hiding in the night air.
In the lime tree
Krabat sits high up.
He sings the beekeepers' song
and below over grass and reed the old answer glides
of ewes and women weeders,
a white song.

Beyond the white song,
Krabat climbs the bare mountain.
Past the mountains he sneaks
through the village,
that sleeps in meekness.
Past the village he hears the creek,
past the creek
the water wheel. There Krabat steps
from night into darkness,
the first step.

The darknesses shine.
Listen to Krabat,
he is still cheering.
The dark kisses him. His arms lengthen,
his uvula and tongue parch,
skin crusts
into PVC and steel. Krabat is yellow.
A dragline grazes in sedge and bulrushes
. Krabat steps heavily.
The wheel shrieks.

A white song collides with darkness.
It sinks.
In glass sounds drown.
Beekeepers crawl
toward women weeders, shuddering.
Water is silent. Silence
wades through the creek.
Krabat uproots the bottom.
The bottom does not answer.
Krabat calls echoes.
No answer.
The echoes fled, in silence.

And not the last step.
The village, the villages,
Krabat tramples them,
wrenches them open. Grabs.
The cellars stare up to the sky.
As they fly
houses tread on fields.
Mountains burst,
with hard ropes he quickly captures the land.

Old is the word getting advice from the raven.
A weasel knows his way in the furrows.
Words and tones rustle along.
Juniper and oak see everything.
Don't give away anything.
They scream when the chainsaw tears them,
but do not speak.
Krabat dances the tightropes,
pulls out lime tree and plague's pole.
No word from them either.

Blinding noise.
Krabat crawls around in hollows.
Where are those bare words? Mountain, creek, tree?
Hidden in fur and feathers
or in air?
Krabat sees clear voids.
He presses with pride
on each eye a coin.
In his head
strobe light stuttering.

3.

At which hearth did
the kantorka sit,
the singer,
a woman with many skirts?
Which song did she hum,
toward the flames?
With which voice?
With many voices, many
limewood and bark ones.
With one voice, one,
chiseled by almost forgotten words.

The mountain top sees the raven and points.
The creek
pours out words when the otters come,
the weasels listen
to moss and leaves.
They know she glides along the lime tree's bark,
kantorka,
and that she rides the pole of the plague in the sky,
they know the creek is guiding her.

What does Krabat know?
His knowing is his doing,
long as shadows of steel arms;
his knowing is a net,
it catches the land,
the land is happy,
the net is wide and shiny,
it cannot tear.
Even if water comes near,
no tearing.
Kantorka,
she shakes the drops from her hair.

Like paws of an otter,
as cautiously,
her feet come closer to the hollows.
Over there, is something
tearing?
Her hand comprehends,
like weasel's ear, like whisker,
that which no eye can see.

She presses

her thumbs in Krabat's pupils. Who's

screaming?

Her mouth sucks and kisses the wound.

Krabat is wilting.
Yellow pales. His arms
are branches, bones, flesh.
His bare hand
feels dew and grass and soil.
The nets are tearing,
wind sweeps them along.
The knowing implodes.
Krabat squats down
in dearth and cold,
nothing to it and nothing to do.
Doomed.

'I have only my two eyes left to cry.'
'Krabat!'
She speaks, blood around her tongue commands:
'In salty tears no otter can swim.'
She picks two eyes from the night air.
'See!'
With moss and sedge she weaves clothes.
'Take!'
With dew and tears she distills quenching.
'Drink!'

They run past the villas of boredom,
they cross straight roads without purpose.
Ranks of redundancy,
pressed into shrink-wrap uniforms,
stand by.
Stand guard?
For what?
She and Krabat,
Krabat and kantorka
are of no avail and light,
unquantifiable.

The weasel is asleep near the mush pot,
the raven keeps watch on the pole of the plague.
Under willows,
in rapids,
otters move.
Near lime tree and moonlight she opens his mouth
with her mouth.
New language leaps off his lips,
blaring on her shoulders,

otters growl.

4.

Like owls old words row
through the night.
They call prey, towers, ewes.
Krabat lights the fires.
Words come.
Her lap encloses Krabat,
she drinks his honey.
He whispers
and he sings.
Hear, echoes in the valleys:
'Here is my word, my hand.
Work. Stories.'

Translated by Marian de Vooght