This Translation Tuesday, we present to you Lior Maayan’s self-translation of his poem “Triangle”, in a moving poem that meditates on the experience of time as the speaker moves through the vicissitudes of living, both grand and personal. Read on!
Triangle
Today it occurred to me that there is no real time,
That there is no time in the real sense, just matter changing around us—changing us.
And I really felt in my body that there is no direction to this change,
In a fallow outside Shefar’am I saw an olive tree two thousand years old.
According to the harvesters. How will you prove it, as you are required to
amputate the trunk and count the rings of time, and yet I write you this
on my way to Stuttgart as evening is falling.
Once in the grocery shop, time wrinkled, I’m not sure this sight will ever come back,
I think it’s because of the sun but it’s probably because of Ayelet’s death.
Wrinkling time is not like standing time, it is the feeling that there is no
movement and you are for one moment a wind.
In the past, I would have told you about such things: “it’s to die for”
And meant “it’s to die”.
The days to come touch the days that have come
like the skin around
a bleeding cut,
and our lives are like a series of cuts.
Translated from the Hebrew by Lior Maayan
Lior Maayan, born in Israel, lives with his wife near Tel Aviv, is a father of three, poet and a high-tech entrepreneur. He studied Physics, Mathematics and Behavioural Sciences. Lior is a graduate of the Arabic-Hebrew Helicon poetry program and laureate of the Weizmann Institute life’s verse prize. His work appeared among others in Haaretz, Yediot Aharonot, Granta, Helicon and was translated into Arabic, Spanish and English. His Hebrew collection That Green (Shira Stav Ed.) was published by Afik Literature in 2019.
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