In this week’s Translation Tuesday, Syrian poet Amarji chronicles the cycle of the moon with visceral surreality in “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases.” Through the imagery of growth and decay, our speaker takes us through nine phases, each new phase unleashing a barrage of dreamlike (or perhaps nightmarish) scenes. We begin with the “nourishment” of a milk that stains the world, and we return to this bodily metaphor as it tarnishes the speaker’s very being. There are shades of Celan’s sublime and terrifying beauty; here the ‘black milk’ is persistent, its repetition adding a dizzying mantra-like meditation on death and the consumability of the body.

1. New Moon

black milk drizzles on the windows. it trickles on the northern forest. first on the sharp needles of the cedar and those blunt on the fir, and then on the other lesser kinds. black milk trickles on all of the families and all of the species. [nothing vanishes in front of the vanished white eye of the exposed black milk] as you see, as you don’t, the black milk makes everything tremble. one drop makes a blue roller tremble. one drop makes a cotoneaster tremble. one drop makes a squirrel tremble. one drop makes a blue rock thrush tremble. one drop makes a blue tit tremble. one drop makes an ash leaf tremble. one drop makes a maple leaf tremble. one drop makes a checker leaf tremble. one drop makes a thread of lichen tremble.
a black, black, black milk.
on the barbary nut iris: black milk. on the prostrate cherry tree: black milk. on the peony
flowers: black milk.
black milk that spreads and coagulates on everything.
black milk that coagulates on the bones of a dead lynx. black milk that coagulates on the skin
of a dying roebuck.
black milk on the corners of my mouth, on my Adam’s apple, and on my chest.
black milk that spills on all of the world, on all of my body:
as i, with my mouth, i pull towards the window and i suck
the black nipple of the night. READ MORE…