The Red Rooster

Branko Ve Poljanski

Had I known where my conscience would take me
I would have extinguished the flame
Joy’s end is nigh
I know
All these houses are wretched brothels
Blackened morals of a time
The brightest hours of heaven are denied us

Pain consumes me
I remember a garden near the train station
And your joy when I plucked a winter flower
That bloomed yellow again in my hand
I revived it with my blood
And gave it to you
I loved you.
In my transient lodging near the station
I was a stranger waiting daily to slip
Down the eternal silvery murmur of train tracks
I dreamed through and saw
My life’s always and ever novel feats of torment
In the glass square of my window
In the throes of my waiting I fired off mad looks
Ah what was I always waiting for
Not knowing waiting meant death.
My glorious waiting in sorrow
I will never realize my dream of bloody streets
To swim in the horror as if at sea.

If there were a thousand and one loony bins
In this stupid Balkan town
In each I would spend a century
To stop verse from spreading in the madness of human drama.
Fall on me, hydra-headed darkness
Every night my heavy head falls
Into my weary hands
I hug myself and feel hellish doom
Cruelly and ruthlessly whipping him
Oh that’s me
Who empathizes with my fall into the abyss
In the abysses of disgust and ever new bitternesses
Endlessly surfacing from my depths.

Machines and boats whistle over rooftops
Melt in the fog
Lights from the city’s din rend my peace
I can’t love the one who loves me
If only
Trains
Anchors
Valves
Boats
Murmurs
Harbors
And flights
Could leave me alone.

And now when I fly to other worlds
I want to carry within me the man who loves
There
Where a mindless machine furiously takes me
Hey poet-son keep your heaving
Hot in the bosom of your darling
Like a geyser
At the departure to the mute afterlife.

One two three four these are the four walls
Of my transient lodging enclosing me on four sides in a desperate dungeon
To roll my heart like a die
To lose and all the more thoroughly perish
Oh my love a ruined gambler cries for you
Because he can’t find a door in these walls
Where
Where
Where to run oh refuge where to escape from one’s own prison.

Who will give us love give us union
Love
The poem of our pride
Love
In our human skin
My spirit proudly carries this body
In it only a mad poet can rave
Hey
If I had a thousand and one minds
I would have lost them if I weren’t a poet
If I didn’t enjoy the workings of death and life
Hey
My love room
My gallows.

I carry my repentance through unlit streets
With my unbearable calm I feel a tragic end
In myself I rend the deepest me to the blood
To salvage my pride and arrogance in raging verse.

One endless afternoon
A greedy Sunday boredom devoured me
I picked up the phone and called a once dear woman
To tell her
My soul was in a fever
Take it to the clinic on Monday to the clinic
For an ultrasun
Was her answer.

I return from where I leave every minute
I leave for eternity
Eternity is my mother
I bear my genius like a burden one dies under
I’m brave enough to proudly spit in the street’s face
At least I know
I’ll spit blood one beautiful day.

Oh my world I suffer from your grinding gears
You embitter my joy
Who the hell created you my world
Why should this meek body put up with your
Shattering labor
Oh my annoying body
Poetic body
Human body.

translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Steven and Maja Teref

Read the original in Serbo-Croatian

Listen to the original read by Maja Teref:

What drew us to Branko Ve Poljanski’s work is that although an indispensable voice of the avant-garde, he is largely unheard of beyond the Balkans. Very little work of his has been translated into English, which was the initial impetus for us to translate much of his opus. As we read and re-read his work, we were taken by the diverse styles of his poetry and prose. Many of his poems marry the melancholy of expressionism with the wildness of Dada and futurism. These influences are, however, more muted in The Red Rooster in which Poljanski intentionally smoothes the jagged marrow of his more expressionism-informed work and tones down the frolic of his more Dada-bent work. Here, Poljanski’s voice is reflective, resembling a farewell letter. Whether it’s to writing, to Zenithism, or to his country is perhaps an open question. The Red Rooster was his last act as a Zenithist and largely as a writer before moving to France where he devoted himself to painting.

We have taken chances with our translation to be faithful to the poem’s tone. Early in the poem the speaker says “I love you” but we have translated it as “I loved you” because the line is written in the historical present and it is more in keeping with the later lines “I can’t love the one who loves me” and “I want to carry within me the man who loves.” A bigger risk was in how we treated mrakovi. Though the word is a pluralization of darkness, we have rendered it as “hydra-headed darkness.” The image fleshes out and grounds the apostrophe. Though mrakovi is as strange in Serbo-Croatian as darknesses is in English, it seems to lack the linguistic awkwardness of the English construction. Besides, we felt that “bitternesses” would wear out its oddness after its pairing with “abysses” if it was preceded by “darknesses.” These liberties get to the heart of our biggest challenge. We needed to reach an uneasy balance in the poem’s earnestness without letting it curdle into sentimentality. We needed to capture the emotional immediacy without letting the poem become overwrought.

The Red Rooster is a paradox. The flower that opens the poem is a surrealist gesture yet the poem is not surrealist. There is a seeming madness in the poem yet the speaker is not mad. And we have tried to honor what made his work avant-garde for its time yet make it fresh for a contemporary reader.

Branko Ve Poljanski (1898–1947) was a leading figure of Zenithism, a 1920s avant-garde movement unique to the then Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that was a synthesis of expressionism, futurism, Dada, and constructivism. He wrote and published a single issue of the futurist-expressionist journal Svetokret (1921), a monthly cinema magazine Kinofon (1921–1922), and a one-off issue of the anti-Dada journal Dada-jok (1922) before focusing his attention on Zenithism. His books include the anti-novel 77 samoubica (77 Suicides, 1923) and three poetry collections Panika pod suncem (Panic Under the Sun, 1924), Tumbe (Topsy-Turvy, 1926), and Crveni petao (The Red Rooster, 1927). In 1927, Poljanski handed out copies of Crveni petao on Terazije Street in Belgrade as a farewell to his literary life. After that, he boarded a train to Paris where he devoted himself to painting.

Steven and Maja Teref translate from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. Their books include Novica Tadić’s Assembly and Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use, the latter shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award. Steven’s other books are Foreign Object, Pleasure Objects Teaser, and The Authentic Counterfeit. He is Co-Chief Copy Editor for Asymptote. Maja is a past president of Illinois TESOL. She teaches English at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where she is also the faculty advisor for Oroboros Review, a student-run literary translation journal.