Horrordeath
Here all things are born and die on their own.
A great stone. A scar. A mumbled, muted word.
Spring is its mother and stepmother, wicked and shrewd.
Ashes of the dream, dream of the ashes. Horrordeath.
Droughts drink it, black rains sift it,
days heap it with night, layer upon layer,
while down its hide the vertebrae stiffen
with ossified shadows of raw flesh and rage.
Here winds are whistling and dark ghosts wail,
here the first crime, sin, punishment, rebuke.
Here sleep human and beast in one lair,
and the little child takes her first stumbling step.
The bread on it grows from a root deep and bitter,
so it is dry and sweet and sears like a flame.
Song, should some weary hermit accost you,
accept him as your own: he burns the same.
O rose in the throat, snakeberry in the mouth,
wild itch of blood with itself contending;
O land of delectable, deadly poisons,
the blazing boulder rolls. Burning. Burning. Burning.
Here all things, on their own, are born and die.
A great stone. A scar. A mumbled, muted word.
Spring is its mother and stepmother, full of lies.
Ashes of the dream, dream of the ashes. Horrordeath.
Lament from the Other Side of Life
I climbed above the summit of the pain.
I am human. But what is a human?
Emptiness before me, emptiness behind me.
Emptiness that catches fire.
From the other side of life,
with strong knots crucified alive,
I climbed above the summit of the pain.
That day. Blackday. Up black stairs.
I climbed above the summit of the pain.
From the other side of life,
from the other side of myself,
of everything not spoken,
everything not burned away,
from the other side of the water,
from the other side of the wellspring,
from the other side of the root.
Dissolve, clump of clay, flow out, water,
overflow, cup of keening,
for all the cities of this city,
all the grievings of this grieving.
Tell me who to blame,
who to feel sorry for? Tell me!
O child who is no more—
my grieving, your embrace.
My grieving, your embrace,
your darkness, my netherworld.
O earth of keening, earth of desert,
from dead weeping grown,
earth, look around, earth, uncover yourself.
Take this eye,
take this wheat
in your withered hand.
Take me, earth, or bring me back,
bring me back below this summit,
below the other side of life,
return my human powers to me.
O earth, bring me back to earth.
I am human, meant as a human to suffer;
to find stone, to wall myself up alive
in an arch on some bridge.
If There Isn’t Enough Light for You
If there isn’t enough light for you,
take me.
That I may be night, a night that burns away
to bring you day.
And if there isn’t enough love for you,
take me.
I will dig out the pupils in the eyes of the night
that you mirror a star and shine.
If there isn’t enough hate for you,
even then, take me.
Hell is weaving beneath my heart
a hell for all eternity.
If there isn’t enough light for you,
take me.
But if there isn’t enough me for you,
what am I to you?
Except that I gaze at you endlessly,
except that I burn away.
August
Beneath the tree of night I lie, in August, which is dying and singing
in a flower of ash from the burned-out horror.
From my forehead, as if from black soil, a vine of stars is springing,
heavy with ripening, swelling clusters.
In the August night I lie, my head riveted to the earth.
Will they stop me, will they continue to hold me—
these tireless soldiers of seeds and herbs,
of grass and roots and ferns and foliage?
Lie here and wait. Be still. Be a stone.
So what if night drinks you and you’re lashed by the wind?
The fishermen in your eyes weave nets unseen:
in the depths of your waiting a golden fish dreams.
I lie here and know: it is August and everything’s changing.
The golden grapes like widened pupils lose their fire.
The dark sun of midnight proceeds to its zenith.
But I remain captive in grass, cemented to ferns.
from Reader of the Ashes
Aco Šopov
translated from the Macedonian by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer
Read the original in Macedonian
Listen to “Horrordeath” read in the original Macedonian by the actor Nikola Ristanovski:
The four poems selected here come from the book Gledač na pepelta (Reader of the Ashes). Written not long after the earthquake in Skopje on July 26, 1963, which killed nearly 1,100 people, injured thousands, and left more than one hundred thousand homeless, these poems represent, in part, Šopov’s response to the devastation of his beloved city. We have chosen them both to commemorate the poet’s centennial and to acknowledge the sixtieth anniversary of the earthquake.
The title “Horrordeath” translates the Macedonian title, “Grozomor,” which Šopov coined from the word groza (horror) and the root -mor-, relating to death. This poem was first published in 1964; the other three appeared the following year. “August” refers to the month immediately after the earthquake. Like most of the poems in Reader of the Ashes, these works echo each other in imagery and themes. In this context, “If There Isn’t Enough Light for You,” which by itself reads as a love poem, becomes a moving declaration of the poet’s readiness to provide solace and healing to his grief-stricken fellow citizens, and builds on the epiphany described in “Lament from the Other Side of Life.”
Our translation process follows several stages: first, Christina prepares an interlinear translation, with details about register, syntax, etc., and a close literal translation; Rawley then creates a version that attempts to capture Šopov’s poetic richness without compromising the meaning; next, we discuss issues back and forth, often with input from native speakers, until we have a version we can send to Jasmina Šopova, who offers helpful corrections and valuable insights into her father’s poetry. A bilingual English-Macedonian edition of Šopov’s poems in our translation will be published later this year by Deep Vellum; it will include the whole of Reader of the Ashes and nearly all of another groundbreaking book, Nebidnina (Not-Being), as a well as a selection of earlier and later work, for a total of seventy-four poems.
The title “Horrordeath” translates the Macedonian title, “Grozomor,” which Šopov coined from the word groza (horror) and the root -mor-, relating to death. This poem was first published in 1964; the other three appeared the following year. “August” refers to the month immediately after the earthquake. Like most of the poems in Reader of the Ashes, these works echo each other in imagery and themes. In this context, “If There Isn’t Enough Light for You,” which by itself reads as a love poem, becomes a moving declaration of the poet’s readiness to provide solace and healing to his grief-stricken fellow citizens, and builds on the epiphany described in “Lament from the Other Side of Life.”
Our translation process follows several stages: first, Christina prepares an interlinear translation, with details about register, syntax, etc., and a close literal translation; Rawley then creates a version that attempts to capture Šopov’s poetic richness without compromising the meaning; next, we discuss issues back and forth, often with input from native speakers, until we have a version we can send to Jasmina Šopova, who offers helpful corrections and valuable insights into her father’s poetry. A bilingual English-Macedonian edition of Šopov’s poems in our translation will be published later this year by Deep Vellum; it will include the whole of Reader of the Ashes and nearly all of another groundbreaking book, Nebidnina (Not-Being), as a well as a selection of earlier and later work, for a total of seventy-four poems.
Aco Šopov was born in 1923 in the town of Štip, in what is today North Macedonia. His first book was published by the underground press in 1944, when he was fighting in the anti-Fascist resistance. By the early 1950s, he was a major Macedonian poet. His volumes Nebidnina (Not-Being; Kočo Racin, 1963) and Gledač na pepelta (Reader of the Ashes; Makedonska Kniga, 1970) are genuine masterworks, establishing his reputation as one of the founders of modern Macedonian poetry. He died in 1982, at the age of fifty-eight, after a long struggle with illness. Among the numerous events planned in 2023 to mark his centennial, a bilingual edition of his poems will be published in the autumn by Deep Vellum; this will include the four poems presented here. Further information about Šopov, as well as his poems in the original and, often, in translation, may be found on the Aco Šopov website here.
Rawley Grau is best known as a translator from Slovenian—he has translated novels by Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Gabriela Babnik Ouattara, and others, as well as poetry by Miljana Cunta, Janez Ramoveš, and Tomaž Šalamun. (An excerpt from Gabriela Babnik Ouattara’s A Silence Full of the Wind recently appeared in Asymptote.) Two of his translations were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and, in 2021, he was awarded the Lavrin Diploma from the Slovenian Association of Literary Translators. From Russian, he has translated a selection of poems and letters by Yevgeny Baratynsky, A Science Not for the Earth (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), which won the AATSEEL Prize for Best Scholarly Translation into English. He began learning Macedonian in 2020, after Christina E. Kramer invited him to collaborate with her on a selection of poems by Aco Šopov. Originally from Baltimore, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.
Christina E. Kramer is professor emerita at the University of Toronto, an author of numerous books on Macedonian language and the Balkans and a translator of Macedonian literature, including works by Petar Andonovski, Lidija Dimkovska, Goce Smilevski, and Luan Starova. She has translated three other novels by Dimkovska. A Spare Life (Two Lines Press, 2016) was longlisted for best translation of the year. Grandma Non-Oui (Istros Books, 2024) was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Numerous selections from the collection When I Left Karl Liebknecht have appeared in journals. These and other excerpts from her translations from Macedonian have appeared in publications including Asymptote, Two Lines Press, Tin House, Chicago Review, World Literature Today, Words without Borders, and others. More information on her work and links to her translations may be found here.
