Anton Baev
ANONYMOUS TOWNS
Translated by Vera Ivanova
To walk across thousands of
Anonymous towns –
Labyrinths of boredom;
To walk without stopping
Neither in a hovel, nor at stations –
A Bedouin without an oasis, blinded
By sun and salt, blinded
By sand storms, blinded
By lack of words…
Two-humped camels chew
The deserts out of melancholia.
To walk without stopping,
Until arriving
In a town without walls and embrasures,
Without underground tunnels,
Without bunkers, without airports,
Without courts, without prisons,
Without night guards, nameless,
In a town with a single house,
In a town where you are not anonymous.
You will tell her at the threshold:
“This town is good because it is yours.”
ANTON BAEV (1963) is the author of a number of books in different genres: eight books of poetry, six novels, two books of short stories, a book of philosophical fragments and two academic monographs. His work has been translated and published in German, English, French, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, Serbian, Russian, Albanian and Macedonian languages, and has a Doctor’s degree at the Institute for Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Board Chairman of Plovdiv LIK Foundation, he is Founder and Director of the International Poetry Festival Orpheus, President of the Writer’s Association in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
A scene of peace,
Some calm passing in my heart,
A few seconds after drinking coffee –
Those pigeons, flying over the square
Passing through the clockwise gap of the swing;
I often dream of Socrates, Aristotle and Lao Tzu,
Ladies and gentlemen, serene, in the air.
My spirit has been fluctuating recently,
Unable to write a few lines, my hand shook.
Ah, I pray to keep my posture.
People eat noodles and drink noodle soup in the alley
The noise floats in the smoke; a bell rings, floats.
They stand up and look up at the square
Where a huge invisible plane is smiling at me,
A few seconds later I woke up —
The plane was diving down on me.
Cao Bo is a Chinese postmodern poet and lives in Xi’an City, China. He has published his works in Poetry Journal, Star Journal and Yanhe Journal, and is author of four collections of poems.He has won the Chinese Young Poet Award, the Top Ten Poetry Collections of Poetry Tide Magazine, the Golden Camel Award of the Silk Road International Poetry Art Festival, and the Boao International Poetry Award.
