Each Other — Hive

Hi all!

Back to translating my own old poems from when I was a teenager.

I'm not sure how to feel about translating and reworking the topics that occupied my young mind, which, in turn, became a poetic journal of sorts. It doesn't feel like betrayal or anything, nor does it feel like I'm reinventing the wheel.

It feels more along the lines of me reinventing one of my wheels, if not my entire propulsion system. And that's a task better done with company. But that seems to merit a different post.

Anyway, the poem is below.

Source

It was probably written with someone in mind, or just as an exercise in (my less than stellar) style back then. The original (in Macedonian) is called 'We look into each other's eyes' and deals with ideas that may be considered romantic. Mind you, at that time, I was a teen buried in books, working hard to get out of his small town, and writing poetry and masturbating. What else was there to do? I certainly couldn't make it known who I'd prefer to sleep with.

Still, the English version of this poem bears a different title, mostly because, while translating it, I somehow ended up repeating 'each other' a number of times, which is not something I usually do when writing.

But then again, I'm not writing, I'm translating and reworking a poem of mine. Is this re-writing it, then?

Here's the poem:

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EACH OTHER

We look into each other’s eyes
a soft silence drains from the curtain
drips from the window
a honey made of yesterday’s tears

We see eye to eye
on why time lies wounded on the floor

We eye each other up
as our fingers intertwine and point
to a world outside taking a turn for the worse
a snow falls over our ashes

We are each under a watchful eye
a statue diminishes under our presence

We glance over each other’s shoulder
smiling daggers and sniffing blood
but not to and from each other
there’s red ink that used to mean something

We stare at the vase
as flowers lose their petals and appetite

We catch sight of the missing half
but that would mean that we were never whole
to begin with, here’s more of that ink
for the common denominator

We perceive the bed as a field
traverse it, embrace it, flip it and reverse it

29 April 2002

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I'm sure you noticed that a lot of the vocabulary used in the first lines of each stanza is related to sight and vision.

Why did I choose to rework my poem like that? What is your opinion?

Thanks for reading!