"The same war story told a hundred times..."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
Zafer Senocak
____________
translated from the Albanian by Henry Israeli
and Albana Lleshanaku
Yearly Snow
In this city the yearly snow
The same war story told a hundred times
Albana Lleshanaku (co-translator) is the sister
of the poet _______________________________________________________________
leaning on sparse, lonesome trees
doesn't mean a thing.
It signifies nothing more
than the meandering of a veteran
leaning on a wooden crutch.
the same brand of cigarette distributed by friendly hands
and those same eyes hovering, dark and lazy.
Only that. And the dry rhythmic knocking
until his silhouette disappears
amidst the shadows cast down by rooftops
their melting snow dripping
in terrible slowness…
Translator's Bio Note
Henry Israeli is the author of New Messiahs,
forthcoming
from Four Way Books in 2002, and the editor and co-translator
of Fresco: Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku, forthcoming
from New Directions in April 2002. His poems have appeared
in Tin House,
Iowa Review, Verse, Fence, Seneca Review,
Quarterly West, Fine Madness and elsewhere. He is co-founder,
along with his wife, poet Joanna Goodman, of Saturnalia Books.
Luljeta Lleshanaku. An architect by profession, she lives
and works
in New York City.