Lunch Ticket
  • Current Issue
  • Archive
    • Issues Archive
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
      • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
      • Issue 1: Spring 2012
    • Genre Archive
      • Creative Nonfiction
      • Essays
      • Fiction
      • Flash Prose
      • Interviews
      • Lunch Specials
      • Poetry
      • Translation
      • Visual Art
      • Writing for Young People
  • About
    • Mission Statement
    • Lunch Ticket Staff
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
      • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
      • Issue 1: Spring 2012
    • Achievements
    • Community
    • Contact
  • Weekly Content
    • Friday Lunch Blog
    • Midnight Snack
    • Amuse-Bouche
    • School Lunch
  • Contests
    • Diana Woods Award in CNF
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
    • Gabo Prize in Translation
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
    • Twitter Poetry Contest
      • 2021 Winners
      • 2020 Winners
      • 2019 Winners
  • Submissions
  • Search
  • Menu Menu
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Five Poems

May 28, 2015/in Gabo, Gabo, Summer-Fall 2015 / by Gëzim Hajdari, Translated by Sarah Stickney

My country,
why this crazy love for you?

You got me born
so I could be your wound.

Where can I hide
on the barren hill?

My verses dog me
like old murderers.

And deep in my ice
every night
something breaks.

 

 

With your name I’ll name

the curve you lean on
like light and shadow.

Your name I’ll call the robin
on the iced creek,

and the serpent that you saw
on the wind’s path
and the flowers you trod
in summer dark,
the burned out fires
on the bare hills,
the call of crows.

All the rains in the world
I’ll name with your name.

 

 

Of those dreams nothing remains—
the houses stand locked-up for good.
Under the stones
you won’t even find a key;
they brought them along, the dead.

 

 

It rains constantly
in this
country.

Maybe because I’m a stranger.

 

 

I want the pages of my books
to be what starts a fire in the cottage
of two cold lovers.

*

To turn oneself into dust,
ashes,

To feel
a little bit oneself
a little bit the universe.

To live the silence.

prose_section_divider

 

 

Mia patria,
perché quest’amore folle per te?

Tu mi hai fatto nascere
per essere la tua ferita.

Dove nascondermi
nella collina brulla

I miei versi m’inseguono
come vecchi assassini.

Ogni notte si rompe qualcosa
nel profondo del mio ghiaccio.

 

 

Con il tuo nome chiamerò

la curva dove ti affacci
come luce e ombra.

Anche il pettirosso
sul giaccio del ruscello,

anche il serpente che hai visto
nel sentiero di vento
anche i fiori che hai calpestato
al buio estivo,
anche i fuochi spenti
sulle colline nude,
il richiamo dei corvi.

Tutte le piogge del mondo
con il tuo nome chiamerò.

 

 

Nulla è rimasto di quei sogni,
le case sono serrate per sempre.
Sotto le pietre
non troverete neanche le chiavi,
le hanno portato con sé i morti.

 

 

Piove sempre
in questo
Paese.

Forse perché sono straniero.

 

 

Voglio che con le pagine dei miei libri
accendano il fuoco nella casa di campagna
gli innamorati infreddoliti.

*

Farsi polvere,
cenere,
oblio

Sentirsi
un po’ se stessi,
un po’ universo.

Abitare il silenzio.

Translator’s Note

We elude ourselves. Glancing in a mirror or hearing my recorded voice I think “but that’s not what I look like/sound like.” Worse, though I believe that home exists, I cannot seem to figure out where that home is. If this sense of dislocation is a side-effect of being human, then the figure of the exile is its highest expression. Hajdari’s mournful, limpid poems place us inside our divided lives and press on the tender spot of our own feelings of homelessness.

I moved to Italy to work with Gëzim Hajdari on the translation of his poems. Hajdari moved to Italy as a young man in flight from the oppressive communist regime of his native Albania. Hajdari traveled to make them, and I traveled to translate them; the poems themselves are the only native Italians. They stand between translator and writer, exile and ex-pat. In some ways, this atypical situation facilitated translation. Usually when I translate I must attempt to inhabit the mother tongue, the native instincts, and at times even the subconscious of the author. It can feel like trespassing. In contrast, Hajdari and I meet on borrowed ground in the fertile, liminal territory of a third language.

The special autonomy of these poems creates new kinds of translation challenges. Hajdari’s language is often deceptively simple. His poems contain many landscape elements; they evoke the earthy intimacy of his rural Albanian boyhood. But it is to a landscape remembered, not lived, that the poems speak. In Italian, the familiar names of trees and animals become strange, distant, and yet because distant perhaps even more longed for. How is it possible to convey that distance anew in a translation? What happens to nostalgia—the first language—when expressed in a second language?

Hajdari sometimes uses Italian to chastise his mother tongue and his country: “you got me born/so I could be your wound,” he says in one poem. There are moments in which he seems to feel permanently alienated by his existence in his second language; he and other exiles are “leaving for a country that calls not your name but your body.” In another poem he says “I’m living in place of myself now” as if the entire Albanian self were abandoned along with the country.

Yet these melancholy comments on exile are balanced by a kind of liberation (quite familiar to us as Americans I suspect) that comes with rootlessness. After he imagines, in one poem, that his books will one day start a fire in the house of two cold lovers, he says “To feel/ a little bit oneself/ a little bit the universe.” What a poignant articulation of one of the ways in which great happiness expresses itself; when that elusive, seeking self appears both within and without, present and distant. It is to remember this feeling, our human belonging and our human lostness, that I return again and again to poetry.

 

Gëzim HajdariBorn in Lushnje, Albania in 1957, Gëzim Hajdari was persecuted by the communist regime and fled to Italy in 1992 where he has since resided. He is a prominent member of the “Scrittori Migranti” movement in Italy, a group of writers who intentionally eschew their first language, choosing instead to write in Italian. Hajdari has earned acclaim both in Italy and abroad for his poems, winning the prestigious Montale prize among others. His work speaks to his experience as an exile, his deep-seated love and equally profound frustration with his native Albania, and the shifting, uncomfortable identity he inhabits.

 

Sarah StickneySarah Stickney received her MFA from the University of New Hampshire. She is a former Fulbright Grantee for the translation of Italian/Albanian poet Gëzim Hajdari. Her co-translations of Elisa Biagini’s selected poems, The Guest in the Wood, was chosen by the University of Rochester for its Best Translated Book Award for poetry in 2014. Her poems and translations have appeared both in the U.S. and abroad in publications such as La Questione Romantica, Rhino, The Portland Review, Drunken Boat, Cold Mountain Review, and others. She lives in Annapolis, MD where she teaches at St. John’s College.

https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 Christopher Pruitt https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Christopher Pruitt2015-05-28 14:08:102016-02-29 17:02:12Five Poems

Issue Archive

  • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
  • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
  • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
  • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
  • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
  • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
  • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
  • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
  • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
  • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
  • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
  • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
  • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
  • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
  • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
  • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
  • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
  • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
  • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
  • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
  • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
  • Issue 1: Spring 2012

Genre Archive

  • Creative Nonfiction
  • Essays
  • Fiction
  • Flash Prose
  • Lunch Specials
  • Poetry
  • Interviews
  • Translation
  • Visual Art
  • Writing for Young People

Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

How to Kill a Cat, or How to Prepare for CATastrophe

March 10, 2023/in Blog / Meghan McGuire
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/51458407-FB7D-4C1F-AD98-9E3181F097C9.jpg 2288 2288 Meghan McGuire https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Meghan McGuire2023-03-10 11:55:512023-03-08 12:08:20How to Kill a Cat, or How to Prepare for CATastrophe

The Night I Want to Remember

December 16, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Sanaz Tamjidi
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/paul-volkmer-qVotvbsuM_c-unsplash-scaled-1.jpg 1704 2560 Sanaz Tamjidi https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Sanaz Tamjidi2022-12-16 16:12:142022-12-16 16:12:14The Night I Want to Remember

From Paper to the Page

November 18, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Annie Bartos
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/IMG-7101-1-scaled-1.jpg 2560 1920 Annie Bartos https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Annie Bartos2022-11-18 12:27:332022-12-07 19:27:42From Paper to the Page

More Friday Lunch Blog »

Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Point Break & Top Gun Are More Than Homoerotic Action Movies

March 3, 2023/in Midnight Snack / Michaela Emerson
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ECD45731-BD0A-4144-9DDE-DBE45519C4A6.jpeg 2461 1882 Michaela Emerson https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michaela Emerson2023-03-03 23:45:542023-03-04 00:06:21Point Break & Top Gun Are More Than Homoerotic Action Movies

Mending the Heart and Slowing Down: Reintroducing Myself to Mexican Cooking

October 7, 2022/in Midnight Snack / Megan Vasquez
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/jason-briscoe-VBsG1VOgLIU-unsplash-scaled.jpg 1707 2560 Megan Vasquez https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Megan Vasquez2022-10-07 23:55:352022-10-07 19:31:09Mending the Heart and Slowing Down: Reintroducing Myself to Mexican Cooking

The Worth of a Billionaire’s Words

September 23, 2022/in Midnight Snack / Kirby Chen Mages
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/image2-scaled.jpeg 2560 1920 Kirby Chen Mages https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Kirby Chen Mages2022-09-23 23:56:162022-09-23 21:56:42The Worth of a Billionaire’s Words

More Midnight Snacks »

Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

On Such a Full Sea Are We Now

March 17, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Jemma Leigh Roe
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/JLR.jpeg 1204 1042 Jemma Leigh Roe https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Jemma Leigh Roe2023-03-17 11:55:192023-03-20 12:27:25On Such a Full Sea Are We Now

The Russian Train

February 24, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Cammy Thomas
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/06BA84B9-9FF6-4D6C-97E3-9F02075E851D.jpeg 2042 1609 Cammy Thomas https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Cammy Thomas2023-02-24 14:30:592023-02-24 11:40:48The Russian Train

Still Life

October 31, 2022/in Amuse-Bouche / Daniel J. Rortvedt
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/827C31B5-92AE-4C32-9137-3B4AED885093-scaled.jpeg 2560 1920 Daniel J. Rortvedt https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Daniel J. Rortvedt2022-10-31 11:59:312022-10-30 21:59:49Still Life

More Amuse-Bouche »

School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SL-Insta-Brendan-Nurczyk-2.png 1500 1500 Brendan Nurczyk https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Brendan Nurczyk2021-05-12 10:18:392022-02-01 13:24:05I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-FB-Isabella-Dail.png 788 940 Isabella Dail https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Isabella Dail2021-04-28 11:34:132021-04-28 11:34:13A Communal Announcement

Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-Insta-Abigail-E.-Calimaran.png 1080 1080 Abigail E. Calimaran https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Abigail E. Calimaran2021-04-14 11:22:062021-04-14 11:22:06Seventeen

More School Lunch »

Word From the Editor

Our contributors are diverse and the topics they share through their art vary, but their work embodies this mission. They explore climate change, family, relationships, poverty, immigration, human rights, gun control, among others topics. Some of these works represent the mission by showing pain or hardship, other times humor or shock, but they all carry in them a vision for a brighter world.

More from the current editor »
Current Issue »

Connect With Us

lunchticket on facebooklunchticket on instalunchticket on twitter
Submit to Lunch Ticket

A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.

Get Your Ticket

We’ll keep you fed with great new writing, insightful interviews, and thought-provoking art, and promise with all our hearts never to share your info with anyone else.

Newsletter Signup
Copyright © 2021 LunchTicket.org. All Rights Reserved. Web design and development by GoodWebWorks.
Scroll to top