AUTHOR’S NOTE. In this poem I embrace the title “Our Ruinscape” with the joy of creating a bleak eye-space ear-space in which biodiversity, movement, competition, interaction, infector, infected, prey and predator — snake dance onto the white page.
Reverberations yes …
The sun too shines into cesspools and is not polluted.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:I first started translating The Magnetic Fields at the request of the young poet Tamás Panitz. He had been going to Gloucester to visit the poet Gerrit Lansing, a dear friend of my husband, the poet Robert Kelly. Gerrit would recommend various poetry books he thought were worth reading to Tamás, and Tamás would faithfully follow his advice. Except in this case: there was no translation available of The Magnetic Fields; the Gascoyne/Atlas edition had gone out of print and was prohibitively expensive.
Alireza Roshan was born in Tehran in 1977, where he worked as a journalist, heading the Books Desk at Iran’s most popular reformist daily newspaper. Around 2008, he began publishing his poetry daily online, on sites such as Google Reader, Google+, and Facebook. In so doing, he gained fame as “a poet without a book,” yet he’d deny claims to being a precursor of Instapoetry.
Translation from Persian by Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach
Poems and poetics