The Sea is dead
Экспромт-перевод стихотворения автора Виталий Мамай
"На Мёртвом море мёртвый штиль..."
The Sea is dead, and calm is in its name.
December salt’s like dirty snow strips,
confronts the greenish-blue of what you think is water
but rather plastics seen from far away,
implying, nature fails to have such colors
in what considers normal. It's so quiet here
to disturb your eyes and ears
that five a.m. is not the time for Jordan muezzin,
and those sleeping peacefully are deaf
to hear prays: for having no sins,
the conscience is calm. So, neither Horst nor I
deserved to be the ones, being by the age of forty.
We doomed to finish ‘Asbach’. Pleasant talk
is going about Bohemond, Salah ad-Din and Kingdom I.
The English language revives to be the means of understanding
when there’s no alternative to it; when swimming, games
have had enough of us. We said goodbye to them,
as well as to the girl from Omsk: she left us in the night
complaining for the bout of migraine.
But in the decent ‘Sheraton’ we sat,
amused and drunk, not sadden in the least,
enjoying watching a miraculous dawn.
The dawn invited me to hang around
in here at the Dead Sea in December.
And Horst is stunned and obviously shocked
with what he’s seen. The quietest school teacher
from Dortmund asked me for how long I’d been
at the hotel. I think he is exhausted with the ‘Asbach’
and the balkony in which he has to stay discussing core of things…
Now, yellow Sun is already above the mountains,
two-thirds of it are distinct. Speech is sluggish,
we fall asleep but here, from the South
a roar comes as if from nowhere.
As if two bees go past to rush for their flowers.
We feel the sound filling our atoms and our cells;
it’s crushing our brains to smash them into dust.
The only thing is Horst – without life a couple minutes back, –
he's now asking ‘What the fuck is it?’ Following him
I slowly switch myself to notice something growing from the clouds:
two General Dynamics F-16s like fighting falcons swept in front of us.
Horst also saw the powerful machines, but was confused so much that even brandy
could not awake his mind and only second though little sip was able to create
some tips of life inside his burgher heart. I smile. I’m trying to explain:
the pilots have the habit to bully tourists in a funny manner.
The pilots risk being punished… Oh my Horst.
You’ve never seen those Germans and the Jews that lived a mere eight decades ago…
