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Lean Against This Late Hour
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Advance Praise for
Lean Against This Late Hour
“Reading Abdolmalekian’s poems is like happening upon a system of non-Euclidean geometry: shapes so clearly rendered, so seemingly inevitable, that you’re stunned you had never encountered them before. But then you realize that these elegantly simple lines, in fact, interpenetrate multiple dimensions. The natural and the political, phenomenology and sexuality, reason and imagination fuse into new and compelling hybrids. Only in language can these concepts occupy the same space, and I’m profoundly grateful that English-language readers have, at long last, been offered access to this work.”
—Monica Youn, author of Blackacre
“Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour delves deep into the solitary melancholy heart of a poet gripped by the buried secrets of Iran’s historical trauma. With aching intimacy, Abdolmalekian takes dreamlike inventory of the deaths that hang over him. He writes with orphic clarity the silence that the state has imposed upon him, and takes a shred of darkness that enshrouds his country and whets it to a blade that sings. This is a powerful, searching, and timeless collection of poems.”
— Cathy Park Hong, author of Engine Empire and Minor Feelings
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Copyright © 2020 by Garous Abdolmalekian
Translation © 2020 by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey
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Some of the poems that appear in this work were first published in the Persian language in The Hidden Bird, The Faded Colors of the World, Hollows, Nothing Is as Fresh as Death, Acceptance, and The Middle East Trilogy: War, Love, Loneliness by Cheshmeh Publications, Tehran, Iran, and in Lines Change Places in the Dark by Morvarid Publications, Tehran, Iran, and are reprinted here in Persian by permission of Cheshmeh Publications and Morvarid Publications.
This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: ‘Abd al-Malikiyān, Garūs, 1980– author. | Nadalizadeh, Ahmad, translator. | Novey, Idra, translator. | ‘Abd al-Malikiyān, Garūs, 1980– Poems. Selections. English. | ‘Abd al-Malikiyān, Garūs, 1980– Poems. Selections.
Title: Lean against this late hour / Garous Abdolmalekian ; translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2020. | Series: Penguin poets
Identifiers: LCCN 2019036463 (print) | LCCN 2019036464 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134930 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506607 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PK6562.1.B23 A2 2020 (print) | LCC PK6562.1.B23 (ebook) | DDC 891/.5514—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036463
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036464
Cover design: Lynn Buckley
Cover photograph: Gohar Dashti, Untitled from the series Home / 2017 / Courtesy of the artist
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
Contents
Introduction
Border
Pattern
I Need to Acknowledge
Long Poem of Loneliness
Doubts and a Hesitation
Poem for Stillness
Pattern II
Necklace
Flashback
Pattern III
Fall
Long Exposure
Agony’s Rasp
The Rest of the Picture
What Bridge
Pattern IV
Paper Boat
Long Exposure II
Meeting
Around Morning
Pattern V
Acquiescence
The Bird of Sorrow
Pattern VI
Characters
The Cluttered Table
Federico García Lorca
Stain on a Soldier’s Uniform
Station and Soldiers
Infrared Camera
Sea
Fog Song
On Power Lines
Insanity
Long Exposure III
Forest
The Bird of Reconciliation
One-Way Ticket
Bits of Darkness
Long Exposure IV
Passage
Long Exposure V
Ant
Long Exposure VI
Dark Period
Door Hinge
Bricks
The Mad Corner of the Room
Pattern VII
Injured Poem on the Table
Game
Sealed Doors
Long Exposure VII
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Born eighteen days after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, Garous Abdolmalekian is one of the most prominent figures in Iran’s contemporary literary landscape. He has had an enormous influence on the new generation of Iranian poets addressing the dramatic social changes under way in the country. The author of six award-winning books and an editor at a leading publishing house in Tehran, Abdolmalekian has become a pivotal voice among poets in Iran determined to convey the inner life of their country and the stifled songs emerging from the silence in which they came of age.
While the force in many of Abdolmalekian’s poems is political, his approach to them is fabulist. In “Border,” he brings the blasts of a battle into the sheets of a couple’s bed. In “Bits of Darkness,” a man shot the day before continues hoping to be released into another sunrise, though he’s been dead for twenty-four hours. In Abdolmalekian’s poems, even the dead go on hoping for intimations of a kinder world. Yet his images never retreat into any kind of easy, blind escape from reality. Instead, they chart the difficulty of not just accepting but prevailing over unspeakable violence and loss. His sensorial images flip the private into the political with a deceptively subversive subtlety and also with startling intimacy. An injured veteran begs his mother to change his diapers. An unspoken death manifests in the dust circulating in a room, aching to be kissed. The political impetus in an Abdolmalekian poem is never evoked directly. Rather, it is left to flow quietly, powerfully, beneath the poem, the unseen groundwater of each speaker’s life.
Abdolmalekian’s style has been described as cinematic, inspired by his love of Iranian film directors such as Abbas Kiarostami who themselves look to contemporary Persian poetry for their aesthetic. Abdolmalekian’s work turns this cinema back into poetry, inviting the reader into poems as unpredictable in their sequencing as the stills of a film, with the reader bearing witness to the poems’ unfolding in both time and space. The poems are thus not only a description of an event, but an invitation for the reader to experience the narrator’s bewilderment alongside all the contradictory reactions that bewilderment demands, as in “Long Poem of Loneliness,” in which time dissembles line by line:
He stands up
to go sit by the window
realizes he has been sitting
by the window for hours.
The reader comes to experience the emerging impossibility of en
during this afternoon in tandem with the lonely character of the poem. In the blink of an eye the world becomes increasingly unworlded, devoid of even the reliable relief of a sunset.
Abdolmalekian has received numerous prizes for his groundbreaking poems in Iran, and his work has been translated into nine languages, with this collection marking the first book-length translation of his work into English. We hope this introduction to one of Iran’s most celebrated new poets will invite English-language readers to join the larger global conversation about his astonishing work. Translating a poet who responds to contemporary events with such a latent metaphorical language can be tricky. How many of his subtle allusions will be apparent to English-language readers, and how many will be lost—this was a constant concern during the translation process. We have done our best to re-create the allusions with as much subtlety as they contain in Persian, with all their fascinating multiplicity of potential interpretations and meanings. Abdolmalekian’s poetry evokes the nuances of the country around him with an urgency evident in the new generation of poets in the United States as well. Young urban poets all over the world are deeply questioning the history and the future of their countries. Abdolmalekian’s haunting, fable-like poems feel as timeless as they are frank and contemporary. His work breathes new life into the ancient art of poetry and how the form may forecast the interior experience of the century ahead.
—Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey
Border
I am in repose
as my wife reads a poem about war
The last thing I need
is for the tanks to advance into my bed
Bullets have made numerous holes
in my dreams
You put your eye up to one of them:
you see a street
its skin whitened with snow
if only it did not snow
if the borders between the streets and the bedcovers were clear
Now the tanks have crossed the trenches into our bedsheets
and one by one they enter my dream:
I was a kid
my mother washed the dishes
and my father returned home with his black mustache
When the bombs poured forth
all three of us were children . . .
The following pictures of this dream will tighten your chest
Shut your eyes
Put your lips on this little vent
and just breathe
Just breathe
Breathe!
Breathe!
Damn it!
Just breathe!
Breathe!
The doctor shakes his head
The nurse shakes her head
The doctor wipes the sweat from his brow
And the green mountain chain
on the screen
turns to desert.
Pattern
Your dress waving in the wind.
This
is the only flag I love.
I Need to Acknowledge
The weight of certain news
on the phone
makes the receiver heavier
makes it fall from my hands
the pointless weight of certain things:
metal pieces in abandoned lots
the curved posture of my father
who after years
has yet to take my brother’s corpse
off his shoulders
and place him in the ground
I need to acknowledge
to bear right along the road
After all, how many more minutes
can I continue walking
the middle of this freeway?
The blaring horns make me lonelier
and lonelier
and lonelier
Why do you bury the one who is left alone?
No death is natural
this poem won’t make it to the hospital
Long Poem of Loneliness
He’s leaning against this late hour
pushing open the creaking door of his age
his temperature drops
causing snow in his eyes.
He stands up
to go sit by the window
realizes he has been sitting
by the window for hours.
A bird
pecks at the corroded corner of the sky . . .
Does it want to die more beautifully?
Does one always need to fall to the ground in order to die?
Does the earth
fill the mouths of the dead
to stop them from describing what they’ve seen?
Has he grown his beard out
to conceal all these questions
in the creases of his face?
Is it possible to rise
to peck at bits of his life with his beak
and place them in his children’s mouths?
He opens the window
the oranges of life are blood oranges
he does not understand the reason for the moon
he does not understand the reason for the all-empty sky.
He turns off the light
lies on the bed he discarded
years ago
he lies down upon the faraway
falls asleep upon the faraway
and when the phone rings,
he has to get back on a road as long as a man’s life.
On the other side of the line
lies the severed corpse of his brother
who exploded while holding a phone in his hand
a corpse now gathering his last sentences
from the ground.
On the other end of the line
a woman
calls from twenty-seven years ago
just to say,
“Son, the oven gas is on
I am dead
and your sisters now
are sorrows growing taller every day . . .
Take care of your sorrows
attend to their homework
talk to them.”
On the other end of the call
it is I
who want to haul him out of this poem
who want to save him from these words.
But someone is busy
scrutinizing the phone wires
someone is busy
a surveillance of my relationship with myself
and the scratchy noise you hear
is from his knife, carving out the words . . .
Blood circulates in the wires
and the red eternity of the dial tone
pours into his ears
drop by drop.
It is his loneliness
that withers the flowers on his shirt.
The tea steeps in his mouth
his life’s buttons have been left undone
and part of his soul is hanging out.
He draws the letter from the drawer
will he get warmer from reading it
or burning it?
He lights his cigarette
and drives it like a crooked peg into the wall
yesterday is over
tomorrow is over
and with each exhale the gray faraway of life
draws closer to his mouth.
He has touched both sides of death
like the front and back cover of this book
which he closes in the middle
tosses on the floor
but it doesn’t fall
it rises
and flies off
with the two lines of its story.
N
ow a couple of white birds
are crossing the sky’s mind like tiny words.
Now they are carrying oranges
to other seasons.
Now they are leaving the stage
empty.
He draws shut the curtain of his eyelids
like a tortoise
retreating into its stony world.
Doubts and a Hesitation
Even your name
I have doubts about
and about the trees
about their branches, if perhaps
they are roots
and we have been living
all these years underground.
Who has dislocated the world?
And why are birds circling in our stomachs?
Why does a pill defer my birth?
For years we’ve been living underground
and perhaps a day
in my seventies I’ll be born
and feel that death
is a shirt we all come to put on,
whose buttons we can either fasten
or leave undone . . .
A man may roll up his sleeves
or he might . . .
I am the captive man’s conjectures
about the seasons behind the wall.
Poem for Stillness
He stirs his tea with a gun barrel
He solves the puzzle with a gun barrel
He scratches his thoughts with a gun barrel
And sometimes
he sits facing himself
and pulls bullet-memories
out of his brain
He’s fought in many wars