If there’s justice—let it come now!
But if it should come after I’ve been
blotted out beneath the sky,
let its throne be cast down.
Let the heavens rot in evil everlasting,
and you, with your cruelty,
go in your iniquity
and live and bathe in your blood.

And cursed be he who cries out: Revenge!
Vengeance like this, for the blood of a child,
Satan has yet to devise.
Let the blood fill the abyss!
Let it pierce the blackest depths
and devour the darkness
and eat away and reach
the rotting foundations of the earth.

– Hayim Nahman Bialik. excerpt from On the Slaughter

translated by Peter Cole

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She has yet to be born:
she is music and word,
and she eternally bonds
all life in this world.

The sea breathes gently;
the day glitters wildly.
A bowl of dazed azure
sways pale foam-lilac.

May I too reach back
to that ancient silence,
like a note of crystal
pure from its source.

Stay, Aphrodite, as foam.
Return, word, to music.
Heart, be shy of heart,
fused with life’s root.

– Osip Mandelstam. Silentium

translated by Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk

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This mournful moon, this unease
Inner turbulence, lagoon,
Inside the solitude, a dying body,
All this I owe to you. Such immense
Plans and future, ships,
Walls of ivory, words full
Always consented to. It would be December.
A jade horse beneath the waters
A double transparency, a line in mid-air
All these things at your fingertips
All undone through the portal of time
Silent and blue. Mornings of glass,
Wind, a hollow soul, a sun I cannot see

This, too, I owe to you.

– Hilda Hilst. excerpt from Joy, Memory, Novitiate of Passion

translated by Beatriz Bastos

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Neither am I inside time,
Nor altogether without;
In the unbroken flow of
An instant singular and vast.

Each shape has been aetherized
By the hue of an uncanny dream,
Even a feather on the wind
Isn’t as weightless as I am.

My head is a limitless mill
Grinding through silence;
My inner heart’s now sated
Dervish without cloak or post;

I sense a world entwined,
Its roots extending from me,
As I float at the centre of
A light the bluest of the blue.

– Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. Neither Am I Inside Time

translated by Erdağ Göknar

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We once woke in Paradise
and the angels surprised us
with their brooms and mops:
“You smell like alcohol and earth
your pockets are full
of poems and heresies…”

Servants of God, we said, go easy on us
We long for but a single morning in Haifa:
Our dreams led us here
by mistake

– Najwan Darwish. Paradise (I)

translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

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