Translation Maria Karo

My encounter with A Year of Birds happened by chance. I was talking to a friend about Iris Murdoch and she told me she really liked The Sea, the Sea. I started it but it wasn’t working for me, I couldn’t get into the character. That same day I came across an old interview of Murdoch’s with Paris Review. At the beginning of these always very interesting author interviews, the interviewer describes where, how the conversation is going…, also what the author has published so far. I was surprised to read that she has also written poetry – A Year of Birds, what an extraordinary title! I imagined a big book of strange poetry. So I wrote to my friend Magda, who works in a library in Kansas, to copy it for me. Copies of a small book with illustrations of birds arrived by email. Very beautiful prints – when you look at them, you seem to feel the moment the poem was written. In translation, the words, supposedly foreign, came naturally and immediately created their own atmosphere, communicated.

JANUARY

Inland seagulls never cry

Ai ai, ai ai,

Humbly in the winter trail

Behind the plough their kite tail,

Or ride transparent in the sky.

         Winter white they pass me by

         As pale as paper in the sky,

         Silent birds who never cry

         Arogantly ai ai

MARCH

In dreadfull light March evening when the violets stain

And primrose lights the wood and trees are bare

And other happy birds do sing,

Our husky pairs of collared doves complain,

Never at ease.

Oh pretty lovers, does the spring

Now in your thougthless blood so soon declare

That love is pain?

SEPTEMBER

Skies are a milder azure, night has a colder finger,

Bland the days linger but they are weary of summer,

And the warmth is quietly withdrawn from the long evenings.

The up-tailed wren precious invisibly piping,

Then moving like a mouse in the dusty hedgerow,

Somehow reminds us that autumn has come already.

DECEMBER

When the dark hawberries hang down and drip like blood

And the old man’s beard has climbed up high in the wood

And the golden bracken has been brocken by the snows

And Jesus Christ has come again to heal and pardon,

Then the little robin follows me through the garden,

In the dark days his breast is like a rose.