Katica Kulavkova (North Macedonia)

Memories, Poems, Translations

There are memories that are forgotten and memories that are remembered. This is well known to people like me, who have a selective, sensory, and associative memory. Therefore, my story about Richard Berengarten (aka Richard Burns) begins somewhere in the middle, with some delay.

 Its beginning is already covered with the mist of that fine peaceful oblivion filled with beautiful feelings. But where the curtain of that mist is lifted, Richard's character appears in full glory. Richard the charming, Richard the eloquent, Richard the dynamic, Richard the meticulous, Richard the performer, Richard the teacher, Richard with one deep Serbian and Yugoslavian scar, with many Mediterranean shades of temperament (Jewish, Italian, Greek), Richard affectionate and inseparable from his Melanie, deep-minded and empathic Melanie Rein.

Memories are born as songs are born. They are here, but we need to dedicate time and meditation or let them arise suddenly, prompted by a constellation between the profane and the mystical. I  have not met Richard in his native environment, I remember him as a nomad who at one moment of his life found his refuge, his inner golden section.

I met Richard in Lisbon, at an international poetry festival organized by the poet Casimiro de Brito. The chamber part of the festival took place on the island of Porto Santo. Something unforgettable happened there. Richard suggested that all poets participating in the festival should write a poem on the theme of "breath". Our mornings were free, they were solemnly bathed in sunshine and splashed gently with the silence of the calm sea, seasoned with the salty smell that stimulated the appetite for writing poetry. Richard's initiative was not in vain, we all wrote a poem about "breath": we made one long poem like a series of dozens of episodes.

Richard has the power of a guru. I realized that when he gave creative writing classes to the students of the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Philology in Skopje. Unusual, immediate, charismatic, he gathered all the students in a circle and first freed them from nervousness, from cramp, from fear – what does this great poet from Great Britain expect from them? The university class began in nature and as if it were a yoga class, continued with an introductory lecture on haiku poetry to initiate everyone into haiku. He did something similar when we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. From those events, there are still some beautiful photographs, and I believe also beautiful memories among the students, many of them today are writers, directors, critics.

I had not written haiku poetry until that moment. Thanks to Richard, I started writing haiku and published a book of haiku poems in six languages and a book of haiku elegies. Richard did his best to make the English translation of my haiku excellent, picky with words and rhythms, until the moment he considers the job almost perfectly done. After more than 20 years, whenever I catch a "haiku situation" I write a haiku poem. And I place something very expansive in the small space of 17 syllables and three lines without feeling cramped. Some formal restrictions are an occasion for creative play. Less is more.

Richard and I collaborated in that way. We translated one of his books into Macedonian, a beautiful ritual poem, In a Time of Drought. In it, the old Balkan and Slavic rituals are repeatedly honoured: with an original replica, with the curiosity of a top poet and intellectual, with a poet gifted with a sense of rhythm, musicality, and solemnity.

His poetry was read as part of a performance in the garden of the Dream Hotel in Struga, where the Struga Poetry Evenings are held. Richard is a poet who belongs to all the languages he has been translated into, not just mother tongue, English. Richard belongs to all the cultures he sings about. His poetry is like a matrix that is updated with every new translation, in every language, in every culture.

Back to introduction here.

Next contribution here.