The Train
- The Train
I’m afraid to mention thingsthings I’ve been afraid ofever since time wasthey were namedI never named themI’m afraid to mention thingsas if they’ll be rubber-stampedas in the post office after I’ve seen themor not and handed them overI’m afraid they will not goand that’s why I won’t mention themcloser to the narrative than I thoughtas if then I’ll be able to touch themnow I understandhow the world was created through the WordSocrates or Christ or Khalil GibranI’m almost afraid an expressI wasn’t expectingwill stop at this stationNot that it isn’t this station or envelopebut to stop there has to be a reasonAnd even if I can touch it firstor second classI don’t want to know the reasonbecause then it’ll be more than a trainMy trainand I may just find a coincidenceto climb on boardI may just climb on board [End Page 148]
tsvetanka elenkova is author of four poetry collections and two books of essays. Her latest poetry collections have appeared in English: The Seventh Gesture and Crookedness. She edited At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria. Her work has appeared in English in Absinthe, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Review, and others. She has translated into Bulgarian poetry by Raymond Carver, Rosalía de Castro, Lois Pereiro, and others. She is editorial director of Small Stations Press.
jonathan dunne has translated more than twenty books of poetry and fiction into English from Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish. He has translated Álvaro Colomer, Alicia Giménez-Bartlett, Manuel Rivas, and Enrique Vila-Matas. He has edited and translated a bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature as well as a supplement of Contemporary Galician Poets for Poetry Review (free download). He is author of The DNA of the English Language and The Life of a Translator, and directs Small Stations Press.
