Krenar Zejno is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. He is
author of twelve volumes of poetry: “The Promenade”,
“The Drunken Epic”, “Lullaby Album”, “Almost
Being”, “Auto stop to the Re minor”, “Hylliricum”,
“AmorEarth” etc., and of the novels “The Legend M”,
“The Leg of the Unknown”, “Praise of the Book”.
Krenar Zejno has studied biology and law. He is also
art curator and editor: founder and director of the
publishing house “Zenit Editions” and the art gallery
“Zenit Art” in Tirana. His essays are introdutions the
publications in Albanian of some of the masterpieces of
world literature, from Balzac, Beckett, Céline, Cioran,
Hrabal, Joyce, Orwell, Stein, Sun Tzu, Kazantzakis,
Swift etc.
I
Zenith Earth
The springs noiselessly, unceasingly slide
Behind the hill’s back and
The hours pervade the hamlet of the sun
In so slow a pace
Over a wench winter they graze
Laying out furrows on waste times
Without any ill will nor harm or dire
Nor evil nor events
The waned pendulum on the wall
Of a freshly painted inn
Is newly hanged there by the sunny people
Of this shore
Cross-weaving in a summer loom
They envy that Sisyphus hand
And sting its fatal downfall
Stings
Of the Town
Under
Temptation
To pinch
II
Nadir Earth
A clock on the wall swaying and swaying
Like the cow alluring her male
In some place where bohemians graze
A table-clock above its head a cock
Nailed to the mainspring pecks
Some night from the sleep of the darkness
In a winding rolling clock dictate of the memory
A yellowish hen scratches the ringworm
Of the human nothingness without disgust:
the remnant humus it prefers
A wrist-watch working perfectly
The sun makes a fool out of the hamlet
The fairy-hours open their mouth wrong
And Time drags down the exact time
A tower clock out of use
Neither tic-tac nor tactics it has but a chance
To mock twice the day’s temporality
An hourglass a glassy marsh
Where the frog quacks a lure
Of public servant to a scorpion
A sundial a finger poked into the soil
The horse carrying a horseman over to a river shore
The redemption shelters the ingratitude
Sinister hours without any acknowledgment
Like the scorpion’s poison on the frog’s neck:
Is my real nature a fault of mine?
A clock on the wall swaying and swaying
While the cow still alluring her male
The nowhere is a pasture for bohemian men
Translated into English by Idlir Azizi
