ibn al iznar the known seven poems of the ibn al iznar's
Translated, introduced and noted by Jean-Pierre Baylin >
The Darkness. The copper sheen of skin. It’s an immense vertigo where abstract and anesthetic cacophonies rampantly devours that darkness of past times, immense black bottomless well that one doesn’t want to achieve: the Memory. It was the memory that blocked me to know the possible truth of a geometric profile, wise metal blades that sculpted the frescos in his face, works of Art but not worth the used canvas, that impenetrable profile in an omnipresent body, in words and gesture that used other language, the expressions of those also deep eyes. It was Memory drowning, imprisoning and killing the thoughts of that enormous and almost silent man, Ibn Al Iznar. Iznar was the paralyzed memory in his own face, the shapes on his sliced face drawings of flesh, literally, stories existed there. They were signs; it was that who call me attentions to this being of mystery. Even his most suave and light words of poems and songs that he would improvise in the hour, and that then would forget, in his rude and musical language, the Shankarian, he would bring lacquered the unpronounceable sound. I found Ibn Al Iznar in the port of Al-Khihira, Cairo, in a first travel to Egypt, one of those voyages of folly and adventure to see the majesties of the crumbling mounts of stones of the pyramids that would end in diarrhea and unbearable mosquitoes. Nevertheless, at the time, just like now, they were ‘trés chic’ to be done. Nineteen and forty-six, the end of ephebia of golden era, the bronzed body of travelling and of Bachian fables aboard white vessels or in little fishermen boats – the water with all its reflexes in paradisiacal tones almost always present – the sound of post-war summer evenings, the awakening of senses (more carnivore to the use other bodies). It was the time of practical magic in bungalows and suspended beds in between the trees where one could hear the sea. And from there one could see the rolling of tiny little boats coming from the copper blue sea, the glittering fishes alive and jumping, afraid of death. Death, a thought that never occurred to me. Those were the times of my reckless and free life when I met Ibn; prophetic and silent like a grey cloud passing by. Eighteen years of age in a body that only could mean liberty, freedom and I possess it all, just for me, in the paths that money always can buy. Everything less Ibn’s Memory that would resist to open because it was afraid or in delirium or illness or with a fear for forgiving.
He was seated in a big stone on the Nile’s sand observing the small whirling of green thick waves that would come to kiss his feet, so much alone as a Buddha meditating. But the body that I would observe in the riverside was of a Babylonian god, large and strong, iron muscles resting, old shorts covering the pudenda. He did speak beautiful paused French. Gods, how surprised and confused my companions of travel were when I spoke with a native! I suppose it was the arrogant and uninterested air Ibn showed towards the others that provoked such rhubarb! A fat cow screeched that he should, Ibn, belong to some assassin gang that she heard talk about, no, please don’t go near him, she screamed! Splendid his French! A few words only I heard from his mouth in that Egyptian sunset, Amon-Ra sun falling to its residence to sleep. Ibn said: ‘the sun that reigns in this time illuminated my small brick house and there I slept enlaced with my lover. Now that star fires the eyes and nothing I do see of that body.’ There was mourning and blood in his golden and plaintive voice that left me silent. It would be like that, usually, in the nights of white lizards yawning in the moonlight, underneath any lonely tree. Ghosts and naked little boys smiling from the top. In addition, Ibn would teach me the language and the signs of the tribes (the Alikyur ones) and others poetry guards. Naïve comme toi, I told him once. He answered back: ‘nothing of what I can say wasn’t once said only, and it was taught by other ancient, master and illuminated Hassan and other sages. But words nothing else means than blues and nostalgia, and what you said I was is nothing else than an obstacle inside of you.’ I can say that Ibn possessed a childish and lonely wisdom, sometimes rounded in little games of laughter and joy, but his tears would hide immediately there. I didn’t g down the Nile in the cruise. I return to Athens and with me Ibn. I exchanged words and they grown and reproduced themselves in scarlet drawings floating out of books and of pages that in vain I would like to write. Gradually I was gaining the memories buried inside Ibn and I, blind, loosing my old companion.Mussolini troops surrounded the village of square and little houses, like the drawings in the native’s faces. Without warning, they bombed it and who was running would face a piece of civilised metal that they call munitions or bullet. In less than fifteen minutes five thousand people were killed and all the buildings destroyed, the desert advancing into oblivion. The village was territory of Arishankar and in less then five hours the fifteen tribal villages (all of the Alikyur tribes) vanished from Earth. The map after nineteen forty-two didn’t indicate the little Sultan kingdom of the sacred fields and plains of Sarikimpor and Aliki. Moreover, there was no photographs or description of the destruction, no witnesses and no appeal. Almost fifty thousand people in a silent massacre. A genocide without a record, without the headlines in newspapers. That we know, survived Ibn Al Iznar and his lover, the young and beautiful Sakoyan.
To speak of Ibn is such an enormous absurd as discuss the angel’s sex. Of all the time I lived with him, I am only sure of his physical presence, always omnipresent and gigantic, and the enormous voice. I only can take note of some of his words that I scribbled quickly. The rest of life and of moments were told in a hermetic language and with so many word games that I only can refer that ‘he said’ and I cannot anything be sure of. Ibn was and is a gigantic and indecipherable mystery. Even his poems, seven here printed, cannot be said belong to him, or were written by him, like the one that follows. He said it and I took note of it, but he would deny any authorship. Nevertheless, he says some of them, as a witness of a lost civilisation, this way:
The City:
Some chimneys watering the sky with the whitish smoke undulating on the wind going. Workers kind of march along the streets, each parallel with one name. You spend your life searching someone’s name, The reward being eternal rest. Silk veils lacing the body of women with water pots passing flowering the head. Youths exercising in the gardens when the sun awakes, the jog naked on the paths, joking and playing verses.
There is not a port in Arishankar who wants to know its life would have to fly imagination and rise the body climb a thousand mountains that exist in the chest rob words shut tears and dry the tempest dreams.
Other oblique bodies to me. Ephebes I undress them when the pass me and I blackened my indecency even more. I sit on the mount and I don’t see pass nothing except my eyes undressing me.
I throw a stone far away, it returns to my head, it rounded Earth, vengeful. I brought with me a mirror that I smash against my face Blood tears I spoilt and I am weak. The shadows in between the mist of the old city of Arishankar awaking to the orgiastic morning. Red guitars fly in the skies. What has been of life except the passing of days involved in nothing except myself. What has been my consistency – not knowing none and oneself, abandoning the body through the weeks painfully being vague tact the blackness of the room not meeting me in every mirage on the mirror, what has been of my smile except not wanted reflexes, lies submerging, chimera hidden under the skin, camouflaged tears in my face. An eyebrow shaved young boy throws a pebble at me, smiles and runs away. I noticed the strange I was arrived without shadow. I guess he went running to warn the others of me. They come and surround me, scream and shout, laugh and smile, undressing me they throw away the travel bag into a green roof. I follow their smiles and walk the town shouting with them until they push me into a fountain. Its name was ‘the luckless one spring’ I walk besides a shadow that reappears and I do not recognise, but something tells me I am it.
~ In this little book that I am collecting with some small memories that hopefully will bring to the top hidden and secret meanings to his words I translate the words that I’ve learned in tranquillity. Shankarian is a strange language and I cannot be held responsible for errors or miscalculations. I suppose that there isn’t someone out there to help me searching the true meaning of them? What else can I do to bring to light more understanding about this mysterious man that passed my life without the happiness of knowing him? I wait for news from his hands because, has he appeared, and he vanished in one dark night. These are his words that I kept. I want to share them, even if they are meaningless. After all, these words belong as well to whom reads them.
Jean-Pierre Baylin (JPG) > [New York, 1953]
< erection ~ acido do luso
I/ balai virgo slat, moró suankapia mi rotor vol bo gra umbre pie bo am. bo eja purpux eman pô, eman baatr. fugasi ulbe ataika bratiyyl bos, domin gra nujra the arjun wip mokin nujra aiai plendin gra niagar ta dau danne mai maorkai inun klot. Kalai kassiopna egin bo matsu, bratiyylus aar hor.
I/ barefoot virgins go by, little maids of thin bodies and in between legs the freshness of breath of lips the beatifulest purple, sweeter. lustful horses riding moonlight nights, youths among the bushes three naked men hugging trees the scaling sex in between their eyes a thousand fields of gold animal and hard thoughts. eternal giving in the dew’s fire, by the coming morning.
JPB – unspeakable, the pilgrimages of those mixed cast silences of nomad birds on the oasis, the equinoxes and idleness of tiny wisdom and light tones of camels and men queuing like a snake on the dunes that golden the skin; the walking of barefoot girls as an old Renaissance painting; more ochre and sexual paintings of boys mix of masks and tree torsos, all unspeakable under the eyes of the writer, vigilant and without rushing in saying what goes in his soul, the ‘mai’, little details and its importance is nil. As Ibn said to me, smoking and careless of the smoke spirals in violet tones. The darkness turns into clarity, the boys languishing in secrets and in girls as if the soul was purely the melancholy of animals. The primitivism of the eternal return is achieved in silence, golden, of gold, but not of the alchemists, only a solar resonance. One only knows the gold, precious chimera, nothing more is worth than the bodies where one sleeps, the ‘egin bo matsu’, the fire of dew that shrieks us and scares the silence as well. Simple poem, too simple, to be read in loud voice.
II/ triunayalis byzantinys arisunkys frat bo ivo klimt mi ioir arkan; aara omni in runiamorian aar moitsia bo mai? sunk, ni maat aar abissur in fraser mal mil niagar, ninum dorse, arjun sator! in orbu fraz se dopi ulbe ataika Bbaatri, saas?
II/ impenitent Byzantine the lords of the world, they judge and condemn the daring fly of novice birds; do they know that the chords are distention and gold? milady, it is not true the abyss, that you sing by the sad eyes, of your son, beloved ephebe! what evil you’d cry if two colts ride in happiness, equals?
JPB – Elegy to a wisdom that impregnates the skin, translucent marble, Bachian love without bashfulness and immense grey slowness that transgresses words, the loves of the poet under the complain of a mother and of the lords that knows of anything but judge, without a cure. Again the refulgent colour of gold that yawns in between the torso and the adolescent sex of some boy enamoured of Ibn in his youth of labyrinthine amplitudes, as everything else on him, as if he was capable of guessing something in that man of dark skin and eyes. After the lament of milady the happiness of the boy, tender laments against the position of chiefs that only can be stultice. I can jump into some flute tune and some enchanted serpent. Oxide earth by the solitude of night, the death and desire as elixirs. Little round that you can whistle to.
III/ sator tred mi oralit flow gi dexta iruat
frazerian brok tramiburat in fou gi dexat iruat
ryiliu sakoyan brot mi bai runia despotr brotyan na mai suliudinean wreck tapap gi dexat iruat?
frazerian brok rotas in okliymanian orf gi di gladiy kruk ba nujra aluir suk bratiyyl fat al buryan gi, gi dexat iruat.
III/ pure love of flying soul of falling leaves
suave sing along plangent dream of falling leaves.
celestial cathedrals free of anima, in the very old song, spelt in gold of the south warm winds, of falling leaves?
suave song born in your white chest painting the wet flowers of soul, a fantastic tree over the night enchanted root that dies, on the falling leaves.
JPB – To sing this poem. Let the mouth roll like the Indian snake and end words are more phonetic than flavour or sense. The first poem in the form of a song, images almost western, European, wasn’t for the earthly language and the roughness and melody of words. The game of the language/tongue by the meaning of the landscape, the baptised poem in the first reading ‘landscape with ruins’, and it was a mistake. Iznar told me: ‘this poem is about a hand that one abandons over the lover’s chest, as the leaf that falls from the tree and it will be manure, this way the hand in the chest will cause the seed of the body and from it will rise a very fantastic tree, if one is capable of seeing it.’ A language, that not ours, because memory is of granite and cathedral ‘Sakoyan’.
[Athens 1949]
IV - telaki u rotas tpa na kaak ka brat eman pô arjun gra kaal ato mi go aitai, inun arjunti reich. aliki flod ru hormur. rawnp plut sot aluir milla, furam fit ate mi biz. brotyan do valad gui. bo gad blado gra futur bo nars tapim bo bo mipat. kaat aluir. nak futuri bo arjuni omni blu bo medusi was.
IV – is being build a temple up in the mount Where sleeps the most handsome Ephebes between the cutting edges of their genitals. the eternal young flesh. aliki is so far away. tigers shake their tails in suffering ecstasy, screeching the yellow teeth in anger. two suns rises there. the old speak of books and flowers they pick and offer them. Supreme gesture. they teach the young to read and in return, they caress the hair.
JPB – Accordingly to Iznar, boy’s love for other boys or in between men [and between women] nothing more is than the extension of what one can call total love, or something similar that I can’t find a literal translation. In Arishankar, there wasn’t the division of sexuality; there was a language of paying devotion to the body, a ritual for and in between people. Because of this Ibn, always smiling would tell me that the poems about boy’s love were too simple. To love a boy or a girl it would be one only and unique same thing. Once he told me a poem that I recorded on tape, and that someone called Arichan Nôus wrote. I asked him if the name was real, if the poet has lived. He answered me that when the poets die the poems left belong to all and, therefore, if I wanted those words belonged to himself, Nôus or me. Ibn poems weren’t his truly, he said. And Arichan Nôus sang:
my body is shaken by spasms of yours my eyes tremble seeing yours my tongue warms up in your belly. where you find rest, I find it too where you take peace, I’ll take it as well when you cry I moan because of your unhappiness and I lick your tears. my soul baths in your smile my body learns yours we are almost perfection me and you both us in a single body, equal.
Iznar told me: ‘now that all Arishankar boys and girls are dead they still running through the desert in the tides and flavours of winds and bodies.’
[New York, 1950]
V - flow fod mi rotor ubik ni fraz ipe in ou qurz nami virg i bu ins kaak mi aliki, faír.
V – I flew by the inside of my body trying not to cry until I cut the wrists, the blood took straight to the Aliki mounts, besides.
JPB – Ibn Al Iznar said, after make me write these four minimal lines, the sad eyes and a little glimmer, a surprising paleness in the quiet hands over the chest: ‘when I was a little restless child my master would make me stand still in front of a clay pot where there was fresh well water. And I have to stay there watching for ages and I must tell him when the water’s surface would move, even if it were a little wave. And I couldn’t get away until the water’s surface moved. That way I was obliged to watch my wide open eyes mirrored in the water, vigilant to the water’s movement. The problem was that the water in the pot will never move and I would be there with my crossed legs, my eyes staring the water until I was hypnotised or in a kind of trance. For so long I watched the water’s surface that, I would see me from the inside on the pot watching myself from within it. I would say this to my master and he would smile; his big hand in my scalp. Only after those words I could go out and play but I would stay there in front the pot in a kind of defiance. It was like loneliness that one feels in cold endless nights when we would go to the vigils in the Aliki mount. It was the same thing watching the water in the pot and the stones in the tombs in the cemetery that tells stories of people gone forever. It was that way that I learned to pray without praying, the stars high above. In Aliki are buried the corpses of incorruptible people, and when we would walk among them there is a kind of joy. The fresh water pot, I discovered later, it was an exercise that able me to understand the life of the dead. I learn how to concentrate on me, because I understood that I am the sum of all of those that lived before us.’
[Athens, 1950]
VI/ bo wa nala aar i qu aa mokin irvat.
VI/ your ashes I will be when in death we’ll embrace.
JPB – This verse was written by Sakoyan, Ibn’s companion, but he himself recites it not very sure of its provenance. Who taught it to him was she. For sure, these two verses are kind of vertigo and final, possessed by a spirit of redemption and almost apocalyptic – small fragment of a lost and peculiar lost language. This is a certainty almost mineral, prophecy of whom thinks not capable of living with the ‘other’, and that’s the lover’s blackmailing to continue the sharing of body and soul. As we said, possession, but as well demonical and detaining, imprisoning will and a desire that is castrating. Nevertheless, whom never said this by other words wanting to see the angelically movement of passion? These are words of a mean calligraphy, but minutiae and conscientious of its territory. Demonstrated uncertainties by the peculiar manners of love lived to the last consequences. Or simply candid and white words, pure in an uncountable and fearless love; or devouring and nervous suicide.
Iznar told me: ‘Sakoyan dazzled the senses of enchanted and fumigation’ possessions, as she was witch or sorcerer, paradise’s fairy. She duped the body burying deeper on it. She didn’t have limits; much less frontiers, and our misadventure and disorder in the world, being pilgrims without a motherland, a vanished one, raped her feelings impossibly. Not having a motherland that she could call her own it was like killing herself. In her death bed she told me these same words, smiling, more saying that they were verses and anything more, and false as only art can be.’
Black turns into white. There is on these two lines a kind of stupefying or drunkenness of Memory, as sibyl and python that wants the sublime and guesses the deadly vapours.
This poem was told for the first time in a Greek taverna among the smoke and fire of an amazing alcohol, the sad eyes as ashes. Ibn vanished after that night. He came back a few days later with an impressive ephebe, like the ones in the temples, Antinoo lookalike. He told me: earth and fire will be one day brand and white, what else to do?
VII/ gapyy portia waam gral frat valad om mi kistz divalad qua mi ho kis.
VII/ little windows reopening to judge the crescent sun in the horizon sunflowers move against the sky.
JPB – Two single verses, simple and almost ridiculous when one is told a poet wrote them. Iznar hated this one. He noted them in a leather agenda that he left behind when he vanished. Nevertheless he would spend hours mumbling and singing these same lines in front of the window seeing the sea melting in the sand and the naked boys bathing there. I remember quite well his silhouette in counter-light, I possibly writing or reading and staring at his back. The light would transform him in a tremendous phantasmagoria statue immerse in the exterior of the little villa by the sea. He was very tall, and seeing him like this, it was like a study, a base inverted triangle, the head in the middle, skinhead. The skin would gain a granule and bronze like tones.
‘Little windows’ possibly were his shinning eyes, blinking when he got emotional and homesick (because of a flower that moved in a more ethereal colour), and for that it was only necessary him to observe the shadow or an imagined reflex of someone he knew. There he was with the eyes sliding on the living room or by the beach, proud and happy, smiling and speaking tiny little words, mysterious as children’s gibberish and diphthongs, that later he would explain to me in all the possible detail. I noted all his teachings in a big notebook that I always carried with me. For instance in Arishankar sunflowers, or ‘divalad’, they were called the ‘flowers of the sun’, ‘di’ for flowers and ‘valad’ for sun, it represented the sun on earth. This way when the sun would rose the plants would follow it in its trajectory in the skies. These are only simple observations, facts, and not invention or art (the lies of.)
Ibn’s sunflowers are invisible, I never saw them. A little charade. [New York, 1953]
digital photography by (c) 2009 wassily blossfeldt |
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