Galaktika Poetike Atunis is de naam van een internationale, vanuit Albanië en Vlaanderen opererende website die, zoals de naam al aangeeft, veel aandacht aan poëzie besteedt.

Op 15 oktober 2019 publiceerde redacteur Agron Shele vier in het Engels vertaalde gedichten van Albert Hagenaars uit diens bundel 'Tropendrift' (2003).

De Engelse versies werden gemaakt door John Irons, die werk van vele tientallen Nederlandse dichters vertaalde en in die hoedanigheid jarenlang actief was voor het jaarlijks in Rotterdam gehouden festival Poetry International.

BANGKOK, R & R 'Not one sucks the fear out of me' still just, no longer legible on the toilet wall. I see him, back for a while from Nam, blond, tall and tittering from tattered nerves in the shadows of The Strip. Neon slashes longing. Time clots. Searching for my dark girl from The Hague you fondle who'll ride you for a handful of rice. Are you rotting in a noose or, through one of those godforsaken places, racing your empty taxi home? Your last sentence, my first, the same kind: The hole, always, everywhere that one and only woman.

KUALA LUMPUR City of idle hours, named after muddy rivers which, like us, meet here in silence. City in the grip of homesick blond clerks, taken by mineworkers from all of Asia. Clothes stick to the body, as in our house with the roll-down shutters you always wanted closed. Just as there: grey sky, tightly stretched membrane. The dry clicks from the cricket field; heads rolling into baskets. Going astray enlightens. In the sum of misunderstandings, in the Brickfields of Indiatown, I kneel before the neon of a commanding language, digging for tin in your exhausted lap.

SINGAPORE Here too the possibilities, like totems, soar into a sky of glass and steel, traffic rushes through us like time, builder's cranes tighten in the memory. But at night, with us beyond ourselves, all energy convulses in a cramp, we bow, numbed at the travesty of Bugis Street, for the lap of the deathly quiet city, and bite into the flesh of the fruit. God is a hypothetical point on the spiral of our longing. We bite down on cities, masks, poems. And bite through.

JAKARTA, 1965 Paper rustles. A cockroach creeps from news papers that remained new. Our landlady asks her father something in Chinese. He shakes his head almost imperceptibly, keeps on stirring his tea. The year which our family never talks about ripples open: rolled-up money, ampoules and lists of names from Glodok. My new aunt embraces him, stares for help. I am only ten but write what I can: 'She buried the books, undid her hair and put on the white dress in the outhouse, where they found her, and did not let her go again.' Grandma is the small cup, tinkling in his hand.

Op werkbezoek in Tirana, Albanië. Foto: © Siti Wahyuningsih.










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