OUTWITTING DEATH

 

OUTWITTING DEATH

 

By Alexander Shurbanov

 

Translated from Bulgarian by Ludmilla G .Popova-Weightman

 

The hour of reckoning has come.

The poplar sheds three golden leaves,

the birch—seven,

The quince—only one,

And not right away,

it doesn’t want

to part with it.

But autumn waits,

even squints in the sun

knowing that everything belongs to it,

no need to be impatient,

because time is its ally

 

I visited Budapest in 2018 and was in a taxi to go to a museum. The driver was a Bulgarian speaking in broken English. When I said I know and have reviewed the poetry of the Bulgarian poet Shurbanov, he had a shock and suddenly applied the brake and drove the car to a side. He then called his wife who spoke fluent English and told her that there is an Indian in his car who knows about Shurbanov, their great poet. She then spoke to me and thanked me for loving and reviewing the poetry of Shurbanov.

 

The Bulgarian Poet Alexander Shurbanov is such a rarity. A versatile poet, a literary critic and chairman of the English department in Sofia University, he has that intuitive ability to fathom the surface of things and record his personal reflection on them in such a way that the reader wonders why such things eclipse his vision. His approach is often unhurried, his lens is pantheistic, and his observations never slip into any religious dogma though many of his poems have strong moral and philosophical moorings.

 

His capacity to create poems of great beauty from the simplest of everyday observations is evident in this one. How eloquently has the poet conveyed the desire to hold on to life against time, the ineluctable devourer of everything!