It Is Very Difficult To Accept Poem by Alexandre Nodopaka

It Is Very Difficult To Accept



that after 78 years of pretending to speak
read and write numerous languages I came
to realize just recently that I know none
enough to call I am master of.

Far from it!
Considering I lived in each of the countries
I profess to speak the language there's that
interrupted continuity between each transition.

It's this gap, while learning the new tongue,
an absence of familiarity of native presence
that occurs where so many inherently
indigenous subtleties zip over my head.

Anna Akhmatova is one such experience.
Reading in her native tongue and in other
tongues is like reading two separate but
exquisitely sophisticated foreign characters.

I even say that her century-old translated
poems sound as modern as any of the poets
of today.
Besides, consider that in the Russian

language nearly all words have all sorts of
declinations. Then there is the feminine case
and the infamous neutered gendered
that also may be declined.

No wonder my brain couldn't keep up
since I left at 4 years old and it has been
compounded that in each different country
we spoke at home only the minimum.

I didn't even learn the basic as my parents
never used 4-letter words that in Ukrainian
and Russian surpass by far anything
you can ever say in English.

Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Topic(s) of this poem: archiving
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