On the hill of Haz-Haz
lived a girl from Asmara.
Alas... my beautiful Abebà,
so poised and slender;
Abebà, a flower that rhymes,
like Kohl around an eye!
So that the world may know:
while they dug her grave,
cloaked in mysterious death,
she wove an aghelghel
and sent it without hmbascià.
On an indelible night,
they handcuffed and kidnapped her!
.........................................................
Every day I feel her absence,
but I see her everywhere in the dark!
As she refuses to leave my side
bring me my Abebà’s aghelghel:
perhaps it’ll hold the answer,
the key to those handcuffs,
that now bite into me.
A single inscription on my Abebà’s
aghelghel reads ‘a souvenir for my parents’,
a flower who withered before she bloomed,
my friend in prison.
It was a real pleasure to translate this poignant, powerful poem by Ribka Sibhatu.
As you’ll see, we reversed the syntax of the first couple of lines so they flowed better. ‘Asmarina’, someone who lives in Asmara, is an affectionate, diminutive term, which is why we translated it ‘a girl from Asmara’.
Andre had been puzzled by ‘bistre’; but Cristina Viti, a native Italian speaker, pointed out that it can also mean ‘kolh’, which made perfect sense in the context.
The first time that ‘alghelghel’ was used we decided to add ‘basket’ in order to avoid having a footnote; we did the same thing with ‘hmbascià’ bread. Subsequently, we just used the Eritrean terms without glossing them.
‘Un’intensa notte’, which Andre translated as ‘an intense night’ also carries a sense of intense as in a deep colour. We thought about translating this as ‘momentous’ and then hit upon ‘indelible’ which, like the Italian, has the sense of depth of hue.
