by Sergey Boyadzhiev
.
Oh, English Language, your glory’s in the past,
The pages you produce today won’t last.
You favor lenders, dodgy politicians;
You’re now the tongue of business and ambition.
Once proud language of letters and of culture
But fallen prey to bureaucrats and vultures,
An instrument for endless, vulgar ads,
The foggy speak of clever legal rats;
Political correctness creeps about
And Kipling who made English people proud
Is undesirable, a writer now obscure…
Oh, English language, for you there is no cure!
And Byron’s fiery tongue, alas, is torn.
A second Shakespeare will be never born –
He’s being forever used and desecrated
In tasteless musicals and shows overrated
With hoodie Hamlet, cockney for Macbeth
A pub or night club where the play is set.
And while in Britain often I have heard:
The English language has conquered all the world!
You’ve made America the menace it is now –
The world wants out but always wonders how.
You have become the symbol of the West
Destroying other cultures like a pest
And there’s no end to you abroad these days,
But people slaughter you in different ways,
The Scots dislike your clipped sound in the South
And speak you with a tattie in their mouth.
They can arrest me and someone is next
So, squeeze the juices out of every text!
.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
* Sergey Boyadzhiev is a doctor, poet, writer, translator. He was born in 1952 in Sofia, Bulgaria, in a family of doctors-teachers. He finished eighth grade in East Germany and ninth in Algeria. He graduated from the French high school in Sofia, after which he graduated in Medicine. He worked as a psychiatrist in the hospital in Karlukovo and in the Medical Academy – Sofia. In 1983, Dr. Boyadzhiev left for Ethiopia, where he worked for several years, including as a consultant at a leprosy hospital; he also worked for the Red Cross. In 1993, he left for London for a while, but remained in Britain with his children. He also worked on a small Scottish island in the Atlantic Ocean. He has been writing poems, short stories, feuilletons since his school years. Two of his poetry books have been published in Bulgaria, the second of which is called „No Return“.
.
