ivan v. lalic


Mnemosyne

 

                                                    1
                                                    Autumn like a slap in the face, on the threshold of September
                                                    In Aquileia: the wipers peel the rain
                                                    And the squashed insects from the windscreen,
                                                                                                                           we slow down,

                                                    So that is the town, that stone axis in the plain
                                                    Between the black cypresses creaking in the wind
                                                                                                                                Like the beams of a ship;
                                                    and the gnawed bones
                                                    Of a jetty drowned in the wet grass,
                                                    Rain-sprinkled grasshoppers, a few wild flowers,
                                                    The mosaic floor of yesterday's summer buried in ozone
                                                    Beneath the fallen vault of lightning; so we must
                                                    Take their word for it: the signs mentioned
                                                    In the guidebook, the fragments, and the darkness
                                                    Beneath our feet, and the red parasol before the café
                                                    Heavy with rain as Attila's tent
                                                    Three days before the slaughter, this is Aquileia

                                                    This healed scar
                                                    And this name, a dried pericardium, silence
                                                    On which history floats like oil on water;
                                                    On our return, the quarter of sky to the west
                                                    Shines the colour of ice, of blue flame

                                                    The screen switched on, but no picture.

                                                    2
                                                    Water is only a swifter image of earth,
                                                    Her sister in a different duration; hence
                                                    The founder of the city, ploughing the furrow
                                                    For the solemn sowing of squares and towers, resembles
                                                    The boatman ploughing the water with his wooden bow,
                                                    Five miles an hour, and the furrow after his stern
                                                    Is overgrown in white weeds of foam;
                                                                                                              the difference,

                                                    The most obvious, is in the speed
                                                    With which the scar heals over; it is in time,
                                                    And so conditional; and yet, if I understand water,
                                                    For I know the reason for her innocence,
                                                    I do not understand earth, her work, the stubborn wrath
                                                    Eating the letters from the stone, felling
                                                    Any peaks rising over her own slow grave,
                                                    Overturning the tombstone with a lime tree's root, wishing
                                                    To wipe the imprint of a long love, on her only bed

                                                    When did the feud begin? And why?
                                                    We collect consequences as the breeze
                                                    Collects poppies along the road;
                                                                                                      the storm thickens,
                                                    'Weathercocks rattle in the wind';
                                                                                                      but
                                                    The direction of the movement quarrels with its speed.

                                                    3
                                                    A trained eye may recognise the unhealed humus,
                                                    The traces of ramparts in this dusty Arcadia of tobacco
                                                                                                                                        And vine;
               

                                                    from the shadow of the hill
                                                    The Acropolis has peeled like a scab;
                                                                                                             the voice of a cricket

                                                    Like barbed wire in the stunted fig tree
                                                    Heracleia, in her horizontal darkness
                                                    Dug four-square at the foot of the hill:
                                                    In the shallow pit a small field of stone stubble,
                                                    Two lines of Hesiod mutilated like statues
                                                    And the midday sun oblique over the orchard of paradise
                                                    Conceived with the aid of tesserae on the floor
                                                    Of a church since faded away;
                                                                                                  cedar and sweet cherry,

                                                    And pomegranate, fruits which the beaks of flame
                                                    Did not peck away in the darkness. And why?
                                                    Is there a choice, is there an order
                                                    In the long migration of landscape into landscape, wall
                                                    Into emptiness, emptiness into tree, into shadow,
                                                    Shadow into hope, hope into wall? One thing is certain,
                                                    There is no pure future: space stays infected
                                                    With the fever of signs, the germ of remembering

                                                    And a mother's kiss
                                                    Transmits the blessed disease.

                                                    4
                                                    The blind eat oblivion with their bread, dreaming
                                                    Of a vacated future, swept clean like a room
                                                    Before the arrival of a new lodger;
                                                                                                        the rose of rust

                                                    Is already sown into the steel girder which hovers
                                                    Over the building site, rain sketches a garden
                                                    And a network of streets in the desert, the rubbish heap
                                                    Moves down the river, the temple up the slope, the highway slips
                                                    Beneath the earth like a snake
movements are linked,
                                                    The word future only designates the unfinished;
                                                    But terrible is the effort to recognise love
                                                    In the waning, and to read the sign
                                                    In the nettle between two syllables of stone, in the wound
                                                    Healing swifter than the telling

                                                    There is resistance from the beginning, the earth trembles
                                                    In the sweat of dew, in effort, in light:
                                                    He who wrestled with an angel performed
                                                    History in one night;
                                                                                   our task
                                                    Is to remember, to deliver blows;
                                                    The task of the peach is to blossom.




Translated by Francis R. Jones

[Note: Mnemosyne was both the Greek goddess of memory
and the mother of the muses.]

Ivan V. Lalic' is a Yugoslavian poet I met and visited a few times back in the seventies, when I was living in Europe. The poem "Mnemosyne" is one I first saw when Lalic' gave it to me (in his own English version) to try to polish up as a translation. The version above, however, is by Francis R. Jones from The Works of Love: Selected Poems of Ivan V. Lalic; London: Anvil Press, 1981.

--Halvard Johnson

 

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