Adam Zagajewski's 'To Go to Lvov': "It Is Everywhere"

Yellow car in street of Lvov, Grigory Kravchenko, 2007. Used under Creative Commons license



Since late last year, and particularly in the last few weeks, Ukraine has moved briefly into the world's fickle spotlight. No one knows exactly what will happen to its government or to its people, but the events of recent years have taught many nations to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

The focus at this moment has moved away from the bloodshed in Kiev's Euromaidan to the largely pro-Russian Crimean peninsula, but a city in western Ukraine called Lviv, or Lvov, has also received attention. Lviv was part of Poland until 1939, when it came alternately under Russian and German control. Since the end of the war, it has been part of Ukraine, and most of its Polish residents were deported. It was also once a major Jewish centre - most of its Jewish population died between 1941 and 1943.

Lviv is one of the cities which in recent days has allied itself with the protestors in Kiev, threatening a decisive movement away from Russia and towards Europe, even independence. It made me think of one of the most famous and beloved poems by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, 'To Go to Lvov'.


TO GO TO LVOV (Adam Zagajewski, translated by Renata Gorczynski)


Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945, and he and his family were among those who were expelled in the same year, to central Poland. Amidst all the news about Ukraine, I was thinking about how it must shape a human being to live in places where borders shift, and cities change names and countries. 'To Go to Lvov' is partly about this: Lvov has become a sort of mythical place, a Borgesian city where "snails converse about eternity" and the stones murmur. The speaker isn't even sure if it is real or not. This happens when you know a place only through family stories, or when you lose it in childhood. But there's more to it: more that I can't really understand, coming from a stable country and a stable background - more so than what most people in this world experience.

I appreciate poetry's accuracy; it can give its readers a greater capacity for empathy. I wasn't born at the end of a war, we weren't refugees, we didn't live in countries where the borders kept shifting or where genocide had recently occurred. I've lived in three different countries, but those choices were entirely my own, more for pleasure than out of necessity. But poetry at its best breaks the boundaries of language to achieve such emotional accuracy that, through a poem such as this, a reader such as myself can glimpse the inner landscape of the people shaped by such events.

'To Go to Lvov' is a classic Adam Zagajewski poem. It remains in a delicate balance between darkness and optimism. As the poem goes on, the shadows draw in more and more thickly, like the clouds covering the sun.

[...] and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye   

without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry

mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death   

awaits you, why must every city

become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,

and now in a hurry just

pack, always, each day,

and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all

it exists, quiet and pure as

a peach. It is everywhere.

What is most terrible and wonderful about this conclusion is when the speaker says "why must every city/become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,/and now in a hurry just/pack..." We all know why so many Jews, and others, had to pack in a hurry; generally they were going to exile, often death. But then the sun emerges from the clouds: "go breathless, go to Lvov, after all/it exists, quiet and pure as/a peach. It is everywhere." Zagajewski turns around all the loss and grief and death implied. Instead of being nowhere, Lvov is everywhere. There is hope for everything that we have loved.

 

New Poems! New Poems!

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna



On Friday three of my poems were published in one day, which was a nice record for me. Also a bit of motivation for 2014, because last year I was anything but prolific poetry-wise.

Shot Glass Journal published 'Wicklow Mountains After Rain' and 'Okinawa', here: http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/issue12/clarissa_aykroyd1.html

The 'Wicklow Mountains' poem is actually ten years old but I always hoped to find a home for it. The final lines are still among my favourites that I've written. 'Okinawa' was written after my trip to that part of Japan a few years ago - it's another travel snapshot, but I also think (and sort of hope) that it might just possibly be the only poem ever written (let alone published) to mention both JMW Turner and Def Leppard. If anyone knows of such another poem, I desperately want to read it.

Josephine Corcoran's wonderful blog/e-zine And Other Poems published my version of Rainer Maria Rilke's French poem 'Winter' (Hiver), here: http://andotherpoems.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/clarissa-aykroyd-2/

I subtitled this "after Rilke" because it was a bit too free to really be a "translation", I think. You can read the original French poem here. I had the (perhaps totally wrong and presumptuous) feeling that this poem was unfinished, that Rilke would like to have worked on it some more. So I think that a lot of the words are mine, building on the original, but the ideas are essentially the same as in Rilke's original poem. I chose not to try to reproduce the end rhymes which appear in the French poem, but my version is far more alliterative than Rilke's. The alliteration is perhaps the aspect in which it is the most my own. It was a very enjoyable poem to create a version of because, as so often with Rilke, his words seemed to speak from his heart to my heart.

Sidney Keyes: "Time Turns Back and the Doubtful Season Passes"

Ivan Shishkin (Russian landscape painter), Rain In an Oak Forest, 1891.


It might be too much sadness to post a poem every month this year by Sidney Keyes, who didn't live to see his 21st birthday - it is just enormously sad that he is out of copyright this year, to be followed very soon by the other great World War II poets. Still, a poem every month is very tempting. He deserves it, and so do the readers.

This poem, 'The Doubtful Season', makes very explicit the non-linear nature of time, which is something poetry partakes of more successfully than other art forms, I think. The poem has a curious effect of both unfolding and turning in on itself, line by line, creating a kind of maze. I find that it can be interpreted equally as optimistic or despairing - a sort of reconciling and things turning out right, or an impossible-to-escape repeating treadmill (Groundhog Day?). Tonight I take it as optimism, having (I think) recently come out the other side of a doubtful season of my own.



THE DOUBTFUL SEASON (Sidney Keyes)


The doubtful season of the brain's black weather
Blew through me, but you waited for its end.
My months were all named backwards till you showed me
That even the mind is not deceived for ever.

O in October it would be the blazoned
Leaves of the chestnut on the cobbled pavement:
And we would seek in the corridors of autumn
Denial of faith and of the summer's achievement.

And in the early year it was another
Sign of evasion when the poplars clattered
To sharpened ears above the metal river -
And I would turn to find your eyes were shuttered.

Even that almost parting on the stair
I could not understand, nor why the candles
Sprouted such flowers between our sculptured faces:
Nor why the river glinted in your hair.

O in July it was our love was started
Like any hare among the watchful grasses;
Its running is my song, my only song
How time turns back and the doubtful season passes.

                                                                           September 1942.

Carolyn Forché's 'Letter to a City Under Siege': Sarajevo Revisited

One of my favourite poets, Carolyn Forché, has just co-edited with Duncan Wu an anthology called Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001. Carolyn Forché has already edited a well-known "poetry of witness" anthology called Against Forgetting, which I've lately been reading - a lot of it focuses on non-English language poetry in English translation, so I would expect this new book to include mostly different selections. I look forward to reading it when I can.

In this video, Forché talks about the new anthology and "poetry of witness".

I've already written about her poem 'Travel Papers' here, and the beautifully (though also tragically) inclusive idea that poetry of witness is not about trying to enforce a political ideology, but about poetry as the trace (sometimes the only trace) of a meaningful, tragic or painful event. It's one of the things which keeps me coming back to her own poetry, particularly in a collection such as The Angel of History.

Further to my brief thoughts on Lawrence Durrell's poem 'Sarajevo', I thought of Forché's poem 'Letter to a City Under Siege' - also about Sarajevo, but about the city's experiences decades after the Durrell poem and its references to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 'Letter to a City Under Siege' is about Sarajevo in the siege it endured during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Specifically, the poem was written to a friend who lived through the siege.

I think that the poems contrast quite neatly; the Durrell poem is very spacious, and seems to circle in closer and closer like a camera zooming in, or a bird of prey drawing down - but it still stays well away, airborne. Forché's poem eventually starts pulling away (in the reverse direction) to the "roofs filled with sky", but that's after it winds its way through a kind of tight, claustrophobic labyrinth - the pages (literal or metaphorical) where her friend has made notes, the tunnel where food was smuggled, the delicate and harsh details of the siege. It is completely personal where the Durrell poem remains more abstract and impersonal.

At the end of 'Letter to a City Under Siege', the oranges seem to light the way in the darkness of the tunnel. There is hope.


LETTER TO A CITY UNDER SIEGE (Carolyn Forché)

Khaled Mattawa's 'Echo and Elixir 2': Remembering Cairo

Cairo, 2010. Photo © Clarissa Aykroyd


Ever since I visited Cairo in August 2010 there has been no way I could ever forget it. Cairo felt like a drug of a city - intense, exhilarating, destructive, terrifying and then addictive. Less than six months after I was there - three years ago - the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution happened and I couldn't look away as snipers shot their own people on the streets where we'd raced around in the astonishing heat. It's always been difficult to look away.


ECHO AND ELIXIR 2 (Khaled Mattawa)


When I think of Cairo's taxi drivers, who seem to take centre stage in this poem by Libyan/American poet Khaled Mattawa, the first thing I think of is staring death in the eye, but in fairness, I think most of them were quite competent; just driving a million miles an hour in a place which laughs at road safety or seatbelts. And some of them will talk, though I found out that if you're a woman accompanied by a man or men, they'll probably address all their remarks away from you and to your companion(s).

So this is a poem about Cairo in the dizzy rushing quality of its images, the overload, and the sense - while you're in it - that the whole world is Cairo. But like the few other poems from the Echo and Elixir sequence that I've read, 'Echo and Elixir 2' is about trying to synthesize the strands of a complicated and multicultural world (and personal experience), about colonial atrocities and economic realities, about how harsh historical truths will never leave us. Mattawa grew up in Libya and moved to the United States as a teenager. He translates great Arabic-language poets such as Adonis and Saadi Youssef, and when I went to Poetry Parnassus in 2012 I hoped to hear him read, but he couldn't make it in the end - I think because he was in Libya, where he was very involved in the post-Gaddafi artistic movements. He was recently appointed to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, a great honour. He is well placed to write this kind of poetry, of dislocation and a multiplicity of experiences.

"I'm sad and tired of truth,/and as usual I'm never believed," says the speaker. The poem has both the excitement and the harshness of Cairo, and it cloaks real frustration in wryness. The taxi drivers and the speaker arrive, but where? They speak "all the languages/of the world" - but they argue. This is what we have to work with, the speaker seems to be saying, but to what end will it lead? Egypt and the Arab world are still asking these questions.

Echoes: Lawrence Durrell's 'Sarajevo'

Sarajevo by Lazhar Neftien. Used under Creative Commons license



After I wrote about Miklós Radnóti and 'Letter to my wife' a couple of months ago, I thought of the poem 'Sarajevo' by Lawrence Durrell, and kept thinking about it for several days at least. Then I forgot to write about it, but tonight it came back to me.


SARAJEVO (Lawrence Durrell)


This was one of my "these poems feel linked, but I'm not sure why" moments. There seem to be echoes between the poems, anyway. Most obviously, it could be the Balkan settings; the war settings, whether death march, or start of war, or aftermath. There is something in the opening lines of both poems that is both soaring and tragically grounded, too: "the mountain roads/Earthbound..." and the distances that just can't be crossed in Radnóti's 'Letter to my wife'.

In any case, that "echo of a pistol-shot" went around the world one hundred years ago and it is still echoing.

James Wright's 'A Blessing': Breaking Into Blossom

Paulus Potter, The Spotted Horse, 1653.



A BLESSING (James Wright)


I realised that what I was looking for tonight was simply a beautiful, optimistic poem which would speak for itself. This was one which quickly came to mind, perhaps based on its final lines, above all. Of course, I also love the fact that it is about horses (or ponies).


"Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom."

"Oh Sherlock, Sherlock, He's In Town Again": Sherlock Holmes in Poetry

Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson as portrayed by Sidney Paget



If you have any interest in detective/spy stories and shows, television, modern updates of old stories, popular culture, or just a famous character named Sherlock Holmes, you may have heard that the latest series of the BBC's Sherlock series has just wrapped up. As Sherlock's big brother Mycroft once said to Watson, "I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler": the current Watson's chronicles appear in blog form, not in the Strand magazine, but not a lot has really changed. Sherlock Holmes is once again the talk of the town, but for me he never really goes away; he and Watson are always around, just a little more in or out of focus at different times. While Jeremy Brett, along with his Watsons David Burke and Edward Hardwicke, will probably always be my favourite screen Holmes and Watsons, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are superb and entertaining and the modern update is incredibly clever. (And yes, in case you're wondering - I totally heart Benedict.) 

I have devoted quite a few conscious and subconscious hours to the mystery of why Sherlock Holmes is so important to me and I have essentially concluded that I am a bit too close to him to ever be able to really puzzle it out. I suppose we have some early influences that become so deeply woven into our lives that there's no way to really discern their exact nature, and in my case some of those influences were always going to be literary. I think I was seven when Holmes entered my life, both in the original stories and in Jeremy Brett's version. I was particularly obsessed through my teens, and it's all returned full force with years of living in London and with his recent upsurge in popularity; it's kind of nice that more of my friends "get it" at the moment. I know that when I was younger I both identified with Holmes (perhaps the fate of a few angsty misfit teenagers with a love of English literature) and had a crush on him; later on I realised that I actually identified more with Watson - less hyper-intelligent, emotionally locked up and rude; more loyal, anxious and both down-to-earth and adventurous. However, I think even now I probably alternate between identifying with Holmes and identifying with Watson, depending how I'm feeling. (Watson is the healthier option.) They could represent two sides of one personality, I suppose.

I do know that my Holmes is very much the guardian spirit of a place, London. Even when he goes out to the countryside, which he often does, he somehow represents London. I suspect that the intensity with which Holmes has remained in my life has a lot to do with place, perhaps more than anything else. The success of the current series, set very firmly in our modern day but also in London, tells me that place is more important for Holmes and Watson as convincing characters, than time. "It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside," Holmes comments one lovely morning as they head out to the countryside to investigate the sinister Copper Beeches (thus totally ruining Watson's fun day out on the train.) Spoken like a true Londoner, is all I can say.

Rather to my surprise, I've gradually realised that although there is a fair amount of cute-but-painful Holmes-related doggerel out there, there is also some genuinely beautiful and thought-provoking poetry inspired by the great detective, as well as some that is really funny and clever. I wrote some time ago about T S Eliot's 'Macavity, the Mystery Cat', which is a real classic and based on Holmes's arch-enemy Professor Moriarty. A less-known but also extremely funny work, written for Holmes's original miraculous return from the dead more than 100 years ago, is P G Wodehouse's 'Back to His Native Strand' (1903):


Oh Sherlock, Sherlock, he's in town again,
That prince of perspicacity, that monument of brain.
It seems he wasn't hurt at all
By tumbling down the waterfall.
That sort of thing is fun to Sherlock.

(from 'Back to His Native Strand', P G Wodehouse)


As a relative latecomer to the delights (if that's the right word) of Sylvia Plath, I was astonished to discover not that long ago that one of her poems, 'The Detective', refers to Holmes and Watson. I read it as a poem about metaphorical death, perhaps due to emotional cruelty by someone close to the victim. Ominously, it concludes:


Then the dry wood, the gates,
The brown motherly furrows, the whole estate.
We walk on air, Watson.
There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorus.
There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.

(from 'The Detective', Sylvia Plath)


Much more recently, I found out that Jorge Luis Borges wrote his own absolutely amazing 'Sherlock Holmes', a meditation on the relationship between the creator and the created, among other things. In this translation by Willis Barnstone, it opens:


Not of a mother born, no elders known,
he was like Adam and Quijano. He
is made of chance. Near or immediately
the whim of varied readers guide his tone.

It isn't wrong to think that he was born
a moment when the Other One may tell
his story, and he dies with each farewell
of memory in us who dream him.

(from 'Sherlock Holmes', Jorge Luis Borges, translated from Spanish by Willis Barnstone)


And I also discovered this beautiful poem by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, 'Sherlock Holmes', where the poet uses the figure of Holmes to meditate on certainty versus uncertainty and ambiguity.


SHERLOCK HOLMES (Susan Fromberg Schaeffer)


I wanted to conclude with this most famous of Holmes poems, Vincent Starrett's '221B'. Although it isn't poetically quite in the class of the above works, it is beloved of Holmes fans and it represents a lot of what we love about the stories and the characters. (I've been advised that copyright in Vincent Starrett's estate is sufficiently murky that I shouldn't worry about reproducing the poem, but if anyone wants to hunt me down with an air gun like Moriarty's henchman Colonel Sebastian Moran, please think about just dropping me a line, first.)



221B (Vincent Starrett)


Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears -
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.