Ivan V. Lalić

The spaces of hope
 
 
I have experienced the spaces of hope,
The spaces of a moderate mercy. Experienced
The places which suddenly set
Into a random form: a lilac garden,
A street in Florence, a morning room,
A sea smeared with silver before the storm,
Or a starless night lit only
By a book on the table. The spaces of hope
Are in time, and not linked into
A system of miracles or a unity;
They simply exist. As in Kanfanar,
At the railway station; wind in a wild vine
A quarter-century ago: one space of hope.
Another, set somewhere in the future,
Is already destroying the void around it,
Unclear but real. Probable.
 
In the spaces of hope light grows,
Free of charge, and voices are clearer,
Death has a beautiful shadow, the lilac blooms later,
But that’s why it looks like its first-ever flower.
 
 
*
 
 
Places We Love
 
 
Places we love exist only through us,
Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,
Places we love we can never leave,
Places we love together, together, together,
And is this room really a room, or an embrace,
And what is beneath the window: a street or years?
And the window is only the imprint left by
The first rain we understood, returning endlessly,
And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the night
Your son began to move in your sleeping blood,
A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,
The night you were frightened by your own light,
And this door leads into any afternoon
Which outlives it, forever peopled
With your casual movements, as you stepped,
Like fire into copper, into my only memory;
When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way,
Places we love we can never leave.
 
 
*
 
 
Aosta
 
 
Solstice in the high hills, clear fires
Printed on the young skin of summer, vultures
Hatching in roses of air, cataracts
Of smoky silver oxidising on the slopes
Between the flowers and bright tatters of wind on the pines,
The lichen of rain on the ridges: I listen to you,
 
To these pictures kept for the slim possibility
That I might recreate a world for you; the imprint of desire
Lives in the air, the imprint of a finger on a postcard,
Look, this is a moment when no place is untainted
With our exquisite blood; I dreamt about sparks of flowers
Burning through the snow, I dreamt about your name, I love,
 
In a glacier the colour of emerald and milk sleeps a creature
With a broken spine, and stone, and a restless tree of water
Twitches its bare roots; an unremarkable memory darkens with desire
As film darkens with light, now you are far away and legible;
For you, I’m saving this day full of hills, that start of summer –
For me, that blurred snapshot of love’s other side.
 
 
*
 
 
Of the works of love
 
 
The works of love are scattered through the world
Like the scars of war;
                                    but grass grows fast
Over the battlefield, and the wet embers of earth
Burst into flame to restore the terrible virginity,
As before the embrace, before the remembering,
Before the voices at dawn, with lips just parting:
The works of love are in dispute –
 
And when the wall crumbles, when the garden grows wild,
When the word is erased, when the ring breaks,
Love loses out;
                        but listen to the screams of the birds
Over the cove where lovers teach the sea
A different tenderness: time is impartial,
And the world is love’s task,
                                             the long rehearsal
Of immature gods.
 
 
*
 
 
How Orpheus sang
 
 
A thicket of song, with every note a rose;
A voice of copper, of fruit and foam; a space
Where every branch outstretches, lengthens and grows
Softer beneath the bark, as if to expose
Its blackened body to a woman’s embrace.
 
The beasts of the field and forest scarcely sensed
The moment their blood congealed to mead. Yet here
They stand, the large with the small, all bristling, tensed;
Sculpted, it seems, where the silence has condensed,
A lake of light in every attentive ear.
 
In his singing, time is translated to sound,
Softened into the limpid, protean form
Of shallow water where red-dappled trout abound,
The speckled tints of flowered and grassy ground,
And the taste of sunlit soil, humid and warm.
 
And he sings his song in the gentle, pouring rain,
In the purple clover; the raw flesh pulsates
Under his skin; but his ears secretly strain
For a wiser voice to echo the refrain
Beneath the stone, where silence’s first wave waits.
 

10  Acknowledgements
11  Introduction
 
from Time, Fires, Gardens (1961)
21  A rusty needle
23  How Orpheus sang
24  Cathedrals
26  Young love
27  Prayer
28  A voice singing in gardens
30  from Four epitaphs
30    To a dancer
30    To a sailor
30    To a singer
31  from Orpheus on deck
31    Song for Eurydice
33    Song for the dead
34  Fresco
36  Byzantium
38  Death with a falcon
39  from Melissa
39    Voices of the dead  I
40    Morning
41    Slavery
42  The Argonauts
44  Marina
45  Three squalls of rain
47  Love
48  from Atlantis
48    Eye-witness report
50    Love: a fragment
51  Tyrrhenian Sea
52  Inventory of moonlight
54  Roman quartet
54    I
55    II
56    III
57    IV
58  from Prolegomena to waking: shores
58    1
58    4
 
from Act (1963)
61  from Algol
61    1
62    3
63    4
64  Snowy night
65  Winter letter
66  Winter morning
67  March
68  from Spring liturgy for a dead poet
68    1
70    4
72  Young woman from Pompeii
73  Places we love
74  Aosta
75  In praise of the poem
76  Belgrade Airport, June
77  Continent
78  Marina II
79  from Nereid
79    3
80    5
 
from Circle (1968)
83  Tomb in Prague
84  Mozart
85  Skopje’s monologue
85    1
86    2
87  Waking, one winter night
89  Lyric
90  from Love in July / 2
91  Orange
92  Photographs: a romance
94  Joanna from Ravenna
94    1
95    2
96  from Dubrovnik, a winter’s tale
96    The masons
97    Portal: pietà
98    The Dark Province
 
from Of the Works of Love, or Byzantium (1969)
101  Of the works of love
102  Memory of an orchard
103  * * *
104  The sea described from memory
105  Song of the statue in the earth
106  Byzantium VII
 
from Fading Contact (1975)
109  Winter sea
110  Marina  V
111  Genius loci
112  Fiesole, rain
113  Belgrade from old photographs
113    1
115    2
116    3
117  Cantico delle creature
118  Letter to John Berryman
120  from Athos in five songs
120    Daphne
121    On the way to Esphigmenou
122    Byzantium VIII, or Chilandari
124  Mnemosyne
124    1
125    2
126    3
127    4
128  To sons growing up
 
from The Passionate Measure (1984)
131  A note on poetics
132  The spaces of hope
133  The raven’s monologue
134  Elegy, or the Danube at Donji Milanovac
136  Five letters
136    1
137    2
138    3
139    4
140    5
141  Étude
142  Looking glass
143  Morning Argolid
144  Acqua alta
144    1
145    2
146    3
 
from Script (1992)
149  In praise of sleeplessness
151  Octaves on summer
153  from Strambotti
153    1
153    2
153    3
154    4
154    5
154    8
155    9
155    10
156  Never lonelier
157  Pietà
158  Sea
 
from Four Canons (1996)
162  from First canon
162    3
163    4
164  from Second canon
164    2
165    5
 
167 Translator’s notes
176 About the translator