Under Which Lyre: Hellenic Poetry

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(Natasha Bershadsky, birdsanddays at gmail.com)

H O M E R

Kevin McGrath

YOU who see through us as if
We never walked the world,
Speculating as if we were
Simply imitating your words,
How absolute you are.

Your genius enveloped us
We did not know that we
Were formed by your kind
Vision supercharging
The gravity of life on earth.

Then when you withdrew speech
Which made all this seem true,
We were obliged to fabricate
Pretend days were just the same
That light had not been veiled.

You gave us destiny and hearts
Outlined love’s nubile body,
You made us search ourselves
To think we wore our souls inside
To be changed just like a tunic.

So now we wander here and there
Lives pausing in their moments,
The sights that you offered we
Repeat when the sun is strong
For action to be obvious.

As we go out on the fields
Which you circumscribed,
Plains of death and ambition
Axles racing in their wheels
Blood upon the powdery sand:

There are ingots of experience
And shadows in the night,
Fires flash and gleam as
All this runs away in time -
To your great voice we turn:

Desperate to hear your sound
Compose desire and grief,
There is astonishment conceived
Since you left us to ourselves
Staring at your figures.

Cambridge, November
Two Thousand & Eight

A song about homecoming

Janling Fu

A song about homecoming[1]

I was homeward bound[2]

Lost in windward flight unerring yet held aloft

And suspended in ecstatic transition[3]

In liminal space[4] we are circumscribed

Never landing until we are home[5]

‘Til we touched sacred earth[6] and felt

Its strange, foreign identity[7]

Alterity it cried

Synthetically marked small packets

That struggle and morph

For reality in the lava-flowing of my beleaguered, whipped

Mind lashed in geometric categorization[8]

I;[9] struggle howled vortices whisper into successive

Movements of a glass sea drop of worlds[10]

Felt ice warmed yawped[11] my breath cracked

Its death shattered shards gasped[12]

Reaching innout[13] space of apoplectic[14] worlds

Reversed course in stitching rent souls[15]

The hypnotic dance of pulsing memory[16]

I shut recollecting open spaces[17]

interstitial in networked meanings[18]

I situate myself

avant nostalgia[19] in opposition

home.

[1] The song is a “song” about nostos, which is both a homecoming and a song about a homecoming.

[2] Referencing the song by Simon and Garfunkel.

[3] “Ecstatic” as a homecoming should be filled with ecstasy, and the joy of reconnection.

[4] “Transition” and “liminal” here in reference to the categories of Victor Turner and Arnold van Gennep of separation, transition and reintegration; of course what is pointed to at least is reintegration, if one can reintegrate into the society of one’s past, or how one accomplishes this in the present.

[5] The circumscribed nature refers to this space we inhabit clearly in the in-between. This should change when at last we should come “home”.

[6] The moment of coming to home should “happen” once we touch the physical space of the sacred earth, sanctified by our mental associations. At the same time, our feelings of being “home” happen in “touch”, the emotional or physical touch of another individual.

[7] But the earth is strange, it is “different” and in the category of “other”, defined by the postmodern term “alterity”.

[8] The poem takes a step back. The problem lies not so much in physical but mental categories. Here, the prior categories or schemata that are used are found to be “synthetic” as mentally constructed and so not real. The process of distance or distancing leads to a further schematization in lapsed memory that becomes increasingly reductionist over time. The problem, or rather solution, would be through experiencing reality and thus, the adjustment of these categories.

[9] The semi-colon is intentional marking a pause with its ungrammaticality meant to highlight its inherently unstable position, as Sappho does similarly, within Sappho 31.

[10] I play here with the phrase “around the glassy sea”, referring to the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” and its imagery stemming from Revelation 4:6; 15:2, but instead condensing this formulation. Of course “sea” also plays with “glassy”. The following imagery continues to center around glass and ice.

[11] The allusion is both to the film “Dead Poets Society” as well as the Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself”.

[12] The gasping corresponds with the physical exertion of the “yawp” and its assertion of identity. The similarity to “grasping” is used in the next line.

[13] “Innout” stems both from the popular Western chain of burgers, but also fittingly describes the sense of in and out explosion and implosion of worlds that happens suddenly. The realization as decisive event is literally world-shattering.

[14] Here both “apoplectic” but also “apocalyptic”.

[15] One can suggest that souls have been rent open, and having been torn, require reintegration. The process of reintegration, started through the yawp in once frozen, thawed space, is nevertheless hindered by memory, and thus requires shutting.

[16] It is the danger of memory that has itself been altered and which no longer approximates reality that must be ignored and so, shut.

[17] Recollection here has nuances both of the active process of re-collecting as well as of its associations with memory. This process is nevertheless different than Kierkegaard’s understanding of recollection in Repetition. Instead of the patterns of the past, it is the “open” spaces that will be knit together.

[18] The language both here and below is explicitly “structural”, as we come to understand not only by oppositions, but through networks of meaning. The new points by which we now orient ourselves, however, is in difference or put another way, the once empty spaces that the speaker weaves together to build identity.

[19] “Avant nostalgia” is dual in meaning, both recalling the imperative “avant!” as in “stay away!” as well as its prepositional meaning of “before” nostalgia, taken in its sense of nostos (homecoming) + algea (pains). A stance against the nostalgic past allows at last for a homecoming that can only be determined by a rechoosing of personal space and connections and so a reformation of identity. In a sense, it is the creation of a new center and structures around oneself in recognition of the broken and forever lost past.

Two Poems by Osip Mandelshtam

Translated from Russian by Natasha Bershadsky

I.

When Psyche-Life descends en route for shades
To half-translucent woods, following Persephone,
A blind swallow flings itself at one's feet
With Stygian tenderness and a green bough.

A crowd of shades hurries toward the refugee,
Meeting the new companion with dirges,
And wring their powerless hands in front of her,
In bafflement and timid aspiration.

One holds a pocket mirror, another a perfume tin --
Since Psyche is female, she must love the trappings,
And the leafless wood of transparent voices
Is sprinkled by dry grievances, as by a light rain.

And, in the tender hustle lost as to how to start,
The soul doesn't recognize the transparent oak dells,
She mists the pocket mirror and hesitates to hand in
The cake of copper from the foggy ferryboat.

1920

II.

I can't recall the word I meant to utter.
The blind swallow will return to the shades' keep,
Its wings clipped, to play with the transparent ones.
The night-time song is chanted in delirium.

There are no birds. The immortelle isn't in bloom,
The herd's manes are transparent in the night.
An empty rowboat floats in a dry stream,
The word's delirious among the grasshoppers.

It gradually extends as if a tent or temple,
And suddenly flings itself as mad Antigone,
And then dead-swallow-like falls to one's feet,
With Stygian tenderness and a green bough.

Would that one could restore the sighted fingers' shame
Along the sculptural joy of recognition,
I fear so much the Aonides' sobs,
The mist, the ringing, the elision.

For mortals' power is to love and recognize,
For them even a sound will spill into their digits,
But I've forgotten what I meant to say,
And the unbodied thought will go to the shades' keep.

The transparent one, she goes on and on,
Repeating "swallow," "girlie," "Anitigone..."
While on my lips the memory is burning,
As black ice, of the ringing Stygian bell.

1920