梁启超
During my interrupted studies
of Liang Qichao’s essayistics
it struck me that I’ve wanted to live
exactly like a Chinese text –
signs that wish to know nothing about tense,
number or personal voice
but that cannot be inflected either.
I would like to have been texted on parchment
so as, after a time in the light,
to be scraped off for a new essay.
When I floated down the Seine
face downwards in the water
I let go of the world
fragment by fragment –
the low ragged sky,
the intolerable black light,
and the shrieking language from Munich
that had reduced father and mother
to silent accusative objects.
Finally I relinquished my image of you
so as to float weightless into oblivion
without any claim whatsoever
which is the final word for home.
Shostokovich reluctantly entered the Communist Party in 1960. The eighth quartet was premiered in 1960 in Leningrad by the Beethoven Quartet. In the liner notes of the Borodin Quartet's 1962 recording, music critic Erik Smith writes, ‘The Borodin Quartet played this work to the composer at his Moscow home, hoping for his criticisms. But Shostakovich, overwhelmed by this beautiful realisation of his most personal feelings, buried his head in his hands and wept. When they had finished playing, the four musicians quietly packed up their instruments and stole out of the room.’ (Wikipedia)
Pressed my hands against my eyes
while my friends packed their instruments
and left the room without a word –
as if a stranger had written it!
It was 1962
and my dejection had entered the Party.
What hammered on the door at night:
Dmitri Shostakovich!
was not black leather-jackets
but the knocks of suicide.
Music had been a word for opposition
when the concert hall sweated suspicion
and integrity was a case for psychiatry.
And now? What a bitter taste of betrayal!
But at the same time this lingering cello.
Such a light confusion.
The quartet, still in the room,
lifted determinedly
the shivering soul on board.
The Battle of Poltava (1709), in which the Russian forces
of Peter the Great overcame the Swedish army
Snowed-up window and loneliness
are my circumstances, ten years after Poltava.
The Siberian light is hardly sufficient
for mending the tear in my uniform.
It is the word ‘home’ that makes the needle quaver.
Hedvig and the children have grown so transparent
and the farm so pale I can only just remember.
To ease my pain I think in grey –
the timbers in the house that shake in the wind,
the hostile sky,
yes, even the language is consolingly grey.
The only thing that still reminds me of colour
is the washed-out blue of my coat at the knee,
the pale-blue of the sky
above my distant Södermanland.
Johannes Messenius (1579-1636)
Swedish historian. Sentenced in 1616 on suspicion of treachery against the Crown
and conspiring with Catholic Poland. While in prison in Kajaneborg, Finland,
he wrote Scondia illustrata, the history of Sweden.
My cell here at Kajaneborg Castle
is a death sentence commuted to loneliness.
The crime was my Catholic faith.
Out there, starvation –
I hear of dead people lining the roadside
with horse dung and straw in their mouths.
They tell me the birch despite everything is in leaf
and that the swallow is up in the sky once more
after its winter on the bed of the river.
Here inside, our country’s history grows
under my zealous pen.
Armour worn by the Danish troops at the massacre of Visby, Gotland, in 1361
That day the sky was as if newly born.
We fortified ourselves with an old hymn,
I one of the few from Eke parish
in the peasant army scraped together
in the hope of casting the Danes out into the sea.
But many were disabled, others ill.
with scythes and fear as weapons
against King Valdemar’s iron-clad mercenaries.
The citizens up on Visby walls
let themselves be rid of us.
Before the mercenary’s raised axe
– the sun’s glint told me it was an axe –
I was an exhausted ox.
My wife sought my body in vain.
I, the youngest novice in Saint Julien,
suffered from the monks’ sin of acedia
and moaned in the sun’s black light.
When the darkness could hardly be breathed any longer
the Tempter came with his huge bellows
and squeezed into my ear:
Follow me and the night will light up for you.
But I shook my head wordlessly
and simply huddled even closer
to God’s shuddering back.
Thoughts are quite suddenly side-tracked again.
Rails gleam softly, brittle as lime.
Light snowstorm, just silence.
The train has halted, confusion of voices.
Engine – a thing of the past –
hisses, its mind somewhat hazy.
The house I live in is not mine.
Seems to be built of mists. Can you comprehend
how one finds one’s way from one room to the next?
Here they speak to me as to a child
though my hands look as if they’re ninety.
And constantly new faces around me.
One of them beautiful a strong longing
as if it was created just for me.
I asked an assistant nurse
what the beautiful woman’s name was.
Lene, professor, she said with a grin.
And maintained she was my wife.
What a nasty joke!
But I am suddenly resolute.
When you bent down towards a rare flower
my large stone shot past your skull.
Even botany seems to be on your side!
But the impulse did not come from all the envy
that mum dripped into my ears
when she’d compared our school grades.
It was the visions I’d started having at night
and the voices that took over my will.
This morning the door was blocked
by a being with determined eyes
that squeezed into me
like a suit that was far too small.
I felt how I burst at the seams.
