Commentary by Rowan Williams
One of my great discoveries a couple of years ago was a Russian poet called Inna Lisnianskaya. Still alive and in enormous old age, she is very much in the great tradition of Russian women poets like Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, both of whom she's written about. And some of her late poems are again about borderland experiences, about death and bereavement and what emerges from that.
I'm going to read first of all, one of her poems in my own translation which is partly about the death of her husband and its setting is fourth floor of a hotel in Jerusalem. But interestingly, and you may find this relevant for this evening, I first read it as looking out from the fourth floor of a hospital, as one sometimes does between visits or when you wander out from sitting by somebody's bed and just look out of a window of a high floor. I think it was partly because it evoked to me some of those experiences when my parents were dying, that it spoke. It's a poem about the memory of love, the presence of challenge and again, what is squeezed out of necessity by that.
So here is
From the Fourth Floor
Inna Lisnianskaya –
My look-out is the mountain peak of the fourth floor;
the eyes are flooded with desert, a seascape
with Bedouin tents blowing full-sail across it,
a mackerel sky, layers of quivering sea-foam.
We came here once together.
The sun has set. A stark white outline tells us
yellow moonrise is on its way, because
the sun and moon don't get divided here;
but you and I do; here's my soul
making a detour of a thousand miles
Round through the Moscow blizzard, where your wheels stuck fast
for good. You left your stick for me, to use it for
a compass needle, and I followed your direction
straight away. Off for a month or so to Bible lands, and never
letting my gaze wander from the sands and their remembering.
Dates blaze in clusters on the palmtrees, eucalyptus
scratches its side against the thorny aloe, and a voice
has been, all day today, crying in the wilderness,
sounding just like that creaking lift in Moscow: just the two
of us, a kiss exchanged as we went up.
Climbing to this fourth floor peak is hard work. But
the desert keeps going up into the sky for ever, you can't tell
camels' humps from clouds up there. And like a car
slipping into its garage, the pine casket slips into this landscape.
The real view's your death; my life is the mirage.
I was so moved and engaged by Lisnianskaya that I wrote a little poem for her, which is again, as like lots of poems, about requited poetry, but it ends with I think one of her greatest images and couplets quoted in translation. A couplet which I think brings together quite a lot of what we've heard from Shakespeare and Keats and Blake. Quite a lot about that experience of being brought up short and being silenced that brings poetry to life, So here's a little poem to finish with,
For Inna Lisnianskaya:
Barefoot, down the long woodland corridors of frost,
over the needles, walks the forgotten
mistress of the king. She smells of grapes,
candles, black furs, of cooking smells
and smoke in a cramped flat. She will disturb
the clinical forest air with haze
and trembling. In the shining kingdom,
in the rich winter malls, she opens for business
with a stall of odds and ends, cheap and irregular,
and scented with a lost indoors. Don't beg,
she says, from the rich, only the poor;
get absolution from the sinner, not the saint.
From the Fourth Floor
Thursday, 18 March 2010