Marilyne and I got to know each other when Marilyne very stylishly translated some poems of mine in 2009.When I read Marilyne’s poem ‘Nuit de Lilas’, I was intrigued and moved by the poem’s sensuousness and musicality, its shimmering painterly effect and sheer lift – an earthy immediacy heightened by the exotic. How could I carry across this airy and erotic blend of music, perfume and colour? It was clear that I would need to strive for the patterns of sound, format and image, and also that I might need some background and some botanical advice. With the ensuing to and fro of comments, I corrected a couple of embarrassing misreadings, and when I realised I had domesticated some lines, to Marilyn’s justifiable ‘author’s dismay’, I used instead the popular French flower name ‘painter’s despair’, the colour ‘perse’, and copied her use of ‘forget-me-not’, ‘Myosotis’, as a verb.
I asked Marilyne about the initial impulse for the poem, the writing process, the inspiration for some images, and the experience of translation. Here is her response:
‘Nuit de Lilas’, ‘Night of Lilac’, was originally partly written in Italian, in Parma where I lived all summer and travelled a lot from one language to the other. You asked me about the inspiration for this poem. Mainly my own memories, magnified by my reading of Arab poetry; images of Persian paintings and carpets, antique frescoes, films and photo-making (in a forgotten time when one had to work in the dark to see images appear on the paper!); and also my dreams and experience of a long, hot summer. I should explain that Leila/lilac is in part born from ‘Majnun and Leyla’, the major Persian classical love poem I was reading in that period – that’s probably why my poem deals with Persian carpets, embroideries, and the bluish color of Persian tiles which I call ‘pers’, and the idea of lost paradise.
I usually reflected on an image or a word linked with the lilac, the garden, and set myself to write in the hottest hours when you can only live inside and avoid light to preserve the little freshness you got from the night. The fundamental memory is of the gardens of my grand-dad, with their particular colours and perfumes. The place I most valued was the lilac-tree which I imagined as a living impersonation of night – I always saw it as springing from the earth, its roots like a labyrinth with access to meanings, and to death – to my dead people and time. It has sadness, of course, and you beautifully express what I intended to evoke for the reader.
The lines breaks follow a ‘musical’ pattern – I mean that’s the way I read them. I arranged the lines to give them a visual effect as well, with space for the words to breathe – to radiate their possibilities around them. I would very much like to be a painter with words, as I’m unable to be a real painter. I love taking photos, though, and it’s similar to the way images come to me – I’m in the dark, I ‘meditate’ on a word or a few words, and just as the photo develops in the liquid, images from the semi-darkness of the room appear to me as sequences of the poem. For ‘Night of Lilac’, I use the image of the photo, the grey flash (l’éclair de magnésie, le papier virant au noir) to come near to this idea of the apparition of the tree and the blooming of its meaning.
The Night of Lilac
Shiver of dawn called up
by the song of a bird
so blue
so full
that to hear it you think of forests hidden in the depths of walled gardens behind houses
so full
so clear
it frees ancient fronds moved by winds from the afterlife
unconscious swimmer
I reach the shores of silence
the tenuous song accompanies me like the flute of Orpheus into the subterranean shade
star-coloured thread
of the reed whose voice
opens the door
of the night
*
Between lavender and burgundy
under the eyelid of the night ciliated by dreams
amethyst almond in its narrow bed before the silent explosion exposes
the living flesh
through the dark cracked husk
the space of a blink chiselling heaven
a thousand and one little cruciform calyxes
the colour of peacocks
swallow feathers
grey doves
Call to the wasps drunk on dawn
ronzio che precede la prima ora del mattino
whose flight already whirrs around the fountain before
the sparkling
the plain song of morning
*
Phosphorescence flinging forth a vinous froth soon set into efflorescences of quartz
in its vein of lava
of obsidian
Toothed borders of the wound the sky greens through
as if burned
before reaching its final colour of flax-blue
in the limpid morning
Flame where ether blends with earth
quiet grisaille subduing the tart greens of mint and sage
the honeysuckle tasting not only of honey but rancid butter
its nard lighting torches
soon burned out
So
ungraspable and subtle
the memory
Lilac
luminous nucleus
of night
*
I saw your eyes, Leila, in the shade of the blind
while the cries of turtle-doves coiled
in the morning colour of their pink plumage
The sun’s reflection is caught in the glass
teasing me
the voice which torments me is like your own
when your joyous song lifts to the fountain
murmurs and trembles like the gush of water
but the collared bird with a beating of wings
dispelled the illusion
And I saw you, Leila, flee like a shadow
skipping across the orchard
in the light veils of the clouds of May
But the passing wind made the branches dance
and nothing of you, this morning, is left here
*
Lilac
Prattle of childish dances and nursery rhymes
Laces and nets which bind and encompass me
Mazes and laces
Tangles and interlacings
Arabesque of branches hidden under the foliage
Secret labyrinth where memory is lost in search of itself
Light perse veil like Persian silk chiffon
Lattice-work of stamens where the solo of the dark
sifts
and dances the solar writing
of death
Colour of Passion
your grapes to be pressed
supple curls of the lilac of my childhood
its thousand mouths fragrant as a soul melting against my own mouth
In the serenity of evening
while the doves murmur and the fifes of the cicadas
resound in the garden
colour of yew
colour of ivy
Elsewhere
silent blue brazier of stars
Dolce sorella
nella mia lingua
segreta
*
Clear or cloudy according to the days
Nightwoman in daylight
Green
For Majnûn enraptured
Forgotten in the grey hollow
of the night
Pomegranate pip
*
After the dazzling magnesium flash of lilac torches burning dawn
the ozone blue of clear day
turning to black like a film
reversing the real
under the thousand green blades
of a thousand vipers swathing the tree and its thunder with their moving mantle of supple scales
false jewellery the colour of seaweed and marine grottoes
Is there a more scandalous absence
than yours
Leila
sustained in the garden by the gushing fountains
the weeping roses under the glaucous eyelid of enchanted arbours
and the piercing drill of insects in the sun
*
Each time your name tears the heart
As with the flight of a bird
My sky is darkened by an equal sadness
Each time the wind imitating your voice
Moistens her eyelid
Palpitating my soul names you in its sigh
And if your body is outlined among the shadows
The madness that draws it along is my madness
Also
And only the night then answers to our desires
*
There
empty space undulating into the infinity of our
childlike gaze
the Zone
surrounded itself with belts of workers’ gardens precisely demarcated and coloured like
Persian carpet designs
aligning their herbal damask enhanced by
the carmine of tulips or the gold and silver bouquets of
marigolds and cinerarias
There
at the border
edge of the town’s dreams
one pushed a complaining door
grinding
askew
the trellis fence bled gold on Sunday's clothes
and one was elsewhere
in the section of mossy paths forget-me-notting
between the tendrilled stems of heather-pink painter’s despair
with its slender umbels
In the furthest part
caressing the toolshed and the old cistern
the sweetness and crimped sharpness of the treeflower
its indefinable presence perforating the sky
the pulsing grey flash organizing the plots of the Garden become
a wheel
around this nucleus
*
Leila
Memory is like the shepherd’s drum
And it resounds so strongly
And swells with sadness
And myths become memories
And you are the drum
And the shepherd
And the world
And my sadness which sings
O Leila
You are the green flash which raises the eyelid of heaven
And the song of birds
And the sistrum which makes the sun rise
And you are each evening the hand which embraces everything
The cold flame which dims
And leaves naked
The Night
*
On the whiteness of the sheet
dark knotty branch with wrinkled bark
the outstretched arm carries the corolla of the hand
straining in a last gesture of labour
or of giving
like a magnolia flower before its fall
Hard
under the worn skin translucent as
the lunar ocellus of honesty
the tree of veins still lives
the colour of slate
The mauve tree designs the final embroidery
for the hand which twisted the silk
The tireless knotter weaving the marvels
of the lost garden
*
Innocence of the dawn
blooming from the dew of dreams still ignorant of
the bird
in its cage
on the blind facade
struck by the sun.
