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The mornings are light, the evenings dusky, water’s metamorphoses alter: clouds, rain, fog, a little snow …
And golden intervals from dawn to sundown are more and more rare, day does not ascend from its cradle of cloud; from the lake a black wind.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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But still there are sounds and light. What should I do, the shadows lengthen, it will soon be autumn, winter will soon evict me, the nights are chill, I recall the snow’s smell when I see a white blossom which shrivels and fades like a flame in daylight. But still there are sounds and light. Birds clamour at dawn, my boat trembles to leave, where should I go in this wind? I strip reeds: brittle fragments of meditation, what should I do? do what to prolong delight? Talk to Thomas, your friend: drop a poem for him into the deep river.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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In the bushes there are no paths, boats do not slide through the shore gaps, frosty mornings, indivisible days, loneliness, soft forests.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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The lanes become red, the forests yellow, the mountains darken in the distant rain, in the yard smoulders the smoke of autumn leaves.
The axe rings more echoingly than before, the forest’s deeper sounds relate the woodcutter’s journey on the slopes of the hawk’s mountain. The echo travels the opposite bank, sharp and clear, as if someone invisible were hewing on the empty shore imagined trees.
Sometimes they greet each other, this and the other, the echo’s man, and shout something across the calm forest lake, deep and cold.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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gets red still earlier in the setting sun, the pine’s heart darkens, the bent light is cold, the evening is red and ageing like the spectrum of iron.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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All day we have heard a swish in the sky, the migration has started. From the forest we have heard a murmur, wind or hawk? Autumn’s sound, the fall of the rain. From the gutter departs a black and airy bird.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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the house is empty, no greeting of morning wind, trusting clamour of birds, no warm glow on the side of the Scots pine. The lake is dead. On the other side, snow, and in the snow, prints, like fear.
The elk raises a bony crown, (away, said the bird, and the cloud slid over)
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
Sky so clear that everything melts in the light. Day so hot, as if it had just been created.
And yet the water has whispered always, the wind combed the grass, the stream worn its stones.
The abstract wheel of the sedge is ancient, ancient … Realisation is young, an hour old.
Sky so clear that a bird shows through, water so deep … Everything else accidental.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
1. The boat slips into the water, the rushes open, close,
a large bird imitates the whisper, the image rises towards the bird.
Nets glisten upon the beach like rain, I am full of leaves, gusts.
2. A horse goes to the landing-stage, bends to the water, from within the water rises another against it.
The horse drinks and shakes from its harness aleatoric music into the soft evening.
The horse bathes, wades deeper, an earth-coloured creature of meat, sinews, rejoicing,
around him the poured-out gold of the sun.
3. The days rise, fall like leaves, weightless like the shadow of leaves,
quick, dumb, as from within a mirror, a running girl dances towards another girl,
and together they hurry away, days like children or kites, bright ribbons of day.
Sorrow closes the gaps in the heart. Love like a bird always off to the reeds, hiding, disturber of water, anxious, complains. A cloud travels the water, the river runs, blossoms, and the gaps in the heart are closed by sorrow.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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from the shore rises a warming opened belt of fog and from the forest calls an owl’s soft cry.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
A shadow went over. Bird or cloud or image of my obscure desire? Or some other… formless, significant, something unchanged, which doesn’t enter into agreements, something I sway with, against which my desire is just a regret, frail like the crust of a wound, fragile, as light as a strainer, the weight of leaves in the wind.
My desire, desire. A cup of tea in an empty evening on a veranda. I cope with the lamp. The heart is charred. I recline. I reflect in the forest’s recesses. The evening’s shift tires me.
On the pond screams a bird, ank-ank!
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
We talked of Mozart and the rondo’s cheerful falls ran down the cliffs, somebody dropped a scented ribbon and laughter came from the music’s terrace. The wind gathered the water’s hem, it lasted a moment and the ingenuous forest lake was filled with light.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
All afternoon I read old streaked-with-silver prose, fine old lays; Vogelweide wrote with a quill lightly, lightly he wrote in a hard time, a skilful rhymer, tandaradei, shône sanc diu nahtegal.
It was calm, from the meadow rose a warm breath, he rested against a tree, he sang into my soul’s darkened and haloed forest an enchanted road, enchanting, he, singing the joy, the warm wind, the birds down from the trees.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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Something had gone, the bird knew, jug jug, reiterated the bird, gone gone.
And appleblossom kept falling, songs, the nightingale’s drugged repetitions deep in the garden,
The air was fragrant, gusty. Days fall like leaves, a weightless forest, the steps overgrown, an age turns.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
Was it your hand scattered stardust on my writings?
A cloud has wrapped up the rain and carried it off, the dawn has drawn into the northwest a silver line.
A star which does not exist lights up on a pale ground and delayed news shadows my mind with questions.
Will you read this poem when I am here no longer? Did you hear the recent rain? Do you see the streak of morning? Do you see the star which does not exist?
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
But in truth I have already been dead a long time, and when death comes, when it strikes the body wearing my clothes, it is only a preordained meeting occurs: a movement fractures, words disappear like snow, the eye’s visions escape like a score of pigeons, (since we see with our feelings) my body inclines from itself, the head in the looking-glass world of the Coachman, the feet in unfamiliar gardens, and it falls and falls and meets me in the night’s emptiness.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
from EXPERIENCES OF THE EMPIRICAL ME
1. If sorrow smouldered the smoke would cover the earth. Yet even under such sorrow there is a fire, my heart burns, it does not consume.
2. My heart burns, the porch and the chamber burn, not here, not in me; outside, as the world would burn at conception.
3. Twins: love and death, both equally unreal, equally desired, when my character fails me I flee from one to the other.
4. Joy and sorrow always alternate. Friend, mixer of senses, do not touch, I am hot, cold.
5. Steps whisper on the stairs, steps come, steps go. They are not his whom I desire.
6. Words come and words go, I need fewer and fewer words. Tomorrow perhaps I shall need none.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
ON WATER’S SUPERIOR FORCE COMPARED TO THE EARTH’S
Many of my works have been born of disgust, but these have been born of love: the biographies of odours and voices. I have loved earth and water, they have lain together like a married pair, one quick to warm the other to hold the warmth; one hot, the other cold, one complicated, the other plain: different, not knowing each other, both sentenced to fidelity.
I have loved them as only one can love the things one does not understand. I have myself been born of both, in me there is something of both these irreconcilable matters; yet I am neither. I am blood and ashes and perception. I know what I am; who am I? I do not know. I know where I am: why? I do not know. I know where I come from: from matter and from desire. Where do I go? I do not know.
I am on a shore and a nausea from vacancy seizes me: I should like to return to the beginning: to the water, which enchants me. I do not desire death, but a floating existence, a dream. I, complicated, desire the water’s deep simplicity, for the earth has many surnames, but water is a father itself.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
When the shore and its reflection are exactly the same and complete and calm the marriage of sky and water,
when the mirror’s image is deep and clear, and animals stray, and clouds, and the dark forest hums in its depths without a wind,
it takes only a bird’s dipped wing in the water to break the mirage:
light’s and water’s enchanted acknowledgement of the world, as frail as silk; but it forms an alliance.
And the world, fresh and lovely as after rain or creation or after a change of heart or a long illness, is single, heavy, member by lonely member.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
Much have the houses grown in this town, the ravines become deeper, the waters blacker, soon it will crawl into the streets, fragile the railings, the underground water rising, cellars full already, fear is rising, fear is being hidden in stifling politeness, in open crimes. Soon boats will be needed, can you hear the gush, take the boats, hats don’t help any more, or if you bravely throw yourself in take word to him, the Mover, that the danger is exceedingly great.
Eeve-Liisa Manner (translated by Alan Marshfield) back
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