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Plaint of a Slovak Poet, 1976

Nothing special can be done for us now.
We are reduced to drawing parable
from nonsense verse and snatches allowed
us of foreign poets hysterical

at their own cloistering, ever more sure.
We garden, watch faces wrinkling with age,
our children learning. They will mature
inside this, they too long to turn the page.

***

On the occasion of a conference in Budapest in 1976, I met several aspiring young Slovak writers and poets. It was an exciting time for them, since the bookstores in Budapest were more liberal than in Bratislava. There was even a copy of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, though in Hungarian, which it turned out a few of them could read, belonging to the Magyar minority at home.

After a prolonged but fruitless flirtation, one of them seduced me into smuggling, once I got back to Montreal, the pages of Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees cut and pasted into the cover and jacket of another now forgotten work, one as innocuous to the censors who read her mail as would be the unaltered copy of Alice in Wonderland I was to place in the same parcel.

I never saw nor heard from her again so don’t know if the package ever arrived. I dared to place her voice into the poem above, inspired by her actual words quoted in the first line.

In Levity, there is a limerick of sorts on the encounter.

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Envoy

Write woman’s words on water swift,
on wind worn thin with vow.
Here mine are in black on white,
though parchment yellow, vowel shift.
In these poems I dubbed you thou
though you gave me such short shrift.

In our embrace I thought I clutched
the pulse that throbs in veins, no sham
beat which rhyme and feet prolong.
With these words let proof be clinched
sting too can send a dithyramb.
I sought more than paltry song.

Fallen leaves which leave behind
a pang each day renews,
my poems on something bright and quickly
drawn away were better in my mind.
I am done with you, my Muse,
now that you are through with me.

***

An envoy or envoi is a stanza appended at the end of a poem, a coda. They are traditionally addressed to an imaginary or an actual person, often a Patron or a Lady Love, in different settings the poet’s Muse.

Rest assured that there was an original addressee though she was ultimately only a minor muse. There remain fragments and heart-shards of the poem I once started out to write to her, something of a grievance, an ancient and noble poetic convention. This poem was however addressed from its beginning to Catullus, the opening lines of whose Carmina 70 are mine in translation:

sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
in vento et rapida scribere oportet acqua

Write women’s word on water swift,
on wind worn thin with vow. 

Before anyone gets too wrought up with the latent political incorrectness of this assertion, let me state that when I wrote it I had decided never to write another poem. This envoy was to be my goodbye to poetry itself. Herself?