Full Description
The Taste of Lightning is a new selection of poems by Ivan V. Lalić, one of 20th-century Yugoslavia's most crucial poets. Lalić's poetry is alive with seeing and feeling the world - a world of sun and wind, water and fire. He is also a poet of love - a love for his wife Branka that 'matures like wine' over the decades. From adolescence, through young adulthood, to the onset of old age, where 'We are twin foci of the same ellipse... Which links two other foci: death and love.'
But for Lalić, the seen and the felt need to be held in memory if they are to last beyond the instant. This means putting them into words, in speech or a poem, though doing so distances us from the raw freshness of experience: 'Images I barter for the right to pronounce them, / Names I slip as a bribe to time'. Memory, for Lalić, is also cultural. Many of his poems speak about Yugoslavia's Eastern and Western heritages. About his native Serbia's history and landscape, and its roots in Byzantium and ultimately in Ancient Greece. But also the seascapes and culture of the Croatian Adriatic, and of Italy.
The Taste of Lightning introduces new readers to this grand master of European poetry, whose other books in English are now out of print. And for those who know Lalić's poetic world, it combines revisions of previously published translations with poems not seen before in English.
The Taste of Lightning traces the whole arc of Lalić's poetic career. From the directness of his early work in the 1950s, which emerged from the trauma of a wartime boyhood. Through the rich imagery and startlingly apt similes of his mature verse. But it also charts another voice, thoughtful and meditative, that gradually grows more prominent. This voice finally reflects, just before Lalić's death in 1996, on what God's purpose might be in a world wounded by personal and national tragedy: 'may he forgive my fear / That he created me, as the book says, in his own image'. Francis R. Jones, the book's editor and translator, knew Lalić well, and has worked with his poems for almost five decades. Of Jones's 15 translation prizes to date, five were awarded for his versions of Lalić's poetry.
'Ivan Lalić was one of the finest European poets of his time... He was exceptionally well served by his main English translator, Francis R. Jones... Lalić's work...crackles with brilliant, arresting imagery forged by the heat of concentrated thought and, above all, it breathes with compassion and humanity. The title of one of his major collections, The Passionate Measure, offers an adequate definition of Lalić's tone: poised, balanced, meticulously judged, these poems owe their existence to love, a word used ... in Lalić's work as the impetus for all achievements of value, from the intimate bonds of family to the great structures of past civilisations.' - Celia Hawkesworth, The Independent
Contents
10 Acknowledgements
11 Introduction
from Time, Fires, Gardens (1961)
21 A rusty needle
23 How Orpheus sang
24 Cathedrals
26 Young love
27 Prayer
28 A voice singing in gardens
30 from Four epitaphs
30 To a dancer
30 To a sailor
30 To a singer
31 from Orpheus on deck
31 Song for Eurydice
33 Song for the dead
34 Fresco
36 Byzantium
38 Death with a falcon
39 from Melissa
39 Voices of the dead I
40 Morning
41 Slavery
42 The Argonauts
44 Marina
45 Three squalls of rain
47 Love
48 from Atlantis
48 Eye-witness report
50 Love: a fragment
51 Tyrrhenian Sea
52 Inventory of moonlight
54 Roman quartet
54 I
55 II
56 III
57 IV
58 from Prolegomena to waking: shores
58 1
58 4
from Act (1963)
61 from Algol
61 1
62 3
63 4
64 Snowy night
65 Winter letter
66 Winter morning
67 March
68 from Spring liturgy for a dead poet
68 1
70 4
72 Young woman from Pompeii
73 Places we love
74 Aosta
75 In praise of the poem
76 Belgrade Airport, June
77 Continent
78 Marina II
79 from Nereid
79 3
80 5
from Circle (1968)
83 Tomb in Prague
84 Mozart
85 Skopje's monologue
85 1
86 2
87 Waking, one winter night
89 Lyric
90 from Love in July / 2
91 Orange
92 Photographs: a romance
94 Joanna from Ravenna
94 1
95 2
96 from Dubrovnik, a winter's tale
96 The masons
97 Portal: pietà
98 The Dark Province
from Of the Works of Love, or Byzantium (1969)
101 Of the works of love
102 Memory of an orchard
103 * * *
104 The sea described from memory
105 Song of the statue in the earth
106 Byzantium VII
from Fading Contact (1975)
109 Winter sea
110 Marina V
111 Genius loci
112 Fiesole, rain
113 Belgrade from old photographs
113 1
115 2
116 3
117 Cantico delle creature
118 Letter to John Berryman
120 from Athos in five songs
120 Daphne
121 On the way to Esphigmenou
122 Byzantium VIII, or Chilandari
124 Mnemosyne
124 1
125 2
126 3
127 4
128 To sons growing up
from The Passionate Measure (1984)
131 A note on poetics
132 The spaces of hope
133 The raven's monologue
134 Elegy, or the Danube at Donji Milanovac
136 Five letters
136 1
137 2
138 3
139 4
140 5
141 Étude
142 Looking glass
143 Morning Argolid
144 Acqua alta
144 1
145 2
146 3
from Script (1992)
149 In praise of sleeplessness
151 Octaves on summer
153 from Strambotti
153 1
153 2
153 3
154 4
154 5
154 8
155 9
155 10
156 Never lonelier
157 Pietà
158 Sea
from Four Canons (1996)
162 from First canon
162 3
163 4
164 from Second canon
164 2
165 5
167 Translator's notes
176 About the translator
