Poetry

Immortal Instant

by Marko Vesović

The sniper at work over the street corner acts.

Two girls, breathless after the dash across,

radiate heat and bouquets, as when ironing

silken delicates. With one, in place of a chignon,

goosefleshed Christmas wheat. She explodes, rages,

curses the sniper; at the window, seemingly,

I'm watching a beautiful storm. From the other, words

like a sun-umbrella's flutterings, in the morning,

on an Adriatic beach. Now and again, she flicks her head

back: just for us. As she well knows: flicked hair

sweetens the air. Beauty, always forthcoming, never

misses a half-smile. As they well know: making us happy

costs them nothing. Those half-smiles saying

you aren't just one fact among others—not at all,

not for them—even banishing the hex of that fact

if any other woman's glacial look had magicked it up.

The air smelt strongly of my distant youth

when every boulevard led to the end of the world,

when life was not yet "threadbare as a proverb."

Now they're going, leaving such tenderness in me

as engulfs you when looking too long at the heavens

into which snowflakes are swarming.

So they disappeared chattering, not girls

but breezes, blown lightly, surprisingly,

through the St. John's heat of siege. The St. John's heat

of being.

Translated from the Bosnian by Chris Agee

Translator Notes:
I was recently re-reading Aldo Leopold's classic of ecology, A Sand County Almanac, and it put me in mind of why exactly I so like this poem and others by Vesović: in each writer there's the perfect fit between a sure-footed delicacy of language and experience that is genuinely hard-earned. This gives to each a deeper coherence, what Mandelstam had in mind in his essay on Dante when he spoke of "the inner image" underlying the fugal unfolding of image-upon-image across his terza rima.

So what I like especially about "Immortal Instant" is the way the two drives, linguistic-metaphorical and experiential-real, are fused and balanced in its rhythm and momentum. We have the whole drama of the Sarajevo siege by the end of the first line—noises off henceforward falling silent, but giving throughout the real context. Thus engaged without being engagé, Vesović turns to what interests him poetically: the impact of the siege on individuals, the actual nature of its reality at one surprising moment.

Quintessential Balkan images—the fresh and spiky Christmas wheat, the sun umbrella, Sarajevo solidarities, alpine snowflakes—are pushed out like little countervailing spurs of meaning from the harsh spine of violent fact and act. With each seamless elision of image and feeling, one senses the operation of Mandelstam's insight: female heat and bouquets morph to hair sweetening the air; which morphs to the heightened importance of sexual relations in wartime; which morphs to the scent of youthful awakenings; which morphs to the tender surprise of moments even in (or even because of) the most extreme circumstances; which morphs from snowflakes to breezes and thence to the final panoptic vision in which the real itself must be metaphorical. With the final three words, we see that the poem has a deeper philosophical arc too, moving from "acts" to "being" from the "heat and bouquets" of a street's microcosm to the infused macrocosm itself. In this light, the light of the poem's life, the death-bound "sniper at work" (words chalked up on besieged Sarajevo streets) somehow seems little more than a hawk's shadow on midsummer life's Heraclitean flow.—CA