Miljana Cunta
translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau
from POEMS OF THE DAY
with photograph by Dušan Šarotar
from POEMS OF THE DAY
with photograph by Dušan Šarotar
photograph by Dušan Šarotar
*
The old lady I visit carries her fears like overripe fruit that must be eaten straightaway, on my evenings, which hunger for her oldness.
*
9 AM
The morning multiplies like the chicks in the coop behind the house. The impatient light searches for the breach point—the sauntering sunbeams turn it around, into premonition. Day besieges us on every side, but we are safe from the intruder: a cool net of shadows stretches beneath our fingers. Tweedy coquetry, cottony calm, silky shimmers, and the long, tireless snip of the noisy shears, which know how to stop at the end of the journey. Buttons in lively disarray and the thinnest of barely visible threads—creating things is safe; it doesn’t make you leave the room. Or leave yourself. Samples of fabric flow across the furniture in waves and let themselves be pricked where it hurts the most. Amid this willing victim, we scoff at beauty; work will be our amble through the day. In the abundance of attention, words are beside the point. The thick silence is a long and sumptuous gown in which I move with remarkable skill and no fear of falling. Nimbly we step, as if one through the other, and waste no time on digressions. The heavy credenza shakes out its treasures at our processions. When I place my hands on it, it too settles down.
*
1 PM
From the road high up in the hills, the sea in a thimble of bay. From the road on the low ground, the sea in boundless expanses. And we go there, all the way, to the very end of yearning. The sweet smell of the pine trees nets the blue as we pass through thick shadow to the edge of the world. We have taken from the house only what is most essential, to nourish the body, and now finally we are there, where nothing is lacking. Wide open eyes learn to look at the turbid world beneath the surface; sea urchins ornament the heel. The searing pain the sea dispatches into the depths, while the breath above the surface is the flash of a body that dwells elsewhere. Quiet grief at the sun’s departure, and the new day, exactly the same, entirely different. The old lady holds the tiny hand tight. She is a heavy hook, drawing to itself the body that has met the sea. On the slick stones the tired step falters, rocks like a boat above the undertow, and I feel my hand being squeezed. In an instant, I am strong. In an instant, I am me. Alive like the sea. Terribly free and alone, it carries its waves far into the distance, and somewhere beyond, across the horizon, turns back towards the shore, with the disdain of a victor who watches as his past lags behind him.
*
6 PM
A sense of the coming darkness sticks in our throats and the words we consumed have nowhere to go. They rise in the mouth. Flooded by the past, we gasp for air.
*
8 PM
The nightstand is full of forbidden things. I plunge my snotty nose deep into holy water; I touch the exhibited Heart. All mysteries are within my reach. The Angel of God, my Guardian Dear, keeps watch by my bed; he is perfectly beautiful and erect; no altar flowers, only a dull green wall with a mirror so at last I see his back—it’s true, he does have wings. Now he comes closer, but gets smaller and smaller, not bigger. Tiny and playful, he is sitting on your lips, which grow larger, with more and more sounds coming out of them, like pebbles gleaming in a mountain stream, gurgling sounds. The Angel of God, my Guardian Dear, now for the third time shows me his face. And I too am as small as can be, hiding in the folds of the sheets and giggling. I long to touch him, to have him beside me on my pillow. But there’s a narrow lane between us, from nose to mouth; I’ve traveled it often, up and down, but I don’t dare cross it. It belongs to you—not like a tree, which sinks its certainty deep in the ground, but like a cloud, which a lonely man watches through a window, and when his attention is absorbed by the excitement across the road, the wind scatters it through the heavens.
*
9 PM
Pajamas must be ironed to a crease, towels folded in half, the bed cover fragrant with a breeze that blows at just the right strength, the curtains concealing and revealing enough for the old lady’s well-kept luxury to be seen and not seen—as the blade of the flatiron keeps unruliness in check, as the palm interrupts the laundry’s springtime dance, as a finger reaches for a large-print story and leaves the dark red mark of a tiny insect, as the unpruned cherry tree stands solidly before the window. And the room shuts its eyes… With darkness comes the thought that the bodies in the photographs will step out of their frames and come to our bed to warm their frozen feet. We were all cold when we were little, you will tell me once more on the threshold of dream, when I’m up to my ankles in the icy Soča River, which is beautiful and doesn’t like me, and I will never be able to move again.
*
11 PM
What happens behind the heavy door? Who invents the language of the night? Go to sleep, my big child, go to sleep. It’s time to untie the moorings. To let down your hair and leave this place. But your legs are pillars in a town of flooded houses with the scorched voices of the ones who couldn’t get away. Is my eye on the other side of the door? My ear on this side? I watch from a distance but up and down her warm body I hear the clacking of aged bones. Wide open eyes adjust to the murky world beneath the surface. There, in the corners of the room, scraps of cloth come miraculously to life, an enormous hand tossing them back and forth. In the wide-splayed disorder, open to the night before dawn, the things we have created display themselves and drunkenly evaporate below the ceiling—images invented over the course of the day. Any moment now, right in front of my nose, I will hear the toothless laughter of unleashed dreams. Who is that talking to you? Who are you pleading with? Are you him? Am I still me? Are you you again? You don’t wake up, you don’t look at me with puzzled eyes—I would slip and fall on your slippery gaze. You don’t wake up, you don’t soothe me with watchful eyes—so in every hue of the night I see a different whispering mouth. Right next to me, a gasp cuts into the darkness, slices the clenched breath into long, illuminated syllables—and the night is white like a dream.
*
2 AM
But still: let us never go down into the chasm of the body; the chasm of the body is only for the body to enter.
*
5 AM
In an instant as brief as a ladybug’s flight off a flower, with slumber observed from every side, present and absent is the hour of the night that people mistake for day. A thousand days are born of it, but all fall asleep in the same room, the room in which you sit waiting for me to bring you the poems of the day. You look at me with limpid eyes, in which all times, all memories, are visible. The closer I am to you, the more slippery it is amid your barely audible leaving.
____________
About the book:
IN THE PROSE-POEM CYCLE POEMS OF THE DAY, by the Slovene poet Miljana Cunta, a little girl visits an old seamstress; she assists her with her sewing, goes to the seaside with her, sleeps in her bed, and perhaps even dreams with her. From hour to hour, youth observes age, yearns for its experience, seeks to enter the mysteries of life, but the closer the child gets to the old lady, the more “slippery” the world becomes. After three brief introductory texts (one is included in the selection), the girl’s story is presented through twenty-four prose poems, each marking an hour in the day. In the original Slovene publication, the poems are interspersed with Dušan Šarotar’s evocative photographs, which do not so much illustrate the text as provide a visual complement to the Cunta’s lyric prose.
Speaking of the cycle, the poet and critic Miklavž Komelj notes: “In these prose poems Miljana Cunta achieves an extremely intense awareness of an existence in which the more that happens internally, the fewer explicit external events there are. By entering a seemingly closed realm, one removed from the eyes of the world and full of mysteries, anxieties, and liminal states of consciousness, the poet achieves the effect of there suddenly being no walls at all.” It is this merging of inside and outside, paired with the interplay of young life and intimations of impending death, that makes Miljana Cunta’s cycle such an exciting poetic work.
— Rawley Grau
About the author:
Poems of the Day (Pesmi dneva, 2014) is Miljana Cunta’s second book of poetry. Her first collection, By Half the Sky (Za pol neba, 2010), was shortlisted for two major Slovene poetry awards and has been translated into Italian. Her third book, Light from Outside (Svetloba od zunaj) is due out later this year.
About the photographer:
Dušan Šarotar is well-known in Slovenia as both a novelist and a photographer. His most recent novel, Panorama (2014, published in English translation in 2016), incorporates photography as an integral part of the work. An earlier novel, Billiards at Hotel Dobray (2007, Biljard v Dobrayu), is expected to appear in English in 2019.
About the translator:
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Rawley Grau has lived in Ljubljana since 2001. He has translated works by a number of significant Slovene writers, including Aleš Debeljak, Boris Pintar, Vlado Žabot, and Mojca Kumerdej. In 2017, his translation of Dušan Šarotar’s novel Panorama was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. His translation from Russian of the poems and letters of Yevgeny Baratynsky, A Science Not for the Earth, was awarded the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Best Scholarly Translation.
The old lady I visit carries her fears like overripe fruit that must be eaten straightaway, on my evenings, which hunger for her oldness.
*
9 AM
The morning multiplies like the chicks in the coop behind the house. The impatient light searches for the breach point—the sauntering sunbeams turn it around, into premonition. Day besieges us on every side, but we are safe from the intruder: a cool net of shadows stretches beneath our fingers. Tweedy coquetry, cottony calm, silky shimmers, and the long, tireless snip of the noisy shears, which know how to stop at the end of the journey. Buttons in lively disarray and the thinnest of barely visible threads—creating things is safe; it doesn’t make you leave the room. Or leave yourself. Samples of fabric flow across the furniture in waves and let themselves be pricked where it hurts the most. Amid this willing victim, we scoff at beauty; work will be our amble through the day. In the abundance of attention, words are beside the point. The thick silence is a long and sumptuous gown in which I move with remarkable skill and no fear of falling. Nimbly we step, as if one through the other, and waste no time on digressions. The heavy credenza shakes out its treasures at our processions. When I place my hands on it, it too settles down.
*
1 PM
From the road high up in the hills, the sea in a thimble of bay. From the road on the low ground, the sea in boundless expanses. And we go there, all the way, to the very end of yearning. The sweet smell of the pine trees nets the blue as we pass through thick shadow to the edge of the world. We have taken from the house only what is most essential, to nourish the body, and now finally we are there, where nothing is lacking. Wide open eyes learn to look at the turbid world beneath the surface; sea urchins ornament the heel. The searing pain the sea dispatches into the depths, while the breath above the surface is the flash of a body that dwells elsewhere. Quiet grief at the sun’s departure, and the new day, exactly the same, entirely different. The old lady holds the tiny hand tight. She is a heavy hook, drawing to itself the body that has met the sea. On the slick stones the tired step falters, rocks like a boat above the undertow, and I feel my hand being squeezed. In an instant, I am strong. In an instant, I am me. Alive like the sea. Terribly free and alone, it carries its waves far into the distance, and somewhere beyond, across the horizon, turns back towards the shore, with the disdain of a victor who watches as his past lags behind him.
*
6 PM
A sense of the coming darkness sticks in our throats and the words we consumed have nowhere to go. They rise in the mouth. Flooded by the past, we gasp for air.
*
8 PM
The nightstand is full of forbidden things. I plunge my snotty nose deep into holy water; I touch the exhibited Heart. All mysteries are within my reach. The Angel of God, my Guardian Dear, keeps watch by my bed; he is perfectly beautiful and erect; no altar flowers, only a dull green wall with a mirror so at last I see his back—it’s true, he does have wings. Now he comes closer, but gets smaller and smaller, not bigger. Tiny and playful, he is sitting on your lips, which grow larger, with more and more sounds coming out of them, like pebbles gleaming in a mountain stream, gurgling sounds. The Angel of God, my Guardian Dear, now for the third time shows me his face. And I too am as small as can be, hiding in the folds of the sheets and giggling. I long to touch him, to have him beside me on my pillow. But there’s a narrow lane between us, from nose to mouth; I’ve traveled it often, up and down, but I don’t dare cross it. It belongs to you—not like a tree, which sinks its certainty deep in the ground, but like a cloud, which a lonely man watches through a window, and when his attention is absorbed by the excitement across the road, the wind scatters it through the heavens.
*
9 PM
Pajamas must be ironed to a crease, towels folded in half, the bed cover fragrant with a breeze that blows at just the right strength, the curtains concealing and revealing enough for the old lady’s well-kept luxury to be seen and not seen—as the blade of the flatiron keeps unruliness in check, as the palm interrupts the laundry’s springtime dance, as a finger reaches for a large-print story and leaves the dark red mark of a tiny insect, as the unpruned cherry tree stands solidly before the window. And the room shuts its eyes… With darkness comes the thought that the bodies in the photographs will step out of their frames and come to our bed to warm their frozen feet. We were all cold when we were little, you will tell me once more on the threshold of dream, when I’m up to my ankles in the icy Soča River, which is beautiful and doesn’t like me, and I will never be able to move again.
*
11 PM
What happens behind the heavy door? Who invents the language of the night? Go to sleep, my big child, go to sleep. It’s time to untie the moorings. To let down your hair and leave this place. But your legs are pillars in a town of flooded houses with the scorched voices of the ones who couldn’t get away. Is my eye on the other side of the door? My ear on this side? I watch from a distance but up and down her warm body I hear the clacking of aged bones. Wide open eyes adjust to the murky world beneath the surface. There, in the corners of the room, scraps of cloth come miraculously to life, an enormous hand tossing them back and forth. In the wide-splayed disorder, open to the night before dawn, the things we have created display themselves and drunkenly evaporate below the ceiling—images invented over the course of the day. Any moment now, right in front of my nose, I will hear the toothless laughter of unleashed dreams. Who is that talking to you? Who are you pleading with? Are you him? Am I still me? Are you you again? You don’t wake up, you don’t look at me with puzzled eyes—I would slip and fall on your slippery gaze. You don’t wake up, you don’t soothe me with watchful eyes—so in every hue of the night I see a different whispering mouth. Right next to me, a gasp cuts into the darkness, slices the clenched breath into long, illuminated syllables—and the night is white like a dream.
*
2 AM
But still: let us never go down into the chasm of the body; the chasm of the body is only for the body to enter.
*
5 AM
In an instant as brief as a ladybug’s flight off a flower, with slumber observed from every side, present and absent is the hour of the night that people mistake for day. A thousand days are born of it, but all fall asleep in the same room, the room in which you sit waiting for me to bring you the poems of the day. You look at me with limpid eyes, in which all times, all memories, are visible. The closer I am to you, the more slippery it is amid your barely audible leaving.
____________
About the book:
IN THE PROSE-POEM CYCLE POEMS OF THE DAY, by the Slovene poet Miljana Cunta, a little girl visits an old seamstress; she assists her with her sewing, goes to the seaside with her, sleeps in her bed, and perhaps even dreams with her. From hour to hour, youth observes age, yearns for its experience, seeks to enter the mysteries of life, but the closer the child gets to the old lady, the more “slippery” the world becomes. After three brief introductory texts (one is included in the selection), the girl’s story is presented through twenty-four prose poems, each marking an hour in the day. In the original Slovene publication, the poems are interspersed with Dušan Šarotar’s evocative photographs, which do not so much illustrate the text as provide a visual complement to the Cunta’s lyric prose.
Speaking of the cycle, the poet and critic Miklavž Komelj notes: “In these prose poems Miljana Cunta achieves an extremely intense awareness of an existence in which the more that happens internally, the fewer explicit external events there are. By entering a seemingly closed realm, one removed from the eyes of the world and full of mysteries, anxieties, and liminal states of consciousness, the poet achieves the effect of there suddenly being no walls at all.” It is this merging of inside and outside, paired with the interplay of young life and intimations of impending death, that makes Miljana Cunta’s cycle such an exciting poetic work.
— Rawley Grau
About the author:
Poems of the Day (Pesmi dneva, 2014) is Miljana Cunta’s second book of poetry. Her first collection, By Half the Sky (Za pol neba, 2010), was shortlisted for two major Slovene poetry awards and has been translated into Italian. Her third book, Light from Outside (Svetloba od zunaj) is due out later this year.
About the photographer:
Dušan Šarotar is well-known in Slovenia as both a novelist and a photographer. His most recent novel, Panorama (2014, published in English translation in 2016), incorporates photography as an integral part of the work. An earlier novel, Billiards at Hotel Dobray (2007, Biljard v Dobrayu), is expected to appear in English in 2019.
About the translator:
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Rawley Grau has lived in Ljubljana since 2001. He has translated works by a number of significant Slovene writers, including Aleš Debeljak, Boris Pintar, Vlado Žabot, and Mojca Kumerdej. In 2017, his translation of Dušan Šarotar’s novel Panorama was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. His translation from Russian of the poems and letters of Yevgeny Baratynsky, A Science Not for the Earth, was awarded the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Best Scholarly Translation.