An online reading group (at 4pm on the last friday of each month) that focuses on poems we feel relate to Utopias Bach's concerns in some way. We will take it in turn to circulate a poem (nothing too long!) and then meet online to discuss it.
This month Steph Shipley has chosen her poem - see below
The group will meet over zoom. The zoom link is the same as always: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85409719450?pwd=d1VaRktoY1QveTZWSDdaUDVKQWRkQT09
Meeting ID: 854 0971 9450
Passcode: 398362
Ignatievo Forest
Arseniy Tarkovsky, 1935
(Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair)
Steph says: This is the poem I’ve chosen to share. Arseniy Tarkovsky was the father of Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky and many of his poems feature in his son’s films. One of the final shots of the thunderstorm in the film Mirror (1975) is set in Ignatievo Forest and gives the title to the poem. It is also cited in Andrei Tarkovsky’s influential work – Sculpting in Time (1984) with the original text.
Themes of time and memory and place are embedded in the poems and intrinsically link to the films. Here the visual imagery that coalesces the stillness of the forest, the latent breathing of human and non-human presence and the decaying of time and relationships. Perhaps it is a fitting contribution to our conversations on looking back as the year turns.
Ignatievo Forest
Embers of last leaves, a dense self-immolation,
Ascend into the sky, and in your path
The entire forest lives in just such irritation
As you and I have lived for this year past.
The road is mirrored in your tearful eyes
Like bushes in a flooded field at dusk,
You mustn’t fuss and threaten, leave it be,
Don’t jar the stillness of the Volga woodland.
You can hear the sound of old life breathing:
Slime covered mushrooms grow in the wet grass,
Slugs have bored through into the very core,
And a gnawing dampess niggles at the skin.
All of our past is like a kind of threat:
‘Look out, I’m coming back, see if I don’t kill you!’
The sky huddles up, holds a maple, like a rose –
Let it glow still hotter! – raised almost to the eyes.
Arseniy Tarkovsky (1935)
(Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair)