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Sunday, August 29th, 2010
THE RAIN SEEN THROUGH A MAN’S FINGERS
by Sturla Jón Jónsson
“To yoke poetry to science or morality is nothing less than to ask for death or banishment; the object of Poetry is not Truth but rather Poetry itself.”—Charles Baudelaire
“When the poet is just five minutes from his time at the lectern he recalls the rain that he looked at through his fingers earlier that day. He thinks about Vitezslav Nezval’s words about his hometown, Prague, which he looked at through fingers of rain, and it occurs to the poet that understanding Nezval’s images will mean turning them on their head.
A poet who travels from his country to another place in order to give a reading of his poems has important work at hand.
No less important than the poet Egill Skallagrímsson, who saved himself from being decapitated by the axe of king Eiríkur Bloodaxe when he composed his poem ‘Head’s Ransom,’ twenty stanzas praising the king.
But today there are no Norwegian kings in the hall. Still, when the poet stands at the pulpit the audience facing him will have just as much power as Eiríkur Bloodaxe. And this audience has probably never before heard poems from the poet’s country.
So he waits nervously. He is present in the hall to hear some new things and to discover some things he didn’t know before.
This particular audience is perhaps Estonian. And in all likelihood many of them have come to recite poems they themselves have composed.
But there are many people in the hall who have either come to recite their poems or to listen, or maybe
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even to do both. They’ve come from Denmark. Or Russia. From England. And Argentina. They’ve come from neighboring Poland. And over the Atlantic Ocean from the United States of North America.
And Italy. One of the audience members is from Afghanistan, another from Iran. A third from Norway, a fourth from Sweden. Two came from Latvia. Only one from Germany. And from Holland likewise. One audience member in the hall is Belarusian. Another, the same gender as the Belarusian—a woman—comes from Finland. One traveled from Switzerland, another came from the Ukraine, but most of those present haven’t had to travel further than from within Lithuania to get to the lecture hall in Druskininkai.
For it is in Druskininkai, a spa town in the southern part of Lithuania, that people from many countries have gathered together to let each other hear their poems.
And at the moment there are only four minutes left until the delegate from Iceland takes the lectern. In three and half minutes he must get up from his chair in the front row of seats by the stage, giving himself half a minute to go to the pulpit and compose himself behind it.
The feeling the poet carries inside him is nothing less than pride at having been invited. Someone has paid for all of the three thousand kilometers that led to the pulpit and taken care of his hotel bill; he has been fed and even been encouraged to drink alcoholic drinks.
At the same time, the poet is quaking inside, out of fear that he won’t be able to stand up to the expectations that go hand in hand with the invitation. In his last moments he wonders again whether the poems he is planning to recite have been carefully chosen, whether he’s decided on the order with good reason.
And the poet scolds himself for choosing reason as his guiding light.
The poet has other guides than reason.
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