The Added Task

- By Erri De Luca

I begin the year as a reader of poets. In the second book of the Illiad one reads for more than two hundred and fifty lines the precise listing of those present in the Greek army. This section is called the catalogue of ships, for Homer also wanted to be a historian. Such is the added task poetry gives itself.

Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Pushkin prove this, as does Borges in his poem entitled “South.”

I read verses instead of history books, and from them I extract information impossible to find in treatises or chronicles.

From Lorca I learned of the tragic, rigged contest between man and beast, from Dylan Thomas of the bombing of London, from Hikmet the fiber necessary for a prisoner, from Neruda the share for a man locked in, with the Andian Cordillera at his back and the vast ocean before him, from Whitman the rural pace of history, from Sarajlić the loyalty of a citizen under siege, and from Katzenelson the force for translating slaughter into song.

As a reader I feel I’m a passenger on an ark, left on some shoal risen from the flood. I page through poets with Noah’s anticipation, sending a dove out to scour the wastes. Most often the dove comes back empty. On rare occasions it returns holding up a branch, a sign of dry land. Its wings dusted with a deposit of pollen. I take in lines from a poem as news of a discovery. They transmit the essence of an era, of a people, of the way things felt then.

A poet is blinded in order to see what slips from sight and thus hasn’t yet been said. In his youth Dante wrote, in his Vita Nova, “I hope to say of her that which has never yet been said of any.” He referred to Beatrice, who died at twenty, but his verse assigns the supreme and general task of annunciating the ineffable, grasping it in the darkness for revelation through writing.

I page through poets like others consult horoscopes, hoping in brevity to find the form of oracles. I page through poets because they are terrestrial beings, leaving the celestial for stars and for others.

I launch the year 2017 with a kick skywards, written by Dylan Thomas:

“The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.”
 

Erri De Luca is a novelist, essayist, translator, poet, and one of Europe's best-known writers. His most recent novel is La Natura Esposta (Feltrinelli, 2016).

Translation by Jim Hicks.
 

Izet Sarajlić (photo from the Fondazione Erri De Luca)