A fugitive inscription on the pages of the earth

Sometimes I think that an ideal landscape poetry would be written by the landscape itself. How? Some examples from Philippe Jaccottet's poetry (see Under Clouded Skies & Beauregard and my earlier post): wind on water is 'a fugitive inscription on the pages of the earth,' darkness is 'thin and threatening ink', the flight of birds 'calligraphy in the sky'. Eugenio Montale is another poet who sees writing in nature - a translation of 'Quasi una Fantasia' by David Young reads 'with joy I’ll read the black / figures of the branches, stark against the white, / an esoteric alphabet'. Similarly, William Carlos Williams writes in 'The Botticellian Trees' of the thin letters that spell winter and the alphabet of trees. I'd be interested in other examples...

I'd also love to know more about Jean-Pierre Richard's Pages paysages (Mark Treharne mentions it in his introduction to Jaccottet's poems). Apparently it develops the idea of the page as a landscape, which would mirror the poems I've just mentioned... The book seems hard to get hold of even in French and I don't think it's been translated.

China: Empire of Living Symbols (see my previous post) includes an illustration that shows how close the pattern of leaves can come to writing. It comes from the famous Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, the first part of which was published in 1679. Calligraphy and painting seem almost to merge here and suggest the possibility of a kind of landscape art suspended somewhere between poetry and painting.

Beauregard

Philippe Jaccottet is described by Roger Cardinal in the Oxford Companion to Literature in French as follows. 'Swiss by birth, Jaccottet settled in a French village in the Drôme, a region of wooded hills and mountainous prospects from which he derives a landscape poetry of non-specific and universal resonance. ... Trees and birds, rain and snow, moon and stars are the archetypal features of a world dense with intimations of harmony and transfiguration. Inspired by Hölderlin, Rilke and Ungaretti, each of whom he has translated, Jaccottet celebrates those rare moments of participatory insight when contingent phenomena, lyrically voiced, accede to the status of metaphor or metaphysical symbol.'

Beauregard (1981) is a set of five prose pieces, the first of which was inspired by the poet's chance discovery of a remote, 'insignificant' village, in the Drôme called Beauregard. I read it in the Bloodaxe translation by Mark Treharne, who describes Beauregard as a collection of 'landscapes in prose', 'place reassembled as text.' Jaccottet writes of both the physical setting and his own interior landscape, something Treharne sees as inevitable - 'endemic in the whole business of inscribing landscape in the referential system of words'. However, the approach is something particularly associated with certain poets: Eugenio Montale for example (whose writing on the Cinque Terra I have described here before). Jaccottet cites Montale's poem Tempi di Bellosguardo in his own poem - they both contain 'the same word'.

I found Mark Treharne's general introduction to Jaccottet interesting, touching as it does on some of the difficulties of dealing with landscape in the arts today. Here are some of the points made in it:

• Jaccottet elected to live in the Drôme to avoid distractions, not to write regional verse or nature poetry. The landscape provides 'a point of focus for sensory, affective and meditative response.'
• His poetry represents attentiveness pushed to its limits. But 'scrutiny should not be too intense, too keen for the capture, or it will kill its object.'
• The eyes, according to Jaccottet, drink in the world and 'contribute to its metamorphosis into immaterial images.' In his poetry, 'objects become images and ultimately figures of language.'
• But landscape is not just a static image, it changes constantly and Jaccottet reflects this (particularly the play of light and seasonal change).
• One of Jaccottet's prose works is called Paysages avec figures absentes, which sounds like a collection of landscape paintings that have lost their 'figures' (in connection with this, see my earlier post on artworks entitled 'Landscape with...') In this, he describes intense encounters with a landscape that sound like epiphanies, but is reluctant to make too much of them. 'Occasionally, as if our movements had crossed - like the encounter of two glances that can create a flash of illumination and open up another world - I have thought I had glimpsed what I should have to call the still centre of the moving world. Too much said? Better to move on...'
• As a modern landscape poet, Jaccottet finds it important to stress the distance between nature and human cycles: 'landscape can appear ordinary and familiar, but also alien, full of uneasy distances, a foreign language.'
• Finally, the introduction to the Bloodaxe translation begins with discussion of a brief poem that contemplates the sight of snow on a mountain. It is from Airs: poèms 1961-64, a collection inspired by haiku. The poem is an 'enigmatic verbal landscape' - its lack of detail leaves the reader unsure how specific or real it is. For Treharne, 'the laconic style provokes an involvement with the poem that a more explicit formulation would not have done.'

Above the frenzied sea

Some years ago we visited the Cinque Terra, a group of five villages on the Ligurian coast of Italy. One day we did the coast walk between them, starting at Riomaggiore and ending at Monterosso (see photo below). I remember the curves of the landscape, the glittering sea, the wind blowing in the pine trees... but I also remember a harsher side to the place: the crumbling, dusty path, a relentless sun overhead and dense brambles hiding the view. Soon afterwards I read Eugenio Montale’s first book Ossi di Seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) and found all these elements in poems set in the Liguria of his childhood and youth. In 1900 Montale’s family had built a villa at Fegina, near Monterosso. As Jonathan Galassi says in his notes to Collected Poems 1920-1954, ‘here Montale will spend long summer holidays until he is nearly thirty, and absorb the elemental landscape – hallucinatory sun, agitated sea, barren cliffs and shoals – that is the primary material of his first poetry.’ The Ossi di Seppia poems were first published in 1925, when Montale was 29.

The path to Monterosso

To get a sense of the Ligurian landscape in Ossi di Seppia you need to read the poems. What I’ve attempted to do below is give a flavour by extracting some phrases from Galassi’s translations, starting with the orchard of ‘In limine’ and ending with the flight of swifts in ‘Riviere’.

the wind inside the orchard ... among the lemon trees ... whispering of friendly branches ... the fragrance of lemons ... the golden horns of sunlight ... the copper horizon ... the livid sea ... swallowed by the haze ... the rock that shimmers with salt ... old-silver shimmer on the walls ... the bitter scent of the sea ... fired reflections ... the plain of the sea ... a blistering garden wall ... among the thorns and brambles ... throb of sea scales ... cicadas’ wavering screaks ... the shade of that green thicket ... wavering mother-of-pearl haze ... the stillness of the country ... my field parched by the salt sea wind ... the sunflower crazed with light ... the statue in the drowsiness of noon ... the trees give up no shade ... walking in dry, glassy air ... butterflies danced fleetingly ... among thin reeds and brush ... the well’s pulley creaks ... the owl darts ... wet smoke hangs heavy on roofs ... the arc of the sky ... slanting shadows of cluster pines ... the sight of the sea ... foam raining back on the rocks ... the sun bakes ... mosquitoes cloud the air ... cork and seaweed and starfish ... the dry cliffs ... the rocks that edged the road ... shaking tufts of thirsty cane ... briny gusts ... rivers of rainwater ... the sea’s lashing ... the wind’s erratic gales ... air so blue it goes dark ... the sun in darkened courtyards ... a throbbing sea hatched with furrows ... tangled seaweed and drifting tree trunks ... scarlet houses built of ancient brick ... the thin hair of tamarisks ... vines and pine groves ... the bald, hunched backs of hillocks ... steep embankments ... bramble thickets ... a wisp of breeze ... the house by the sea ... shivering tamarisks ... false calm over carved waters ... sirocco gale that burns ... the sky alive with pale lights ... the choppy sea talks in the rocks ... a few seabirds are flying ... clouds pressed between the branches ... among the silver blades of tender leaves ... a patch of sky burns overhead ... the rumble of a train ... the solemn cicadas ... the dusty streets ... tops of elders shiver ... the sea that shudders ... the windy gorge ... the branches of dwarf pines ... a lead stormcloud high above the riptide ... a salty, roiling maelstrom ... thunder rolls with a struck-metal clang ... the apprehensive sky starts spattering ... among the stones ... the sun hides in the clouds ... hazy afternoon ... the gentle breakers ... copper water riffled by a breeze ... the swarm of bats that sunset scatters ... a fisherman lets down his line ... tranquil afternoon ... the excess of light stuns ... edges go abstract ... tendrils of the low vines ... an eddy of deepening blue ... assiduous, slow waves ... sluggish mists ... the sigh of the breaker ... someone hangs out nets ... a curve of flayed horizon ... the whistle of the tugboat ... the offshore wind’s hot eddies ... a cormorant’s wing beats up above ... the rivermouth, waterless, but alive with rocks and lime ... a roadway of dried mud ... a dense fog ... glancing light ... a few blades of agave ... above the frenzied sea ... a pair of pale camellias ... shuddering olive trees and staring sunflowers ... the cuttlefish bone ... a stone smoothed by the sea ... the arcs of shifting branches ... rocks brown in the foam ... arrows of roving swifts.

The 'copper horizon', Riomaggiore

Salt sea wind

One of Eugenio Montale’s most famous poems, in his first collection Ossi di seppia (‘Cuttlefish Bones’) describes a sunflower, which the narrator wants to plant in a field ‘parched by the salt sea wind’. This phrase is Jonathan Galassi’s translation of ‘bruciato dal salino’ and in his note to the poem he explains that ‘salino’ is a dialect term in Liguria for the wind impregnated with salt from the sea. There seems to me to be so much condensed poetry in that word ‘salino’…

The beauty of local language is not just a question of individual words. In Arctic Dreams (1986) Barry Lopez says that young people struggle to be fluent in Inukituk because it really only comes alive out on the land. For Lopez, language is not imposed on the landscape, it evolves from a conversation, and “a long-lived enquiry produces a discriminating language”.