The consequence of history—erasure—is a common theme in Ivan Lalić’s oeuvre. But instead of wallowing in what is lost, he focuses on the remains, which most often take the form of memory. As such, it is fitting that of all the Greek muses Lalić evokes in his poetry, it is to Mnemosyne, the muse of memory, that he dedicates a whole poem.

The poem opens with the speaker driving in the rain through the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Aquileia and the tourist town that has grown out of its excavation. For Lalić this resurfaced city is a “healed scar,” a “silence / On which history floats like oil on water” (ll. 16, 17–18). This first section sets the scene where the ruins of the once wealthy Aquileia serve as a trigger for meditating on the nature of memory.

In the second section the image of water gives way to that of earth and its “stubborn wrath / Eating the letters from the stone” (ll. 12–13). Lalić questions the origins and purpose of this “feud” (l. 17). All that remains is the gathering of its “consequences,” the shards of what survives (l. 18).

The third section revisits the ruins “peeled like a scab” (l. 4). Lalić draws constant connections throughout the poem linking ruins, healing, and memory. These ideas dance around each other provocatively, even as they break down for the poet, as they do here in the poem’s most moving moment:

Is there a choice, is there an order
In the long migration of landscape into landscape, wall
Into emptiness, emptiness into tree, into shadow,
Shadow into hope, hope into wall? (ll. 15–18)

It is an appeal for rebuilding, for a saving, of sense against the entropy of nature and time. Again for Lalić, “There’s no clean future: space stays infected / With the fever of signs, the germ of remembering” (ll. 19–20). What one carries around is what survives, and out of this we build meaning.

In the poem’s concluding section, even though it is “terrible . . . to recognize love / In the waning / our task / Is to remember, to deliver blows” (ll. 10–11, 18–19). What makes this chronicling bearable is that nature, or the world, renews itself. As Lalić aptly puts it, “The task of the peach is to blossom” (l. 20). This is arguably what makes the restoration of Aquileia—and the remembering of what is left of it—worthwhile.

Bibliography
Lalić, Ivan V. Mnemosyne. In Fading Contact. Translated by Francis R. Jones. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1997, 75–78.
———. “Mnemosina.” In Smetnje na vezama. Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1975.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature

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