Adrienne Rich: The Tourist and the Town

Adrienne Rich som ung. Bilden härifrån.

För BTJ:s räkning läser jag en kommande roman av Michelle de Kretser: Questions of Travel (som utges i maj av Little, Brown and Company), och fann där ett citat som förbryllade mig: To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery… från Adrienne Rich “The tourist and the Town”. Vem denna Rich var hade jag inte en aning om, så jag fick googla och fann då hela den dikt citatet är hämtat från.

 The Tourist and the Town

Those clarities detached us, gave us form,

Made us like architecture.  Now no more

Bemused by local mist, our edges blurred,

We knew where we began and ended.  There

We were the companile and the dome

Alive and separate in that bell-struck air,

Climate whose light reformed our random line,

Edged our intent and sharpened our desire.

Could it always be so: a week of sunlight,

Walks with a guidebook picking out our way

Through verbs and ruins, yet finding after all

The promised vista, once! - The light has changed

Before we can make it ours.  We have no choice

We are only tourists under that blue sky,

Reading the posters on the station wall:

Come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

There is a mystery that floats between

The tourist and the town.  Imagination

Estranges it from her.  She need not suffer

Or die here.  It is none of her affair,

Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.

Her bargains with disaster have been sealed

In another country.  Here she goes untouched,

And this is alienation.  Only sometimes,

In certain towns she opens certain letters

Forwarded on from bitter origins,

That send her walking, sick and haunted, through

Mysterious and ordinary streets

That are no more than streets to walk and walk --

And then the tourist and the town are one.

To walk and suffer is to be at home.

All else is scenery: the Rathaus fountain,

The skaters in the sunset on the lake

At Salzberg, or emerging after snow,

The singular clear stars of Castellane.

To work and suffer is to come to know

The angles of a room, light in a square,

As convalescents learn the face of one

Who has watched beside them.  Yours now, every street.

The noonday swarm across the bridge, the bells

Bruising the air above the crowded roofs,

The avenue of chestnut trees, the road

To the post-office.  Once upon a time

All these for you were fiction.  Now, made free

You live among them.  Your breath is on this air,

And you are theirs and of their mystery.

 Från Adrienne Rich: "The Diamond Cutters"

Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012)