Sound, word, stroke

Vitaly Shapovalov presents his vision of O. Sedakova’s poem “Music”.

Music
for Alexandre Vustin

By the gates of air, as they say now,
before the celestial steppes,
where half-incorporeal salt marshes prepare to float away,
alone, as usual, straying across the splendor
of the oecumene,
distorting various languages,

expecting who knows what: not happiness, not suffering,
not the sudden transparency of non-transparent existence,
listening intently, like a watchdog, I distinguish sounds –
sounds not sounds:
a prelude to music which no one calls “mine.”

For it is more than no one’s:
music that has no tune or tone,
no stock or root, nor bar line,
nor the five lines invented by d’Arezzo,
only shiftings of the unattainable, of height.

Music, sky of Mars, star of archaic battle,
where we are at once and irrevocably defeated
by the approach of armed detachments of distance,
by the beating of breakers,
by the first touch of a wavelet.

I pleaded for yon on the hill of Zion, forgetting
friend and foe, everyone, everything
for the sake of unsounding sound,
of unrung ringing,
of your almightiness,
your all-suffering.

This is a city in central Europe
its gates of air:
perhaps Budapest, I think,
but that magnificent display
of embankments and towers I will not see, don’t even wish to,
I’m not sorry at all. In transit.
Music is in transit.

The bubbling of lava in a volcano’s crater,
the chirping of a cricket on a village hearth,
the heart of the ocean, pounding in the ocean’s breast,
as long as it beats, music, we are alive,
as long as no least patch

of land belongs to you,
no glory, no assurance, no success,
as long as you lie, like Lazarus, at another’s gate,
the heart can still look into the heart, like echo into echo,
into the immortal,
into the downpour that, like love, will never cease.

Translation from Russian by
Larissa Volokhonsky and Emily Grosholz

Source: International Exhibition of Calligraphy