Three Memories of the Journey

POETRY IN PROSE

by Yves Bonnefoy

I

I was looking at a picture—a landscape. I’d been told that finally—and “undoubtedly,” or “obviously”—it evinced an aspect of another world. And I sought it out: I questioned these wide horizons, these masses of clouds, these trees with glittering leaves—yet all in vain. Must I resign myself to thinking, like Leonardo the painter, that the other world is nothing but the vulture, almost perfectly invisible, which gently holds in its talons our lights and colors: forever, the only ones that exist.
Time passed; they were preparing to store the picture in a cupboard.
And it was only at the last second, when they were already carrying it away, that I grasped how the enigma, or excess of evidence, gathered at any rate within a certain green spot. Down in a trough, it was the shadow cast by a tree along a path. A low wall stood there as well, warmed by the full luminous red of what was now the evening sun.

II

Then I was trying to wipe the mist off a window with the back of my hand.
But through it I made out something red, shrouded by multicolored wings, armed with an immense beak and claws. It was screeching, though I couldn’t hear its shrieks because the glass was too thick. I searched blindly for a handle to open the window, but all I found was the shape of a foot, a knee, a body. I surmised it was a Victory of pallid marble, veined by those momentous storms that sometimes illumine the night of the world.
Then I was taken by the hand and led into another room.

III

And now there’s a rain like the crack of doom, in Seville.
I enter the museum. At the end of a room, its windows lashed by water, I catch sight of a statue: a young woman, in painted wood or stone. Almost at the level of her face she holds up a hand-mirror, set in silver; on the mirror’s back is yet another face, which smiles at me. A ray of sun, from who knows where, has fallen on the face that’s supposedly real; and so the image within the image—although dark—is completely rimmed by light.
Later on, it’s night. I’m at San Salvador. From a distance, I look at the chapel to the right of the choir, and raise my eyes. At the top of the wall, I see a shadow—immense, distended, since the bulb producing it burns too close to one of the retable’s supports. The shadow is cast by a gilded wooden head, which long ago a forgotten sculptor haloed with beams of light.

(translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers)