ur “Mozarts Tredje Hjärna” / from “Mozart’s Third Brain”

by Göran Sonnevi / translation by Rika Lesser

LVI

Objective music  A concept I continually 
return to  Or rather: a reality  Because the sound is
inescapable, within me   Because we are
palintropic beings?  What are they?  Returning, always
recursive, time created again and again, in its interior
spherical form   A hypersphere; of a growing number of dimensions
Memory’s recognitions  Near-identity  For we are
never alike  Or:  all-too-alike, in our mental automata
But we transcend   The motorics of the fingers moves   The motorics
of the soul  The selfsame movement  Until something breaks out
                                                                                     A wing
From which pair of wings?  Birds fly at breakneck speed, in an uproar

New wars   Rwanda  Yemen  San’a’ is attacked with Scud-missiles
Bloated corpses float in the turbid river from which
refugees draw water  While spring explodes here
All the flowers, birds   The ash tree’s dark violet flowers
In the ravine wood anemones, lesser celandine, and hollow-root, Corydalis
cava, rare   Fragrant balsam poplars, grown wild
From the bridge we see a big pike, streaking across
the bottom in shallow water  Full of algae
On the pike’s back some kind of thread-shaped growths  Parasites?
A wild duck squeaks  We look for the mourning cloak in the still clear
hazel thicket, but it is not there   The nuthatch calls
In the evening we drink wine, make love, twice
then we watch an old film, 8 1/2, don’t watch the news
It doesn’t hold up   The circus people can no longer simply move on  Who
                                                                                         needs it?
Stravinsky asked, about the new music  The chaffinches are singing
I need the music  I listen to its unfamiliar sounds  There
                                                                     is no repetition
I hear the resonance of war; its complete brutality; its
                                                         abrogation of value
But that’s not it  Standing wounded before one another
                                                               we can also open. . .

The raging storm takes fire  When the wounds of political
silence open up under the skin   The white
hell opens   All righteousness   All pride   All
shame  At what is on my hands, what
cleaves to me  I am publicly thanked  But I can’t
take it  No one has the right to thank me
Yes, it’s true, I say, about my having written a poem in 1965
about the war in Vietnam   That I then wrote several more,
took part in the solidarity movement, onward to victory
I add: Those years have left a deep mark on my life   I feel
I’m not being understood; a smile comes to my lips
Earlier I refused to recite the poem   I look at
Bao Ninh, the author of a realistic novel about the war
He sits absolutely quiet, drinks wine  Knows no foreign languages
I myself feel utterly foreign  It is my lot to play host to
all that is foreign  Unconditional hospitality  The conditions are the same
I cannot repeat anything   But I know that I would
do the same thing, again, against that war   I talk about you,
dearest, who had come home in the afternoon and spoken about
a 13-year-old Vietnamese girl you met at a school, who said
there were two things she liked in Sweden: democracy, and
that you were allowed to criticize your teachers   I tell this
to my friends  With official representatives I cannot speak—

For the first time a major reconciliation  Perhaps  Yesterday 
Nelson Mandela took an oath as president of South Africa   In a
simultaneous liberation of Africans and Boers  Never  Never  Never
again, shall this beautiful land need to experience oppression, or
suffer the shame of being regarded as the scum of the earth, said Mandela
But we do not know   The white extremists suddenly seem to be few and
                                                                                                     marginalized
The strength, the power of transformation  Amandla   With the same force as
pain   But in the moment of liberation as if without resistance
The light streaming from people’s faces, in lines at
their polling places, with their same human value  That strength
But all power is transformed   In the wear, the tear, toward other
attractors   Once before I praised a victory; which became bitter
This time it is something else   Law   Democracy   Peaceful means—
I know, everything simultaneously carries its opposite   As does this reservation

Note:
Mandela: The indirect quotation given in the Swedish text has been rendered here. Mandela’s exact words were: "Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world."

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