One, Two

Angela Leighton

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800170179
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In 'Pickpocket, Naples', a sonnet sequence reflecting on her Neapolitan background, Angela Leighton imagines a poem 'surprised in the act of finding itself'. Constantly alert to such surprises, One, Two moves from memory-scapes of childhood to elegies for her mother, quirky tributes to the creatures of the natural world to anguished poems about breath and breathlessness in times of coronavirus. Some of these poems are in formal stanzas; others catch the spaced freedom of dream or day-dream. Above all, this is a poetry which insists on the rhythmic footstep that walks in words, on the 'one, two' of a beat in language, whether the steps of a dance or the daily countdowns of sickness and death. The volume ends with some translations of the poetry of Dante and Pirandello which, either strictly or more freely, test the limits of translation.

This is Leighton's fifth volume of poetry, and shows once again her characteristic sense of wit, music and formal invention.

119

TOWARDS TRANSLATION

120

121

DANTE, ‘PURGATORIO’

Canto X, 1 – 48 (Literal translation)

Then as we made our way through that door

which the soul’s unwise, earthly desires

disable quite, so a wrong path seems right,

I heard it clang resonantly shut.

If then I’d turned to look back in regret

what could have excused my disobedient heart?

We climbed up higher through a stony fissure

that rocked first one way, then another,

like a wave concussing in ebb and flow.

‘Here we must employ a modicum of art,’

my leader began, ‘in edging close,

this way or that, by the side which rolls.’

And so we went with such cautious steps

that not before the waning moon

had snuggled down in her darkening bed

did we clear the gap in that needle’s-eye pass.

But once we were out and free of danger,

up where the mountain levelled to a plain,

I, quite exhausted, and both of us still

uncertain where to step, we rested on the flat –

a road lonelier than any desert track.

And from that edge which gives onto nothingness,

to the foot of the rise that rises higher still,

the measure was just three lengths of a man; 122

though as far as my eye could see to scan

either by the left side or the right,

that circling plateau stretched an equal span.

We’d not yet started to trudge uphill

when I perceived that, all around,

the bank rose sheer, abrupt and pathless,

and the Parian marble was adorned with reliefs

that might have outdone, not only Polyclitus’

chiselled art, but nature’s own.

The angel, who came to earth with news

decreeing the age-long, wept-for peace,

unlocking the sky’s old barrier to heaven,

appeared so lifelike beside us there,

and sculpted with such a graceful sweep,

it seemed an image about to speak.

One might have sworn he cried: ‘Ave!’

For there, imaginatively carved, was the one

who turned the key, unlocking God’s love.

Her very stance seemed to tell the tale:

‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’ – just so

an imprint sets its seal in wax.

123

DANTE: ON REFLECTION

(verse commentary on Purgatorio, Canto X, 1 – 45)

So this is the way to go, however

you summarise the sin, calibrate the soul:

to follow a road to the ends of the world.

That door clanged shut – was I out or in?

(Over my shoulder Eurydice lapsed.

Lot’s wife was salted to an upright stack.)

But he and I pressed on through a chink –

stonewalled, yet finding some permissive path

that pitched and rolled under our feet.

My dear poet warned me: ‘Now ...