POEM TO DURATION

By
Abdul Cadre
V.N. 19 DEZ 2019
Peter Handke was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. Assírio &
Alvim (Lisbon, Portugal) has just published his long and extraordinary poem entitled
Poema à Duração (Gedicht an die Dauer). It is a bilingual edition – German and
Portuguese –and the translation is by José A. Palma Caetano.
When we like a poem, as I liked it, we feel like saying it just for us, very much
in secret, without anyone hearing us: what a pity, I didn't write it.
For not having written it, I took some of the verses that touched me the most
and made the alignment that I put below. Whoever reads the book will find these
verses there, just as I transcribe them, not as I align them. Do not see this as a
summary of the several dozen verses of the poem, but as a souvenir. Perhaps
revisiting what Bergson said of his understanding of duration will help in reading
the poem.

«Duration is the feeling of life.

The ecstasy is always too much,
the duration, on the contrary, is right.

I raised myself
waiting for the duration,
without the expense of the romage.

Duration, my peace.
Duration, my place of rest.
Time impulse of duration, you surround me
describable space
and the description creates the space that follows.
The impulse of duration is
what I've been missing.
Who has never felt the duration
hasn't lived.

Duration does not exist in stone

ancient and eternal,
but in the transitory, in what is soft and sensitive.

Instead of all the talk in me,

of the torment that inflicts many voices,
meditation arises,
a kind of redeeming silence,
but from which one detaches upon arriving on the scene,
an explicit thought, my highest thought:
Save, save, save!
In an impulse as sweet as it is powerful
round the eyes,
there's a creaking in the ear canals
and I celebrate in the clearing
the thanks party for the presence in place. «