Nicola D'Ugo
A Our habit is to think that poetry is somehow detached from the great issues of our time. Not so for Tony Harrison, one of the most esteemed English poets of today. In 1984, when Margaret Thatcher closed the mines, the British, he intervened by writing a long poem in which he imagines to meet some fans of Leeds United, the skin-head who smeared with obscene writing the graves of a cemetery with the spray, including those of the parents of the poet.
harsh dialogue with the children was a way to bring out their reasons in the public eye English. The television adaptation for Channel Four aroused bitter controversy. Harrison's attack was directed against unemployment and lack of future prospects for violent young men, whose only ideal was a football team will lose.
what strikes like a punch in the stomach British prudery was not only the language of the hooligans, but the shallow considerations on the choices of the government which, for reasons of profit, crushing the weaker society. But when Harrison's poetry began to attend the British newspaper Guardian , it became clear that it should stay out of public debate.
A few days after the end of the Gulf War made their appearance in the newspaper two songs: "Initial Illumination" ("Home Lighting", March 5, 1991) and "A Cold Coming" ("A cold come, "March 18, 1991). The poem after so many years came back to play a civic role in the media. The first was a direct indictment of George Bush:
Candela, steady hand, gold leaf,
had a brush what he had to embellish Eadfrith
the very word of God invoked by George Bush
whose word lit up the sky at midnight
and confused the cock of Baghdad that was bombed
stretch to believe that the day was coming
and sang with all my heart to the deadly raid
and did not live to greet the morning true.
But if this track was divided into a rich literary form, with images not always accessible to the common man, the song of the March 18, "A cold coming," demonstrated the qualities of immediacy linguistic Harrison.
The long poem was almost a full page of the newspaper, with a series of vignettes apocalyptic Kranz. Written with a modern vocabulary, the piece of luck, however, availed itself of the ancient couplet (two lines in rhyming couplets), according to a form ancient, medieval, when the poem was recited by the poet in public so that anyone could understand and easily remembered . The topics ranged from the war insemination artificial intelligence, from myth to destroy the image of the image of the enemy, the instrumental use of religion from politics, the culture of bombs to that of classical Greece, from journalism to art, from power to the common man.
Instead anathema to loosen the speech, Harrison made use of a narrative device, figuring to see a charred Iraqi soldier from a U.S. bomb. The Iraqi poet decides to grant an interview to ask him to turn on the recorder. The man is described in detail: it is burned and nearly intact, dark, and her features were disfigured by the heat, presumably that of Uranium Depleted spoken of for some years now the United States, after a series of U.S. veterans have reported disease that you do not yet know the cause.
This dead Iraqi is not invented by Harrison, but he is a soldier photographed in February 1991 by Kenneth Jarecke, shown recently in a CNN broadcast on Rai. The poet imagines to interview the dead, but the dead is real. It is the product of the destructiveness of a cannibalistic policy that pretends to be civil, against which Harrison opposed the creativity of art. Despite the language of Harrison is easy to implement, he builds a very detailed text, full of implications that can not escape an attentive reader.
The poet of "A cold coming," he never questions the soldier charred, so that there is a direct conversation between the living and the dead, between the Western man el'iracheno, between the victim and the witness. The poet does not defend Iraq, but he gives a voice through their writing, picking up a fragment of humanity destroyed by bombs in the West. "A cold coming" has a multitude of ways, all explained in the interview imaginary.
The first call is to the three kings who, with three gifts, went to the Middle East to welcome the birth of Jesus, but now three marine left to their own wives as many vials containing frozen semen (another sense of "being cold"), so that they can continue to have children also died.
But what they bring are not gifts, they are bombs, and their well being left to a future in vitro. It is also a freezing of the future:
I stared at him and he made me look
seeing me through to Iraq.
Looking towards the side which looked
I saw the frozen vial of destruction,
a tube frozen in the dark,
cradle and Kaaba, Ark of the Covenant,
a pilgrimage of the Cross and Crescent
the cold suspension of the Present.
Rainbows with seven shades of black
from Kuwait to Iraq covered the sky,
e la pentola ghiacciata era stracolma
non di oro ma di uomini in cubetti,
i geni congelati che non si scioglieranno
finché il mondo non rinuncerà alla guerra,
sperma freddo meticolosamente inscatolato
per non essere mai carbonizzatore o carbonizzato,
Betlemme in fiala di un millennio maledetto
from Cruise and Shields, which freezes all come.
A present in which a man loses all human vitality and clings to life as he can, in extreme conditions of uncertainty violent.
[published in: News ... Backlight, No IX / 6, June 1999 , p. 2. ]
Bibliography:
- Byrne, Sandie , H, v & O. The Poetry of Tony Harrison , Manchester University Press, Manchester 1998.
- D'Ugo, Nicola, " V. and Other Poems by Tony Harrison " Events No X/36, September 24, 1997, p. 68.
- Harrison, Tony, V. and Other Poems, Einaudi, Torino 1996. Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo.
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