(trans. Denise Levertov)
Eternity
never was lost.
What we did not know
was how to translate it into days,
skies, landscapes,
into words for others,
authentic gestures.
But holding on to it for ourselves,
that was not difficult,
and there were moments
when it seemed clear to us
we ourselves were eternity.Eugène Guillevic (1907-1997) was a French poet, often just known as ‘Guillevic.’ His poetics were something like the Imagists, without ever being aligned to that movement: he deliberately eschewed (most) metaphors, believing in direct descriptions or comparisons.
There’s something tricky in reading his poetry, in that it can be simultaneously deeply symbolic and completely literal. The question when reading ‘Eternity,’ for example, is exactly what Guillevic means by the word. I read it as being something akin to ‘nature’ or ‘the universe’: the whole of existence, since time began. Presuming that the ‘we’ refers to writers, then, it suggests the difficulties of writing about primordal forces, and a conflict between the individual poet and the collective unconsciousness.
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