The Paris Review

I  

Two old men, father-in-law and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner,
    are staying by Canal Grande
together with the agitate woman who is married to King Midas
the one who transforms everything he touches to Wagner.
The green cold of the sea penetrates through the floors of
    the palace.
Wagner is a marked man, the well known Punch profile is more frayed than ever,
his face is a white flag.
The gondola is loaded down with their lives, two
    round trips and one one-way.

II

A window flies open in the palace and someone is making faces
    in the sudden draught.
Outside on the water, the garbage gondola appears paddled by
    two one-oared bandits.
Liszt has written a few accords that are so heavy that they out
    to be sent
to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.
Meterorites!
Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink through
    the future all the way down
to the years of brownshirts.
The gondola is loaded down with the cowering stones
    of the future.

III

Embrasures toward 1990.

25^th of March. Worry about Lithuania.
Dreamt that visited a large hospital.
No staff. They were all patients.

In the same dream, a newborn girl
who was talking in complete sentences. 

IV

Next to his son-in-law, who is a man of his time, Liszt is a
    moth-eaten Grand Seigneur.
It is a disguise.
The deep that tries out different masks has chosen precisely
    this one for him—
the deep that wants to approach us humans without showing
    its face.

V   

Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his own suitcase through slush
    and sunshine
and when he is finally about to die there is nobody meeting him
    at the station.
A temperate breeze of a highly gifted brandy carries him off
    in the midst of an assignment
He always has assignments
Two thousand letters a year!
The schoolboy who must write the misspelled word a hundred
    times before he is allowed to go home.
The gondola is loaded down with life, it is simple and black.  

VI  

Back to 1990.  

Dreamt that I drove two hundred kilometers in vain.
Then everything was magnified. Sparrows the size of hens
their song a deafening din in my ears.  

Dreamt that  I had drawn piano keys
on the kitchen table. I played on them, mutely.
The neighbors came in to listen.  

VII  

The keyboard which has kept silent through the entire Parsifal
   (but it has listened) is at last allowed to say something.
Sighs… sospiri…
When Liszt is playing tonight he will hold down the sea pedal
so that the green power of the sea will rise through the floor
    merge with all the stones in the building.
Good evening, beautiful deep!
The gondola is loaded down with life, it is simple and black.  

VIII  

Dreamt that  I was to start school but came late.
All those in the room were wearing white face masks.
Who was the teacher was, impossible to tell.

—translated from the Swedish by Joanna Bankier

NOTE: At the turn of the year 1887-1888, Liszt visited his daughter, Cosima, and her husband, Richard Wagner in Venice. A few months later Wagner died. Liszt’s two piano pieces entitled “La Lugubre Gondola No. 1” and “La Lugubre Gnodola No. 2” were composed at the time. –T. T.