Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

Marina Cvetaeva: vision and metamorphosis
in Quaderni “Nel corpo – come in esilio” (Notebooks "Inside the body – like in exile")
Reading seminar on three women writers from twentieth-century poetry - Cesena - 2006

abstract

[...] It is indeed very difficult to isolate one or two exemplary lines among the poems of Cvetaeva, to find one or two lines in which the image supposedly charges itself with the utmost intensity; that is precisely because intensity does not lie within a single image, yet it dwells in the movement, in the impetuous and merciless rush towards the very last line. It is as if images were constantly urged by the potential and the dynamic nature of language, as if they were solicited by its alchemic alterations and absorbed by a signifying mode that surpasses and bends them. Images cross several points of passage rather than remaining focused on specific angles, and touch the degrees of a thought that clarifies itself during a process where the very thinking activity is progressively reduced to its bare bones.
The work of art is founded upon the inner forces of language, rather than on the images that come out of it, it is built on the alternation of euphonies and cacophonies, on the presence of rhymes and assonances, on the whole concerto of syllables: “ Intonation: intention that has become sound. Incarnated intention.”. The syllabic unit is for Cvetaeva a concrete and real one – the voice is essence, foundation. The images are transitions and ephemeral values that have to be realized, through and for the sake of language: “a poet is someone for whom each and every word is not the end but rather the beginning of a thought, someone who utters the word raj (heaven) or tot svet (the other world), and mentally goes to the next step by finding the suitable rhymes; thus, one obtains kraj (country) and ot svet (reflection) and, by doing so, extends the existence of those whose life was interrupted”.
Cvetaeva widens language to the extreme, to its extreme consequences, as she accelerates its metabolism; within this stretching activity the framing process – the metaphoric still picture – gives way, in fact, to a sequence, to the contortion which is proper of all metamorphosis: every single experience is shaped again and again and crossed backwards up to a different beginning of its own, to some unheard-of initial state. Through such a process, a decisive role is played only by thresholds and power-changing peaks – one is tightening and loosening the grip – as everything is pushed more forward, deeper than what was originally supposed to express. In a letter sent in 1926, Rilke answered the poetess with the following words: “And it is extraordinary that, as they are thrown like the dice following the call of a number, your words are thrown onto a lower step, managing to show a different number, one that is more precise, definitive (and often a bigger one)!”.
Rather than embodying descriptive and stabilising forms, in which meaning gets thicker or more concrete, both similitude and metaphor are in Cvetaeva like “throws of the dice” – movable, open, transitive, all aimed at producing the sense of a passage; metaphors are tense to the point that they abandon their purely embellishing function, in order to become the bridges and the arches of a cognitive achievement. They start a strong relationship of complicity with life, by not reducing themselves to life’s mere expression. The original matrix, the portion of reality from which poetic composition takes shape, is involved into a cycle of transformations, is transferred, dislocated: it does not precede us anymore, it does not occur behind our back, in the past. On the contrary, it is constantly projected before and transposed to us.
Therefore, no transcription is involved here, but there is rather a creation, which is, indeed, a real one, because it coincides with the reality in process, and is taken in its self-making simultaneity.
Simultaneous, eternal: the place of poetry is one of restructured time, one that is absorbed by a different concentration, placed inside the coexistence of all times – outside of any measure or parcelling out.

For I was born outside
Time! You wear out in vain,
you do not convince! Caliph for an hour!
Time, you – fail me!

The metaphor becomes a metamorphosis, a force of synthesis, an absolute identity with a major degree. Cvetaeva’s poetry is one of formation, not of form: through the act of designation, words act as connectors and propellers, thus giving birth to new figurations. No solace, no song, no evocation exist: her poetry equals experience and transformation, because it deals with the live recording of the order of things, one that is amplified to the smallest detail and to the minimum reverberation – so that nothing is left out. [...]