20 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY photo : louise holgate Let’s say Courbet . . . Let’s say Courbet, to take just one example, who painted portraits on commission, landscapes, might have been anyone, completely average artist’s existence, but he goes and stakes it all on the Commune, throws away the still lifes, his path crossed by the rolling wave of fate. He makes his sketches of the barricades: there at the top: the fallen, some of them are hardly more than boys; or let us say Géricault, who painted saddle horses as regularly as some artists paint the sea, suddenly, on Reality’s back roads, sees he has been abandoned with the troops in the retreat – Moscow in flames not even visible in the background, only snow, the trackless snowdrifts stretching on for leagues, the details of the soldiers’ bodies sticking up through the snow, cheek stubble, arms and kitbags. History had chosen him for something greater than a succession of mere workadays, so I thought, and I saw it all before me the kernel of morality in art waiting for me to strip it bare one day. But nothing happened. Now, in middle age, I’m waiting still; Christmas Eve afternoon in half-darkness with heavy flakes of snow I watched on my way home, a crooked shape who with a cardboard box in an entryway was laying down the foundations of a bed; a big white beard, but this no Father Christmas. He said that he was seventy, and that life passes awful fast, “as you will see” – west-country accent in the capital. On Good Friday, the empty trolley car with me and – swollen up – a man-woman with pink nail polish on the cuticles – a guy, first, I supposed – who took small sips of nail-polish remover and had no plans, she said, for Easter weekend but to follow the line in circles, round and round, till midnight, an extra plastic cup showing through her plastic bag. And the other day, my daughter’s hand in mine, with all that’s struggling now to grow in her compacted like the oak’s drama in its acorn, she’s pulling at my arm with little tugs: Two Poems Håkan Sandell SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 21 photo : dmitri lurie The first of May and there, red as a sunset, the advancing banners raised against the sky in celebration of forgotten victories and under them you can’t see the footsteps can’t quite make out the heads, all blurred together in spring rain so thin it’s half turned to mist. Translations from the Swedish By Bill Coyle The Assault “Wer hat dich so geschlagen . . .” J. S. Bach, Johannes-Passion The back catches the initial surprise: the punch lands – a blind arrow, chances are, and aimed at everyone and no one. Tentative small boyish karate stances searching through the streets in search of greatness. Dispatched, the new initiate advances, the chorus watching him as they await his solo there before their semicircle. The other punch comes in now from the side, my left arm moves to block this new attack, and the right follows up, gliding as lithe as a cat’s paw past his guard to nail him back. Shock of impact, crunch, the echo widens like aspen leaves, or cracked limbs, through the pack. Suffering for suffering I requite him. Experience is the only thing that teaches. Now he feels, as though he had gone behind the world, implacable nearness, his Adidas warm with the blood and urine pooling inside them drop by drop, and how it sweeps his steps along in a transformation, winding from mighty rivers on down to a drain where one is nonetheless a part of humiliation’s secret congregation. So new, confusing, to become acquainted with how devotedly the body complies, and over one eyebrow this burning pain. Remarkable the way one well-aimed blow, where a benign almighty might well smite all barriers and let the self just overflow, suffices to set the unwitting victim right. Five men behind him – the kid’s diminutive size at night’s foot and those fragile features, though, plus the twitching in his pink skin...