Europa

 Europa

  City

  So this is city, is it?

  Dug earth, its water fired to air.

  Rust rocks smoothed to steel,

  Shouldering elm,

  And sand for eyes.

                     Mansfield 2006 ‘City’ Europa

After long travels, the final arrival in the city is always worth celebrating in writing.  The Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘The Ruin’ in the Exeter Book here in Devon does just that; the writer unfamiliar with the great urban works of the Romans arrives in one of their British cities 300 or 400 years after they have left.  Ruin expresses the poet's understanding of the deserted urban space.  In ‘City’ from my collection Europa, I try to convey the wonder of a traveller who has never seen a European city and its buildings.  The travel writer makes sense of the scene using only the elements of nature, bricks are not in the writer’s word hoard, so they appear as clay dug out of the ground, dried and baked.

I collected these poems to celebrate Britain becoming European on 1 January 1973 and the declaration of shared European citizenship for British subjects in Maastricht in 1992. Let’s finish the post with the French translation from Europa of those opening lines:     

  La grande ville

  C'est la ville, n'est-ce pas ?

  La terre creusée, son eau tirée à l'air.

  Les rocs de rouille lissés à l'acier,

  L'orme endossant,

  Et pour les yeux, on a le sable.

                        Mansfield 2006 ‘City’ Europa

 

Reference

Mansfield, Charlie (2006) Europa : le vers anglais à l’aube du troisième millénaire avec les traductions parallèles en français, Paris, Éditions Thélès.  ISBN 2847767606.   http://www.theles.fr/livre/charlie-mansfield_europa