Of Dire Combustion and Confused Events
Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957)
after Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606)
I worry about the horses,
dashing, galloping into thickest
of impenetrable fogs. Out and back again,
they return to view, whinnying with each turn,
in endless, forced gallop under their two warriors.
Only the Doppler effect of drumming hooves
tells me when they are coming
and when going.
Kurosawa wants to use the slain
monarch’s riderless horses,
…….turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out
just one of many breaks in order,
…….a thing most strange and certain,
on screen a single white stallion
bucking through running bodies
…….his loyal horse went mad today
against outstretched staffs and arms.
Tangled, leafless, horizontal vines,
as warriors gallop by, look
like so much barbed wire. And too recent,
the heaps of skull and bones shrouded by forest,
despite the ornate sword and warrior helmets.
The Jacobean play with Jacobean fears
…….Bleed, bleed, poor country!
made the transit to medieval Japan
with chants in swirling mist
around a castle since lost to time.
Still, the disturbance in my bones
struck by wooden flute and drums
reminds the horrors are not past.
Just now my window darkened briefly.
Light interrupted by the wide
wingspan of a bird of prey,
a majestic, dark silhouette banking
towards open sky. It too an omen that signals
…….this degenerate age.
———
For Many Years He Wanted to Write about the Finzi-Continis
Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) after
Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962)
He hated the film,
called it “The Betrayed Garden.”
Would I have even entered his garden
without the impact on my teenage self
of De Sica’s film
with its beautiful young men and women on bicycles
and the blond Jewish shiksa, Micòl, smiling from hers?
I don’t remember the jostled hand-held shots
of treetops against bright skies,
but remember images of refined, assimilated Jews
the parents of the film
intertwined in my mind
with images of my own German-Jewish grandmother,
always in black or dark blue
with volumes of Goethe and Schiller
brought from Stuttgart and
lined up in glassed bookcases.
The film captures the Jews of Ferrara
being captured,
rounded up in their homes.
gathered in schoolrooms,
to be sent to Italian prisons
and on to death camps,
but Bassani’s narrator hits a cesura before that end.
…….My story with Micòl Finzi-Contini
he explains
…….ends here.
So begins his epilogue.
Yet we know what happened,
beginning as he did
with the mausoleum of the Finzi-Continis
recounting that only one
…….among all the Finzi-Continis
he had known and loved
…….had managed to gain that repose.
The mausoleum with its crazy-quilt stylistic pastiche
…….its incredibile pasticcio
is
…….an ugly tomb
indeed,
…….at home I had always heard them say so.
And the large house with its outsized grounds
having greatly expanded medieval Ferrara,
was also
…….isolated down there among the mosquitoes and frogs.
There was something not quite perfect
with the Finzi-Continis.
They were in the Jewish community but
not of it.
As Giorgio’s father tells him,
…….They are different
…….… they don’t even seem judim.
We learn that from De Sica, too
but not the mosquitoes and frogs.
Bassani’s Giorgio describes the garden with its tennis court
as also Edenic,
a threatened Eden.
At the end of the season, the days
…….seemed too beautiful
he recounts, and
…….at the same time, too threatened
…….by the now imminent winter.
Carl Landauer, a visiting scholar with UC Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies and contributing editor for Poetry Flash, taught history at Yale, Stanford and McGill. His book of poems on film adaptions of literature, The Reel and the Paperback: Refracted Ekphrases, is forthcoming with Sagging Meniscus Press. His poems have appeared or will appear in the Kenyon Review, Exacting Clam, New American Writing, VerseVille, Poetry Flash, Bangalore Review, Santa Clara Review, Caveat Lector and the Mary McCarthy Society website, and his writing on cultural history has appeared in Beat Scene, Salmagundi, The American Scholar and Renaissance Quarterly.
