NOTE: “To protect myself, to support myself, to sustain myself” is a remark made by Giacometti about art.
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More poems and contributor notes in Chinese feature
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Yu Jian
from Watching a Documentary Film of Giacometti at Work
slowly gradually adding
a kneading in here a squeezing out there
building up the left a little pinching in one side a bit
adding salt adding sugar adding clay
in the emptiness his hand is holding on to something
womb-wise something is about to be
born from that place to grow and take shape here, it manifests
itself
a little there at another point it disappears the artist hesitates
like a lion roaming at the edge of night
gleaming it wants to come in its quarry
begins in the shining gypsum darkness intervenes and on the other
side there is
bronze ultimately one of them in the emptiness
fluttered its eyelashes another, however, stays buried beneath rock
iron spectacle frames like Empire furniture you simply cannot budge
the artist is exhausted joints ice-cold
a battle with death 'To protect myself
to support myself to sustain myself'
apoplectic hands fondling a breast shameless
hands chewed by the fire's sharp fangs hands
probing moaning shaking caressing rubbing
like wind toying with an unpredictable tree
there is something about to emerge to emerge something about to
emerge
gradually emerging this is not a formula in teaching material
sound appearing once you've learnt about ears sentences appearing
once you've learnt the tongue every time you must start from
scratch
every time is a pall of darkness
his own hands, invisible every time he gets to work
he has no idea never any idea what the next thing is
that he has got to grasp hold of an iota of what?
A? B? X + Y? or is it the moisture content?
hands always empty always an ungraspable anxiety
an insupportable anxiety an insistent but not long-lasting anxiety
anxious that ability is not equal to ambition a strange bashfulness
where is it he should let go? it won't do to be discouraged
hardening too quickly he worries about cracks so many battles
he has fought with those elements urging him to come too soon
o but he has plenty of time he goes off to Paris without impatience
he can work from morning to night work on the tops
the bottoms sticking together then moving apart
working on the backs fronts using hard and soft tactics
tumescent places declivities dry and then moist a pairing of fast and
slow
searching hunting bending only to straighten out
from shallow to deep from outside working in
going in then coming out coming out only to go back in again
he is a lover made of the flesh of spring-time
and when he can move no more only then does he
stop work and that's because God in His darkness
has slammed a foot down on the brake
there is something that props up
the world this hollowed crone
opens her shrunken womb
once the shoulders have emerged
the process should by rights result in
the appearance of a proper head
filled with meaning and promise but no
there instead
all you'll find is a small lump of bronze
that looks like an error
the end or just a beginning
who knows?
2 July 2001
Translated by Simon Patton
Translated by Simon Patton
