Week Ten - Sign Inventory - "Minature" by Yannis Ritsos

Miniature
      -Yannis Ritsos, translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley
The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
made for a child’s fairy tale. The young officer sitting opposite
is buried in the old armchair. He doesn’t look at her.
He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles,
throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup’s handle. The clock
holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
The moment has gone. It’s too late now. Let’s drink our tea.
Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,
with its little yellow wheels of lemon
parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?

-Emphasis on the hands toward the beginning.
-Personification of inanimate objects: hands that are “sad,” the clock with a “heartbeat.”
-Actually, making things what they are not in general: the lemon wedges as wheels and maybe the armchair as coffin?
-Takes place in the present, but the first line has a level of past-ness to it. “Stood” before “begin,” “holding, “has gone,” etc.
-Movement from specific moments of narrative action (cutting the lemon, lighting the cigarette, not looking at each other) to abstraction (musings over death’s carriage, where Death would have gone, the image of the lemon wheels on an imagined dark street, etc.)