![]() When we meet August she is returning to Country for her grandfather’s funeral, and caught in a jag of compulsive recall. In The Yield, Tara June Winch uses three different voices to describe the Wiradjuri people’s journey through ‘executed forests/and hanged bridges’: Elder and compiler of a Wiradjuri language dictionary, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi, his granddaughter August (‘about to exit the infinite stretch of her twenties nothing to show’), and the nineteenth-century missionary Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf. The narrator (‘obviously a survivor with obsessive memories’, Czesław Miłosz wrote) registers the meeting as a kind of insult the experience of oblivion, of visceral trauma and fear, make meeting the Mona Lisa, inert, endlessly waiting, feel like a cruel joke: A survivor of the torrential wars and everyday business of annihilation being carried on behind the Iron Curtain comes face to face with Leonardo’s most famous painting, the pièce de résistance of the Louvre and representative of European cultural achievement. One of his most haunting poems, ‘Mona Lisa’, imagines a visit to Paris. ![]() ![]() ![]() In the poem ‘Mona Lisa’, published in Study of the Object (1961), the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert wrote: ![]() Some days it’s not so easy -WAAX, ‘ Big Grief’ ![]()
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