My Sister’s Song
for solo soprano
In 1972 Annalibera Dallapiccola, whose passion was classical Indian art, gave me a copy of A.K.Ramanujan’s The Interior Landscape. The book quickly did the rounds of my friends. The imagery of the Tamil poems, at once luminous and precise, their energy of spirit and senses, fired the imagination of a number of composers during the 70s. The present work was composed in 1974 and is by way of being a companion piece to The Same Day Dawns by Nicola LeFanu, composed earlier the same year.
Jane Manning had performed and broadcast a number of my works by 1974, and I had recently composed the mammoth soprano part(s) in Aria for Edward John Eyre for her. My Sister’s Song , commissioned by the Camden Festival, was also written for her; she gave the first performance in the spring of 1975.
The still drone of the time past midnight, all words put out. Men are sunk into the sweetness of sleep... My lover, capable of terrible lies, Lay close to me in a dream which lied like truth. The great city fell asleep, but we did not sleep. From the hillock, next to our house, clearly we heard all night, the tender branches of the flower clustered tree, with leaves like peacock feet, let fall their sapphire blue petals. I woke up, still deceived, and caressed the bed, thinking it my lover. I grow lean in loneliness, like a waterlily gnawed by a beetle. Love, love, love they say, Yet love is no new grief. The still drone of the time past midnight, all words put out. Men are sunk into the sweetness of sleep. Even the far-flung world has put aside its rages for sleep. Only I am awake. I am a dancer; my pride, my lover... lay close to me in a dream which lied like truth. Only the thief was there, no-one else. And if he should lie, what can I do? There was only a thin-legged heron standing on legs yellow as millet stems, looking for lampreys in the running water, when he took me. Nowhere, not among the warriors at their festival nor with the girls dancing close in pairs, nowhere, nowhere did I see my lover, I am a dancer; my pride, my lover he is a dancer too. The still drone of the time past midnight, all words put out. Men are sunk into the sweetness of sleep. Even the far-flung world has put aside its rages for sleep. Only I am awake. On beaches washed by seas, seas older than earth, in groves filled with cries of birds, on banks shaded with flower-clustered trees, when we made love, my eyes saw him, my ears heard him; My arms grow beautiful in coupling and grow lean as they come away. Love, love, love... Yet love is no new grief nor sudden desire, nor something that rages and cools; Like madness in an elephant, coming up when it eats certain leaves, love waits for you to find someone to look at. The still drone of time— Bless you my heart— my eyes, sleepless for days, are muddied. Get up, let’s go, let’s get out of this loneliness here. Who is your sister? I am she. Who is your mother? I am she. Day dawns the same for you and me. This is the same day we shall see.
The last verse is Dumuzi Mourned from Inanna’s Journey to Hell in Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopatamia translated by N.K.Sanders, Penguin Classics, 1971. The rest of the text is woven from poems by a variety of authors included in The Interior Landscape, Love poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology translated by A.K. Ramanujan, Indiana University Press 1967. All texts used by permission.
David Lumsdaine