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'Unspoken Ghosts':
Selected Translations from Two
Italian Poets
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Benjamin Morris and Ari Messer
University of
Edinburgh
Italo Testa - Three Poems
gloria e i
gelsi
ma le foglie di gelso premono alle finestre
e la
tua gola bianca, sul banco, offerta,
Gloria di un giorno, la luce
nell'aula
leva dall'ombra l'insidia degli occhi:
noi,
saremo presto invasi dalle foglie,
tu, crescerai paziente
nell'aperto dei giorni
Gloria and the Mulberries
but the mulberry
leaves press against the windows
and your white throat, on the
desk, a gift,
Gloria of the morning, the light in the
room
lifts from the shadows the snare of your eyes:
we,
we will soon be invaded by the leaves,
you, you will grow
calm in the flowering of the days.
La
Dissipazione
Chi ha scoperto il disamore
e ha guardato
nella pioggia
un acero, il globo acceso
nell'arancio
autunnale,
chi sa di non aver amato,
fuori espone il suo
dolore
sui tuberi nel vaso
tra i bossi sul balcone,
ora
che il verde lo ha invaso
all'inguine sente una fitta,
la
lingua come una foglia
gocciola nella sua
bocca.
Dissipation
Who has discovered disgust
and
has watched in the rain
a maple, or the bright globe
of the
autumn orange,
who knows not having loved--
outdoors he
displays his grief
on the tubers in the jars
in the planters
on the balcony,
now that the green invades him:
a pang in
his groin,
tongue like a leaf
dripping in his
mouth.
Sbadatamente
Una bottiglia di plastica,
tagliata
a metà, sul ripiano del lavabo
mi hai lasciato,
quando te ne sei andata,
per innaffiare il nostro
amore;
ma io mi dimentico, ed evado
le tue consegne, di
giorno in giorno
la luce si ritira, io me ne vado
lasciando i
nostri fiori in abbandono;
e così, sbadatamente,
continuo
a camminare per le strade, solo,
a fuggire,
allarmato, dal tuo bene,
per rincasare, affranto, a
sera
scoprendo la felicità inattesa
delle tue piante ancora
vive, e nuove.
Absentmindedly
A plastic bottle, cut
in
half, that you left me
on the sink when you went away
for
watering our love;
but I forget, and evade
your orders,
day after day
the light fades, I left too
leaving our flowers
in neglect;
so, absentmindedly, I keep
walking through the
streets, alone,
in flight, alarmed by your goodness,
to
get back home at night, spent,
but discovering the unheard-of
joy
of your plants still alive, and new.
Roberto Bartoli - Two
Poems
Apnea
Parlerò di voi, padre e
madre,
senza l'aiuto del vento or dell'acqua,
ma con gli occhi
saldi sui vostri corpi enormi
e immobili nel sonno, mentre dalla
cavità orale
vi esce un tremendo frastuono
a tratti interrotto
da un silenzio mortale.
A volte, poco prima che l'immagine di
spazi molli
in luoghi oscuri confonda le mie due lingue
e
aizzi la cagna iniqua che ringhia in me,
io m'introduco tastoni
nei vostri territori orribili,
che di giorno, abbagliati, non so
entrare,
e di notte, perché incustoditi, posso solo
amare.
Così mi avvicino a premervi la pancia nuda,
a
sigillarvi la bocca, a carezzarvi le palpebre,
ricomponendo gli
arti scossi in una posizione docile
e addomesticando l'ansito
impervio a una condotta soffice.
A volte, però, è nel buio
immediato che precede il mattino
che io tocco quei luoghi,
sorprendendoli
tristi come un ammasso di mobilia in un
giardino
e dolenti come due balene accando sulla spiaggia e gli
occhi al mare.
Che tutto tra di noi resti per sempre
separato
intrasmissibile e opaco, in quella distanza
che
consente di guardare in diagonale e senza muovere i confini.
Che
siano soltanto la vecchia bestia e l'albero troncato
che stanno
in questa casa a portarmi notizie di voi
mentre caricata sulle
spalle la potente gerla
mi avvio per l'ultima volta all'estuario
del monte.
Apnea
I'll speak of you, father and
mother,
with no help from wind or water,
but with solid eyes
on your bodies
huge and inert in sleep, and while from your
mouths
comes a thundering broken only by a mortal
stillness.
Sometimes, a little before the vision of soft
spaces
in dark places confuses my two tongues
and before you
sic on me the bitch that growls in me
I grope my way into your
frightful lands,
which in the morning, blinding, I cannot
enter,
and in the evening, left alone, I can't but love.
So I
draw near to press your bare stomachs,
seal your lips, stroke
your eyebrows,
replacing your shocked limbs into a safe
position
and smoothing your stony longing into something
softer.
But it's in that first darkness that comes before the
morning
that I sometimes touch those places, surprising
them,
as cheerless as a heap of furniture in a garden
and
weeping like two beached whales with their eyes to the sea.
How
much between us remains forever apart,
untranslatable and opaque,
in that distance
that sits and watches from askance, never moving
the lines.
May it only be the worn animals and the cropped
tree
that stay in this house to bring me news of you,
when,
laden with a full basket on my shoulders,
I set out for the last
time to the estuary of the mountain.
Radar
Tu, padre, io lo so, non griderai
mai
il mare che ti si gonfia e ti si sgonfia nella gola
dove
per un vento di ghiacciaia naufragarono
tutte le tue grandi navi
e con esse
il loro inestimabile carico di affetti,
i capitani
esperti di rotte sicure,
le stive e le anfore colme di borraccina
e gelo,
quando, chiuso tra i discendenti e la tua
femmina,
sentirai insanabile ogni
separazione,
l'inconoscibilità espressa di notte da una finestra
sempre accesa.
Così chiuderai gli occhi pensando
intensamente
di rivederle ancora, riaprendoli, davanti a
te:
alla via così, le vele sature, possenti nella
virata,
riapparire da oceani ignoti tra i vicoli del tuo
paese
per entrare nelle anse protette della casa
e riapprodare
alla baia pacifica della tua camera esile:
ma, riacceso lo
sguardo, soltanto la visione di chi, il volto al muro,
sosta
tutto il giorno sul ripiano delle scale
o di una porta nel
corridoio costantemente chiusa.
"Roberto, chi non c'è più è come
se non fosse mai stato,
è nel ricordo unico di procedimenti
chimici, di sgretolazioni e riedificazioni
è nel ghiaccio che
dimoia e nel sangue coagulato,
è nella memoria della sola
terra,
è vivere per i superstiti è essere un popolo originario e
barbaro
senza zolle calde tra le mani, fogli tra i
capelli,
senza la bocca viola di mirtilli."
Appartiene alla
scomparsa degli esseri
portarsi via tutto di sé
nell'invisibile.
Radar
You, father, I know, will never cry
out
at the sea that swells and abates in your throat,
where in
a frozen wind all your flagships founder,
and with them their
priceless cargo of affections,
their captains, skilled in sure
passages,
their holds full of crates brimming with stonecrop and
frost,
when, shuttered between your children and your
wife,
incurable, you will hear every gulf,
the unknowability
voiced each night by a charring window.
And so you close your
eyes, thinking furiously
of seeing them again, of beholding them
before you:
at the start, the billowing sails, muscled as they
veer,
emerging again from unknown waters into your back
alleys
to make their way through the sheltered bends of the
house
to harbor in the irenic calm of your bedroom--
but, eyes
opened again, only the vision of one who, face to the
wall,
lingers all day long on the landing
or by a door,
invariably closed, in the hall.
"Roberto, it's as though they
were never here,
are in the singular recollection of chemicals,
of crumblings, remoldings,
are in the melted ice and the
congealed blood,
are in the fabrication of the lonely
earth--
and to live by superstition is to be a savage
tribe
without warm lumps in your hands, leaves in your
hair,
or mouths purpled by blueberries."
He belongs to the
evaporation of those beings
carrying everything of themselves
away into the unseen.
Explication
Antonio
Porta's Kisses From Another Dream was the volume that
introduced us to Atelier, where Porta's work has appeared in the
past and from which these poems are drawn. The title of Porta's
collection is a useful guide into this work: these poems are not
sappy dreamlike kisses, nor hallucinatory kisses in a dream; they
are kisses from another dream, a dream which elects a
fantastically direct, dripping realism of the human heart-real in
its fearlessness. The emergent voices here are at the same time
emotionally pure and subtly alchemical, naturally transformative.
Even the seasons are in rocky relationship with each other, like
lovers at dark, relentless play. At times narratives unseat and
supplant themselves--the speaker's father in 'Radar' chooses
reveries and fantasies, though they can never last, over the truth
he knows awaits him--and shapeshifting poetic turns are found just
as much in heightened ending moments (the crushing invasion at the
end of 'Gloria and the Mulberries;' the 'leaf / dripping in his
mouth' at 'Dissipation's' close) as in the pregnant space before the
poems have even begun.
Italo
Testa's poems sampled here are brief, lyric, and devastating, rarely
making use of more than one image per line, but wringing as much
emotional and heuristic effect from each moment as possible. Each
poem is, in effect, a single moment of unbridled access into the
poet's consciousness, a consciousness deeply interpretive,
insightful, and troubled by what it knows and has known, hence the
'snare' of Gloria's eyes and the flight of the speaker of
'Absentmindedly' through the streets, 'alarmed by your goodness.'
But if reading Testa's work feels like testing the mental waters
with a toe, such an experience is counterbalanced nicely by the
total-body baptism of Roberto Bartoli's dense, image-soaked lines.
In these poems he compresses multiple visions and revelations
together, allowing them to jut into and overlap one another, but in
so doing never loses hold of the narrative thread that binds them.
This is not to say that any of these poems are purely narrative;
rather, they court the form--personal histories, family mythologies,
the peregrinations of loss--without ever fully committing to it.
Testa offers a blinding flash of mental clarity and notes the
resulting shadows; Bartoli begins in darkness and gestures towards
the light.
How did
we undertake translating these pulsing relationships? How could we
allow these poems to make known in English the unspoken ghosts which
hover around them in Italian? We worked towards a combination of
simplicity and elegance, but with so much of the emotional and
rhythmic weight coming from what was ultimately elided-the way in
which 'del tuo paese' foregrounds possession in Bartoli's 'Radar,'
for instance-we worked to be sure that we were not losing those
elements, that we were not accidentally severing essential but
invisible images. By beginning with the most basic, prosaic
translations and only arriving at a more intricate syntax, we found
that the images at play in all these poems-mature, incisive examples
of what Eliot called 'felt thought'-- were only happy to oblige.
Works Cited
Bartoli, Roberto. Atelier 34 (June 2004):
77-83.
Porta,
Antonio. Kisses From Another Dream. San Francisco: City
Lights, 1987.
Testa,
Italo. Atelier 35 (September 2004): 88-94.
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