(Elba Songs)
In Chiessi, the fish would come up from the sea, in the morning,
after sunsets in the Costa del Sole,
where one makes love overhanging the Tyrrhenian Sea,
dodging falling rocks from Mount Capanne.
fishing competitions against the cormorants
while the Libeccio crushes their echoes against the rocks
and you understand why one can never see Corsica
from the French shores
– paths wind up through vineyards
that smell of oleander and juniper,
among prickly pears scattered over the terraces
that climb the ruins of San Bartolomeo –
but, once you take on the challenge,
it is you, alone, in front of the horizon…
from the mountain ridges –
even giants fell in love with it
and spent epochs lost in that abyss
sadness
resting by their side.
(From “Stagioni scalene”)
Edoardo Olmi is a poet based in Florence, Italy. He was a member of Rome’s Revolutionary Poets Brigade and was featured in two international anthologies by the RPB. His poetry collections are Il porcospino in pegaso (“The Porcupine into Pegasus,” Felici, 2010 and Ensemble, 2017) and R: exist-stance (Ensemble, 2017). Together with Marco Incardona, he is the editor of the “Affluenti” book series at Edizioni Ensemble, for which he edited, with Anna Aresi and Andrea Sirotti, the Italian edition of Ewa Chrusciel’s Contraband of Hoopoe. He won the 2017 Nabokov Literary Award for Poetry.
Anna Aresi is a translator, editor, and educator based in Providence. Her academic interests include modernist poetry, translation, and reception studies. Among her scholarly publications are: “Dante in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: Vision, Mysticism, and the Mind’s Journey to God,” (Literature and Theology, 2015) and “Con Dante attraverso il modernismo. T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam e il caso di Clemente Rebora,” in “Oltre il canone. Problemi, autori e opere del modernismo italiano” (Morlacchi, 2018). Her translations and essays have appeared in Solstice Literary Magazine, Asymptote Journal, and Interno Poesia, among others. Her Italian translation of Polish-born, American poet Ewa Chrusciel’s “Contraband of Hoopoe” (Omnidawn, 2014) was published by Edizioni Ensemble in 2019 as “Contrabbando di upupe”.
