(All poems selected from Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti, 1985)
First an earthy earth,
then another—no, the very same
suddenly unearthly.
Am I in her, watching her
rolling hills, watching her
desperately at Montepulciano or at Pienza,
or is she in me,
unmoving, one and the same as memory
and well beyond, one and the same as
what unfailing substance?
And then
her profile,
limitless, restless,
burns, yes, but what—
her planetary solitude
or my spent remembrance?
or nothing, both nullified,
she and I, made equal to zero
by some celestial algebra...
Most of them, hung like lanterns;
others, carved from within—
this is how
they wear their faces,
or rather those black clots
of rage and hebetude,
in hostile array.
Where are we? in what alley of hell?
You might lose your life for a coffee too cold,
or for a coughing fit
suspected of mockery.
The murderers
are everywhere, knife at the ready,
bullet in the barrel. Their time is come.
Just as it should be? –cries out,
far more ancient than I, my horror
at it knows not what officials
of what impenetrable government.
They give no answers. Nor deny them.
Mario Luzi (1914-2005), was one of the most prominent Italian poets of the second half of the 20th century. Having begun his career in the “hermetic” vein of mid-century Italian verse, he moved towards greater realism, social concern, and informal language in his middle years before entering the “metaphysical” phase of his later career, when the Christian inflections of his earlier work give way to a more generalized gnosticism with an eye still on a rapidly changing Italian society. The poems here presented are from the start of this last phase.
Stephen Sartarelli, author of three volumes of poetry, has translated broadly from Italian and French poetry and prose, including generous selections of the verse of Umberto Saba (Sheep Meadow Press, 1998) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He is the principal English-language translator of popular Sicilian novelist, Andrea Camilleri.
