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Longjing, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin, China

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Longjing, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin, China

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Longjing, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin, China

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La Piccioletta Barca | Rediscovering Yun Dong-ju in 2020 - by Ronald J. Kim

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Baffled at my little room in Shoreditch, refreshing the Wi-Fi every 20 minutes to cope with the flood of video calls...

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Juan A. de la Peña, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

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Juan A. de la Peña, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

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Juan A. de la Peña, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

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El arriero

by Atahualpa Yupanqui

En las arenas bailan los remolinos,
El sol juega en el brillo del pedregal,
Y prendido a la magia de los caminos,
El arriero va, el arriero va.

Es bandera de niebla su poncho al viento,
Lo saludan las flautas del pajonal,
Y animando a la tropa por esos cerros
El arriero va, el arriero va.

Las penas y las vaquitas
Se van par la misma senda,
Las penas y las vaquitas
Se van par la misma senda.
Las penas son de nosotros,
Las vaquitas son ajenas

Un degüello de soles muestra la tarde,
Se han dormido las luces del pedregal,
Y animando la tropa, dale que dale!
El arriero va, el arriero va.

Amalaya la noche traiga recuerdos,
Que hagan menos pesada la soledad,
Como sombra en la sombra por esos cerros,
El arriero va, el arriero va.

‍

The drover

The sands lead the dancing of swirls,
The sun in sparkling gravel plays,
And seduced by the magic of the trails,
Along goes the drover, along he goes.

His poncho to the wind, a flag lost in the mist,
The flutes in the pasture salute his pace,
And spurring the herd through the hills,
Along goes the drover, along he goes.

Cows and sorrows
Both walk the same trail.
Cows and sorrows
Both walk the same trail.
Sorrows are ours,
the herd is not.

The gushing of suns unveil the afternoon,
Lights now rest on darkling gravel,
And spurring the herd, dale que dale!
Along goes the drover, along he goes.

Oh! Let the night whisper a memory,
That soothes crude solitude!
As shadow in shadows, through the meadows
Along goes the drover, along he goes.

‍

‍

If we should, with Miguel de Unamuno, focus our attention in poets "that more profoundly belong to their country, the most traditional, pure", then few better than Atahualpa Yupanqui to reveal the spirit of La Pampa, the endless extension of rural area that constitutes most of Argentina's territory. Atahualpa was born in the heart of the land that he then sang, in the midst of summer, 1908. The rains of January, relentless, roared through the Argentine prairie; a newborn's cry rose from an old rural post in the province of Buenos Aires, only to perish in the wind; little knew the wind that this child was to praise his constant rumor, revealing its secrets in the strum of his guitar.

Yupanqui used to say that "La Pampa is like a green guitar, that knows not how to hush, and therefore always sings". No better vessel did La Pampa find to embody its music; none other than Atahualpa understood her so well, and thus, in perfect harmony, the breathing of La Pampa was weaved by her prodigal son into glorious melodies. In return, she whispered to him what was to be his artistic name; she baptized him Atahualpa Yupanqui, which in quechua means "the one who comes from far lands, and has something to say". So she sent him to the world, with nothing but his guitar, and thus the world listened the cries of La Pampa.

"El arriero" is but one of these many hymns, and perhaps the one that most beautifully illustrates the wanderings of the gaucho through La Pampa. The Argentine gaucho is surely the literary symbol of the nation,(best depicted in the writing of José Hernández, his Martín Fierro). In this song, Atahualpa sings the craft of "el arriero", whose literal translation is "herdsman" or "drover"; "the one that leads the cattle". But no arriero in La Pampa is only that, for every arriero is also a gaucho, and the gaucho is much more! He is a figure so heartily tethered to his land that attempting any translation would surely transform his essence beyond recognition. One can venture to mumble such words as farmer, herder, even drover; barren and vague attempts indeed!

Whenever I witness the gaucho trotting through La Pampa, its body resting on the horse's back, fully absorbed in his craft, as the burning horizon of the afternoon stretches through the endless plains, I can not but think of Emerson´s words: "every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible to the enchantments of nature". Farmers, hunters, grooms and butchers, one must not doubt that these are men that worship nature as much as the poet, "though they express their affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words". Little did Emerson know that, far South, in the the Argentine plains, the gaucho managed all four of these professions.

It is behind these practices -those of the gaucho- that one senses the chant of nature in all its splendour; nothing other but the blazing sun to guide him, to command his hands around the objects of his craft, to steer his horse through the endless meadows and trails; no other cycle than that of day and night. Thus men´s presence is one more tone -and surely the most beautiful- in the everlasting symphony that everywhere resounds. For "a beauty non explicable is dearer to a beauty we can see the end of", and thus lies the gaucho, as a part of nature itself, honouring nature´s body "with coarse, but sincere rites". No other character does Atahualpa sing. His verse immortalizes this figure and his territory -for surely the gaucho is sovereign amongst the plains- and not as separate things: they are but one, as there is no gaucho without Pampa, and no Pampa without gaucho.

Atahualpa used to say that guitars, being made out of wood, were once a tree: "There -in the tree- used to live the guitar before being guitar". So it is that even before being moulded into a curved and hollowed shape, even before resting on man's lap, there was the wooden crib of "infinite vibrations": the chirping of birds that rested on the branches and, eternally grateful to the tree, sang their shelter in perpetual devotion; the hissing of the wind that leaded the dancing of leaves, there, where their greenness teetered in thin air.

It is not folly to think that amongst these sounds, deeply entrenched in the fibres of the wood, living upon its crannies, lies the chanting of gauchos that, years before Atahualpa was born, honored the tree with their guitar and their verse, letting him know how much they appreciated its shade, when resting, contemplating the sky amongst the leaves and branches, after long hours of riding and droving cattle, poncho on their back and horse on their side.

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La Piccioletta Barca | The Drover by Atahualpa Yupanqui - by Antonio Melloni

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by Atahualpa Yupanqui En las arenas bailan los remolinos,El sol juega en el brillo del pedregal,Y prendido a la magia de los caminos,El arriero va, el arriero va. Es bandera de niebla su poncho al viento,Lo saludan las flautas del pajonal,Y animando a la tropa por esos cerrosEl arriero va, el arriero va.

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Bordas de Hielo

by César Vallejo

‍

Vengo a verte pasar todos los días,
vaporcito encantado siempre lejos...
Tus ojos son dos rubios capitanes;
tu labio es un brevísimo pañuelo
rojo que ondea en un adiós de sangre!

Vengo a verte pasar; hasta que un día,
embriagada de tiempo y de crueldad,
vaporcito encantado siempre lejos,
la estrella de la tarde partirá!

Las jarcias; vientos que traicionan; vientos
de mujer que pasó!
Tus fríos capitanes darán orden;
y quien habrá partido seré yo...!

‍

Ice Rails

‍

I come to see you pass, everyday,
Enchanted little steamboat always far...
Your eyes are two blonde captains,
Your lips, a fleeting red handkerchief
That waves in a blood stained adieu!

I come to see you pass; until one day,
Inebriated in time and cruelty,
Enchanted little steamboat always far,
The evening star will depart!

The tackle; winds that betray; winds
Of woman that's passed!
Your cold captains will give the order;
And I'll be the one who departs...

‍

For many years I have turned to this poem just to read that metaphor which I find one among the most beautiful: the brief lips as the fugacious red handkerchief; the impression of space into time, taking advantage of the coincidence in forms and turning the material reality into a spiritual one. Un brevísimo pañuelo rojo... que ondea en un adiós de sangre...

The steamer had always been for me the woman that occupied Vallejo's mind until he ran out of patience. Today I cannot unsee that Vallejo is talking to a ship. Had I thought back then that Vallejo was putting the qualities of feminine delicacy into a steel boat, I would have thought of him a brute, but my books have changed... There's this sonnet by Wordsworth that says:

‍

With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,
Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;
Some lying fast at anchor in the road,
Some veering up and down, one knew not why.
A goodly vessel did I then espy
Come like a giant from a haven broad;
And lustily along the bay she strode,
Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.
The ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a lover's look;
This ship to all the rest did I prefer:
When will she turn, and whither? She will brook
No tarrying; where she comes the winds must stir:
On went she, and due north her journey took.

‍

I see Vallejo's poem as an extension to Wordsworth's lover's look. Vallejo's steamboat is attractive and cocky, Wordsworth's ship counts with the elegance of distraction: the Peruvian takes pleasure in the passing spectacle; the English suffers the impossiblity of transcendence.

A crossed authorship of these poems would have been impossible, and as I see it, none is superior to the other, but they are the same thing in two times and two different places.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Ice Rails by César Vallejo - by Nacho Oliden

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by César Vallejo ‍ Vengo a verte pasar todos los días,vaporcito encantado siempre lejos...Tus ojos son dos rubios capitanes;tu labio es un brevísimo pañuelorojo que ondea en un adiós de sangre! Vengo a verte pasar; hasta que un día,embriagada de tiempo y de crueldad,vaporcito encantado siempre lejos,la estrella de la tarde partirá!

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La Famija Poverella

Siccapíssivo er bene che ve vojjo!...
Che ddichi, Peppe? nun vòi stà a lo scuro?
Fijjo, com'ho da fà ssi nun c'è ojjo?

Ettu, Llalla, che hai? Povera Lalla,
Hai freddo? Ebbè, nnun méttete llí ar muro:
Viè in braccio a mmamma tua che tt' ariscalla.

The Poah Li'ul Famly

‍

If yous anlee knew how ah luv yous'all
What yer sayin, Joe? Ye divvent like th'dark?
Howay! What can ah dee wi' nee oy-ul?

And yee, Lassie, what's wrang? Canny beggar,
Yer frozzen? Well, shift yasell from thewaall;
Come hee'ya to ya mam and she'll warm ya propa.

The Poor Little Family

If you only knew how much I love you
What do you say, Peppe, you don't want to be in darkness?
Son, what am I to do if there's no oil (for the lamp)?

And you, Lalla, what's the matter? Poor Lalla
Are you cold? Well don't just stay thereby the wall.
Come to your mother's arms/lap and she'll warm you.

The Italian poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863) wrote thousands of sonnets about Rome during the Risorgimento, when the Catholic Church lost much of its power and the various states in the Italian peninsula were unified into a single state. His quietly revolutionary choice to write in the Romanesco street talk of the time and focus on the underbelly of Roman society created a precious contemporary documentation of a sublimely irreverent people who might otherwise have been lost in time. But although Belli is as well-known and revered by Italians as Shakespeare is by the British, he has not travelled as well. This relative anonymity outside of Italy has been attributed to the 'dialect' Belli used - an authentic voice that has proved tricky to translate because of the strictures of literary English and the likely intended subjectiveness of the original sonnets. Inventive translators who turned to street speech and dialect to convey the nuances of Romanesco, however, have demonstrated that a less conventional approach to translating Belli's sonnets could help export one of Italy's most important treasures to the English-speaking world. Geordie, from the North of England, is one such dialect. There is something about it that reminds me of the Romanesco I grew up hearing all around me.

Romanesco, or romanaccio, was like a second language to Italians born or resident in Rome. Most could speak Italian as well as the next person, but an earthier way of speaking was often necessary (and preferred) for expressing the joys and frustration of daily living. Perhaps this is was what Gioachino Belli felt also. A highly literate and relatively conventional man, perhaps he felt that only Romanesco provided the sounds he needed to express his outrage over the church and state's treatment of the poor, the weak, and the disenfranchised. Through his sonnets he satirised the rampant hypocrisy of the Catholic church and commented sharply on the crippling poverty that afflicted the vast majority of Romans. Through poetry, he encouraged his readers to look beyond the gilded trappings of the powerful and see truth and beauty in the lives of the wretched. Consequently, in Italy, he is famed for his often obscene and blasphemous sonnets, and beloved for conveying not only the beauty of the Romanesco language but also of the humble people who spoke it. His introduction to his collected sonnets says: "I have decided to leave a monument to the common people of Rome today..." Interestingly, as he neared death, Belli reconsidered his sonnets to be 'full of blameworthy opinions and thoughts', and instructed that they be destroyed. Fortunately, his son disagreed and ensured their publication. Although the first complete edition was published only in 1952, Belli's sonnets are indeed a fine monument, and they deserve far wider acclaim.

'La Famija Poverella' - The Poah Li'ul Famly in Geordie - exemplifies how Belli could take a situation and reveal its protagonists in all their gritty reality, using the brevity of a sonnet to offer a glimpse into the wretchedness and humanity of daily lives. In 'La Famija', the voice is the mother's, and we learn that her children are hungry and cold, and afraid of the dark. We learn that the father figure has gone to 'find' something with which to buy food, a possible euphemism for stealing, and we see how the mother ekes out hope despite her resignation to darkness. Belli keenly observes the resilience of the common people and their resourcefulness: a mother kept her children warm and safe, and a father provided for them as best he could because they could not depend on the responsible authorities or the church. There is an urging here to truly see the people and their suffering, and not walk past them. This would have been a revolutionary idea among many literate people of the time, who were more likely to ignore the poor and instead deify power, riches, and philosophical abstractions. Many of these 'literati' might not have understood the sonnets, however, and the poor illiterate Romans would not have been able to read them at all. But it is a function of the beauty and truth of Belli's work that it is taught in all Italian schools and so persists to this day. Belli's sonnets deserve to be better known, but translating them has proved tricky.

The substantial difficulties in translating Belli stem from the structure of his sonnets, from the slangy language used, and also due to the plentiful references to Catholic prayers and culture, whose nuances are easily lost in translation. The structure of abba, abba, cdc, ede follows Petrarch's rhyming rules rather than the English form of three quatrains and a couplet abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Petrarchian sonnet form works well for Romanesco with its plentiful rhyming words but not for the less rhymy English. To deal with the rhyming, the above translation of 'La Famijja' into Geordie uses a hybrid Crybin form, which is helped by the more open vowels and emphatic consonants of the Northern dialect. Like Romanesco, Geordie also is characterized by fluid grammatical rules and local words with no easy equivalent. Translating into dialect is not an original approach, however. To avoid the strictures of standard English, inventive translators such as Robert Garioch, Harold Norse, Anthony Burgess, and Peter Dale have previously relied on Lallans, New Yorker, Lancastrian, and Australian 'Stryne' respectively to translate Belli's sonnets, especially the most shocking ones. Standard English is simply too polite to capture the musicality, texture and vividness of Romanesco. Geordie provides an additional vehicle for translating the humanity of Belli, with its particular words and translingualism borrowed from Norse as well as Saxon, Latin and Celt. Further, with its emphatic consonants and wayward endings, the sound of Romanesco is quite different to standard Italian, just as Geordie sounds different to standard English. The deliberate flouting of linguistic rules in Romanesco makes perfect sense for those who know the people of Rome - a people who defied authority, and still do. The Geordie culture and somewhat anarchic of speaking conveys a similar playful irreverence, and Geordie is perhaps more accessible than many other dialects spoken in Britain.

Inventive translators who adopt street speech and dialect to convey the nuances of Romanesco may help to more effectively export Belli's sonnets to the English-speaking world. These sonnets deserve to be better known since Belli laid the foundations for an Italian literary tradition that moved away from legendary heroes to focus on the real lives of real people. This tradition would later give us directors like Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, and authors like Alberto Moravia who celebrated the 'little' person and the human condition. Belli's sonnets reinforced the idea that common people deserved a voice in literature and art, paving the way for films such as Roma Città Aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and La Strada (The Road, 1954), and books such Racconti Romani (Roman Tales, 1954) and La Ciociara (Two Women, 1957). Thus, translations with popular dialects such as Geordie could lead to a wider appreciation of Belli's work and not only provide a window into Italy's past but also further a broader understanding of modern Italian culture and aesthetics. There are 2279 Belli sonnets - surely a worthy challenge for Geordie translators to attempt!

With thanks to Michelle Egan and Graeme Bell for their assistance with the current Geordie speech.

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La Piccioletta Barca | The Poah Li'ul Famly by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli - by Zoe Fairtlough

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Siccapíssivo er bene che ve vojjo!...Che ddichi, Peppe? nun vòi stà a lo scuro?Fijjo, com'ho da fà ssi nun c'è ojjo? Ettu, Llalla, che hai? Povera Lalla,Hai freddo? Ebbè, nnun méttete llí ar muro:Viè in braccio a mmamma tua che tt' ariscalla. ‍ If yous anlee knew how ah luv yous'allWhat yer sayin, Joe?

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Wohlgesangdurchschwellte Bäume,
wunderblütenschneebereift -
ja, fürwahr, ihr zeigt uns Träume,
wie die Brust sie kaum begreift.

Herbst Gedichte
‍

Zu Golde ward die Welt;
zu lange traf
der Sonne süßer Strahl
das Blatt, den Zweig.
Nun neig
dich, Welt, hinab.

Bald sinkt's von droben dir
in flockigen Geweben
verschleiernd zu -
und bringt dir Ruh,
o Welt,
o dir, zu Gold geliebtes Leben,
Ruh.

The world has turned to gold;
the sun's sweet ray
has struck too long
the leaf, the branch.
Now, world,
bow down.

Soon, from above
flaky fabric will
veil you round-
and bring you rest,
O world,
O you, dear life turned to gold,
rest.

‍

Nebel, stiller Nebel über Meer und Land.
Totenstill die Watten, totenstill der Strand.
Trauer, leise Trauer deckt die Erde zu.
Seele, liebe Seele, schweig und träum auch du.

Der Fjord mit seinen Inseln liegt
wie eine Kreidezeichnung da;
die Wälder träumen schnee-umschmiegt,
und alles scheint so traulich nah.
So heimlich ward die ganze Welt...
als dämpfte selbst das herbste Weh
aus stillem, tiefem Wolkenzelt
gliebter, weicher, leiser Schnee.

The fjord with its islands lies
like a chalk drawing there;
the forests dream, snow-nestled,
and everything seems snug and close.
The world grows hushed,
as if autumn's own grief were steaming
from the still, deep tent of clouds
as dear, soft, silent snow.
‍

Neuschnee‍

‍
Flockenflaum zum ersten Mal zu prägen
mit des Schuhs geheimnisvoller Spur,
einen ersten schmalen Pfad zu schrägen
durch des Schneefelds jungfräulicher Flur -

Kindisch ist und köstlich solch Beginnen,
wenn der Wald dir um die Stirne rauscht
oder mit bestrahlten Gletscherzinnen
deine Seele leuchtende Grüße tauscht.

To print for the first time the flaky foam
with the shoe's mysterious track,
to slant a first narrow path
through the snowfield's virginal meadow-

such beginning is childish and delicious,
when the forest swirls around your brow
or sends radiant greetings to your soul
from the shimmering glacial peaks.
‍

Der Abend
‍‍

Auf braunen Sammetschuhen geht
der Abend durch das müde Land,
sein weiter Mantel wallt und weht,
und Schlummer fällt von seiner Hand.

Mit stiller Fackel steckt er nun
der Sterne treue Kerzen an.
Sei ruhig, Herz! Das Dunkel kann
dir nun kein Leid mehr tun.

‍

In selecting and arranging this series of poems by Christian Morgenstern, my intention was to create for the reader an experience of moving through the seasons of the year. The final poem, then, rounds the series off with a description of the movement from day to night, movement which on a smaller scale mirrors the passage of time in the seasonal poems.

In this series, we observe how the poet finds his relationship with the mysteries of the natural world through direct experience of the soul in nature. With lyrical sensitivity, and a painter's eye, Morgenstern evokes powerful impressions of nature's spiritual landscapes. This is not surprising from someone who came from a family of landscape painters, and who once wrote of himself, "I am a painter to the very last drops of my blood [...] and this wants to go out into the realm of the Word, of sound -a strange metamorphosis".

Morgenstern delights in the possibilities of his native tongue when describing nature. Unlike the English language, which relies on prepositions to forge connections between words, the German language can create meaning by bringing separate words into a single one. In "Fields of Buttercup-yellow", Morgenstern uses this attribute of the language to great effect, engendering an experience of "overflowing growth" that courses through the whole poem. For example, the single word "wunderblütenscheebereift" (which is formed out of four separate words) produces a flood of language that mirrors the exuberant, youthful energy flowing through nature in springtime.

By contrast, in the quieter atmosphere of "Winter", Morgenstern uses commas to give the words some space to breathe. For example, in the final line of the poem, he writes, "dear, soft, silent snow". This use of punctuation evokes a feeling of spaciousness that corresponds to the experience of snowfall gently descending over the landscape. He also uses the repetition of words for a similar effect in "Mist on the Tidelands". In the first, third, and fourth lines of the poem, Morgenstern repeats the initial word, adding an adjective for emphasis, "Mist, still mist", "Sorrow, soft sorrow", "Soul, dear soul", while in the second line he repeats the phrase "deathly still". This repetition lends the poem a solemn, processional mood that enchants the reader into a dreamlike world.

In the final poem of this series, we find Evening, personified, walking through the landscape of the "tired world" with "brown shoes of velvet". Details like these lend the evening a concrete presence and make one think of the Nordic gods who were seen moving through the forests of Jotunheim.

Reading these poems feels like walking through a dreamscape, but fully awake. This waking dream of Morgenstern's poetry uplifts us into a world where nature and imagination intertwine in a beautiful harmony. Rainer Maria Rilke expressed it best when he wrote of Morgenstern: "You child of joy, I'm willing to bet your pockets are full of stars".

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La Piccioletta Barca | Poems by Morgenstern - by Clifford Venho

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Wohlgesangdurchschwellte Bäume,wunderblütenschneebereift -ja, fürwahr, ihr zeigt uns Träume,wie die Brust sie kaum begreift. Zu Golde ward die Welt;zu lange trafder Sonne süßer Strahldas Blatt, den Zweig.Nun neigdich, Welt, hinab. Bald sinkt's von droben dirin flockigen Gewebenverschleiernd zu -und bringt dir Ruh,o Welt,o dir, zu Gold geliebtes Leben,Ruh.

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¡De todo te olvidas! Anoche dejaste
aquí, sobre el piano que ya jamás tocas,
un poco de tu alma de muchacha enferma:
un libro, vedado, de tiernas memorias.

Íntimas memorias. Yo lo abrí, al descuido,
y supe, sonriendo, tu pena más honda,
el dulce secreto que no diré a nadie:
a nadie interesa saber que me nombras.

...Ven, llévate el libro, distraída, llena
de luz y de ensueño. Romántica loca...
¡Dejar tus amores ahí, sobre el piano!...
De todo te olvidas, ¡cabeza de novia!

You are so forgetful! Yesterday you left behind
here, over the piano that you no longer play,
a bit of your ailing girl soul:
a book, forbidden, of tender memories.

Intimate memories. I opened it, carelessly,
And knew, smiling, your deepest woe,
The sweet secret that I will not tell:
That you mention me no one wants to know.

...Come, take the book, you faraway, full
of light and daydreams. Crazy romantic...
Leaving all your loves here, over the piano!...
You are so forgetful, absent-minded!

Evaristo Carriego, who was born in 1883 and died in 1912, was an Argentine poet that, in spite of being from Entre Rios, has come to be known as the poet of the - now popular - neighbourhood of Palermo, in Buenos Aires. His poetry, catalysed by J. L. Borges' reading of it in his book Evaristo Carriego, is generally viewed as the melancholic memoirs of the old neighbourhood in the outskirts of Buenos Aires; as a song to the crepuscular streets that faded into the Pampas. These streets were, in this reading of Carriego's verses, the setting for compadres, guapos, cuchilleros and other lowlifes. These 'cultists of courage', as Carriego calls them in the poem El Guapo, were the Homeric figures of the suburbs that 'in the corners or in the yards' with a dagger or a guitar sought each other and fought for the recognition of the neighbours. Victorious, these rural 'musketeers' would 'later sing, congratulated, to the insolent compadraje'.

Yet, this Palermo of dirt roads, uncertain lights, fresh evenings and silent walks was also the place for secret unrequited love, warm beloved hands, smiling eyes and tender words. Maybe because he was less interested in these memories of Palermo than Carriego himself or because he really did think that Carriego's sentimental poetry was minor, Borges failed in his commentary to see the depth and value of Carriego's love verses. In these verses, Carriego's realist costrumbrismo turns into the romanticism of early modernist poets, or the modernism of late romantics. In the first verses of Envios, Carriego summons 'delicate modernist poets' who are able to 'praise in gold' the ladies' 'aristocracy' and 'olympic temples', something which he then sets out to do in Ofertorios Galantes. In this section of Misas Herejes, in which Tu Secreto is placed, Carriego takes the voice of the modernist poet and sings to the beloved, which becomes the intended recipient of most poems of this section, with the hope '[t]hat this verse, which you have lost, finds you, as if it was sent from memories left in a land of oblivion'. In these songs, the yards that in El Alma del Suburbio (The soul of the Suburb) were occupied by El Guapo, who sang with the guitar the victories obtained with the dagger, are now taken by the suburban muchacha. In the poem El Patio ( The Yard), Carriego describes:

I like to see you like this, under the vine,
Sheltered from the midday sun,
Laughingly bold, gentle, gallant,
As an evocation of Andalucía.
'When I hear the red violin of your laugh', adds Carriego, 'a warm wine - bohemian liquor - fills my brain with crazy melodies' and as he does Palermo gets tainted by the Filtro Rojo ( Red Filter) of young love. In Palermo, 'it is raining peace', says the poet, when 'a guitar, far away, cries and the neighbour makes her piano laugh'. Far from the violence of the guapos, the poverty of the 'worker's woman, dirty and tired', the 'husband that will come back drunk' and the 'silence' that makes the 'soul of the suburb, rough and sombre', Palermo is, in Ofertorios Galantes, indistinguishable from the gallant girl that walks its streets and rests in its yard.

Palermo was, probably, neither the idyllic andaluz setting of Ofertorios Galantes, nor the backdrop of empty streets and unwelcoming corners for the duels of guapos - or maybe it was both. Nevertheless, I take it that Evaristo Carriego's poetry was never about Palermo. Carriego's loving poet that sings about the eyes of the beloved, or his compadres and guapos singing coplas about their old victories are heroes not of Palermo but of the tragedy in which Carriego saw himself involved: the tragedy of oblivion. Evaristo Carriego suffered from Tuberculosis and died when he was 29 years old. During his last years, conscious of his tragic destiny, Carriego grew desperate for recognition. He found solace in the hope of literary immortality. Borges says that Carriego used to go to the literary cafes of Buenos Aires and fervently defend his verses and, in Carriego's words, 'his talent'. He also made sure, by criticising those who were included in it, that he would have a place in the Argentine cannon. It was not vanity what drove him, but the remote dream:

'[t]hat this verse, which you have lost,
find you, as if it was sent
from memories left
in a land of oblivion...
as an insinuation to your ear
of its most secret agony,
when in your nights, restless
due to the memories, maybe,
you read, at least once,
the stanzas of the poet.

I doubt that he ever was part of the Argentine cannon. Arguably, the closest he got to it was through Borges' book and through the lyrics and sentimental melodies of some Tangos, which found in him an early inspiration. Yet, I believe that Borges thought of Carriego when he wrote:

Blindly the soul wilfully asks for eternity
When its eternity is assured in the lives of others
When you yourself are the realised continuation
Of those who did not know your time
And others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.
‍

Borges thought that Carriego, as well as all those who lived before us, persist in those actions we perform that mimic theirs. In fact, Borges did not think that we engage in a mimetic enterprise when we perform the movements, gestures and routines of Carriego, but rather that, for that moment, we are Carriego and that time is, therefore, non-linear. Borges thought that this identification with people that lived before us proved the circularity of time, as he later argued in New Refutation of Time.

I think that this strict identity in action is dubious, but not so in consciousness. We are, unfortunately, incapable of being materially identical to Carriego in our actions; yet, I believe, we can have an identical conscience to Carriego by seeing and thinking (strictly) the same things that he did at some moment in time. As Allan Bloom notes, 'when two persons prove the Pythagorean theorem together, they are for that moment undeniably one, seeing and thinking the same things. They are really the same that moment in a way that persons are not in any kind of relationships.' Surely, if we tried to unify our conscience with Carriego's and revive it by way of walking in Palermo and perceiving the same things as Carriego perceived, we would dramatically fail. The things that he perceived are no longer, and the ones we perceive were not yet. However, this is not true for incorruptible objects, such as Pythagoras's theorem or El Secreto. Translating El Secreto is, I believe, seeing and thinking what Carriego saw and thought when writing it, and reading it for the first time is doing what he once did. I hope, then, that in this translation and in its few readers Carriego will, for the length of 12 verses, live again.

‍

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La Piccioletta Barca | Your Secret by Evaristo Carriego - by Facundo Rodriguez

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¡De todo te olvidas! Anoche dejasteaquí, sobre el piano que ya jamás tocas,un poco de tu alma de muchacha enferma:un libro, vedado, de tiernas memorias. Íntimas memorias. Yo lo abrí, al descuido,y supe, sonriendo, tu pena más honda,el dulce secreto que no diré a nadie:a nadie interesa saber que me nombras.

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Lacul codrilor albastru
Nuferi galbeni îl încarcă;
Tresărind în cercuri albe
El cutremură o barcă.

Și eu trec de-a lung de maluri,
Parc-ascult și parc-aștept
Ea dintrestii să răsară
Și să-mi cadă lin pe piept;

Să sărim în luntrea mică,
Îngânați de glas de ape,
Și să scap din mână cârma,
Și lopețile să-mi scape;

Să plutim cuprinși de farmec
Sub lumina blândei lune -
Vântu-n trestii lin foșnească,
Undoioasa apă sune!

Dar nu vine...Singuratic
În zadar suspin și sufăr
Lângă lacul cel albastru
Încărcat cu flori de nufăr.
‍

The wood's blue lake
On which yellow lilies float,
Trembling in clear white circles,
Is startled by a little boat.

And I roam across its shores,
As I listen, as I wait
For her figure to arise
From the reeds to my chest straight:

Let us leap into the craft,
Water's voices hum in wonder,
Let me drop the rudder in,
Let the oars fall deep down under;

Let us float in sweet enchantment
In the moon's pacific light,
Let the wind rustle the reeds,
Let the water wave, recite!

But she does not come ... Alone
I sigh and suffer, mute, remote,
On the shores of the blue lake
On which yellow lilies float.

"Water!"
a baby screamed at me, holding his father's hand.

"Oh my god they're mating,"
said a pre-teen in my ear as he picked his nose,
I became the sullen child
who didn't want to play,
briefly considered cutting him out of the poem.

But soon the azure dragonflies arrived,
the water lilies blushed on edge
in tones of Sunset Boulevard and Campfire.
Beneath the glaze,
they grew divine, unimaginable organs.
Snails caressed the roots in pirouette,
spun, taking out their secret parts
deftly and industriously, as they never would on earth.
I even found
the pots of Tophet, secondhand from Pompeii,
full of swaying lettuce.

The stiller I remained, kneeling on the banks,
the more my eyes penetrated this book of secrets,
and a copper-haired mermaid
plucking the water lilies
to make a bouquet for the dirt-floored room
rippled before me.
That sea-girl would not call for me:
I did not care that I snapped her veins,
that I hurt her.

Romania's national poet, Mihai Eminescu (1850 - 1889), is the prototype of the Romantic poet: thematically comparable to Lamartine and Novalis, delicately handsome and tragically doomed, he seemed to fit every box for what he ended up representing, and what he continues to represent to this day.

This first poem, which I have translated as faithfully to the original as I was able to, demonstrates this. While I can only applaud the beauty of this style and ideal, my poetic response to "The Lake" appeals to the more ludic and polymorphous aspect of Eminescu's poetry, which is less apparent in this particular poem, but which is salient in his entire corpus. This transition from Romanticism to Modernism tends to creep in nearly subliminally as we watch the poet mature. Hence my poem is in itself about the process of maturation and, in its ending, references T.S. Eliot's "The LoveSong of J. Alfred Prufrock", thus bringing the two poets, currents, and cultures (to which I belong, as a Romanian-American), together.

‍

["The Pond" was originally published in The Blue Nib.]

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La Piccioletta Barca | Lacul by Mihai Eminescu - by Andreea Iulia Scridon

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Lacul codrilor albastruNuferi galbeni îl încarcă;Tresărind în cercuri albeEl cutremură o barcă. Și eu trec de-a lung de maluri,Parc-ascult și parc-aștept Ea dintrestii să răsarăȘi să-mi cadă lin pe piept; Să sărim în luntrea mică,Îngânați de glas de ape,Și să scap din mână cârma,Și lopețile să-mi scape; Să plutim cuprinși de farmecSub lumina blândei lune -Vântu-n trestii lin foșnească,Undoioasa apă sune!

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В день рожденья его посидим,
Молча попьём вино.
Слово жить - значит быть живым.
Необязательно мной.
‍

On his birthday we'll sit a while,
silently drinking wine.
To live means a life being lived -
not necessarily mine.
‍

Мне снилось в юности, что я
Лет в сорок пять умру
А я жива.
И это значит кто-то смерть мою забрал
И умер за меня
Перебираю имена.
Володя Митлин, ты?
И горячо
Мне сразу сделалось, и нежность, и вина,
И страх пустого дня.

In youth I dreamed that I
would die at 45
yet I am still alive.
So someone else is dead
whom death took in my stead.
I pick over the names.
Volodya... Could it be?
I feel a rush of heat
and tenderness and shame -
fear of an empty day.
‍

Окна хотят удержать в памяти мысли
но умещается только немного дыма
Время состарилось время молчит повисло
воздух недвижен вещи кричат роди меня

‍

Windows wish to hold on to their thoughts
but only have room enough
for some smoke time grows old silent stops
in still air things cry give me birth
‍

‍

‍

The art of translation, like any deeply engaged act of reading, is partly a matter of mirroring. We often see, in the texts that mean most to us, not only a record of their authors' experiences but also a reflection of our own. The textual mirror, of course, is a funhouse one, even when the image it shows is as serious as sin. No matter how honest it remains to its inspiration, all art is artifice. The author shapes the image in order to achieve the ideal effect, and we, in our turn, are shaped by that effect. We look into the text, see a version of ourselves, and walk away changed.

The moment I first encountered the poems of Julia Nemirovskaya, I felt I had acquired a magical mirror - a mirror that promised to reveal, with striking clarity, traits of my own personality that I had barely glimpsed before. I saw a version of myself in her lyrics and heard a version of my voice; but the self was brighter and better, the voice gentler yet surer than the ones I was used to.

After nearly a decade of living with Julia's poems, I have come to appreciate the degree to which the process of translating them has helped me become that better self and find that surer voice - at least on the page. I have worked to mirror her Russian mirrors in English, doubling the reflection. Standing between these reflective surfaces - the originals and the translations - I feel I am able to examine myself from all sides in an eternal, infinite space of reflection. That space is the domain of poetry, in which Julia dwells more naturally than just about anyone I know. I will forever be grateful to her for welcoming me into it.

The poems above have all served me as mirrors, and I hope my translations will do the same for other readers. The first, titled "Mirror", moves me to reflect on my relationship with my father, who died many years ago; the second, "45", helps me reckon with my own existential guilt at midlife; and the third, which has no title, lends words to my inchoate distress at the fires that raged up and down the West Coast of the United States - from the forests near my home in Southern California to those in Oregon, near Julia's.

‍

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La Piccioletta Barca | Poems by Julia Nemirovskaya - by Boris Dralyuk

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В день рожденья его посидим, Молча попьём вино.Слово жить - значит быть живым. Необязательно мной.‍ On his birthday we'll sit a while,silently drinking wine.To live means a life being lived -not necessarily mine.‍ Мне снилось в юности, что яЛет в сорок пять умруА я жива.И это значит кто-то смерть мою забрал И умер за меняПеребираю имена.Володя Митлин, ты?И горячоМне сразу сделалось, и нежность, и вина, И страх пустого дня.

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The One Pierced Through

(Ich kenne dich, du bist die tief Gebeugte,
ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan.
Wo flammt ein Wort, das für uns beide zeugte?
Du-ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich-ganz Wahn.)

(I know you: you're the one bent low.
I, your servant, am the one pierced through.
Where, to vouch for us both, will a word flame free?
You-so completely real-hallucinate me.)
‍

I began with one short, circumscribed, parenthetical, untitled poem, in a language I didn't know, a spark of encounter and revelation, purposely fragmentary, and from these four lines, Paul Celan's poetry has grown outward for me and become immense. The poem first appeared in 1967 in his book, Atemwende -"breathturn", or "change of breath"-a word Celan coined for the turning or breaking point, the crisis in writing and life, which these poems recorded. Four lines, four breaths: a poem that itself enacts a turning.

This tiny poem takes up enormous matters-knowing, witnessing, the real, the not-real, freedom, servitude, revelation, union-with the metaphor of an immanence that hovers and pierces, the image of a Word on fire. An entire scripture, encapsulated; an I and a Thou, Ich and Du, both in need of a witness. The disturbing encounter, and the immediate knowing, seem to recall the burning bush of Exodus-that humblest of thorn-trees, on fire but not consumed, and capable of piercing. As an ancient midrash (rabbinic commentary) observed, you may put your hand into a thorn bush without harm, but just try to take it out. An early title of Atemwende was the all but untranslatable compound, Wahnspur: Wahn, the last word of this poem, meaning delusion, illusion, hallucination, error, madness; and Spur, meaning a trail, a track, a vestige, a mark.

The poem carries and holds these matters-the disturbance and fright-in a container of rhyme and meter that was all but unheard-of for Celan. The form manages to suggest harmony, completeness, and rest, even though the poem leaves us with anything but these-just as Celan's final poem (" Rebleute graben..."), written about one week before his suicide in April 1970, invoked in its final lines "the Invisible" summoning the wind within bounds, and being known, and the Sabbath. Here, the stanza is held within parentheses, as if broken off, provisional, a shard, or one can read it as a theatrical aside, an intimacy meant to be overheard-hermetic, sealed-up, but wide awake, as Emmanuel Lévinas once observed that Celan's poems enact "insomnia in the bed of Being". [1]

I wanted to make this poem my own. And I was willing to take liberties, as Celan was repeatedly willing to do as a translator himself, of Mandelstam, Blok, Apollinaire, Valéry, Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Frost. The poem itself seemed a parable of translation-an encounter, and its shadow. I wanted to keep the formal structure, making a rhythmic, rhymed poem in English, which other translators had not done, or not to my satisfaction. I knocked off a word-by-word draft, quite unsatisfactory, but a start, knowing what an illusion it is ( ganz Wahn) to expect literal accuracy:
‍

(I know you-you're the one bent low,
and I, pierced through, am your underling.
Where does a word flame forth, to witness for us both?
You, so completely real-I, completely not/a complete illusion.)

Who is this "you", the reality addressed by an unreal "I"? Celan's early encounter with Martin Buber's work is well known, particularly I and Thou, and his compilations of Hasidic tales of encounter with the divine. One of the few prose testimonies Celan left behind as a key to his art, an acceptance speech that he delivered in Bremen in 1958 for a literature prize, is especially poignant. He said, "A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the-not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality". And he ended his brief remarks with a somber and subtle evocation of the Shoah, calling himself "someone who, overarched by stars that are human handiwork... goes with his very being to language, Wirklichkeitswund und wirklichkeit suchend ".[2] Reality-wounded, and Reality-seeking.

"Not always greatly hopeful": there was always the possibility that the addressable Thou was No One, Niemand-the figure who is, after all, the central character of Celan's previous book of poems, Die Niemandsrose (1963). One poem in that book, recalling a Nazi labor camp, cries out in yearning, or despair, or both, " O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du." O one, O none, O no one, O you. The "Psalm" that gives the book its title records, even blesses, an encounter with and against No One and Nothing ( Niemand and Nichts) that is also a blooming, as "the No-One's Rose"-its final word is "thorn". A poem in Atemwende that is a kind of companion to " Ich kenne dich..." ends by declaring, " Niemand/zeugt für den/Zeugen"-No one bears witness for the witness. But is this a positive "No One" who does bear witness, after all? The vocabulary of " Ich kenne dich..." is infused throughout this book of "breath-turning". Wounds, scars, piercing; "temple-pincers" that seem to recall psychiatric shock treatment; witnessing; I and you; wirklich; Wahn.

But how to translate these four lines, which would not let go of me? Partly by slogging my way through German dictionaries and asking friends for help; partly by learning from and quarreling with other translators. Here is what four of them have made of the poem in English:

Pierre Joris:

(I know you, you are the deeply bowed,
I the transpierced, am subject to you.
Where flames a word, would testify for us both?
You-all, all real. I-all delusion.)[3]
‍

John Felstiner:

(I know you, you're the one bent over low,
and I, the one pierced through, am in your need.
Where flames a word to witness for us both?
You-wholly real. I-wholly mad.)[4]

Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh:

(I know you: you're the one who's bent so low.
You hold me-I'm the riddled one-in bondage.
What word could burn as witness for us two?
You're my reality. I'm your mirage.)

And then, less directly, there's Robert Hass-not translating the poem exactly, but slightly referring to it in the last stanza of his poem, "The Distribution of Happiness":

(I know: you are the one
Pierced through. I'm the one
Bent low beside you, trying
To peer into your eyes.)[6]

Joris, we notice at once, has set rhyme and meter aside. Felstiner manages off-rhymes, but seems shaky on the meter, especially in line 4. Popov and McHugh come up with a rather awful visual rhyme, almost urging one to say bon-DAZH. But that is only the beginning of the challenges these four lines present. Joris delivers a couple of phrases that are not quite English-"the deeply bowed", "transpierced", "all, all real"-but I can't say what these add to the language, in the sense that Celan fought with, added to, and transcended German. His "where flames a word" (which Felstiner also uses) is merely German word order,and without a connective, his two-phrase line becomes ungrammatical. I admire Popov and McHugh's solution for Durchbohrte, "I'm the riddled one", yet the pun adds a lightness of tone that doesn't seem right.

Untertan is not an easy concept to render either. "Underling" occurred to me, echoing the under-ness of the German term, but it, too, seems too light in tone to capture what's at stake. Felstiner's translation, "in your need", is a stretch, perhaps for the sake of the rhyme with "mad"-a move that I will hardly be innocent of myself. "Subject" is better, catching some of the word's sense of obedience, submission, and humility. "Bondage", to my taste, strays too far. And what to do with zeugte? For what I have in mind, "witness" and "testify" have too many syllables; I hit upon the word "vouch", which has a more energetic sound, and combines the meanings of witnessing, testimony, and oath taking.

Flammt, as Joris's version demonstrates, does not translate so easily as "flames"-it needs something more. Flame forth, catch fire, flare up, flash? Popov and McHugh's use of "what word could burn" changes Celan's line into a different question, losing its where-ness, the physical search for a word in the realm of space. Stretching a bit myself, and wanting a rhyme, I decide on the verb phrase "flame free", counterbalancing the nuance of servitude in untertan.

Then there is the finality of Wahn, which, maddeningly, means so many things. Felstiner catches the connotation of insanity when translating Wahn as "mad", but it's not just madness. I prefer "delusion" or "mirage", but neither quite sings to me. So I take a leap, emboldened by Celan's own style of translation, and make the noun a verb: the utter reality of you is what makes the I unreal, a creation out of Nothing and No One. You hallucinate me. And who can witness such a thing as that? Who but you and I will ever know it?

(I know you: you're the one bent low.
I, your servant, am the one pierced through.
Where, to vouch for us both, will a word flame free?
You-so completely real-hallucinate me.)

Content for now with what I've made for myself out of these four lines by Paul Celan, I feel certain nevertheless that they've eluded us all, and broken free.

‍

‍

‍

[1] Quoted in Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, by John Felstiner (Yale University Press, 1995).

[2] Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner (W.W. Norton, Inc., 2001).

[3] Paul Celan, Breathturn (Green Integer, 2006).

[4] Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (W.W. Norton, Inc., 2001).

[5]Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (Wesleyan University Press, 2000).

[6] Time and Materials (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2007).

‍

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La Piccioletta Barca | Four lines by Paul Celan - by Dan Bellm

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(Ich kenne dich, du bist die tief Gebeugte,ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan.Wo flammt ein Wort, das für uns beide zeugte?Du-ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich-ganz Wahn.)

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przestanąć i przestać przełknąć to brzmienie
i przełknąć chromą przestankowość stania
i stanu w którym wstawiona i w który wstawiona
dzierżę i łykam płonę i zamiatam
nagrobki trzy światła mistrzów którym serca stanęły
trzy mgły za pyski przez zamieć wleczone
zwlekanie czasem przez klawisze zębów
cedzonym jak potok przez górskie kamienie
tam hen gdzie jesień z zimą się podmienia
stygnięcie w budyniu żelową chłodną skórkę
i głazu w śmierć
kurtyna ściana przystaję przestaję

to pause & stop swallow that sound
& swallow the lame punctuation of standing
& the state when I'm drunk & I'm dunked
I wield & swallow I burn & sweep
tombstones three lights of old masters with unbeating hearts
three mists dragged thru a blizzard by their snouts
deferring time thru the piano keys
strained like a stream thru mountain stones
over yonder where autumn swaps with winter
cooling in the pudding with a cool gel crust
& a boulder in death
a curtain a wall I stall & I stop
‍

jeszcze nie przeszłam na drugą stronę powtarzam się
ruch w pionie zagadka huśtawki i coraz gęstsze pauzy
w najrzadszej siatce niech odpocznie oko
do wód gruntowych pochylone równią
oszklona szronem twarz odbita od piany
jak ona pływała teraz wydaje się krzywa
‍

surfacing
‍

I haven't crossed over to the other side yet I repeat
vertical movement puzzle swings & ever denser pauses
let the eye rest in the rarest mesh
at a level angled to the groundwater
a frost-glazed face reflected in the foam
how she swam now seems a curve
‍

late bloomers
‍

skręcona kostko pod moimi palcami
bierna jak muł rzek starych i leniwych
a przecież znam cię z lepszej strony znam cię hardą
drzazgo z jodełki polskiej w nagiej stopie
znam cię wślizgniętą w limfę przez skórę
kłującą to tu to tam w serce i w przeponę

chwilo co pestką po śliwce ku ziemi upadasz
okiem owocu ślepa wyjedzona
która przychodzisz jak powidok po świecy
i między oczami dwie zmarszczki pionowe

dwie ukręcone łodygi mieczyka
zakwitłe na czas jaki płonie drzazga
‍

late bloomers
‍

oh twisted ankle under my fingers
as indifferent as the mud of old & lazy rivers
and yet I know your better side I know your snark
oh splinter from a Polish fir in a bare foot
I know you slipped into my lymph thru the skin
stinging here and there in the heart & diaphragm

oh instant you fall to the ground like a plum pit
like a fruit's eye eaten blind
you come like a candle afterimage
& two vertical lines between the eyes

two twisted gladiolus stalks
in bloom as long as the splinter burns
‍

nagrodą za wolność jest wolność

a jeśli jesteś głodna
to przeżuj ją dokładniej jak kawałek mięsa
smakując pod językiem co krew co kość co ścięgna
co kręgi na wodzie co nic co słoje drewna
‍

the prize for freedom is freedom
‍

and if you're hungry
then chew it more thoroughly like a piece of meat
tasting every bloodline under the tongue every bone every sinew
every ripple on the water every absence every grain of wood

(Original poems from Druga Osoba. Biuro Literackie, 2020).
‍

My first encounter with the work of Katarzyna Szaulińska was through her poem "dorothy vallens", which jolted me with how dexterously it shifted between David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Sylvia Plath, and Mike Tyson in the moment he bites off Evander Holyfield's ear. As I read more of her work, it became readily apparent that Szaulińska is part of an exciting younger generation of Polish women poets offering dynamic disruptions of surface in their poems. In Szaulińska's case, these disruptions collapse binaries like interior vs exterior, the corporeal vs the cognitive, or the pastoral vs the urbane and envelop them with the attendant emotions of memory: piercing pain or surprise, rootlessness, and disorientation.

Both language and encounter are (made) material in her poems, which largely eschew punctuation, to compose a linguistic space both finite and without boundaries. This profound lack of punctuation also creates a kind of temporal and readerly slippage, like trying to catch an eel in the dark. And if the reader may not be sure of their footing--enjambment or fracture?--the translator's path is not necessarily clearer. Every word or phrase could be both bridge and banana peel, "a boulder in death" or "fruit's eye eaten blind".

In Szaulińska's poems, an abstraction like freedom--increasingly timely these days!--can be savored and consumed down to the gristle, while something as concrete as a comma becomes the pulse drum in a lyrical dance teeming with assonance, a gravesite slurry between piano keys, mountain stones, and seasonal shifts. Szaulińska's is a lyric alive with the hum of possibility, even if that song leaves us doubled-over with a splinter in agony--or is it ecstasy?--or gasping for air with some blood dripping down the chin.

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Mark Tardi is a writer, translator, and lecturer on faculty at the University of Łódź. He is the author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017). Recent work and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Circumference, Armstrong Literary, Another Chicago Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, Berlin Quarterly, La Piccioletta Barca, Notre Dame Review, Asymptote, Anomaly, and Periodicities. His translation of The Squatters' Gift by Robert Rybicki was recently published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2021.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Poems by Katarzyna Szaulińska - by Mark Tardi

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przestanąć i przestać przełknąć to brzmieniei przełknąć chromą przestankowość staniai stanu w którym wstawiona i w który wstawionadzierżę i łykam płonę i zamiatamnagrobki trzy światła mistrzów którym serca stanęłytrzy mgły za pyski przez zamieć wleczonezwlekanie czasem przez klawisze zębówcedzonym jak potok przez górskie kamienietam hen gdzie jesień z zimą się

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از اسب
هاشورِ مبهمی بالایِ تپه
و از سوار
گوشه‌ی پیراهنی
زیرِ آبگینه‌ی برف پیداست.
کمانِ مضرسِ کوه را
تیرِ عقابی به هوا بر نمی‌شود
و حماسه
مردی است مدفون
در سرزمینی مفقود

1

‍
Of the horse
only a vague contour
on top of the hill.
Of the horseman
a piece of cloth
under the mirror of the snow.
The ridged arc of the mountain
throws no eagle to the sky.
And mythicis a man buried
in a lost land.

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2

چه پگاهِ پلشتی!
از آفتابش برنمی‌آید
که از کفنِ سردِ مه به درآید
آسمانش
چترِ آبی بسته است
و بادِ صبحدمش
از تطاولِ گل می‌آید
چه پگاهِ پلشتی!
‍

2

‍

What a filthy dawn!
Its sun, unable
to come out of the cold shroud of fog.
Its sky
has closed its blue umbrella
and its early morning wind
arrives only to plunder flowers.
What a filthy dawn!

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To Awaken from Despair:
Translating Hamid Adib

I have long been mesmerized by the varied social settings and contexts in which classical Persian poetry is reproduced, reprinted and recited. Ordinary Iranians constantly re-visit, reframe and recite traditional verse in different ways and within different venues, in order to convey new emotions, new passions and new times. The classical tradition does not just offer a poetry of joy, recited for the Beloved or Friend, but gets called upon for personal reflection in moments of solitude and despair. Traditionally, classical poems have been recited at funeral ceremonies and verses are still often carved upon tombstones. These days, one can find classical poems summoned in the solitude of Sufi lodges, while also recited in stadiums during election campaigns.

However, if poetry is a language to remember lost souls, something to help mediate the moments of remembering the beautiful lives that have perished, I have found modern Persian poetry, in comparison, to be relatively limited in its social contexts of recitation, especially when it comes to the celebration of life and the mourning of death.

This changed for me a few months ago, when a dear friend, now living in exile in Canada, reached out and asked me to translate a few poems by his close companion in Iran, the poet, Hamid Adib (1948-2005). My friend wanted to read Adib's poems in an English translation at a forthcoming memorial ceremony in Toronto for one of the passengers of flight PS752, the airplane that had been shot down by Iranian surface-to-air missiles on 8 January 2020, minutes after taking off from Tehran. I had never come across Adib's poetry until then, but I found myself relating effortless to his writing. I felt as though we breathed the same socio-political air as I read his work, and in the following days, translated his words.

The previous year (2019) has been one of nonstop economic, social and national crises in Iranian history. It had been a year of living under various state-sponsored psychological wars, merciless social suppression, growing political deadlock, rising regional threats of war, and the politicization of everything -- even personal grief and communal mourning. The Iranian psyche was, and still is, trying to cope with the many layers of trauma, grief, depression, and anger at the injustices that continue forty years since the 1979 Iranian Revolution once the early euphoria of political freedom was suppressed by one party under its flag of political Islam. In post revolution Iranian history, the decade most comparable to the current socio-political times is the 1980s, when the repression of the Islamic Cultural Revolution transformed Iran's cultural and poetic life as the tragic toll of the Iran-Iraq war impacted thousands of families in both countries.

Hamid Adib's poetry was shaped during this tumultuous period of the 1980s in Iran and it conveys the moments and modes of his personal, social,and political despair. To relate to Adib's poetry so deeply is not at all unnatural for those, who like myself, suffer from restless nights, helplessly trying to awaken from the nightmare of the present.

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‍

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La Piccioletta Barca | To Awaken from Despair: Translating Hamid Adib - by Mahdi Ganjavi

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از اسب هاشورِ مبهمی بالایِ تپه و از سوار گوشه‌ی پیراهنی زیرِ آبگینه‌ی برف پیداست. کمانِ مضرسِ کوه را تیرِ عقابی به هوا بر نمی‌شود و حماسه مردی است مدفون در سرزمینی مفقود ‍Of the horseonly a vague contouron top of the hill.Of the horsemana piece of clothunder the mirror of the snow.The ridged arc of the mountainthrows no eagle to the sky.And mythicis a man buriedin a lost land.

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by Alberto Moravia (translated from Italian)
‍
When I was a kid playing with other kids, we had that counting rhyme that goes ' Centocinquanta la gallina canta' and ends with 'and now it is precisely your turn!' I remember how much I wanted that counting finger to stop at my chest, and that I'd be chosen to lead. Self-love. In life, you know, self-love is everything. Those who don't understand this understand nothing. When I grew up, I continued to hope it would be 'precisely my turn'. Sadly, it's not often my turn, indeed almost never. I'm too humble, I know. Furthermore, until recently I was a mondezzaro, a dustman. There's a lot said about rubbish and dustmen. There's no one below dustmen, they say, not even beggars. That could be true. But if there were no dustmen, what would happen? We see it on strike days: the whole city's dirty, sad, litter everywhere, the bins overflowing. And the most beautiful roads, they're the dirtiest because, you know, the rich make more filth than the poor - rubbish shows you exactly how people live. It's on strike days, I'll say it again, that we appreciate the dustman and his importance to modern life.

I'm just saying that, when I went around with the cart, picking up rubbish, I'd think of that phrase 'now it is precisely your turn' and how I'd never hear it for me. It was always others who got their turn, especially with women. Every single time I was with a girl I liked and I'd get to telling her 'I'm a dustman', I'd see her darken and twist her nose. Then, more sooner than later, she'd leave me.

I might as well have said, 'I'm a thief.' I didn't get it at first but when it happened over and over, I began to suspect that I might be better off hiding what I did. It was one of my cart partners, old Silvestro, who, you could say, opened my eyes. One morning when we were going from house to house, and I was complaining about women finding fault with my job, he said, no pleasantries: 'It's because it's a dirty trade... women don't like dirty trades... you should hide it.'

'But how?'

'Just say you work for the council... it's true after all... we're all council employees... we pick up rubbish, those at the registry office sit behind their desks... but we're all employees.'

The third cart partner, Ferdinando - my age, red-haired, freckle-faced, bespectacled - interrupted: 'I think you're wrong... why hide what you do?... It's a job like any other... we're workers like everyone else... hiding it just lets prejudice win.'

' Bravo,' Silvestro said, 'but prejudice exists doesn't it? And for Luigi, is it more important to fight prejudice or to get a girl to love him? On the other hand, look at porters... they're workers too... and they're calling themselves things like steward now... they're changing the word though, not the deed... they're doing it and all because of prejudice.'

'Mind me, Luigi,' Ferdinando said, stubborn, 'don't hide nothing... if a woman's swayed by prejudice, that just shows she loves prejudice more than you.'

Anyway, we discussed the matter a great deal while the cart filled with rubbish and proceeded slowly slowly from one street to the next, all in the November morning mist. The cart stopped in front of a house. Ferdinando grabbed a sack, climbed down from the cart and strode into the doorway, whistling all the while. I said to Silvestro, 'You're old and you know about life... you tell me what to do.'

He pulled his pipe from his mouth. 'Ferdinando chooses to boast about his job... for me that's just another way of being ashamed of it... me, I'm not ashamed... I don't boast of it and I don't hide from it... I'm a dustman, that's all.'

'Yes, but I...'

'It's different for you... it's better for you to hide it... you should pretend you're a council worker.'

In that moment, I rejected that advice. I was a dustman and didn't see why I should hide it. But a few days later, in my free time, without my cap or apron, I was sitting on a bench in Villa Borghese and thinking to myself that Silvestro might be right after all. With that thought, I suddenly felt like in some dreams, when we dream we're walking about with just a shirt on and our arse is naked and we don't know, but then someone tells us and we wake up. So, I'd been a dustman for two years and I'd never thought about it. So, I'd been walking about with just my shirt on and I'd been the only one not to know it. So...

It was a day in mid-November, really pretty, the air sweet and misty, and the trees all yellow and red, the avenues full of women and children. I'd been so deep in my reflecting that I hadn't really noticed the young woman with the little girl joining me on the bench. Perhaps she was a maid or a governess. At the sound of her voice, 'Beatrice, don't go too far,' I turned to look. She was young, stocky, with a round face all whites and reds, and a blonde braid as fat as a hawser wound about her head. Her eyes struck me the most - black and shiny as velvet, smiling eyes. The little girl was crouched down, playing with the gravel. The woman sat holding the girl's bucket and spade. Sensing she was being watched, she turned to me and said calmly, 'You don't know me... but I know you.'

Such words seemed suggestive somehow and I felt myself blush. Thinking she must have seen me with a sack of rubbish on my shoulders, I replied right away, 'Miss, you're mistaking me for someone else... I've never met you.'

'And yet I know you.'

Already set on lying, I said, 'That's impossible... unless you've seen me at the registry office, where I'm employed... lots of people pass through there...'

She said nothing, but she looked at me at length and strangely. Finally, she asked, 'You're an employee at the registrar?'

'Certainly.'

'Which office?'

'Well, sometimes here, sometimes there... there's a great many offices.'

'Then,' she said slowly, 'that's where I'll have seen you... I was there two days ago.'

'That's it then.'

The little girl, meantime, had ventured away and was rummaging with both hands in a pile of debris and dead leaves. The woman scolded her, 'Leave that alone, Beatrice... it's rubbish... good little girls don't touch rubbish.' At the word 'rubbish', I couldn't help wincing. Then, as if that wasn't enough, a street sweeper approached with his ugly grey uniform and his zinc cart and brush, and started sweeping away the pile.

She said, 'With all these dead leaves, the streetsweepers must be very busy.'

I blushed again and hoped that she'd agree with my reply: 'That's their job... they're employed by the council like me... they sweep and I write... there's no other difference.' Still looking at me strangely, she said, 'My name's Giacinta... and yours?'

'Luigi.'

That's how our relationship began. She never told me where she lived - she said she didn't want her mistress to know we were seeing each other. It turned out, however, that she lived in the area where I went with my cart every morning. We saw each other often, sometimes during the week, and every Sunday. We'd go to the cinema, or a football match, or the caffé. I fell in love with her, you might say, for her character. I've never known another character like hers: quiet, sweet, calm, sly perhaps, all concealed and secret like a deep still water. She was always silent and, when I spoke to her, she'd nod her head sweetly like she was approving of me and, at the same time, she'd make a little sound like a moan, as if to say, 'That's true, it's so, you're right.' If she didn't speak, her eyes spoke for her, always smiling, always attentive, velvety black and mysterious. She never allowed me to get familiar; perhaps a few times at the cinema she let me hold her hand. Meantime I continued to tell her I was employed at the registrar, always adding some new detail to reinforce the impression of the truth. But every now and then I'd betray myself, because rubbish and dustmen are part of conversation more than we think. Like the time that, having made me wait, I told her off, saying but not really meaning, 'I'm a man, you know, I'm not rubbish.' Straight away I bit my tongue and blushed to my ears. I thought she smiled as she said nothing.

I was so in love that I began to think of getting engaged. But I knew right off that if I wanted to marry her, I'd first have to change jobs. I'd told her too many lies. Suddenly acknowledging that I was a dustman would have meant ruining everything, mainly because of the inevitable disappointment of me being a dustman. Then she would discover that I was a liar and, everyone knows, women don't love liars. But it wasn't easy changing jobs, and I had to change two: my real one and my fake one. In my free time, I began to go about Rome looking for work. I couldn't find any and it came to me that, since I was damned either way, I might as well sack myself and be unemployed. I don't know why but being unemployed sounded better to me than being a dustman. At this point, however, the event I'd feared actually happened.

We always took the same route in the mornings. Like I said, there were three of us on the cart: Ferdinando and I who'd take turns filling the sacks, and Silvestro who'd drive the horses and help us balance the rubbish in the back. We spoke little. Silvestro would sit at the front, reins in hand, smoking his pipe, Ferdinando would perch on the rubbish, reading a magazine or newspaper fished out of some bin, while I thought about Giacinta and all my lying. Now one morning, when it was my turn to fill the sacks, the cart, as usual, stopped in front of a yellow three-storied building near Piazza della Libertà. Without a word, I grabbed the sack, got down from the cart and went in. There was no lift to the three flats. It was an old house and so quiet that it seemed uninhabited. I climbed the stairs two at a time, sack in hand, up the first flight, then on the landing I went to the first apartment. The plaque on the door had a straightforward name: 'Ginesi'. I recalled vaguely that the same person would come to this door: a middle-aged cook from Friuli, solid, surly, sad, mannish. And that morning, as usual, as soon as I heard the door open, without even raising my eyes, I called 'Rubbish!' and opened the sack.

But seeing the two hands that offered me the aluminium dustbin, not the cook's large dark hands, but small white ones, I looked up and saw it was her. I learned later that there were two servants in the house, the cook and Giacinta, and that, because she was a lady's maid, she'd never come to the door but had observed me from the window. That morning, by chance, the cook was ill. I also learned later that shyness had stopped Giacinta from speaking when she saw me on the threshold. We all know better in hindsight. But at that moment, while silently she handed me the dustbin, I detected I don't know what teasing in her black eyes watching me. I sensed myself blush and blanch as I poured the rubbish into my sack, swung it over my shoulder, and turned my back on her. I'd seen myself for what I was, with my cap over on my ear, and my stinking striped apron: a dustman, not an office worker. I thought I'd never have the courage to see her again. I didn't go up to the other apartments, but instead went back down to the street, threw the almost empty sack to Ferdinando, then the cap and the apron. 'Take these too... I'm ending it... I'm going... Tell dispatch.'

'What's the matter? You gone mad?'

'No, I'm not mad... goodbye.'

I'd arranged to see Giacinta that day, but didn't go. I lay on the bed in the basement rented from a seamstress, with a wanting to weep that wouldn't decide itself, like when your nose itches and you want to sneeze but can't. Towards evening, instead of weeping, I fell asleep. Upon waking, I realized that it was truly the end, and feared being unemployed forever. Instead, by pure luck, after a few days I found a job as a caretaker at an out of the way building site near Magliana.

For a full four months I remained in the countryside as that site's guard dog. But one Sunday I went back into Rome, and met Silvestro in Piazza Risorgimento. Soon as he saw me, he said, 'We found out why you left... that girl... but you did wrong... she really loved you. She loved you for being you and not someone else... she said she only had to see a man with a dustman's cap and a sack swung over his shoulder, and her heart would begin racing... She said that for her the dustcart was better than a luxury car... and now she's with Ferdinando.'

'With Ferdinando?'

'Right. She wanted a dustman and she got him... he never hid his job, he was proud of it... they're engaged.'

I left him with his mouth still going. I'd have eaten my hands. The one time the counting game had stopped at me when, as the old rhyme says, 'it's precisely my turn', I hadn't understood. Among all the women, I'd encountered the one who liked dustmen, but I hadn't guessed. Ah life, that's how it is, we misread things, and so I missed my turn again.

The Tragedy of the Dustman

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Alberto Moravia, one of Italy's most famous literary figures, is renowned for his neorealist and anti-fascist novels such as Gli indifferenti - The time of indifference, La Romana - The Roman woman, and La Ciociara - Two women, but he also wrote more than a hundred short stories featuring the common people of Rome, collected in Storie Romane - Roman Tales. Although Moravia wrote these in standard Italian, he used Romanesco flourishes to convey sentiments and emotions, from passion and pathos to hubris and humour. He was a fervent admirer of the Romanesco poetry of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, who said:

Ma nun c'è lingua come la romana
Pe' dì una cosa co' ttanto divario
Che ppare un magazzino de dogana.
- G. G. Belli, ' Le lingue der monno'

But there's no language like the Roman
for saying something so variously,
it's like a customs warehouse.
- G. G. Belli, ' Languages of the world'

Like Belli had done through thousands of sonnets a hundred years previously, Moravia in his Roman Tales dissected Rome's 'commoners', so transmitting his profound love for these people and their language. The tales were written to be read with a Romanesco accent, the way Rome's people speak, not standard Italian, and to my ears the former has a lovelier sound, as distinctive as Lallans or Geordie to the British ear, or Gaditan to the Spanish.

Although the story below doesn't appear to have ever been translated, it deserves to be better known, epitomizing as it does Moravia's illustrations of Rome and its Romans. It also says something about the aspirational character of Italy as a whole in the 1950s, when it was transitioning from an agrarian past to its industrialised future, uncertain of its place in the global context, especially after its miserable performance during World War II. In first person, Moravia brilliantly characterises the dustman as someone ambivalent about his place in the world - on the one hand recognizing his worth, and on the other needing to be more in the eyes of his beholder.

It's perhaps not an accident that Moravia chose to focus on il mondezzaro since this word could be understood to have a dual meaning: this Romanesco name for dustman is derived from immondezza or filth that is out of this world, where world is mondo; the word mondezzaro also sounds like it could mean 'everyman', or any man in the world. By equating the dustman to an everyman, Moravia might have been commenting how Italians should not be ashamed of themselves, rather take pride in who they are or risk losing what they hold most precious. He might also have been reflecting on that most Italian of vices: the need to make a ' bella figura ' or good impression.

To make a ' bella figura' is a typically Italian way of demonstrating dignity and self-respect, but Moravia could be suggesting a negative aspect when someone feels the need to pretend to be more or different to one's real self. Although Moravia has been praised for his analysis of ennui and alienation, a theme throughout many of his stories is actually authenticity. 'Just be yourself,' he seems to be saying, 'be yourself and everything will be all right.' Sound advice for anyone.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Precisely Your Turn by Alberto Moravia - by Zoe Fairtlough

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by Alberto Moravia (translated from Italian) ‍ When I was a kid playing with other kids, we had that counting rhyme that goes ' Centocinquanta la gallina canta' and ends with 'and now it is precisely your turn!' I remember how much I wanted that counting finger to stop at my chest, and that I'd be chosen to lead.

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(Translated from Polish)

Popiół
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- Smakuje ci chryzantema? - zapytało dziecko kamień i włożyło do ust płatki zbite w kulkę podobną do miniaturowej kapusty. Każda chryzantema miała taką w środku, ta jednak była najokrąglejsza i najbardziej złota.Chrupała jak kapusta, ale smakowała cmentarzem.

- Gorące - dziecko wsadziło palec w szarą górę, która usypy-wała się w popielniku.

- Mróz - powiedziało i polizało oszronioną furtkę. - Krew- dodało.

Poczęstowało się ziemią, a gdy ją przeżuło, powiedziało:

- Czarne.

Pisało patykiem na ciele: "czereśnie", "czarodzieje", "poranki". Ze znikających ze skóry słów można było powyjmować mniejsze. Tym samym patykiem wydłubać śnienie z czereśni.

Tak dziecko karmiło kamień, żeby żył.

Ash
‍

-How do you like the chrysanthemum? - the child asked the stone and chewed on petals arranged into a tight ball resembling a miniature cabbage. Each chrysanthemum had one like that in the center, but this one was the roundest and most golden. It crunched like cabbage but tasted like cemetery.

-Hot - the child poked its finger into a gray mount that formed in the ash pan.

-Cold - she said and licked a frosted gate.

-Blood - she added.

She helped herself to soil and after chewing it, she said:

-Black.

She used a stick to spell on her body: "blackcurrants", "wizards", "mornings". The words vanishing from the skin left behind smaller ones. With the same stick, you could pick ants from blackcurrants. That's how the child fed the stone so it could live.
‍

‍

Pióro

- Czy nie wiesz, gdzie są martwe ptaki? - zapytało dziecko kamień, bo nikt, kogo pytało wcześniej, nie wiedział. Nie grzebie się ich i nie grzebią się same, więc powinny leżeć na ziemi. A że jest ich dużo jak ludzi, powinny leżeć jeden obok drugiego. Jeśli nie jeden na drugim. Nie tylko pod drzewami, ale też na chodnikach i ulicach, bo ptaki na pewno potrafią umrzeć w locie, skoro ludzie mogą robić to, idąc. Nie jest to coś, do czego koniecznie trzeba się zatrzymać.

- Więc gdzie? - spytało dziecko, bo w całym ogrodzie nie było ani jednego ciała, z którego wyprowadził się ptak. Było tylko pióro. Dziecko dotknęło się nim i pomyślało, że wszystkie ptaki, które umarły w powietrzu, nie spadły. Zrobiły się lżejsze o siebie i zawisły.

Dlatego może zdarzyć się grad bębniący o dachy wróblami albo czarny deszcz, który wypłucze z góry wszystkie wrony. Albo taka zima, że trzeba będzie odśnieżać gołębie. Może też nic się nie zdarzy i martwe zwierzęta zostaną w niebie, a ludzie na ziemi.

Feather

-Do you know where the dead birds are? -the child asked the stone because no one else she'd asked knew. You don't bury them and they don't bury themselves so they should be lying on the ground. And since there are as many of them as people, you should see one lying next to another. If not one on top of another. Not only under trees, but also on sidewalks and streets, because birds surely can die midair, if people can do it walking. It's not something you need to stop for.

-So, where are they? - the child asked because in the entire garden, there was not a single body vacated by a bird. There was only a feather. The child touched herself with it and thought that all the birds that died midair didn't fall. They just got extra light and are hovering.

That's why there might be hail thumping sparrows against rooftops or black rain that will flush all the crows from the sky. Or a winter when you'll have to plough through pigeons. Or maybe nothing will happen and the dead animals will stay inheaven, and people, on earth.
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Bryła gliny
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Dziecko przystawiało kamień do wielu rzeczy, ale żadnej nie ubywało. A skoro miały siebie ciągle tyle samo, znaczyło to, że nie są dla niego jadalne.

Wtedy dziecko znalazło wgłębienie pod językiem, włożyło tam kamień i nie stało się przez to cięższe. Poczuło, że jest go mniej. Nie tak mniej, jak jest się mniej, bo się żyje i zużywa życie. Tak mniej, jak się coś z siebie daje.

Dziecko szło po ogrodzie i patrzyło na to, czym był. Kamień jadł ten widok razem z dzieckiem, które już wiedziało: wyżywi kamień czymkolwiek, co przejdzie przez zmysły. Nawet bryłą gliny, jeślina na nią popatrzy, zwykłą trawą - jeśli jej dotknie. Może nawet samym myśleniem o trawie.
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Chunk of clay

The child has offered many things to the stone but none of them diminished. And since they had the same amount of themselves, this meant that it didn't find them edible.

That's when the child found a dip underneath her tongue, put the stone there and wasn't any heavier for it. She felt there was less of her. Not less in the sense that you live and use up life. Less because you give away a piece of yourself.

The child walked around the garden and studied it. The stone ate that view up along with the child who already knew: she will feed the stone on anything that will come through her senses. Even on a chunk of clay, if she looks at it --ordinary grass, if she touches it. Perhaps, by merely thinking about grass.
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The first thing about Bronka Nowicka's work that resonated with me was her language, which seemed clean and effortless, yet at the same time left me with things to ponder and feel. Nowicka's writing presents a certain lightness of touch, which reminds me of Italo Calvino and his famous lecture on "Lightness" in Six Memos for the Next Millennium: "there is such a thing as lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy." Calvino sees lightness as reflective of the vitality of the times, another quality that I think Nowicka's work shares.

To Feed the Stone is about objects that we all have at home and a child, who we all once were (and maybe who some of us have at home). The book is a moving reminder of a child's perspective; a child who's surrounded by unmagical things; objects that are sad, ugly, serious or just ordinary. It's that lens of a child that breathes magic into these objects. My nearly three-year-old son has helped me to understand the book better, and the book has helped me to understand my child better.

In the Polish original, the speaker or the protagonist is a child who is often referred to as "it". Initially, I wanted to keep the neutral signifier without revealing the gender because it allowed the child to stay in this twilight realm: a sexless creature, intuitive and honest like ananimal; wise and surprisingly rational, almost like an extraterrestrial being.In the end, I used "she", when necessary, to avoid confusing the speaker with inanimate objects, of which there are many in the book, but I still think that the child is best described as it -- its own kind.

In moments when I couldn't adhere to the original because literal translation would sound flat, I was guided by what effect Bronka was trying to achieve and I took liberties with how I arrived there. An example is the poem "Ash", where I needed to find a word contained within another word that would also be related to the plant world. The original was based on "czereśnie" -- sweet cherries, a word that, when fading away, would leave behind the lexeme "śnienie"-- dreaming. Cherries and dreaming share little in terms of spelling, so I explored other fruits and was happy with "blackcurrants ," which also generously provided me with "ants". Bronka was quite pleased with that solution and applauded my willingness to let go of the original and carve my own path. ‍

To Feed the Stone seems like an impossible task, Sisyphean in nature. But the child doesn't think that. She shows us that finding the access point and right sustenance allow us to feed something inside us. Something that has been ossified and indifferent for a long time, but is capable of tremor and amazement.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Poems by Bronka Nowicka - by Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi

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(Translated from Polish) - Smakuje ci chryzantema? - zapytało dziecko kamień i włożyło do ust płatki zbite w kulkę podobną do miniaturowej kapusty. Każda chryzantema miała taką w środku, ta jednak była najokrąglejsza i najbardziej złota.Chrupała jak kapusta, ale smakowała cmentarzem. - Gorące - dziecko wsadziło palec w szarą górę, która usypy-wała się w popielniku.

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La Piccioletta Barca | The Puzzle of “Mimic Language” - by Eponine Howarth and Yara Bazzoun

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In the original version of “Encounter in the forest”, the French-speaking reader manages to understand that a horrible..

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by Juan Arabia‍
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Nos alejamos de la ciudad,
infortunio, infortunio, etcétera.
En la que ya no hacemos
más canciones.

Nuestra flauta quedó encerrada
en la raíz de un sauce:
destruyendo el suelo,
levantando calles y baldosas.

Nos vamos lejos, amigos:
donde las vacas beben,
donde la savia fluye.

Nuestros versos necesitan
ser juzgados,
pero en tierras más salvajes...

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Judgement

We leave the city behind,
misfortunes, miss for tunes, etcetera;
where we no longer sow
any songs.

Our flute became trapped
inside a willow's root -
punishing the ground,
upheaving streets and sidewalk slabs.

We set afar, among friends -
where cows sip,
where sap flows.

Our verses must
soar for judgement,
but in wild, wilder lands...

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Coming to Poetry as a Verb:
On Juan Arabia's 'Juicio'

'Juicio' [Judgement]: first a noun, an act of assessment. Granted. But when we say judgement in poetry today, do we know what we are judging? Do we know whom? Is it the social function of the verses, utilitarian value, timeliness? How much heed do we pay to poetic diction, to versecraft? What about imagination and authorship? Answers will inevitably vary-from era to era, from ear to ear. Tell me what your perspective is and I will tell you how you judge. A holistic approach, however, sh*ould lead the reader to an awareness that neither poet nor poem operates in isolation, independent of language and tradition, detached from the array of linguistic symbols and established aesthetic practices... Octavio Paz tells us:

'Ningún texto es enteramente original, porque el lenguaje mismo, en su esencia, es ya una traducción: primero, del mundo no verbal y, después, porque cada signo y cada frase es la traducción de otro signo y de otra frase'.

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[No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation; first from the non verbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign and another phrase.]

Juan Arabia's 'Juicio' reminds us of this, of a poem born from the shelves of poetry: the sonnet, a fourteen-line construct with a distinctive volta on the 9th line ( 'We set afar, among friends - '). And, to some extent, it carries the lineage of other poems: Baudelaire's 'Le Voyage', Pound's opening of The Cantos, Pessoa's 'Viajar! Perder paizes!' [To travel! Leave countries behind!], to mention but a few. In this sense 'Juicio' is a translation-of a motif in the world of letters harkening back through the centuries, namely the experience of poetry as departure, as wandering and wonderment, as quest. And, naturally, it isn't one.

My intention is not to reduce 'Jucio' to an intertextual web, or even to approach it through a geographical lens, getting caught up between 'sauce' [willow] and 'flauta' [flute]--the tree widely spread in Argentina and the flute, metonymy for poetry here, a traditional Argentinian instrument. But to ignore them altogether would be as shortsighted as to turn a deaf ear to an essential matter in the translation of poetry: poetic rhythm. As Pessoa noted early on in his own practice: 'In the translation of a poem [...] the first element to settle on is its rhythm'.

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Settling on rhythm is a two-fold process: (1) scanning the source poem; (2) mimicking the rhythm as much as possible in the new version. The task becomes all the more challenging when performed across prosodic systems, as the case, for example, in a poem from Spanish (syllable-timed language) to English (stress-timed language).

Now, the reader may wonder about, and justly question, some of my translation choices. One could be line 9, where the preposition 'among' is not required for a semantic reason. Below I offer a scansion of the original and two possible English renderings that should answer the query (where the accented monosyllabic prosodic words are highlighted and prosodic words with more than one syllable are underlined and highlighted; the numbers on the right, inside brackets, indicate the accented metrical positions in the Spanish original and the positions that take a beat in the English version).

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[line 9] Nos vamos lejos, a migos: [2-4-7]

[literal translation] We're leav ing far, friends: [2-4-5]

[rhythmic translation] We set a far, among friends-

I will spare the full scansion of 'Jucio' (30+ accented syllables) as well as of 'Judgement' (30+ beats). A few other lines from each poem should suffice to shed light on the driving principle underlying my translation.

More than an invitation or beckoning, 'Juicio' calls for a departure; a calling that becomes phonically intensified through three rhythmic patterns throughout the poem, as we can observe here:

[lines 3-6]
En la queya no ha cemos [4-6]
en la ra íz de un sauce: [4-6]

[lines 4-13]
más can ciones. [1-3]
ser juz ga dos,

In the English translation, therefore, I sought to (1) reproduce three rhythmic patterns, preferably the same set of lines as the original (i.e., lines 3-6, 10-11, 4-13); (2) mimic the rhythm of each pair. While I succeeded in the former, in the latter I managed to replicate the rhythm of lines 4-13 [metrical positions 1-3] and (partially) of lines 3-6 [metrical positions 4-6].

[lines 3-6]
where we no longer sow [2- 4-6]
in side a willow's root - [2- 4-6]

[lines 10-11]
where cows sip, [3]
where sap flows. [3]

[lines 4-13]ny songs. [1-3]
soar for judg ement,

Based on the aforementioned, it should not be surprising that my English version semantically departs from the source poem in at least two instances (lines 2 and 13), both partly resulting from homophonic renderings. Content over sound represents a utilitarian stance. But a translation must aspire to be more than just functional.

As readers (and readers-translators), we need to come to poetry as a verb, insofar as we ought to engage with the how of the poem; that is, with how the poems does what it says it does, with how the poem poems. While 'Juicio' urges for a departure (whether physical and/or spiritual), it also enacts it by breaking away from the sonnet tradition (absence of rhyme scheme and endecasílabo, traditionally the poetic meter for this poetic form). Much like the original, a translation must depart from, transfigure, open toward - paradoxically seeking to become self-sufficient, autonomous.

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1. Octavio Paz. Traducción: literatura y literalidad, Barcelona, Tusquets, 1971.

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2. The term poetic rhythm (which I employ to distinguish from linguistic rhythm) is equivalent to Pessoa's usage of 'rhythm'. In the rest of this note, for the sake of abbreviation, I will use the word 'rhythm' instead.
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3. 'Na traducção de um poema, portanto, o primeiro elemento a fixar é o rhythmo'. For details on Pessoa's translation theory and practice, see '"A Rhythm of Another Speech". Pessoa's Theory and Practice of Poetry Translation'. Fernando Pessoa as Translator. Paulo de Medeiros & Jerónimo Pizarro, guest eds. The Translator, Loredana Polezzi and Rita Wilson, eds. Vol. 27, Number 2, 2021. (In collaboration with Claudia J. Fischer).
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4. My English translation (version or rendering, which I use interchangeably) is scanned in terms of ictic verse, based on the counting of prominence peaks, or beats, in Derek Attridge's terms. In this meter, the beat is the dominant feature and remains constant, falling at rhythmically equivalent intervals, usually between 0 and 3 poetic syllables (so positions where beats occur are easily identifiable), while the number of syllables in the verse instance may vary. The term 'beat' is not to be confused with 'stress', for not all stressable syllables in a given line represent beats. Generally, stressed and unstressed syllables coincide with beats and off beats. Now, beats are provided by peaks in stress and less often by atonic grammatical monosyllables (e.g., articles and prepositions) with unstressed adjacent neighbors (a phenomenon known as ictus promotion in the Attridgian terminology). There are cases in which a stressed syllable takes an off beat (ictus demotion), as in the case of 'among' placed before the prosodic word 'friends'.
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Other translations by Patricio Ferrari include:
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The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (co-translated with Forrest Gander; New Directions, 2018).
The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa (co-translated with Margaret Jull-Costa; New Directions, 2020).

More of his work can be found in , Buenos Aires Poetry, , The Paris Review, Words Without Borders, among others.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Juicio by Juan Arabia - by Patricio Ferrari

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by Juan Arabia‍‍Nos alejamos de la ciudad,infortunio, infortunio, etcétera.En la que ya no hacemosmás canciones. Nuestra flauta quedó encerradaen la raíz de un sauce:destruyendo el suelo,levantando calles y baldosas. Nos vamos lejos, amigos:donde las vacas beben,donde la savia fluye. Nuestros versos necesitanser juzgados,pero en tierras más salvajes...

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周年之雪 ‍

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Translation by Brian Holton, winner of the Sarah Maguire Prize 2021, awarded by the Poetry Translation Centre.

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earlier dark formed up behind winter is so similar
but isn't you

more hastily collapsing white more like the museum's marble steps
steps you can't come down

two gardens neatly fall into
a shrubbery a freezing pink girl's embrace

anniversary streetlamps register each passing snowflake returning snow
fingers flying thick and fast stab you scald you

on the so graceful place of the conductor
two breaths float in air

each an unfinishable book you take on your hand
leaning on the trickle of melt water that oozes from marble floods the museum

an earlobe pink with cold trysted with the twilight
waiting everywhere a planet carved from the cold

the wind's wailing knows you stands still
and floating down too tender six-sided signatures

press the girl's secret curved shoulder
you need not walk down moon-white stone statues splashes are rising now

the very likeness of your imagined skeleton
tattered a bit by small hands carrying ashes

the small seer commemorated nothing but swirling upward gave birth again
chilled to the bone like beauty itself

Chinese, like English, is an analytic SVO language ( man bites dog/dog bites man), although nouns don't decline, verbs don't conjugate, and tense, number, definiteness, gender, are all unmarked. There is one irregular verb. Verbs can be marked for aspect, but don't have tobe; similarly, nouns can be pluralised, but it's not compulsory, as it is with pronouns, which do have a plural suffix; but Yang Lian sometimes adds that to nouns, forcing me to write things like oysterses.

The writing system leans toward sense rather than sound, and because Chinese is very parsimonious with syllable sounds, it rhymes easily for many more lines than are possible in English. It's also well-equipped for puns and wordplay.

Modifiers come only before nouns, so sentences are often complex structures of adjective, noun, or verb phrases in apposition, with none clearly dominant. Yang Lian likes both piled-up modifiers and ambiguity: a Chinese editor once told me she saw five different ways of reading one of his lines.
earlier dark formed up behind winter is sosimilar but isn'tyou
At first reading, I have to put who did what to whom and when to one side, and by the time I reach a pre-final draft, every article, every tense, almost every singular or plural are mine, and not the poet's. Yang praises the Chinese verb for its tenseless timelessness, and much of his poetry does seem to operate in eternity, but those of us who work in a language burdened by the need to mark for definiteness, time, number, and so on, have to make tough decisions in the knowledge that we are flying in the face of the poet's intention.

In this poem, lines 1-2
more early [subordinating particle] gloomy/darkness/darknesses
are literally
shape[d]-become to very like you [enjambement]
更早的幽暗　gengzao de you'an
and not is/was you[sing.] [subordinating particle] winter(day) behind [postposition]
形成于酷似你 xingchengyu kusi ni

又不是你的冬日后面 you bushi ni de dongri houmian

Chinese word order has to be inverted here, as does the relation between headword winter and its modifiers. The verb xingcheng is rendered as a participle: Chinese verbs are not necessarily marked for voice, and since they don't conjugate, an infinitive is indistinguishable from a participle, past tense from present, active from middle or passive, and so on.

Chinese tends to trochees, and English to iambs, but I try to keep the same number of beats in my line as Yang has in his, and I build a sound structure out of chains of echoic devices like alliteration, or half-rhyme, for example: in lines 3-4, this includes ha ily/e/colla ing, or ore/useu's/ a ble. When he asks me to rhyme, I will comply as far as I can: adding form while keeping content is difficult and often impossible, but it's great fun to try.

After nearly thirty years of working together, the voice I have found for Yang Lian feels like my own voice now.

Brian Holton

Melrose

3-4 March 2021

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La Piccioletta Barca | Anniversary Snow by Yang Lian - by Brian Holton

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周年之雪 ‍ ‍ Translation by Brian Holton, winner of the Sarah Maguire Prize 2021 , awarded by the Poetry Translation Centre.

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Sissy Zhong

(translated from Chinese)

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For the Zhongs of South Gate to have a son like Sissy seemed like a huge joke, at least to the folks of Pingle Town.

'Sissy' was just one of their disparaging nicknames for a man who was spineless, or slippery, or just plain shameless - in other words, not a proper man. There was 'sponge', 'snot-sucker'... and 'sissy'. That was for a boy who was so girly it was just gross.

Sissy Zhong was certainly girly. As a child, I used to see him mincing down South Street, hips swaying alluringly. Sometimes he was followed by a naughty kid, shouting 'Sissy Zhong! Sissy Zhong!'

He would turn and frown with annoyance: 'Little kids shouldn't pick up bad habits! Don't call me that.' But his voice was so gentle that no kid was ever scared. They just laughed at him.

We called him Sissy to his face, but never to the rest of his family. 'You don't want to get on the wrong side of those Zhongs!' the townsfolk all agreed. There were generations of martial artists in the Zhong family. And once there was a martial arts contest in our town and one of the Zhongs won a medal. It was years ago, and no one had actually seen the medal, but still the Zhongs were known as people you didn't mess with. Particularly Zhong Zhenxi, volleyball coach at the Number One Middle School; none of the kids he taught down the years would ever have dreamt of giving him any trouble.

Zhong Zhenxi was Sissy's father.

'He can control any kid,' people said. 'What on earth did he do to end up with a son like that?' 'He must have beaten him too hard as a child, and that made him wrong in the head.' And so on.

Sissy Zhong went to the county vocational college, a prison camp of a school outside East Gate where the town's roughest kids - those that no one could do anything with - were dumped. Apparently, Sissy Zhong had told his family he wanted to study hairdressing. His dad nearly flipped his lid but Sissy wouldn't budge. Finally Mr Zhong said: 'Be off with you then!' And Sissy was left at the college, to sink or swim.

When he finished there, he spent several years working at Zhu's Hair Salon at the South Street old town gate, starting with washing clients' hair. That was where I met him for the first time. My mother took me there. 'Give her a "mushroom bob", like on the TV,' she said. Mr Zhu, in the middle of perming a customer's hair, glanced at me, and said: 'Zhong Qiang, you cut her hair.' 'Will your apprentice do a decent job?' asked my mother. 'Yes,' said Mr Zhu as he carried on rolling the woman's hair around the curlers.

Sissy stood looking at me, a bit embarrassed. I smiled at him and he smiled back. That's all that I remember from that day. And the only evidence of the 'mushroom bob' he gave me is a few photos in which I'm smirking, ever-so-grown-up, in a pale yellow headband my mother bought me specially.

I began to see Sissy more regularly when I started at lower-middle school, by which time he had set up on his own. School regulations stated that our hair had to be cut level with our ear lobes so my mother took me to his salon. Every time, she stood guard at my side, her eyes fixed on the bottom of my lobes as if she had a micrometer, insisting: 'Shorter.... shorter...'

'I can't cut it any shorter, it doesn't look pretty on a girl,' he used to say. He couldn't change the basic style, so he spent ages finessing my fringe, sometimes layering it, sometimes cutting it in a curve, or even slightly at a slant. I was delighted with these deft, subtle variations. After he finished, he always asked: 'Do you like it?'

I would study my fringe carefully in the mirror, and say: 'It's lovely!'

I have very few pictures of myself from when I was small, only a few from school. Amongst the rows and rows of girls all with pudding-basin haircuts, I can easily spot myself, glum-faced and uninteresting, but with a fringe that stands out from everyone else's. It gave me a huge sense of pride and satisfaction.

My mum liked the way he did it too. Once she met Zhong Zhenxi in the street. 'Your son's such a good hairdresser, Mr Zhong!' she told him.

But Zhong Zhenxi scowled fiercely: 'Are you trying to wind me up? Don't you go saying things like that!' It was obvious my mother had said the wrong thing, and after that, everyone in town avoided mentioning Sissy to his dad.

By then, Sissy was thirty-seven or thirty-eight and still unmarried. Some years back, well-meaning neighbours had introduced him to quite a few girls. Some had dinner with him a few times, others took one look and backed off. Disgust written all over their faces, they said to the would-be matchmakers: 'You know what? He's just like a girl!' Word soon got around. It was even rumoured that Sissy Zhong was really, really small down there.

So one day, some of the Pingle Town toughs stopped him in the street and demanded: 'Drop your trousers so we can see!' Poor meek Sissy put up quite a struggle, and finally got away. He arrived home, holding up his trousers and looking very sorry for himself, pursued by cries of: 'Sissy's red in the face! Sissy's going to cry!'

Zhong Zhenxi evened up the score on that occasion, storming off down the street and giving the toughs a savage beating. After that, no one tried to marry Sissy off again.

There was one time, though, when I went on my own to have my hair cut, and a girl was there. Sissy talked to her while he cut my hair and the pair seemed very close, more than just friends. The girl sat, legs crossed, wearing black tights, a rare sight in our town in those days. She had a frizzy perm and her hair was dyed blond.

'What do you think I should do with my hair, Qiang?' asked the girl.

'Don't do anything with it, it's too much of a mess. And wherever did you get it dyed? It's too blonde. Just have it trimmed and wait until it's in better condition, then I'll do it for you again,' said Sissy.

'Will you give me a discount?' asked the girl.

'OK,' said Sissy.

The girl sat for a while longer, watching him cut my hair, then said: 'What huge eyes the kid's got. Have you ever seen such big eyes, Qiang?'

I was startled. I smiled at her but didn't know what to say. Sissy gave my eyes a long look and said: 'Not as big as Yuan Qingshan's eyes.'

The girl's reaction surprised me even more. 'Who's Yuan Qingshan?' That must mean she was from out of town.

'She died last year. You didn't meet her,' said Sissy.

After another little while, the girl got to her feet. 'Gotta go. I'm off to play mahjong.'

'You're not still playing mahjong are you?' said Sissy.

'Business is slack. There's nothing else to do,' the girl said, and strode out of the shop, arms swinging. She had such a big arse it threatened to burst the seams of her skirt, which was eye-catchingly short.

'Is that your girlfriend?' I teased him. I knew Sissy quite well by then.

He laughed. 'No.'

In that instant, I really wished Sissy had a girlfriend. But I didn't say so.

Everyone in town agreed that Zhong Qiang was a real sissy. He was always so slow and deliberate, and I never saw him riled. I was very struck by his hands. They were beautiful, white-skinned, with slender fingers and neatly manicured nails, quite out of place in Pingle Town. Every time he took up the scissors to cut my hair, I felt how different he was from the rest of us.

The summer I finished lower-middle school, Sissy killed himself. He sliced the artery of his left wrist with a cutthroat razor. There was blood all over the room.

We were all shocked. Who could have imagined it? What a brutal way to go.

Zhong Zhenxi was an elderly pensioner by then. His few remaining hairs went white, and he looked stooped and frail as he and his wife buried their son at Clearwater Creek. They both wept bitterly. People talked: 'It's too bad. Mr Zhong is a good man but he's never had any decent luck.' Afterwards, Zhong Zhenxi seemed to get smaller. If we bumped into him in the street, we could never think of anything comforting to say, but the old man always spoke up. 'That's the end of the Zhong family line,' he would mumble. 'The end of the line...'

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Yan Geis a Sichuan author, currently resident in the UK, who writes both in Chinese and in English. 'Sissy Zhong'is one in a series of vignettes she wrote in preparation for her full-length novel about secrets and lies in a fictional smalltown, The Chilli Bean Paste Clan. Yan Ge sent me three of these vignettes, and I chose this one because it works well as a short story: in just a few pages, it manages to be touching and funny, and to shock you with its denouement.

Yan Ge has always taken her inspiration from the town where she grew up, but she uses that backdrop in very different ways. In fact, one of the delights of Yan Ge's writing is her range: in the four works published in translation in the last couple of years, there is fantasy, madness and gross corruption. But there is also humour and playful, rude language, and food, lots of numbingly hot street food.

In Strange Beasts of China, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of fabled beasts in the city of Yong'an. These creatures - with their greenish stomachs or gills or strange birthmarks - live unobtrusively alongside humans, some with ancient forbears, others engineered as artificial breeds.

The Chilli Bean Paste Clan is a twenty-first century family drama that is both warm and funny, and barbed and irreverent. The eponymous chilli bean paste enterpriseis headed by the matriarchal figure of Gran. As the family gather for her eightieth birthday celebrations, there are growing tensions between the family's middle-aged siblings. Events take an unexpected turn on the day of the party, when a number of secrets are revealed, most surprisingly, some from Gran's own past.

In 'White Horse', Yun Yun lives in a small West China town with her widowed father, an uncle, an aunt and one older cousin - all who live nearby. Then her once-secure world falls apart. Through the eyes of Yun Yun, we observe her cousin, Zhang Qing, who is keen to dive into the excitements of adolescence but clashes with repressive parents. Ensuing tensions reveal that the relationships between the two families are founded on a terrible lie.

Yan Ge's writing is full of acute comments on human relationships. She has a wonderful ear for the things that remain unsaid, as well as for the way people actually talk to each other. The strength of her writing is her ability to inhabit the character and his or her humanity. She does not spare us human tragedies, but somehow manages to soften the blows. In 'White Horse' and 'Sissy Zhong', she achieves this by having the story narrated by a young girl, and hinting at homophobic prejudice and the toll it takes on Sissy, rather than making it explicit. Both of these stories were written early on in Yan Ge's writing career, and have proved very popular with young adults. She says ofthem, '[t]he message I have got from young readers is that they relate to the feelings I describe. In other words, these stories are very personal but they chime with what other young people in China are going through'.

Yan Ge has aroused a lot of interest among Chinese critics regarding her use of spoken language, and in particular, of her local dialect. As an example, just the title of this piece had me scratching my head: 钟腻哥 - surname 'Zhong', nickname, 'Greasy [soft/unctuous] elder brother/young man'. I came up with 'Softie Zhong' and 'Sissy Zhong', both of which Yan Ge liked (the great advantage in having an author whose English is good is that you can brainstorm such problems), but eventually plumped for the latter.

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Sissy Zhong was originally published in Read Paper Republic, in its free-to-view translated short fiction series, in August 2015. Paper Republic is an independent, registered non-profit, promoting Chinese fiction in translation.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Sissy Zhong by Yan Ge - by Nicky Harman

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(translated from Chinese) ‍ ‍ ‍ For the Zhongs of South Gate to have a son like Sissy seemed like a huge joke, at least to the folks of Pingle Town. 'Sissy' was just one of their disparaging nicknames for a man who was spineless, or slippery, or just plain shameless - in other words, not a proper man.

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THE SOLDIER POET

(Translated from Spanish)

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During the final battle of one of the Argentine Civil Wars (Ferbuary 3rd, 1852), the forces of the Big Army (Brazilians, Uruguayans, several Argentine provinces, and exiled Unitarians) seek possession of Buenos Aires, then under the power of Rosas (Federals). "The Pigeon House", with its circular shape and the small holes that filled the walls, represented a key spot for the Federal resistance...
The day of the battle of Caseros, the famous Pigeon House was occupied by an infantry division, of which was part, as a surgeon, the medic and poet Mamerto Cuenca.

Dr. Cuenca was an amiable and rough man; dedicated to the science he professed, he had not mixed himself up in political events. He had marched to Caseros as he would have marched to Flanders, because the government had said so. And who would dare to disobey?

At the camp as he did at home, Dr. Cuenca distracted himself writing verses, favorite passion of the young surgeon, the one to which he has owed all his glory, for Cuenca is better known as a poet than as a medic.

He had great easiness for writing; his inspiration was inexhaustible, and the charming verses of special coloring sprang out of his quill with a magnificent eloquence.

Cuenca had with him a small suitcase from which he did not draw apart. Not for a moment. When knowing about his profession, anyone would have thought that this suitcase was a first aid kit or some surgical box. But it had nothing to do with his profession, for what the poet carried in the suitcase were the original manuscripts of his best cantos, and the ones he went on writing as the campaign extended.

And there was not an occasion of catching him separated of his dear suitcase. She served as a seat and as a pillow, as a table, as a tray, as nuisance: there were times when he did not know what to do with the suitcase to stay hands free for more important business.

His companions dropped on him the most friendly jokes, which he accepted smiling while turning back with some epigram or spicy roundstrophe.

The day of the battle arrived and the encounter of men began. Nobody thought Rosas would abandon the army, and everyone thought he was going to dispute in a bloody way the triumph of that day.

The night before, Cuenca had made a poetic composition and was determined to begin another one that morning, when, in the Pigeon House, cannon shots were felt.

The resistance was well organized there: they had put four artillery pieces that poked, with their formidable mouths, out between the holes of the ground floor. Four or six infantry companies held the entrance, and inside, there were some commanders, there were some outsiders to the division, and there was surgeon Dr. Cuenca.

The cannonry of the Pigeon House started to open fire over a column that approached (men that answered to the orders of the heroic Uruguayan leader, Colonel Pallejas). This column brought the order of attacking the Pigeon House and storming it in case it didn't surrender.

The Colonel Pallejas was a rough and valiant chief, and you could not expect of him something different than the compliance of the received orders. Pallejas attacked with his usual gallantry, and in spite of the fierce fire with which he was welcomed, he was able to form his troops at the entrance of the Palomar.

"If the presence of the hawks does not impose on the pigeons," he said joyfully, "it will be necessary to impose in another way".

As Pallejas advanced, opening an impassioned fire with the artillery already close to the Pigeon House, the gunners abandoned their pieces and ran towards the higher rooms.

"It looks like everything is lost" said Cuenca, closing his suitcase and saving in it all of his papers: it is good to take the necessary measures in order to avoid losing anything in confusion.

"So it seems to me" answered the commander in the Pigeon House. "The enemy has won the battle and any resistance here is useless when out there everything is lost; I will capitulate".

And with this purpose he went down, and sent to Colonel Pallejas an assistant stating they had surrendered. "No one will fire" he added, "the Colonel may enter with the most utter trust".

Pallejas received with sympathy that message that prevented him from causing more damage than that already done. He called a company forward, which he put under the orders of his assistant, and sent him to pick up the guns of the Pigeon House, while he remained there with the rest of the forces; a little pause was required at this point.

That assistant was a young Uruguayan to whom the Colonel Pallejas had special care and estimation. He had been by his side since very little, and caressed the hope of making a soldier of merit and brillance out of him, given that his protégée counted with outstanding conditions.

This way the Colonel Pallejas sent him to unarm the surrendered enemy, and in the meantime ordered his troops to put their guns down in the pavilion.

The young assistant had barely diminished the front of his company and entered to the Pigeon House with the most utter trust, when a tremendous discharge was felt. Pallejas had not had time to return from his surprise when the thunder of a second discharge is felt and his assistant falls to the ground, riddled with bullets.

The infantry in the yard was firing in the most villainous manner. Only two soldiers sent to the unarming were standing: the rest laid down in an immense pool of blood.

Pallejas, to whom wrath was augmenting upon such a coward villainy, immediately formed his troops and fell down on the Pigeon House with an imperious bayonet charge. The infantries of the yard could not stand the push of those troops and fled in all directions available, leaving behind their guns. Officers and soldiers penetrated everywhere, killing and destroying to satiate the thirst of vengeance that encouraged them.

And there in the center he is standing, with his suitcase, the young poet Cuenca, frozen in terror, watching the inexplicable carnage.

Cuenca wears the uniform of Rosas' officers, which is the one that corresponds to the surgeons of the army. And for such they took him those men who did not get tired of killing.

And the young poet is rushed with shots, with bayonets, with stabs.

He wants to defend himself, opposing as a breastplate his poor and powerless suitcase. But what good can it do against a group of enraged men that want to kill him at all cost?

Soon he falls, riddled by all kinds of wounds, on a ground blotched and full of dead bodies.

And those men passed over his inanimate body, not without first taking possession of the suitcase believing that it may, perhaps, be money. Shortly afterwards, in the Pigeon House, the most complete silence reigned: the silence of death.

The next day the Colonel Pallejas collected from the hands of his soldiers the famous suitcase, realizing with profound sorrow, that the inspired poet had died victim of a mistake. And they had took him, without a doubt, for an officer of Rosas.

And this suitcase, ripped off the hands of his deadbody, was the one that helped to print the volume of his most beautiful verses: the only poems that of him are known today.
‍

In his book from 1886, Croquis y siluetas militares. Escenas contemporáneas de nuestros campamentos, Eduardo Gutiérrez enumerates all what he saw and lived in 10 years of military campaigns, and all he heard told from veteran memories during their gatherings by the late night fire. The book covers some of the most tragic episodes of the time: the internal wars, the revolutions, the "Conquest of the Desert", and the war with Paraguay. The hierarchies are blurred by Gutiérrez, and cooks, medics, widows, captives, high rank soldiers, low rank soldiers, march before our eyes, all taking a part in this abominable fate of being pushed into the stage of war.

One of these episodes is that of Claudio Mamerto Cuenca, of whom I had no acquaintance in the moment of first reading. Be another case of a Soldier Poet, I thought, among all the rest who fill the shelves of our newborn continent, where those who did, wrote: history and literature were done by the same hand, first firing a pistol, then dipping the quill in the ink.

Some years later I came across an anthology of Latin American poets of the 19th century, volume of which precise paratexts I do not recall but the hint that they went such as Antología del verso americano del siglo XIX para el uso escolar. I remember too that it had been published somewhere near that small village of San Javier, in the valley of Traslasierra -beyond the mountain-,where I was enjoying my readings each morning at the feet of Mount Champaquí.

After going through these pages of verses (most of them, very memorable), from Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Panamá, etc. (the poems were arranged geographically, from North to South, which I found fairly curious), I finally got to Argentina, chapter which had, to my surprise, Cuenca as one of the exponents. Each poet, I forgot to add, had a brief paragraph under her or his name, with one or two facts as introduction. Cuenca's biographical text was (again, my words depend on my recollection): 'Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the University of Buenos Aires: Doctor, teacher, and poet; forced by the tyrant Rosas to die in Caseros'.

Surely, the publisher put the elements that thought would be most didactic for the high school student, as the title remarks, and fortunately, thought it better to emphasize the fact that he dedicated his time mainly to teaching at school and university, as poetry may be worth just as a distraction, and war was not to be suggested as an entertainment for the young.

So, the reflection about the lives that do not enjoy the least remembrance of their merits came to my mind, and with it, Quixote's discourse in Chapter XXXVIII (Ormsby's translation):
‍
Then, after all this, suppose the day and hour for taking his degree in his calling to have come ; suppose the day of battle to have arrived, when they invest him with the doctor's cap made of lint, to mend some bullet-hole, perhaps, that has gone through his temples, or left him with a crippled arm or leg. Or if this does not happen and merciful Heaven watches over him and keeps him safe and sound, it may be he will be in the same poverty he was in before, and he must go through more engagements and more battles, and come victorious out of all before he betters himself ; but miracles of that sort are seldom seen. For tell me, sirs, if you have ever reflected upon it, by how much do those who have gained by war fall short of the number of those who have perished in it? No doubt you will reply that there can be no comparison, that the dead can not be numbered, while the living who have been rewarded may be counted with three numeral figures. All which is the reverse in the case of men of letters ; for by skirts, to say nothing of sleeves, they all find means of support ; so that though the soldier has more to endure, his reward is much less. But against all this it may be urged that it is easier to reward two thousand men of letters than thirty thousand soldiers, for the former may be remunerated by giving them positions, which must perforce be conferred upon men of their calling, while the latter can only be recompensed out of the very property of the master they serve ; but this impossibility only strengthens my argument.
‍

Cervantes wrote the Persiles..., the Quixote..., Galatea..., the Exemplary novels and the Journey to Parnassus, yet his biggest pride remained in taking part in the Battle of Lepanto, White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty. He knew, however, the miseries of it, as he lost with a shot the movement of the left hand for the glory of the right one (one hand would obtain through literature the glory he deserved for fighting), and was held captive in Argiels for five years. Quixote continues then
‍
Happy the blest ages that knew not the dread fury of those devilish engines of artillery, whose inventor I am persuaded is in hell receiving the reward of his diabolical invention, by which he made it easy for a base and cowardly arm to take the life of a gallant gentleman ; and that, when he knows not how or whence, in the height of the ardor and enthusiasm that fire and animate brave hearts, there should come some random bullet, discharged perhaps by one who fled in terror at the flash when he fired off his accursed machine, which in an instant puts an end to the projects and cuts off the life of one who deserves to live for ages to come.
I have with me now the first edition of Cuenca's poems, Obras poéticas de Claudio Mamerto Cuenca con una biografía del mismo, engraved with golden letters on the burgundy surface, printed by the Garnier brothers in Paris in 1889. It counts with a biography of the man, and a prologue to the author. What I find in these pages, which back in 1852 were a breastplate, is the spirit of someone who had a predilection for romantic poetry, and who wrote to ease his mind but had no time to apply the file to his work. This last thing is meant as something good, as it allows to see directly into his spirit: perhaps, the dreadful scenery that he witnessed every day in the campaign, the terrible times his homeland was going through in those conflicts, and maybe, maybe, the remembrance of a face that was missed, were the causes of such melancholic turns in his cantos. Any part of his work would convince us of this: the final stanzas of the last poem of the volume ('Epílogo'), translated by myself, say:
‍

[...]

‍

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La Piccioletta Barca | The soldier poet by Eduardo Gutiérrez - by Nacho Oliden

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(Translated from Spanish) ‍ During the final battle of one of the Argentine Civil Wars (Ferbuary 3rd, 1852), the forces of the Big Army (Brazilians, Uruguayans, several Argentine provinces, and exiled Unitarians) seek possession of Buenos Aires, then under the power of Rosas (Federals).

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Fałdy oświaty

wokół nas wapienne wzgórza, hałdy fermentacji, fałdy ewolucji
w mojej dłoni miękka skała sproszkowanych istot
krzemień dolomit margiel
‍dzieci potrzebują wapnia, by mieć mocne kości czasem jedzą
kredę ze strachu bądź niedożywienia
kruche pancerzyki ten proch z obcych istotpodkładam się im, ja pożywka na szkiełku
wykarmiam się, wysławiam, wypączkowuję
gdy głaszcze ich niewidzialna ręka rynku
amonit o bezradnych odnóżach

‍

Folds of education

around us limestone hills, fermentation heaps, the folds of evolution
in my hand the soft rock of pulverized creatureschildren need calcium to have strong bones, sometimes they eat
chalk out of fear or malnutrition
this powder of alien creatures a fragile armorI lie myself down for them, a medium on a glass slide
I nourish, glorify, pullulate
as the invisible hand of the market strokes them
ammonite with helpless legs

I

Co pani robiła w czasie wakacji?
‍Łowiłam pustkę na haczyk, przycinałam
róże pozwalając kolcom swobodnie zadrapywać skórę,
usiłowałam zapomnieć, czytałam
trawy, dotykałam liter, unosiłam się
na gładkiej tafli tlenu.
Żyłam jakby was na świecie nie było.

II

Dziś skaleczyłam się przycinając róże,
powinnam zapaść w letarg rodem z baśni,
lecz niestety -

brnę przez godziny jak przez mętny muł,
zapadam się

grudki tlenu w przełyku, nie oglądam się
za siebie
zagrożony gatunek, szczute zwierzę
- zapadam

akwariowy aksolotl marzący
o symbiotycznym stylu życia ukwiału - śnię.

III

nie jest wam teraz potrzebna odrębna
jak meduza wyrzucona na piasek
sharatane tkanki zapadają
w letarg
oczekuje osadza się cementuje
wapiennieje w kalcyt

‍

Vacation

I

What did you do during your vacation?
‍I fished the void with a hook, pruned
roses allowing the thorns to freely scratch the skin,
I tried to forget, I read
grass, touched letters, I was floating
on a smooth sheet of oxygen.
I lived as if you didn't exist.
‍

II

Today, I cut myself pruning the roses,
so I should've fallen into a fairytale lethargy,
but no -

I wade thru the hours like a muddled mule,
sinking

lumps of oxygen in my esophagus, I don't look
over my shoulder
an animal hounded, an endangered species
- I fall

the aquarium axolotl longing
for the symbiotic lifestyle of anemones - I dream.

III

you don't need her anymore, discrete
like a jellyfish tossed onto the sand
the torn tissues collapse
into lethargy
she awaits, settles, cements
clotting into calcite

‍

There's vocabulary, and then there's vocabulary. A word you can look at in your native tongue and think, "Huh? Is that right? That can't be right". For me, two of those words- marl and greywacke-surface in the space of one poem: "Folds of education" by Aleksandra Byrska. Marl immediately conjured up images of Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead shouting for his son: "Carl! Carl!" Greywacke? Couldn't that be the name of a castle in Game of Thrones? Or a venereal disease in Game of Thrones?

To say that Byrska knows a thing or two about geology is to make plain just how little I do. And it's not the first time I've run into my lexical limitations with her poems. It's perhaps no great surprise that Permian, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, or Ordovician weren't part of my go-to discussion topics over coffee. Without research and reading, these geological time periods could just as well have been schools of philosophy or little-known Byzantine religions. Or maybe that's just a typically Devonian thing to say.

I note these details not (only) to highlight apparent blindspots in my knowledge, but to celebrate the fact that it was precisely this kind of specificity that drew my attention to Aleksandra Byrska's poetry. Byrska's work explores intersections between classroom behavioral dynamics, speech pathologies, and posthumanist empathies with the nonhuman (like the geological). She toggles between shifts in tone and register, nursery rhyme and epistemological lyric, and brings to mind writers such as Elizabeth Willis and Charles Simic, along with a dose of what Arielle Greenberg termed the "Gurlesque".

The geological details in Byrska's poems serve to reinforce a certain intimacy. We're invited into and part of the poetic worlds that Byrska creates, worlds that simultaneously care about planetary time and pedagogical difficulties-for both students and teachers. A teacher can be invested in the success of her students while also craving some time away from their relentless demands: " I lived as if you didn't exist". She can evince concern about her students' malnutrition-"children need calcium to have strong bones, sometimes they eat / chalk out of fear or malnutrition"-while also marveling at the geological process that produce the object she's holding in her hand.

As a reader and a translator, I'm drawn to work and literary worlds that are very different from those that I might imagine as a writer. To my mind, it's one of the most enduring and intimate forms of travel. I didn't know the word axolotl before Aleksandra Byrska's poetry, but I won't soon forget that humans aren't the only animals with dreams.

‍

‍

Aleksandra Byrska (b. 1990) - a graduate of literary criticism at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University, and now a PhD student at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University dealing with Polish prose after 2010. She edited the cultural magazine Fragile and is the author of the play Śnieg [Snow] published in the anthology Nasz głos [Our Voice] by the Helena Modrzejewska National Stary Theater in Kraków. Recent poems of hers have appeared in Mały Format, Wakat, and, in English translation, Periodicities and Salt Hill. She is a speech therapist, Polish language teacher, and librarian.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Two poems by Aleksandra Byrska - by Mark Tardi

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wokół nas wapienne wzgórza, hałdy fermentacji, fałdy ewolucjiw mojej dłoni miękka skała sproszkowanych istotkrzemień dolomit margiel‍dzieci potrzebują wapnia, by mieć mocne kości czasem jedząkredę ze strachu bądź niedożywieniakruche pancerzyki ten proch z obcych istotpodkładam się im, ja pożywka na szkiełkuwykarmiam się, wysławiam, wypączkowuję gdy głaszcze ich niewidzialna ręka rynkuamonit o

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La Piccioletta Barca | The clock has just struck midi: five poems by Mario Scalesi - by Carlo Massimo

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There was a time when, in the Sicilian port of Trapani, a crowd would gather at the docks once or even twice a week...

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La Piccioletta Barca | Five poems by Omar Lara - by Jessica Sequeira

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The poet Omar Lara (1941 – 2021) was a vital referent in contemporary Chilean poetry. I have translated a few of...

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(Café en La Boca, 1959. Photo by Sameer Makarius)

‍

From Bulmenia, to be published in 2022

‍

Yo trabajo de noche, desertando al ogro insaciable
que desfigura a los jóvenes y los deja acéfalos
sin cambiar una bolsa de manzanas por mi cabeza
‍
Trabajo como el mar, como una sombra,
donde unos gorriones saltan sobre las migas del día
y las golondrinas hacen un escándalo por un pedazo de cielo
‍
Bebo cianuro y venenos desconocidos,
porque esta sed no tiene lámparas
y su cáscara se multiplica como la pobreza
‍
Trabajo como todos trabajan,
sin lograr una estrella, sin saciar una pluma
perdiendo todos los rumbos
dando pequeñas muertes en partes desiguales sobre mi cuerpo
‍
Sin alcanzar tan solo uno de mis sueños
dejo embriagar a unos pocos desamparados, restos esclavizados
que han sido y que por siempre serán difamados
secados en el aire del crimen

‍
I work at night, forsaking the insatiable ogre
that leaves the young men disfigured and acephalous,
not trading a sack of apples for my head.
‍
I work like the sea, like a shadow,
where sparrows jump on the crumbs of the day,
and the swallows make a fuss for a bite of sky.

I drink cyanide and poisons unknown,
for this thirst has no lamps
and its crust is multiplied like dearth.

I work as everybody works,
not achieving a star, not satiating a quill
losing the ways
giving slight uneven deaths on my body.

Not reaching at least one of my dreams,
I let some helpless drunks proceed, enslaved remains
that have been and forever will be defamed
dried in the air of the crime.
‍

‍
A NOTE ON BULMENIA

‍
Puis, quand j'ai ravalé mes rêves avec soin,
Je me tourne, ayant bu trente ou quarante chopes,
Et me recueille, pour lâcher l'âcre besoin
RIMBAUD: "Oraison du Soir"

‍
Arabia is configured in this monological song through the trade that has fallen to him, the craft that leads him to a perpetual activity, as the present tense of the intransitive verb "to work" depicts. At his desk, Arabia contours his own work: this is his clay which continually spins in its wheel, and to which he adds "cyanide and poisons unknown" to maintain its plasticity. Arabia "drinks" the cyanide, and its present tense in this case, accounts for the undeath, (maybe the unwanted undeath). We find what Harold Bloom calls "the suicidal version of Whitmanianism", present in certain poems such as "Walking Around", by Neruda:
‍
(...)
Yo paseo con calma, con ojos, con zapatos,
con furia, con olvido,
paso, cruzo oficinas y tiendas de ortopedia,
y patios donde hay ropas colgadas de un alambre:
calzoncillos, toallas y camisas que lloran
lentas lágrimas sucias.
[I stride along with calm, with eyes, with shoes,
with fury, with forgetfulness,
I pass, I cross offices and stores full of orthopaedic appliances,
and courtyards hung with clothes hanging from a wire:
underpants, towels and shirts which weep
slow dirty tears.] (W.S. Merwin's translation)
‍
Certainly, it is Neruda with whom Arabia writes. More particularly, the Neruda of "Entierro en el Este":

Yo trabajo de noche, rodeado de ciudad,
de pescadores, de alfareros, de difuntos quemados
con azafrán y frutas, envueltos en muselina escarlata (...)
[I work at night, surrounded by city
of fishermen, of potters, of the burned dead
with saffron and fruit, wrapped in scarlet muslin]

But neither Neruda nor Arabia work in the real night, nor the dead are the real dead (in "Entierro en el este" a burial is described), but both inhabit the other night, the night of the conscience of the crowds, the one which is image of death. Arabia hands in his poetry, hands in his tears and his razzle, dirty with cyanide and ink and the corruptive germ of the city of man, and lets them be drank by someone else, a fellow poet perhaps, but indeed a fellow sleepless "drunk", alienated, freed from the daily order. It is a sacrifice through which, first Arabia, and then his fellow drunks, consume the "poisons unknown", and experience and cope with language.
‍
It is to work under the light of a lamp, in a room that is an old yellow stamp as seen from a street in Buenos Aires, but that hardly contradicts the darkness of the alley; to obey the basic daily chore to justify one's existence. Arabia must drink cyanide in order to produce, and must produce poetry in order to exist. I think now of Rimbaud, who works at night too, like Neruda and Arabia; Rimbaud, who begins his "Oraison du Soir" by saying: Je vis assis [I live sitting down], and who, like Arabia, drinks his "fuel" in order to work, and works "holding his chop filled with strong flutes".

And what about the poet's clay? What about Arabia's work which has been nourishing and will continue being continually unsatisfied? The quill is not satiated, the "thirst has no lamps", just like Rimbaud's. The poet continues to model it in its perpetual spinning, and with it, he shapes himself. Here, Arabia and Rimbaud remind me of Stephen Crane's creature in the desert:

(...)
Who, squatting upon the ground,
He held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it's bitter
And because it is my heart.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Bulmenia by Juan Arabia - by Nacho Oliden

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La Piccioletta Barca | Earth for Me is Sky: Poems by Agi Mishol - by Joanna Chen

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‍Reading Agi Mishol’s poetry is like going for a walk on a well-trodden path and finding something new and surprising...

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San Martín de los Andes, Neuquen, Argentina

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San Martín de los Andes, Neuquen, Argentina

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San Martín de los Andes, Neuquen, Argentina

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(Detail from Surreal Scene, 1930, by Mina Loy)

‍

Countdown

‍
Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves
Break on our edgeless contours
- Mina Loy
Countdown
beginning with a fair
skin from which we run
runaways
our prowess
scales the cityscape
as eyelashes become
tamed by a lashing of stars
and we delay our passions
inside the young twilight
of a cold-blooded lineage
a hunger long swallowed
once quenched with rage
and we dissuade each other in ratholes
an immortality that is ours
bearing old dwellings
suddenly stuck
in a life of impalpable dimensions
and we stand opposite of the cities' lie
one we digest gut by gut
as the streetlights call
evanescent before these hollow eyes.

‍

Nos dimos cuenta

‍
Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves
Break on our edgeless contours
- Mina Loy

‍
Nos dimos cuenta
empezando por fuera
de esa piel por donde
nos escapamos
nuestra elasticidad
camina por el techo
y las pestañas se
contaminan de estrellas
en el joven crepúsculo
de nuestra cruel descendencia
dejamos nuestras pasiones de lado
habiendo tragado su hambre
satisfecho de ira
nos disuadimos en nidos de ratas
viejos aposentos nacidos
de nuestra inmortalidad
estancados tan rápido
en una vida de impalpables dimensiones
estamos al revés de la mentira de las ciudades
que se digiere en nuestros estómagos
mientras las luces de la calle
se desvanecen ante nuestros ojos.

‍

Camila Evia, San Martín de los Andes, Argentina (July, 1987). Poet, graphic designer and translator. Graduated from the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She is the Art Director of Buenos Aires Poetry, working with editorial design as well as editing and translation. Her artwork was exhibited in several media from Argentina, Latin America, United States (Print Magazine) and Italy. Her poems have been published in magazines from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Italy, France, Colombia, Macedonia and China. Her first book, Ridículos (Buenos Aires Poetry) was published in 2019. In 2020 Buenos Aires Poetry published her translation of the British poet Mina Loy Poemas escogidos + Feminist manifesto with an extended edition coming up in 2021.

Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, editor, and literary translator. Recent editions and translations include The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (co-translated with Forrest Gander; New Directions, 2018) and The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa (co-translated with Margaret Jull-Costa; New Directions, 2020). His work appears in Asymptote, Buenos Aires Poetry, Lit Hub, The Paris Review, Words Without Borders, among others.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Countdown by Camila Evia - by Patricio Ferrari

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(Detail from Surreal Scene, 1930, by Mina Loy) ‍ ‍ Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves Break on our edgeless contours - Mina LoyCountdownbeginning with a fairskin from which we runrunawaysour prowessscales the cityscapeas eyelashes becometamed by a lashing of

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(William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac in 1953. Photo by Allen Ginsberg)

‍

Mexico City Blues
53rd Chorus

Translation nº1

‍
Translation nº2

‍
Translation nº3

Translators' Note
‍

Chinese Whispers

'Lost in Translation' is very much an experiment in linguistics and translation, where the outcome revealed above to the reader was unknown to its writers at the beginning. To a large extent, it is modelled on the Chinese Whisper's game (Téléphone arabe, in French) played by children, and often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error.
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Players form a circle, and the first player comes up with a message. They whisper it to the ear of the second person, who then repeats the message to the third, and so on. When the message reaches the last player, they announce what they've heard to the entire group, and the original message is compared to its final iteration. Errors accumulate in the re-tellings, and the statement announced by the last player usually differs significantly from that of the first player.
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As in the Chinese Whispers game, the translator(s) here strive to preserve the meaning and words of the source-text by Kerouac and source-language (English). However, the exercise differs in that interpretation (via translation) holds a central role, and the message is transmitted by written form. Reasons for inaccuracies relate to the difficulties to find equivalences in the 'target language,' or active decisions made by the translator to maintain rhythm, or overall meaning, over specific given words.

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The Text: 53rd Chorus, Mexico City Blues

To avoid as much distortion as possible, the poem chosen doesn't include rhymes. The absence of metrics also made the translation 'easier,' in the sense that it excluded certain formal restrictions. Naturally, this doesn't necessarily favour a 'freer' translation. For the rest, the room for manoeuvre is quite limited. There is little interpretative freedom in the translation of the name of musical instruments for example.

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Metaphrase vs. Paraphrase

The translators very much alternate between the ancient Greek concepts of 'metaphrase' ('literal', or 'word-for-word' translation) and 'paraphrase' (a saying in other words)-also known as 'formal equivalence' and 'dynamic equivalence'. Although the concept of metaphrase, or word-for-word translation-is imperfect, as a given word in a language often carries multiple meanings, and because similar given meanings can often be represented in a given language by more than one word, the concepts of metaphrase and paraphrase remain useful as 'ideals' of possible approaches to translation.

The concept of metaphrase and paraphrase reveals much of the material lost in translation; many of the decisions in the interpretation, made by Translators nº1, 2, and 3 included a choice between word-for-word equivalence, or dynamic equivalence that conserved the purported effect. For example, Translator nº2 records the use of the word 'mierda' (shit, literally), instead of 'error' (corresponding to 'erreur' in French). This indicates a choice of paraphrase over metaphrase.
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Translator nº1 also highlights that they translated 'merrily' to 'gaiement' rather than 'joyeusement' (closer to 'happily' in English) because of the musicality. 'Joyeusement' broke with the shorter 'merrily' (hence the use of 'gaiement'). Translator nº2 then notes that, in their choices, they chose the term 'felices' to 'alegres' (gai, in French), for it accentuates the given impression on the reader.

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The Art of Fidelity & Interpretation

While fidelity is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source-text, without distortion, both Cicero and Horace cautioned against translating 'word for word' (verbum pro verbo). Indeed, the idea of metaphrase and paraphrase returns; a choice between absolute fidelity to the given-word, or interpretation as fidelity to the author's intent (and perhaps meaning of the text).
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Translator nº1 underlines the difficulty to translate the second verse "Dee de lee dee doo doo doo". Indeed, the choice of "Tra la la la la la la", rather than a conservation of the English onomatopoeias, encapsulates a moment in which the translator perceived the verse would likely be lost in translation.

All in all, translating a text necessarily involves interpretation: choices must be made. Part of the ambiguity, and the imposition of these choices, is the very structure of human language. Every sentence, generated by a human, is ambiguous. In addition, languages are not merely collections of words, rules of grammar, and syntax for generating sentences, but instead, they are also vast interconnecting systems of connotations and cultural references. For instance, Translator nº3 notes the use of "Hush" instead of "Shhhhh" in reference to Herman's Hermit 1967 hit "There's a kind of Hush". In doing so, Translator nº3 is acknowledging the input of their own cultural baggage in the translation.
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Concluding Remarks

The beauty of translation is surely that dilemmas have no definitive right answers-though some may be definitely wrong. Every translation passes through the mind of a translator, and minds inevitably contain their own perceptions, memories, and values. No two translations of a literary work, by different hands or by the same hand at different times, are likely to be identical.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Lost in Translation: 53rd Chorus, Mexico City Blues - by Nacho Vilanova, Emilio Vilanova, and Eponine Howarth

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(William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac in 1953. Photo by Allen Ginsberg) ‍ Chinese Whispers 'Lost in Translation' is very much an experiment in linguistics and translation, where the outcome revealed above to the reader was unknown to its writers at the beginning.

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(Soir Blue, by Edward Hopper, 1914)

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Baudelaire, 1845: Homo Duplex

Poeta-persona, mi doble naturaleza:
una espada de los ciervos en el bosque,
animales salvajes que se ejercitan en la esgrima
solitariamente acorralados.

Bestia y hombre no forman más que un solo ser
mi dolor son las sentencias de un otro delator;
el verso, un cadáver sin descanso
de un muerto que nunca termino de matar.

Detestable evidencia de mis malas artes.

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Baudelaire, 1845: Homo Duplex

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Poet-personae, my double nature:
the sword of the deer in the woods,
primitive animals who train their fencing
solitarily cornered.

Man and beast become just one
my pain are the words of that tale-tell other;
the verse, the restless corpse
of a man I am never done with.

Appalling evidence of my evil trade.
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The movement of Arriagada Zubieta's poetry throughout Hotel Stitges (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018) takes place on a truly experiential level, playing on great impulses, from the aesthetic point of view, over the dark art and trade of poetry ("the poet already lives forgotten / under a dead sky of doves"; "He preferred, instead, to disappear in a dark chamber (...) / and grow winters old inside / on the margin of his time"); and, taking less comfortable, more prophetic leaps, approaching those of Rimbaud ("Beautiful are the centuries that will come. / Everything expands, dragged by a drunken boat"; "A new season approaches").

A second layer, or movement, takes place in the very formation of the author. Here we find Mallarmé, or the creation of a poem from the origin of a painting by Hopper (Soir Bleu, 1914). Even more representative is the mask he appropriates, in the mode of a dramatic and self-referential monologue, from Charles Baudelaire in "Baudelaire, 1845: Homo Duplex":

Poeta-persona, mi doble naturaleza:
una espada de los ciervos en el bosque,
animales salvajes que se ejercitan en la esgrima
solitariamente acorralados.
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Rodrigo Arriagada-Zubieta (Viña del Mar, Chile, 1982) is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He writes regularly for journal and press Buenos Aires Poetry, where he is also director of the international poetry collection "Pippa Passes". His poems have been translated to Italian and Spanish and published in Chile, Austria, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, the United States, Italy, and Spain. His verse collections include Extrañeza (2017), Hotel Sitges (2018), Zubieta (2020), and El Greco (2021), all published by Buenos Aires Poetry. His work has been anthologized in Chile as Una Temporada en la cabeza (2020), from Editorial Santiago Inédito. As a translator, he has published Cutty Sark (Poesía escogida) by Hart Crane (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2020). He is currently completing his doctoral studies in Hispanic letters at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He lives in Alicante, Spain.

Juan Arabia is a poet, translator and literary critic from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Among his most recent titles are: Il Nemico dei Thirties (Samuele Editore, Collana Scilla, 2017), Desalojo de la Naturaleza (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018), L'Océan Avare (Al Manar, Voix Vives de Méditerranée en Méditerranée, 2018),Juan Arabia is a poet, translator and literary critic. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1983. Among his most recent titles are: Il Nemico dei Thirties (Samuele Editore, Collana Scilla, 2017), Eviction of nature (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018), L'Océan Avare (Al Manar, Voix Vives de Méditerranée en Méditerranée, 2018), The Bund (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2020) and Hacia Carcassonne (Pre-Textos, 2021). Ignacio Oliden is co-editor of the translation colummn of La Piccioletta Barca, Paraphrasis. His work has also appeared in other history and literary magazines, as well as short story anthologies.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Baudelaire, 1845: Homo Duplex by Rodrigo Arriagada-Zubieta - by Juan Arabia & Ignacio Oliden

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(Soir Blue, by Edward Hopper, 1914) ‍ Poeta-persona, mi doble naturaleza:una espada de los ciervos en el bosque, animales salvajes que se ejercitan en la esgrima solitariamente acorralados. Bestia y hombre no forman más que un solo sermi dolor son las sentencias de un otro delator;el verso, un cadáver sin descanso de un muerto que nunca termino de matar.

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La Piccioletta Barca | After the Show by Anton Chekhov - by Kotryna Garanasvili

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Despite demonstrating Anton Chekhov’s writing at its finest, the story is little researched and largely overlooked...

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La Piccioletta Barca | The World Used To Be More Poetic - Lêdo Ivo’s Poems and Confessions - by Andrew Gebhardt

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“The world used to be more poetic,” wrote Lêdo Ivo in “Vultures on the Cove.” He had a broad and unusual vocabulary...

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La Piccioletta Barca | Sarmiento’s Travels: an emancipated gaze - by Nacho Oliden

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Sarmiento (San Juan, Argentina, 1811-Asunción, Paraguay, 1888) observes and writes down; he used to exhaust the pages...

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('La reproduction interdite', by René Magritte, 1937)

ŞI MUNŢI PIERDUŢI ÎN NOURI (by Mihai Eminescu)

AND MOUNTAINS LOST IN CLOUDS

That's how my soul reflects
The ample world, again,
But come the slightest pain
The mirror's boarded up
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SECOND GAME

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THE CIPHER AND THE MIRROR

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What a Borgesian delight to think that Mihai Eminescu, considered by many to be Europe's last great Romantic, performs a magic trick on a fellow poet from the future, the modernist-hermeticist Ion Barbu.

The mechanics of this wizardry are as follows: between 1871 and 1872, by way of a deceptive simplicity of tone and imagery he often likes to cultivate, Eminescu disguises a work-in-progress poem about art - poiesis - as a poem about nature - physis; the completed piece, 'And Mountains Lost in Clouds', is a lyrical cipher on / of mimesis. Decades pass. Between 1929 and 1930, Barbu, a poet who often likes to emulate Mallarmé and Valéry, composes a mimesis cipher of his own, oblivious to the fact that he's rejigging puzzle pieces devised by Eminescu about sixty years before. More decades pass. Hailed as a masterpiece, Barbu's mimesis cipher, 'Second Game', has become a staple of the literature curriculum in his homeland Romania, where generation after generation of lycée students learn that his "second, purer, game is the game of poetry". Meanwhile, Eminescu's mimesis cipher remains in the shadows: published in 1958, in a massive scholarly volume that gathered pieces retrieved from manuscripts under the title Exercises and Rubble, 'And Mountains Lost in Clouds' is reprinted in 2016, in an anthology called Eminescu, Poems from Manuscripts ( Eminescu, Versuri din manuscrise), a small but mighty book edited by Ioana Bot and Catalin Cioaba and published by Humanitas. It was while perusing this wonderful anthology that I recently experienced my Borgesian eureka: "My word", I cried in disbelief, "Who'd have thought Eminescu wrote 'Second Game' long before Barbu did it?"

The proof is in the texts. A quick paraphrase of Barbu's more celebrated, canonised cipher: "Deduced, from the hour, the depth of this calm summit / Into redeemed azure transmuted by the mirror, / Etching into the agrestic cattle, which plummet / And drown into the water knots, a second game, much purer": as a locus amoenus with its "calm summit" silhouetted against the "azure" gets reflected in the surrounding waters, this "second" i.e. reflected image undergoes the equivalent of a mysterious, redemptive transmutation - in the mirror of the sea, the earth turns into "redeemed azure", the slopes with bucolic herds turn into an art piece that could be an etching or a painting by a near-abstract Theo van Doesburg or Mondrian and, paradoxically, the earth's heights turn into "depth". This "depth" of the "calm summit" brings us back to the discouraging syntax of the poem's first line: the angles and proportions of the "depth" of the reflected landscape are to be (though, please, note the deliberately disconcerting lack of an auxiliary verb in that initial line) 'deduced from the hour' of the day. So what's the time here, in Barbu's locus amoenus? To me, it seems to be very close to Valéry's "midi le juste"/ "impartial noon", with its bright sun at or near the zenith. And why? Because the reflexion of the "calm summit" into the "depth" of the waters is, as the start of the second stanza exclaims, a "latent nadir" i.e. the perfect opposite - and mirror-image - of zenith. It's this nadir that contains the mysterious materials to be "elevated" into poetry.

Now a brief look at the other mimesis cipher, 'And Mountains Lost in the Clouds', and at Eminescu's locus amoenus: mountain summits touching the sky, green slopes, the mirror of the sea, a "white day" - maybe "white" suggesting the luminosity of the "just", "impartial" midday sun? Eminescu's idyllic high-altitude landscape caressed and reflected by clear seawaters, beckoning to be exalted by mimesis, is strikingly similar to Barbu's.

Yet there's a slight dissimilarity between the ways Eminescu and Barbu play the game of gazing. Their mirrors - by mirrors I now mean the degree of empathy between the mirrored and the mirroring - are different. For Barbu, there's no "I", no ego scriptor instance, but a commanding " the poet", keen to take in, dissect and refashion in verse a vast tableau of alpine serenity, reflected, as if by art, in swathes of marine serenity. The result of this poetic process is a very cold indeed "cold pastoral": while many commentators regard the herds of cattle as symbols of the earthly or contingent aspects of existence, I think the "agrestic" cows (Barbu makes use of the precious, literary adjective in Romanian and I decided to preserve it as such in the English translation) roam the slopes of this generically beautiful alp only in order to get the hatched lines of their contours re-drawn in the "second game" of the reflecting waters, in other words only to get stylised? butchered? idealised? "exhausted"? by the abstraction of mimesis.

In Eminescu's poem, the mystery of reflection appears to bear the marks of a more empathic Romantic pantheism: mountains and forests "look at themselves... in the white day's clear sea" and seem to glimpse an Other - "And nature a new nature / Seems to descry and see". Is this, am I, somehow implying that physis is flirting with the experience of a Lacanian stade du mirroir? Of course not. It's the poet who's flirting with the dissolution and reestablishment of a sense of self, just as his poetic gaze is embracing an ideal scene of alpine serenity, which the sea waters mirror splendidly. Until they don't. If Barbu's mirror of the sea is clear, stable, calm - the surface of his sea only ripples gently, and then only as much as needed in order to transform the reflected contours of physis into a cubist or abstract painting; likewise, the only undersea movement is a "stealthy" gliding of enigmatic, translucent jellyfish - Eminescu's mirror is ever so fluid, so changeable. "Grand in feature" as it is, the reflection of his locus amoenus may at any moment "crease" and dissolve in "fog" - no mirror can fulfil the promise of a stable replica of a stable reality. Furthermore, the final image of the soul as a "boarded up" mirror ends Eminescu's mimesis cipher on a more ambiguous, questioning note: how can an artist reflect the ample world? he seems to ask, whereas with 'Second Game' Barbu seems to assert firmly: this is how art reflects the world.

It's as if each poet chose to reflect (there's never an end to reflections, they continue forever...) the two types of mimesis described in Plato's Sophist. Barbu's mimesis is more eicastic - insisting on objective accuracy and representational fidelity - while Eminescu's is phantastic - more reliant on the perspectivism of the poetic gaze.

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La Piccioletta Barca | The Cipher and the Mirror: Two Poems by Eminescu and Barbu - by Delia Radu

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('La reproduction interdite', by René Magritte, 1937) That's how my soul reflectsThe ample world, again,But come the slightest pain The mirror's boarded up‍ ‍ ‍ What a Borgesian delight to think that Mihai Eminescu, considered by many to be Europe's last great Romantic, performs a magic trick on a fellow poet from the future, the modernist-hermeticist Ion Barbu.

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Photo: Marina Jarre with her sister at Torre Pelice in 1945

UNA SCRITTRICE TORINESE
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Ricordo perfettamente la prima volta che ho letto Marina Jarre. Era l'estate del 2009, avevo scelto dei libri a caso dal mucchio sulla scrivania di mia madre e ora sul treno notturno mi trovavo con un libretto sottile che sembrava parlare di cose che di solito m'interessano - guerra, russi, morte e distruzione. Non avevo mai sentito nominare l'autrice e anche mia madre la conosceva soltanto perché una sua tirocinante aveva fatto la tesi su di lei - valdese, molto anziana, viveva a Torino come noi (i torinesi che leggono hanno una fascinazione morbosa per gli scrittori che vivono a Torino). Il piccolo libro s'intitolava Il silenzio di Mosca.

La prima parte era la decostruzione di un'immagine di guerra che aveva a lungo ossessionato l'autrice dopo che qualcuno gliel'aveva raccontata (i soldati tedeschi catturati a Stalingrado che sfilavano davanti alla folla silenziosa a Mosca); la ricerca di documenti in russo, le versioni discordi nelle testimonianze, infine la scoperta dell'imperfezione congenita in una scena tanto perfetta, tanto iconica; il tutto diventava un saggio personale su menzogna, memoria storica, fallacie del ricordo e finzione narrativa. Del libro mi piaceva l'andamento divagante, freddo e intelligente, la struttura atipica, la stranezza, la rabbia sotterranea che intuivo, la precisione implacabile con cui parlava di cosa significasse invecchiare e avvicinarsi alla morte. C'era in quel libro finale, minore, qualcosa che sfuggiva alle mie categorie e si imponeva alla mia attenzione.

Errando tempo dopo in Internet, digitai a caso "prigionieri tedeschi" e, sotto il titolo La mistica dell'anima russa, trovai subito la pagina di un'autobiografia in cui un ragazzino undicenne raccontava proprio l'episodio che Pavel mi aveva riferito. Il ragazzino era il poeta Evgenij Evtušenko; tornato con la mamma a Mosca nell'estate del 1944, aveva visto sfilare circa 25.000 prigionieri tedeschi tra il silenzio totale degli abitanti della città. [...] Il racconto letto riferiva però di un avvenimento interamente diverso da quello che mi ero immaginato, se si esclude la cornice. [...] Il ragazzino undicenne lo aveva bensì descritto mentre gli astanti, dopo gli urli di scherno verso gli ufficiali, impietrivano alla vista dei nemici infine vinti, ma il poeta che sarebbe diventato lo aveva effettivamente subito interrotto con il sopravvenire della donna in stivaloni di gomma. Dal fazzoletto avvoltolato era sbucata insieme col pezzo di pane l'anima russa, la misericordiosa anima russa. L'anima russa alla quale, invero, non occorrerebbero mai altri aggettivi. Il mio racconto mi era stato strappato di mano.

Altri libri sono venuti negli anni, alla spicciolata, e sempre per rinvenimenti casuali: nella biblioteca di un amico, su una bancarella di libri usati, su eBay. Erano uno più bello dell'altro, si trattasse di romanzi o di memoir. Come poteva essere accaduto che una scrittrice così straordinaria e originale fosse sparita quasi del tutto? Non che non sia successo ad altri: penso a Wilcock o a Manganelli, che per fortuna Adelphi sta ripubblicando da tempo. Rispetto a loro, Jarre è più "leggibile", poco interessata alla sperimentazione estrema; sarebbe stato più facile, almeno in teoria, che incontrasse un pubblico più vasto di una nicchia di appassionati.

L'anno scorso Claudio Magris si interrogava sui motivi di questo silenzio incomprensibile. Ci sono molte spiegazioni possibili, nessuna sufficiente: il "duro riserbo" di Jarre, per dirla con Magris; la sua lontananza dai circolini letterari, il fatto che negli ultimi anni si fosse occupata quasi solo di teatro e di storia dei valdesi. Non a caso, i pochi articoli usciti dopo la sua morte l'estate scorsa hanno parlato di lei come della "narratrice dell'epopea valdese", magari menzionando i libri autobiografici dove veniva evocato lo sterminio degli ebrei di Riga. Ma Jarre non era soltanto questo. Il territorio della sua scrittura è infinitamente più vasto, più complesso e più enigmatico: è il mondo di un grande scrittore, e come tale si sottrae a ogni etichetta identitaria o testimoniale. Quello che vorrei fare qui è tentare di tracciarne una mappa, incompleta e sommaria, ma che dia un'idea di quanto l'esperienza di leggere Marina Jarre sia eccitante, sorprendente e meravigliosa.

Era nata Marina Gersoni a Riga, nel 1925, figlia di Clara Coïsson, un'italiana delle valli valdesi che insegnava all'università di Riga e che, tornata in Italia, sarebbe diventata un'importante traduttrice dal russo per Einaudi (avrebbe tradotto Propp, Bulgakov, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij e molti altri), e di Samuel Gersoni, un lettone ebreo. La sua prima lingua fu il tedesco: avrebbe imparato l'italiano dopo il 1935, quando i suoi genitori divorziarono, con grande melodramma, e la madre portò lei e la sorella minore in Italia, dove sarebbero state cresciute dalla nonna a Torre Pellice. Il padre, un personaggio eccentrico, teatrale e misterioso, rimase a Riga, dove ebbe più tardi una bambina da una relazione con un'infermiera tedesca che li avrebbe lasciati dopo l'invasione nazista della Lettonia. Sarebbero morti tutti, lui, la bambina e gli altri della famiglia, nelle stragi di ebrei nei boschi di Riga del novembre-dicembre 1941. Su questo buco gigantesco, e sul padre irresponsabile e sentimentale, Jarre tornerà in due libri capitali: I padri lontani, Einaudi 1987, e Ritorno in Lettonia, Einaudi 2003.

Il primo è un'autobiografia. Ma è un'autobiografia nel modo in cui lo sono Parla, ricordo di Nabokov o Gli anni di Ernaux, di cui peraltro, mi hanno fatto notare di recente, è progenitore nella struttura (il montaggio serrato di immagini separate che vanno a comporre un enorme quadro organico). E secondo me andrebbe letto da chiunque si occupi di nonfiction narrativa oggi, in Italia - e anche fuori, ma, come ho scoperto da Magris, altrove lo sanno già. Su tutte le cose della sua vita Jarre posa lo stesso sguardo distaccato, straniante e lievemente ironico: le minute tragedie dell'infanzia, la guerra e la Resistenza a cui assiste da spettatrice guardinga, la maternità e la scrittura, il lavoro come insegnante di francese a Torino e la città stessa nelle sue trasformazioni nel tempo. Il tempo, appunto, è uno dei temi che innervano e legano tutti i frammenti, così come la mancanza di appartenenza, di "patria", a volte fieramente perseguita, a volte più sofferta, a volte semplicemente registrata come dato di fatto. Un'estraneità che sente anche rispetto al mondo valdese, che pure è in parte il suo: "Non c'era legame tra me e quel mondo che mi restava esteriore. No, le povere e pietrose case in ombra, le quattro creste affilate, la donna dalla voce alta, chiara, segnata dalle erre, non mi erano parenti. La loro storia non mi precedeva, non ero venuta da quella".

Ho passato un'estate a Torino con un libro di botanica. Alle cinque del pomeriggio uscivo e andavo lungo la recinzione dei giardini del centro e della Crocetta, camminavo nei giardini pubblici e intanto riconoscevo gli alberi confrontandoli con le indicazioni e le illustrazioni del libro. [...] Mentre camminavo per i luoghi, strada dopo strada, sui marciapiedi sporchi di polvere, carte, gelati squagliati, preservativi, siringhe, escrementi di cane, la strada finiva col diventare il luogo, l'unico possibile, indistinguibile dagli altri luoghi, e la gente ed io con loro sul marciapiede, indistinguibili tra di noi. [...] Opinabili le cabine telefoniche, copia esatta delle macchine di trasmigrazione temporale o spaziale dei film fantascientifici, ovvie appunto come cabine telefoniche, a testimoniare anche loro la necessità quotidiana, la naturalezza di simili trasmigrazioni. Questo è il luogo senza nome, uguale ad altri luoghi e il mio tempo, uguale al tempo degli altri. Non fuggirò più.

Ritorno in Lettonia è il più celebre e dibattuto tra i libri di Jarre (ma comunque fuori catalogo), che giustamente Alberto Cavaglion su Doppiozero definisce una riscrittura dei Padri lontani. Qui, infatti, l'ormai anziana Jarre torna in Lettonia insieme al figlio, per la prima volta da quando l'ha lasciata a dieci anni. E prende infine su di sé quel padre ripudiato e la sua fine mostruosa, nonché quella storia ebraica a cui è altrettanto estranea e altrettanto indissolubilmente legata. È un libro potentissimo, che esplora le profondità vertiginose del senso di colpa e della rimozione con l'intransigenza e il disgusto per l'enfasi che sono una costante nella prosa di Jarre. Ed è ancora una volta un testo anomalo, che fa per esempio un uso molto interessante dei documenti, nel senso esatto in cui ne parlava Danilo Kiš in un'intervista che appare nella raccolta Homo poeticus: "Per quanto mi riguarda, personalmente credo nel documento, nella confessione, nel gioco dello spirito. Non esiste l'uno senza l'altro, è una specie di Santissima Trinità". Questa magica, sapiente mescolanza delle carte è la perfetta definizione della nonfiction di Marina Jarre.

Poi ci sono i romanzi e i racconti. Rubando la definizione che Franzen usa per Alice Munro, si può dire con una certa esattezza che Jarre è una "distaccata fornitrice di piacevolissime esperienze private" (si parla di piacere del lettore, naturalmente). In effetti, per quanto la sua misura sia il romanzo lungo, Jarre somiglia per certi versi sia a Munro che al primo fra tutti i fornitori di esperienze private: Čechov. Nelle sue storie, in genere, non ci sono grandi accadimenti o eventi roboanti. Sono storie piccole di persone comuni; e come in Munro e Čechov, gli eventi minimi delle loro esistenze individuali assumono una portata immensa, che riverbera a lungo in chi legge assumendo sempre più intensità, finezza e mistero con il passare del tempo, unicamente per il modo in cui vengono raccontati. Ho già parlato della precisione di Jarre, ed è questa la sottile connessione che la unisce agli altri due scrittori: l'esattezza asciutta e priva di giudizio con cui sa registrare i propri sentimenti e quelli dei suoi personaggi. Anche i più strani, profondi o incomprensibili; e quelli che suscitano vergogna. Ci sono molti sentimenti indicibili, oscenamente naturali, nei libri di Marina Jarre, fermati in pagine magnifiche da cui è difficile estrapolare citazioni che ne dicano la bellezza complessiva. Come spesso accade con quelli davvero bravi, la sua non è una scrittura aforistica: il respiro vero della sua prosa si trova nel tessuto del testo, nell'architettura piena della pagina o del capitolo intero.

A volte le storie minute dei suoi personaggi incrociano la Storia: è il caso del delizioso La principessa della luna vecchia, uscito per Einaudi nel 1977, romanzo eroicomico su una scalcagnata famiglia di comunisti torinesi raccontata dalla voce irresistibile del figlio undicenne, che ha come sfondo i mesi che precedono il referendum sul divorzio del 1974 ed è uno dei pochissimi libri che raccontano (in chiave satirica, ma affettuosa) le persone che fecero il movimento di quegli anni. O del racconto "La fotografia", in Galambra. Quattro storie con fantasmi (Bollati Boringhieri 1987), che parte dal lento e freddo resoconto di una vacanza coniugale in una cittadina immaginaria per trasformarsi in una delle cose più belle mai scritte in narrativa sulla lotta armata italiana e le sue conseguenze.

Ed è soprattutto il caso di Un leggero accento straniero, il primo romanzo. Uscito nel 1967 come Monumento al parallelo per una piccola casa editrice, e poi ripubblicato da Einaudi nel 1972 con il nuovo titolo e alcune parti riscritte, ha come protagonista un'ex Waffen SS, Klaus Boehr, che ha partecipato agli eccidi di massa in Europa orientale e che dopo la guerra si è rifatto una vita in incognito come professionista svizzero in una grande città industriale italiana - Torino, sempre lei, ambigua e bifronte come il suo abitante segreto. Come nelle Benevole di Littell quarant'anni dopo, è Klaus stesso a raccontare la sua vita e le sue azioni, per le quali, ammette candidamente, non prova rimorsi, senza sapersi spiegare quando quella capacità sia caduta. Alla sua - come chiamarla? Confessione? Autodifesa? Meglio: gelida rielaborazione estetica di se stesso, si alterna la storia presente di un gruppo di giovani amici della Torino borghese, che finirà per intersecarsi con la sua.

Questo contrappunto, che può sembrare solo tecnico, contiene in realtà, come in un gioco di scatole cinesi, altri nodi narrativi articolati, altri paesaggi, altri interrogativi. Arriva il momento in cui il corto circuito potrebbe scattare e la verità essere svelata; ma quella che potrebbe diventare una banale svolta poliziesca prende una strada inaspettata, come sempre in Jarre. E pone domande fondamentali - la più feroce: sono davvero le circostanze a trasformarci in assassini meccanici, come insinua Klaus nel tentativo di scaricare su tutti il suo barile di sangue e cervella? Nonostante qualche lungaggine e alcuni passaggi un po' invecchiati, il libro è vivo per dettaglio psicologico, costruzione dei personaggi, dialoghi, ironia. Forse era troppo presto per leggere la voce narrante di un nazista non pentito, forse la sua forma era troppo "tradizionale" in un momento in cui a dominare le scene erano le neoavanguardie, chissà.

Eppure, non vi sembra che ci sia in tutto questo un progredire fatale? Un anello si salda all'altro, fino al lillà bianco, fino al ragazzino russo, fino al campo cecoslovacco? Tutto sembra previsto da una regia impeccabile. Tutto fuorché il gesto che non compii, che non mi venne in mente di compiere, l'inutile, grottesco gesto di puntarmi la pistola alla tempia, rinunciando a capire. "Morto sul campo, un altro prende il suo posto". Se a un dato momento vi fu un errore, o di scelta o di valutazione, trovatelo voi, signori. Io non riesco a scoprirlo e non riesco nemmeno a vedere chi o che cosa m'abbia mutilato così. Come un mostro antidiluviano, non ho che i monconi di qualcosa che serviva ad azioni che non so. Ma vi giuro che non riesco a trovare il punto, o il momento o la persona. Tutto fu chiuso ferreamente fra le invalicabili pareti della mia sorte. E della sera d'estate non ricordo il nome della ragazza, ma ricordo il frusciare dell'avena al vento, vicino a noi; un immenso, sottile fruscio lunare. Com'è possibile che io abbia sbagliato più degli altri?

C'è un ultimo romanzo di Jarre di cui voglio parlare qui, completamente diverso dal precedente. È uscito per Einaudi nel 1971 con una copertina di Roy Lichtenstein e un titolo bruttino: Negli occhi di una ragazza. Ed è forse il più bel libro di Marina Jarre. Racconta una storia piccola, ancora una volta: quella di Maria Cristina, una ragazzina di tredici anni colta nel momento in cui sta diventando una persona. L'anno è il 1969; lei vive in una famiglia modesta, con un padre incapace di comunicare, una madre malata e un fratello maggiore molto impegnato a fare la rivoluzione. Maria Cristina viene considerata stupida e così si considera lei stessa. Il suo sguardo sul mondo somiglia a quello della protagonista di Deserto rosso di Antonioni: un regista molto vicino a Jarre per toni, stile e storie: non mi ha sorpreso, mentre facevo ricerche per questo pezzo, scoprire che le aveva proposto un progetto per trarre un film dal suo Viaggio a Ninive. "C'è qualcosa di terribile nella realtà, e io non so cosa sia. E nessuno me lo dice": la frase del personaggio interpretato da Monica Vitti vale anche per Maria Cristina, che preferisce le cose alle persone, più facili da amare, più comprensibili, meno spaventose. Del resto gli altri hanno già deputato Maria Cristina, in quanto femmina, esclusivamente al fare. Ma il suo ripiegamento su di sé deve interrompersi quando accadono due eventi, due scomparse che la costringono ad avere a che fare con l'imprevedibilità della vita umana e a compiere scelte.

La trama è tutta qui. Dietro la facciata di ingannevole semplicità ci sono tante cose: la classe, la stolidità del potere costituito, il destino subordinato delle donne, la politica come paravento emotivo, la solitudine tra membri della stessa famiglia, la morte. Ma nessuno di questi elementi diventa mai ideologico; questo non è un romanzo a tesi o un'operetta morale. È il Bildungsroman di un personaggio unico, Maria Cristina, che si innalza gigantesco fra i molti e affascinanti outsider dei libri di Jarre.

Si possono amare anche le cose. E lei aveva amato la castagna perfetta, cotta fin nel suo cuore giallognolo e s'era richiusa nel silenzio striato di odore di fumo e così non aveva più amato i suoi familiari radunati nella cucina della nonna intorno al giovane zio con la sua giovane sposa. E forse, se si ripeteva la magia, non avrebbe più amato Eliana e neppure Roberto. Visto che non l'amavano e questo la rendeva tranquilla ma le faceva anche male. Sul punto d'addormentarsi mise fuori la mano dalla coperta. Poi sognò; sognò di alzarla verso il buio e dal buio scese un'altra mano a toccare la sua, e non era di nessuno, né della mamma, né del padre, né di Eliana o di Roberto. Scese dal buio silenzioso odorante di fumo, rastrellato da un rastrello non guidato, ed era una mano calda e forte. Si rese conto poi che quella mano uscita dal buio era certamente la propria: dormendo s'era stretta la mano sinistra con la destra, quasi avesse avuto paura che qualcosa le sfuggisse nel sonno.

Tutto il libro passa attraverso la lente della sua visione, bizzarra, innocente ma molto più attenta alla natura delle cose e dei fatti di quella di chi la circonda, e lo straniamento formale funziona alla perfezione. Ci sono innumerevoli scene indimenticabili, dove la prosa sempre bellissima, levigata e severa si apre in quelle osservazioni piene di echi di significato in cui Jarre è maestra. Questi tumultuosi, inaspettati scarti nell'irrazionale, sotto le spoglie di una cronaca austera; questi soprassalti di emozione violenta che arrivano da una pendola nella casa di un ricco, da una castagna, da un occhio visionario dipinto sulla fronte di una bambina; è qui che risiedono il genio, la felicità di questo libro meraviglioso. Negli occhi di una ragazza esiste ancora, ristampato ormai molti anni fa da una piccola casa editrice, Calypso. Forse sarebbe ora di farlo tornare in una nuova veste, di ridargli il posto e l'attenzione che merita.

Sono stata al funerale di Marina Jarre, a luglio. Uno dei figli, credo quello che l'ha accompagnata in Lettonia, parlando di lei ha ricordato una scena descritta nei Padri lontani. Dopo la separazione dei genitori, lei e la sorella erano state nascoste dalla madre in un castello tedesco e il padre era venuto a cercarle, battendo alla porta per ore, ma loro, fedeli alla madre, non gli avevano aperto. Ora, diceva il figlio, spero che tu possa aprire quella porta e corrergli incontro. Sono state dette molte cose. Qualcuno ha letto un brano dal Silenzio di Mosca, il suo finale, in realtà. C'è dentro un'espressione di Bonhoeffer (la "cara terra di Dio"). Solo più tardi ho pensato: è giusto così. L'inizio, la fine.

I nomi si semplificano o scompaiono. Il mare di Sardegna che ogni mattina, appena alzata, ero solita contemplare da dietro il finestrone del nostro soggiorno non avrà più nome, sarà il mare e basta. Il mio luogo e il mio tempo sulla cara terra di Dio staranno in un cortile, povero, nitido, odoroso di fumo di legna. Tutto il resto, di là, continuerò a immaginarlo.

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A Writer for Our Times
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I remember perfectly the first time that I read Marina Jarre. It was the summer of 2009, I had chosen at random some book from the pile on my mother's desk and now on the night train I found myself with a thin little book that seemed to speak of things that usually interest me-war, Russians, death and destruction. I had never heard of the author and even my mother knew her only because one of her interns had done her thesis on her-Waldensian, very old, she lived in Turin like us (the Turinese that read have a morbid fascination for writers that live in Turin). The little book was entitled Il silenzio di Mosca ( The Silence of Moscow).

The first part was the deconstruction of a war image with which the author had long been obsessed after someone had told her about it (the German soldiers captured in Stalingrad had paraded before the silent crowd in Moscow); the research of documents in Russian, the discordant (conflicting) versions of the testimonies, finally the discovery of the congenital imperfection in an almost too perfect scene, too iconic; all of it became a personal essay on lying, historical memory, fallacies of memory and narrative fiction. I liked the digressive progress of the book, cold and intelligent, the atypical structure, the strangeness, the subterranean rage that I intuited, the implacable precision with which she spoke about what it meant to grow old and approach death. There was in that final minor book something that escaped all my categories and imposed itself on my attention.

Searching some time later on the Internet, I typed at random "German prisoners" and, under the title The Mystique of the Russian Soul, I found immediately the page of an autobiography in which a boy of eleven years old recounted the episode that Pavel had just reported to me. The boy was the poet Evgenij Evtušenko; returned with his mother to Moscow in the summer of 1944, he had seen the parade of about 25,000 German prisoners among the total silence of the inhabitants of the city. [...] The tale reports however an entirely different event from what I had imagined, if one excludes the frame. [...] The boy of eleven had however described it while the bystanders, after yells of derision towards the officials, were petrified at the sight of the enemies finally vanquished, but the poet he would become was effectively interrupted by the arrival of the woman in rubber boots. From the wrapped handkerchief emerged together with the piece of bread the Russian soul, the merciful Russian soul. The Russian soul to which, indeed, they would never need other adjectives. My story had been torn from hand.

Other books have come over the years, bit by bit, and always by casual discovery: in a friend's library, on a used bookstand, on eBay. Each one was more beautiful than the other. They were novels or memoirs. How could it have happened that a writer so extraordinary and original had almost entirely disappeared? It wasn't that it hadn't happened to others: I thought of Wilcock or Manganelli, that luckily Adelphi has republished for some time. In respect to them, Jarre is more readable, less interested in extreme experimentation. It would have been easier, at least in theory, for her to encounter an audience wider than a niche of impassioned readers.

Last year Claudio Magris questioned the motives for this incomprehensible silence. There are many possible explanations, none of them sufficient: the hard reserve of Jarre, as Claudio Magris calls it; her distance from literary circles, the fact that in the last years she was almost solely occupied with theatre and stories of the Waldensian people. Not by chance, the small articles that came out after her death last summer spoke of her as the "storyteller of Waldensian culture," perhaps mentioning the autobiographical books where she evoked the extermination of the Jews of Riga. But Jarre was not only this. The territory of her writing is infinitely more vast, more complex, and more enigmatic: it's the world of a great writer, and as such it evades every identity or testimonial label. What I would like to do here is attempt to trace a map of it, incomplete and rough, but that gives an idea of how much the experience of reading Marina Jarre is exciting, surprising, and wonderful.

She was born Marina Gersoni in Riga, in 1925, daughter of Clara Coïsson, an Italian of the Valdese (Waldensian) Valley who taught at the University of Riga and, returned to Italy, became an important translator of Russian for Einaudi (she translated Propp, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and many others), and of Samuel Gersoni, a Latvian Jew.

Her first language was German: she would have learned Italian after 1935, when her parents divorced, with great melodrama, and her mother brought her and her younger sister to Italy where they were raised by their grandmother in Torre Pellice. The father, an eccentric character, theatrical and mysterious, stayed in Riga, where he later had a baby girl in a relationship with a German nurse who left them after the Nazi invasion of Latvia. They all died, him, the baby, and the others in the family, in the massacres of the Jews in the forests of Riga in November to December 1941. Concerning this giant hole, and the irresponsible and sentimental father, Jarre will return in two crucial books: I padri lontani (Distant Fathers), Einaudi 1987, and Ritorno in Lettonia (Return to Latvia), Einaudi 2003.

The first is an autobiography. But an autobiography in the style of Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Or, with the structure of Ernaux's The Years, but, as someone recently pointed out to me, it's a predecessor in structure (the tight montage of separate images that compose an enormous organic frame). And in my opinion it should be read by anyone involved in nonfiction narrative today, in Italy-and also outside of it, but, as I discovered from Magris, elsewhere they already know it should be read. Jarre places the same detached, estranged and lightly ironic gaze on all things in her life: the minute tragedies of childhood, the war and the Resistance in which she assisted as a watchful spectator, motherhood and writing, work as a French teacher in Turin and the same city in its transformations through time. Time, precisely, is one of the themes that enervate and bind all the fragments, such as lack of belonging, of "homeland," at times proudly pursued, at times more painful, at times simply noted as matter of fact. An unfamiliarity that she also feels with respect to the Waldensian world, which in part is hers: "There was no bond between me and that world, which remained outside me. No, the poor, rocky houses in shadow, the four pointed peaks, the woman with the high, clear voice marked by those r 's, were not related to me. Their history didn't precede me, I hadn't come from that." (1)

I spent a summer in Turin with a botany book. At five in the afternoon I used to go out and along garden fences in the center and in Crocetta, I was walking in the public gardens and meanwhile recognizing the trees comparing them with the clues and the illustrations in the book. [...] while walking by places, street after street, on the sidewalks dirty with dust, papers, melted ice cream, condoms, syringes, dog excrement, the street ended with becoming the place, the only one possible, indistinguishable from the other places, and the people and I with them on the sidewalk, indistinguishable among ourselves. [...] Questionable telephone booths, exact copies of the time machines or spaceships of science fiction films, obvious precisely as telephone booths, bearing witness also to their daily necessity, the naturalness of similar transmigrations. This is the place without name, the same as other places and my time, the same time as others. I will not run away anymore.

Return to Latvia is the most celebrated and debated among Jarre's books (but however out of print), that Alberto Cavaglion in Doppiozero correctly defines a rewriting of Distant Fathers. ( 2) Here, in fact, the by now aging Jarre returns to Latvia together with her son, for the first time since she left at ten years old. And she finally takes upon herself that repudiated father and his monstrous end, as well as that Jewish history to which she is otherwise estranged and otherwise indissolubly tied. It is a potent book, which explores the dizzying depths of guilt and repression with intransigence and disgust for emphasis that are a constant in Jarre's prose. And it is still at once an anomalous text, that makes for example a very interesting use of documents, in the exact sense in which Danilo Kiš spoke about it in an interview that appeared in the collection Homo poeticus: "As far as I'm concerned, I personally believe in the document, in the confession, in the play of the spirit. One does not exist without the other. It is a kind of Holy Trinity." This magical, skillful mix of writing is the perfect definition of Marina Jarre's nonfiction.

Then there are the novels and the stories. Stealing the definition that Franzen uses for Alice Munro one could say with a certain exactitude that Jarre is a "detached provider of highly pleasurable private experiences." (One speaks of the pleasure of the reader, naturally.) In effect, as much as her measure is the long novel, Jarre resembles in some respects both Munro and the first among all the providers of private experience: Chekhov. In her stories, in general, there are not big facts or bombastic events. They are small stories of common people; and as in Munro and Chekhov, the minor events of their individual existences assume an immense reach that reverberates for a long time in whoever reads, acquiring more and more intensity, finesse, and mystery with the passing of time, uniquely for the way in which they are told. I already spoke of Jarre's precision, and this is the thin connection that unites her with the other two writers: the dry exactitude and lack of judgment with which she knows how to note her own feelings and those of her characters. Even the strangest, most profound, or incomprehensible; and those that arouse shame. There are many unspeakable feelings, obscenely natural, in Marina Jarre's books, set in magnificent pages from which it's difficult to extrapolate quotes that tell of their full beauty. As often happens with those truly amazing, hers is not an aphoristic writing: the true breath of the prose one finds in the fabric of the text, in the full architecture of the page or of the entire chapter.

At times the tiny stories of her characters intersect with History; this is the case of the delicious The Princess of the Old Moon, released by Einaudi in 1977, a mock heroic novel about a down and out family of Turinese communists told by the irresistible voice of the eleven- year- old son that has as a background the months preceding the divorce referendum of 1974 and is one of the few books that recounts (in a satirical but affectionate tone) the people that made that movement in those years. Or of the story of "The Photograph," in Galambra, Four Stories with Ghosts (Bollati Boringhieri 1987), that begins from the slow and cold account of a conjugal vacation in a small imaginary city to transform into one of the most beautiful things ever written in narrative on the armed Italian struggle and its consequences.

And it is above all the case of A Light Foreign Accent, the first novel. Released in 1967 as Parallel Monument for a small publishing house, and then republished by Einaudi in 1972 with the new title and some parts rewritten, it has as the protagonist an ex-Waffen SS, Klaus Boehr, who participated in the mass killings in Eastern Europe and who after the war remade a life hidden as a Swiss professional in a large industrial Italian city-Turin, always Turin, ambiguous and two-faced like its secret inhabitant. As in Benevolent by Littell forty years later, it is Klaus himself who tells his life and his actions, for which, he admits candidly, he does not feel remorse, without knowing how to explain when that capacity failed him. How to define his story? Confession? Self-defense? Better: frozen aesthetic self-reworking, it alternates the present story of a group of young friends of Turin's middle class that will end up intersecting with his story.

This counterpoint, that may seem only technical, contains in reality, like in a game of Chinese boxes, other nodes of articulated narrative, other passages, other questions. The moment arrives in which the short circuit could snap and the truth is unveiled; but that which could become a banal police breakthrough takes an unexpected detour, as always in Jarre. And she poses fundamental questions-the fiercest: is it really the circumstances that transform us into mechanized assassins, as Klaus insinuates in the attempt to unload on everyone his barrel of blood and brains? Despite some lengthy and some slightly aged passages, the book is alive with psychological detail, character portraits, dialogue, and irony. Perhaps it was too early to read the narrative voice of an unrepentant Nazi, perhaps the form was too "traditional" in a moment in which the neo-avant-garde dominated the scene, who knows.

Yet, does it not seem that there is in all of this a fatal progress? A ring soldered to another, up to the white lily, up to the Russian boy, up to the Czechoslovakian camp? Everything seems predetermined by an impeccable organization. All except the gesture of non-compliance, that did not come to mind to enact, the useless, grotesque gesture of pointing the pistol at the temple, renouncing understanding. "Died in camp, another takes his place." If at a given moment it was an error, of choice or judgment, find it, sirs. I fail to find it and I do not even succeed to see who or what has mutilated me like this. Like an antediluvian monster, I have nothing more than stumps of something that served actions about which I know nothing. But I swear to you that I cannot find the point, or the moment or the person. Everything was closed ironically between the impassable walls of my fate. And of that summer evening I do not remember the name of the girl, but I remember the rustling of oats in the wind, near us; an immense subtle lunar rustle. How it is possible that I have erred more than others?

There is a last novel by Jarre which I want to speak about here, completely different from the preceding one. It was released by Einaudi in 1971 with a cover by Roy Lichtenstein and an ugly little title: In the Eyes of a Girl. And it was perhaps the most beautiful book by Marina Jarre. It tells a little story, once again: that of Maria Cristina, a girl of thirteen years caught in the moment in which she is becoming a person. The year is 1969; she lives in a modest family, with a father incapable of communicating, a sick mother and an older brother preoccupied with making revolution. Maria Cristina is considered stupid and so she considers herself. Her outlook on the world resembles that of the protagonist of Red Desertby Antonioni: a director close to Jarre in tone, style and story: it doesn't surprise me, while I was doing research for this piece, to discover that he had proposed to her a project to make a film from her Journey to Nineveh. "There is something terrible in reality, and I don't know what it is. And no one tells me about it": the words of the character played by Monica Vitti apply also to Maria Cristina, who prefers things to people, easier to love, more understandable, less frightening. After all, the others have already assigned Maria Cristina, in that she is female, exclusively to doing. But her self-withdrawal interrupts itself when two events happen, two disappearances that force her to deal with the unpredictability of human life and the making of choices.

The plot is all here. Behind the facade of deceptive simplicity there are so many things: class, the stolidity of established power, the subordinate destiny of women, politics as an emotional screen, solitude between the members of the same family, death. But none of these elements ever becomes ideological; this is not an ideological novel or a moral tale. It is a coming of age novel of a singular character, Maria Cristina, who rises huge among the many and fascinating outsiders of Jarre's books.

One can also love things. And she has loved the perfect chestnut, cooked through to its yellowish heart and enclosed in the striated silence of smoked odor and in this way she no longer loved her family gathered in grandma's kitchen around the young uncle with the young wife. And perhaps, if she repeated the magic, she would no longer love Eliana and not even Roberto. Given that they did not love her and this made her tranquil but also made her feel bad. On the verge of falling asleep she put her hand outside the covers. Then she dreamt; she dreamed of getting up through the dark and from the dark choosing another hand to touch hers, and there was no one, neither mother, nor father, nor Eliana nor Roberto. It descended from the dark silent odor of smoke, raked by an unguided rake, and it was a warm and strong hand. She realized then that that hand emerging from the dark was certainly her own; sleeping she squeezed her left hand with her right, as if she had feared something would escape her in sleep.

The whole book happens through her viewpoint, bizarre, innocent but much more attentive to the nature of things and the facts which surround her, and the formal estrangemen functions to perfection. There are innumerable unforgettable scenes; where the always beautiful prose, smooth and severe, opens in those observations full of echoes of meaning of which Jarre is master. These tumultuous, unexpected diversions into the irrational, under the guise of an austere chronicle; these somersaults of violent emotion that arrive on a pendulum in the house of the rich, of a chestnut, of a visionary eye painted on the face of a little girl; it's in all these things that the brilliance and beauty of this book resides. In the Eyes of a Girl still exists, reprinted many years ago by a small publishing house, Calypso. Perhaps it needs to return in a new guise to give it the place and attention it deserves.

I was at Marina Jarre's funeral in July. One of her sons, I believe the one that accompanied her to Latvia, spoke of her remembering a scene described in Distant Fathers. After the parents' separation, she and her sister were hidden by their mother in a German castle and their father came to look for them, banging at the door for hours, but they, faithful to their mother, did not open it to him. Now, said the son, I hope that you are able to open that door and run to meet him. Many things were said. Someone read a passage from The Silence of Moscow ( Il silenzio di Mosca), its ending, in reality. Inside there is an expression by Bonhoeffer (the "beloved earth of God"). Only later I thought: it's right like this. The beginning, the end.

Names simplify themselves or disappear. The Sardinian sea that every morning, just out of bed, I alone contemplated from behind the large window of our living room will no longer have a name, it will be the sea and that will be enough. My place and my time on God's dear earth will be in a poor courtyard, clear, fragrant with wood smoke. The remainder, beyond, I will continue to imagine.

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(1) Marina Jarre, Distant Fathers, trans. Ann Goldstein, New Vessel Press, 2021.

( 2) Return to Latvia is soon to be published in English translation by New Vessel Press.

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WRITERS CHANGE US
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Over four years I've been composing a sort of hybrid biography and memoir entitled The Bright Dream: A Writer's Return to Italy. This is the second book I have composed with the Jewish Italian writer Primo Levi at its center. In this particular book I entwine his story of return to his home in Turin from Auschwitz through Poland, Russia, Central Europe, and, finally, to northern Italy in 1945. In part, I critically explore the development of his writing career as it was influenced by his deportation and internment at Auschwitz. Perhaps it is courageous or even folly to think through the intellectual, emotional, and intellectual influences that his story has imprinted on me in teaching his work to college students, and even more risky to mingle my personal story of return to Italy after studying in Florence in college and to know Italy anew as an adult firmly in midlife while critically considering his written oeuvre.

Yet, I persist. I must write this book and I must travel to Italy to do so. Consequently, I have a renewed relationship with the Italian language. My study has intensified as I venture deeper into thinking, reading, and writing in Italian. These days I meet twice weekly with my language tutor; several months ago we started to translate The Bright Dream manuscript from English into Italian. Subsequently, I immersed myself in reading literature in Italian, both by English speaking and Italian writers. In the course of my reading, I have discovered books-among them I padri lontani (recently translated into English as Distant Fathers by Ann Goldstein) and Il silenzio di Mosca-both stunningly poetic, personal, and deeply social and political works by Marina Jarre, about whom novelist Marta Barone writes in her searching and beautiful article translated here. Barone, who wrote the introduction to the Italian reprint of I padri lontani (Bompiani 2021), writes how she discovered Jarre's work in a pile of books on her mother's desk ( dal mucchio sulla scrivania di mia madre) and how Jarre's writing compelled her and continued to absorb her complete attention.

Barone's voice as a reader, which is also wonderfully the voice of a writer, woven with passages from Jarre's various novels and children's books, illumines the process of how a writer encounters another writer who may change her way of thinking and being in the world. Of course, I find in Barone's relationship with Jarre's writing echoes of my relationship to Levi's writing and the life story that undergirds it. Ultimately, other writers may alter and transform our lives through the work they have left us. Further, I discovered that translation invites reading through one's primary language(s) to the newer language. With the movement through languages, the brain enlarges. The labor of reading in another language and translating into and from that language can teach us to love the rudiments and nuances of a language, the new one, and deepen an understanding of our original language. We can meet and know the world in a voice that tells us something of the place we love, the serendipitous discoveries of quotidian life there, the way humans find writing company across time and space. Because Barone introduced me to Marina Jarre through her Italian eyes and sensibility, I wanted to read her critical thought on Jarre. Her article was originally entitled "A Turinese Writer," and in speaking with Barone during the translation process she expressed to me a desire to share Jarre's universality with readers. I'm thrilled to present Barone's "A Writer for Our Times" to an English language readership.
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Marina Jarre was Latvian and German-speaking and became to Turin one of the most original writers of the post-war period.

Marta Barone was born in Turin in 1987. She has published three books for children with Rizzoli and Mondadori and the novel Città Sommersa (Bompiani 2020). An editor, translator and teacher, she lives and works between Como and Milan.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Marina Jarre: A Writer for Our Times - A prologue by Marta Barone - by Cheryl Chaffin

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Photo: Marina Jarre with her sister at Torre Pelice in 1945 Ricordo perfettamente la prima volta che ho letto Marina Jarre. Era l'estate del 2009, avevo scelto dei libri a caso dal mucchio sulla scrivania di mia madre e ora sul treno notturno mi trovavo con un libretto sottile che sembrava parlare di cose che di solito m'interessano - guerra, russi, morte e distruzione.

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(The Course of Empire, painting by Thomas Cole)

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15

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Quid πλατανῶν opacissimus?
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Ὁ ὕπνος σὲ τύλιξε, σὰν ἕνα δέντρο, μὲ πράσινα φύλλα,
ἀνάσαινες, σὰν ἕνα δέντρο, μέσα στὸ ἥσυχο φῶς,
μέσα στὴ διάφανη πηγὴ κοίταξα τὴ μορφή σου
κλεισμένα βλέφαρα καὶ τὰ ματόκλαδα χάραζαν τὸ νερό.
Τὰ δάχτυλά μου στὸ μαλακὸ χορτάρι, βρῆκαν τὰ δάχτυλά σου
κράτησα τὸ σφυγμό σου μιὰ στιγμὴ
κι ἔνιωσα ἀλλοῦ τὸν πόνο τῆς καρδιᾶς σου.
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Κάτω ἀπὸ τὸ πλατάνι, κοντὰ στὸ νερό, μέσα στὶς δάφνες
ὁ ὕπνος σὲ μετακινοῦσε καὶ σὲ κομμάτιαζε
γύρω μου, κοντά μου, χωρὶς νὰ μπορῶ νὰ σ᾿ ἀγγίξω ὁλόκληρη,
ἑνωμένη μὲ τὴ σιωπή σου
βλέποντας τὸν ἴσκιο σου νὰ μεγαλώνει καὶ νὰ μικραίνει,
νὰ χάνεται στοὺς ἄλλους ἴσκιους, μέσα στὸν ἄλλο
κόσμο ποὺ σ᾿ ἄφηνε καὶ σὲ κρατοῦσε.
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Τὴ ζωὴ ποὺ μᾶς ἔδωσαν νὰ ζήσουμε, τὴ ζήσαμε.
Λυπήσου ἐκείνους ποὺ περιμένουν μὲ τόση ὑπομονὴ
χαμένοι μέσα στὶς μαῦρες δάφνες κάτω ἀπὸ τὰ βαριὰ πλατάνια
κι ὅσους μονάχοι τους μιλοῦν σὲ στέρνες καὶ σὲ πηγάδια
καὶ πνίγουνται μέσα στοὺς κύκλους τῆς φωνῆς.
Λυπήσου τὸ σύντροφο ποὺ μοιράστηκε τὴ στέρησή μας καὶ τὸν ἱδρώτα
καὶ βύθισε μέσα στὸν ἥλιο σὰν κοράκι πέρα ἀπ᾿ τὰ μάρμαρα,
χωρὶς ἐλπίδα νὰ χαρεῖ τὴν ἀμοιβή μας.
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Δῶσε μας, ἔξω ἀπὸ τὸν ὕπνο, τὴ γαλήνη.

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15

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Quid πλατανῶν opacissimus?
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Sleep wrapped you like a tree in green leaves,
you breathed like a tree in a quiet light.
In a diaphanous spring, I saw your form,
your eyelids closed and eyelashes carving the water.
In the supple grass, my fingers found your fingers,
there I held your pulse for a moment
and felt your heart's pain elsewhere.
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Under the plane tree, among the water and laurels
Sleep moves and dissevers you
about me, near me, I am unable to hold you whole,
you are one with silence.
I watched your shadow lengthen and lessen,
lost among other shadows, in the other
world that forsook you and held you.
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The life which they gave us to live, we lived.
Pity those who wait with such patience
lost among the dark laurels, under the heavy plane trees:
they alone speak with cisterns and wells
and are drowned in the circles of a voice.
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Pity the companion who shared our loss and sweat
and dove into the sun like a crow beyond the ruins,
without hope of delight in our reward.
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Give us, outside of sleep, serenity
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Born in Smyrna in 1900, Giorgos Seferis would become one of the most prominent Greek poets in the twentieth century. Seferis worked in the greek diplomatic service for much of his life, witnessing the flux and fissure of the Greek State at close quarters. By the time he received the Nobel Prize in 1963, Seferis had lived through the fall of a monarchy, mass constitutional reforms, the first Balkan wars, the Greco-Turkish war, two world wars and a civil war.
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Pulblished in 1936, his collection Mythistorema comprises of 24 rhapsodies, mirroring the 24 book division of Homer's Odyssey. In many ways, Mythistorema is an Odyssey Redux, a modern poetics of displacement. Written in the aftermath of the Turkish capture of Smyrna, Seferis' homeland and an event that caused the mass exodus of 1.2 million Greeks and Turks, history haunts Mythistorema. The loss of an Ithaca and the dispersal of a people can be felt throughout the poem's course. Describing the collection, Seferis wrote that he had tried 'to express, with some coherence, circumstances that are as independent of myself as the characters in the novel'.

However, poem 15 of Mythistorema presents a strangely insular interlude in the collection. Here, the exile turns inward. Seferis' reader finds two people drifting from one another, dissevered as gently and definitively as shadows in the afternoon light. Although Seferis never specifies the poem's address, its persistent 'you', the poem seems to conjure Seferis' personal life, particularly his romance with Maria 'Maro' Zannou. When they first met in the early 1930s, Maro was married; it would take a decade for their lives to reconcile, and, ultimately, Maro would become the poet's lifelong partner. Nonetheless, in the period before that- during the composition of Mythistorema- their relationship was characterised by fraught letters and distance.

In poem 15, we find ourselves in a vague Arcadia, where quietude becomes silence, patience the attrition of the soul. The word which closes poem 15, which also ends the collection, "Γαλήνη", "serenity", seems more a plea than the poem's reality.

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La Piccioletta Barca | Seferis 'Mythistorema 15' - by Ollie Cowley

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(The Course of Empire, painting by Thomas Cole) ‍ ‍ Quid πλατανῶν opacissimus?