Grant Duncan
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Grant Duncan
Italian Poetry 1990
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Roberto Carifi
from Epoch of the Son
Who comes, tomorrow, who speaks from behind
that shell, immobile and transfixed by light? It's cold
here, without relief. Is it true that the dead are in
the palm of the hand, in the sleeping eye? He who
comes, the summoned, is the son. Let him pass in
the word, in the silence of the word where all was
said, all was forgotten.
(Anterem 39, 1989; trans Grant Duncan)
Nicola Paniccia
Poem 'A'
meanwhile they turned without noticing losing
hair the act that goes back to the fall
of leaves tracings of the head studying
the usual wall thus
conclusions in autumn by the study
of leaves from that moment the ebb
was sanded although they spoke of no other the total
of maps on the hands water in the head
around crumbling strata
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you'll have to carry on
with gumboots quietly disguising
and carefully the flashlights skirting
the coast in the very same place as the
telegraph poles to move across by surprise
on the crossroads at the right moment it'll be easy
to graft oneway streets get together a crowd
of the blind traffic lights put in
(Anterem 39, 1989; trans Grant Duncan)
Cesare Viviani
They were right to tell us: don't push on beyond,
go as far as the big vineyard and turn back.
Look at the things you already know,
the lime-trees by the street,
the row of willows along the ditch,
the garden with the old fountain, the little wood,
after which appear the houses of San Romolo, and continue
as far as the chapel and the lines.
Take the same path as always, take
a stroll.
*
Those who find a skull and baptise it
and say—it can be redeemed—that it gathers time
and the rays of the sunset light it up
and it spoke to the discoverers and late arrivals . . .
I can't comment, I can't speak!
And you point out the cap that's too tight—
now I'm old and the elastic should
soften with age.
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*
Who will pass by seeing that black line,
that illegible sign had been the body of a sailor,
of a player dragged away, buried?
The gentleman does well not to stop, 'who knows what it is'
he says one moment and his gaze is already elsewhere:
because here there wasn't a glimmer of truth, and neither is there
in any passing away, you know, in any memory,
only the ruler of the living and the dead
only the empty sky.
(from Preghiera del nome, 1990; trans Grant Duncan)
Giorgio Caproni
Big window
and to whom?
'There's no more time, surely,'
he said. And I saw
the lost and pale look
and the old coat, and the foot
(the foot) that banged
on the big window—the hand
outstretched not quite
to the far end of farewell, but perhaps
(it was a callous time)
as a plea for charity
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Ah, Milan, Milan
the Ponte Nuovo, the street
(I saw it on the Fleet)
with the words: 'No Exit'.
He was my father: and now
in frost that kills
my fingers I wonder
how—my father dead
since '56—there
with outstretched hand, could he
ask of me the reckoning (the injustice)
of an entire life I've spent
in forgetting, here
where 'There's no more time',
he said, there's no longer
the briefest pause—not even
a hole—to say
without shame: 'Daddy,
we all do—all—
no other.'
(Poesia 26, 1990; trans Grant Duncan)
Piero Bigongiari
A flock of migrating starlings
There's a space that your rather crazy
and haphazard pointing out ('See there?'
The undulating flock of starlings
blurs into the already over-ripe sky.
Will they be looking vaguely for a place
to rest? Already the tangle is merging
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with the tauter cobalt of the glance of yours
that allows no other comeback), there's
a space that your yielding forefinger
neither covers nor rediscovers: the final flashing
of the visible beyond
every sign: that of the invisible
the legendary kingdom: a blurred
sweetness, a loss, a rapture
already a wee bit bitter.
What do the crazy months
tell us about time? That it takes
error to spark us into action?
That it's the year that memory touches on
and abandons to its most mysterious
flowing beneath all other sources?
If it's not your forefinger trembling, it's my eye
where that which I do not see appears
to tremble, where something groans
oblivious to itself.
If we cannot own
what isn't ours, it is that we,
the insecure hostages to the Other,
abandon ourselves more and more to its mirage.
The tear that breaks out on your face,
scores it with a transparent sign,
takes hold within and falls by itself
—a brief glitter—into nothing,
may flow down past a fragile, distant
smile. What does your hand poke at
in the tangle that from close up is to us
a snare in which, as it struggles,
it plunders what once was granted to the flock?
I want neither to console you nor to console myself.
What arms, what arts, what pangs
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other than this can free us now?
Pain too has a subtle flavour,
even the imperceptible absence
of a flower from the colour of a room.
But from what does your being here distance you
if, to grab hold of unbelonging,
perhaps not even that belongs to us?
I watch the little blue delta of veins
on the back of your hand. And I'm satisfied.
It doesn't hold back your fingers, it becomes
indeed an other, a more prehensile flowing
into life, in its slow denial.
(Poesia 27, 1990; trans Grant Duncan)
Edoardo Sanguineti
She's watching us
watching us with a gloomy eye (an overaged glass eye), sad Gaia:
(a many-breasted matron's eye):(an eye of menacing evil-eye, of malign
stepmother):(a most ruined polluted eye: an economic eye, a logical
ecological eye):
so she watches us, she us: her disposable, soup-slurping squatters.
(Mercurio, 21 April 1990; trans Grant Duncan)
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