Don't Sleep

No, don’t sleep while the governors of the world are busy!

Be suspicious of the power they claim to have to acquire on your behalf!

Stay awake to be sure that your hearts are not empty, when others calculate on the emptiness of your hearts!

Do what is unhelpful, sing songs from out of your mouths that go against expectation!

Be ornery, be as sand, not oil in the thirsty machinery of the world!

(from Dreams by Gunter Eich, in Angina Days: Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, 2010), translated by Michael Hofmann)

The Poems Of Sidney West

I’ve been reading Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West. Gelman is one of Argentina’s greatest living poets, although this volume was the first time I’d heard of him.

First thing to say is that the book presents an immediate oddity. The poems are ostensibly Gelman’s Spanish translations of work by a U.S. poet, Sidney West, but it’s also clear that West is an entirely fictional creation. The book therefore, consists of notional translations into Spanish of non-existent English poems, which have then been translated into English by Katherine Hedeen and Victor Rodriguez Nuñez.

The poems are all laments for people Sidney West has known, but these aren’t conventional elegies. They use surreal images, which recur in different laments throughout the book. Also phrases and unusual syntax patterns echo one another from elegy to elegy, as if the collection as a whole converges around Death as well as a series of deaths.

What I really want to talk about here is the first poem, ‘lament for the death of parsifal hoolig,’ a poem that really knocked me sideways and set up a foundation for the rest of the book. You can read the poem (in both Spanish and English) at pp. 20-23 of the book’s .pdf sampler (the introduction to Gelman’s life and work is also well worth reading). It starts off with a surreal description – ‘it began to rain cows’ – and then narrates the effect of this on various characters. A man is then found ‘dead several times’ and the surreal descriptions continue, now centring on the dead body. In many surreal poems, I find the surrealism frustrating, as an excuse for not fully engaging with reality rather than an angular commentary on it. However, in this poem, Gelman’s ‘Sidney West’ uses the crazed backdrop like a foil to the vulnerable humanity at its centre:

that rain fell years and years on the pavement of Hereby Street
without ever erasing the slightest trace of what had happened!
without dampening one of the humiliations not even one of the fears
of that man with hips scrambled tossed in the street
late so his terrors can mix with water and rot and end

I just find this incredibly moving, that the rain (cows or not) can’t dampen or dilute the man’s fear and humiliation, but he isn’t seen by others as a humiliated man:

and so died parsifal hoolig
he closed his silent eyes
kept the custom of not protesting
was a brave dead man
and while his obituary did not appear in the New York Times and the
...........Chicago Tribune paid no attention to him
he did not complain when they picked him up in a truck from the city
him and his melancholy look

and if someone supposes this is sad
if someone is going to stand up and say it is sad
know this is exactly what happened
nothing else happened but this
under this sky or vault of heaven

I like the way Gelman withholds judgement here. We don’t know who the dead man was, the source of his humiliations, whether he was right or wrong not to protest, but he is, I think, a kind of everyman/everywoman (I wondered if there were also allusions to the 'suffering servant' passage from Isaiah 53). He is all of us, or a side of all of us, and Gelman creates for him a particular kind of sympathy and dignity, whatever his faults. It made me think of Denis Johnson’s poem, ‘The Circle’ which recounts a helicopter crash and the reaction of people to the dead pilot, trying to explain what might have happened. Johnson’s narrator walks through the scene of chaos:

the machine burst ajar like a bug,
the corpse a lunch pail
left open and silly music coming out –
I couldn’t seem to find a way
that didn’t lead straight to the heart of the trouble
and involve me forever in their grief.

I think that’s what Gelman has found too and the rest of his collection reflects on what that means using both surreal and realistic imagery – the silly music that plays the heart of the trouble.

Translating Zbigniew Herbert

Translating Zbigniew Herbert's poems from the original Polish is not for the faint-hearted. I mentioned in a previous article here that there had been controversy over Alissa Valles’s translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems. I'd advise taking a deep breath before reading this post...

It began with Michael Hofmann’s review of the book in Poetry magazine. Hofmann, although he admits to knowing no Polish, is an accomplished and admired translator and poet. He asks why John and Bogdana Carpenter’s translations (they have translated much of Herbert’s output up until now, but the books are out of print) were not used in the new Collected, and then compares their translations to Valles’s in several poems. In each case, he feels Valles does a poor job. His criticism is that the poems read – in English – as inferior to the Carpenters’ versions. He pulls no punches:

“Alissa Valles's Herbert is slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration, complacency, and reaching for effect. The original (I'm quite sure) is none of those things. This Collected Poems is a hopelessly, irredeemably bad book. The only solution to its problems would be a bulk reinstatement of the old translations.”

The reaction in Poetry’s letters page in the following issue took up the issues raised in Hofmann’s review. They published a good balance of opinion, I think. Some letters (on both sides) were more to the point than others, and one offered a moment of unintentional humour:

“I know Michael Hofmann about as well as he knows Polish, which is to say, in translation.”

Hofmann, of course, writes poetry in English (unless the letter-writer means that he has read Hofmann's translations of other writers)!

The balance of opinions exhibited in Poetry's letters' page was complemented by Don Share’s blog post at the Poetry Foundation. He tries to get to the root of things, raising questions wider than those congregating around Valles’s translations and Hofmann’s review:

“What constitutes competence in translators... and in reviewers of their work? Do great poets deserve many translators - or, as Hofmann said, not. In what sense is a translated poem the same poem as the original?”

These are huge questions and people have been arguing over the answers since translation began. A translated poem surely sets out to render the poem as effectively in the new language as in the original, but quite how that comes about has been a source of endless argument.

In addition, David Orr assessed the debate in the New York Times in an even-handed way. His conclusion was that, while Hofmann may have overstated his case, nonetheless there are deficiencies with the Valles book (although he also asks how there couldn’t be deficiencies in a work of translation). Orr writes:

“Herbert is now a complete poet in English, and he’s not as strong as he should be.”

The involvement of Adam Zagajewski in writing the introduction raises further questions. Zagajewski was born in Lvov, the same city as Herbert, but some twenty years later, and Herbert was a fundamental influence on his own development as a poet. It's surely unlikely that Zagajewski, who can also lay claim to being one of Poland’s great 20th century poets, would have lent his name to a book that was unworthy of his own mentor. That’s even if Valles did have the professional connection to him that’s claimed by some of the Amazon reviews.

The Amazon USA page offers comments of varying levels of insight, and includes one by well known poet, Stephen Dobyns, who writes:

“Believe me, I have been reading and teaching Herbert since the early 1970's and Alissa Valles' translations are a travesty.”

However, some reviewers there argue that the translations are, for the most part, very good. Valles's Collected Poems is also the only in-print, comprehensive Herbert that exists and anyone wanting such a book either buys it or does without entirely. If you’ve been dedicated enough to negotiate this labyrinth of opinion so far, you’ll realise that the only solution is to read the Valles, pick up the Carpenters’ books from the library or second-hand, and compare and contrast.

Alissa Valles has responded to the controversy in a fashion. She hasn’t quarrelled with any particular reviewer, which seems like the correct approach to me. Her article is well written and cool-headed, but the point she makes on the controversy is clear. The acerbic nature of this paragraph isn’t quite hidden by the measured quality of the writing:

“It isn’t possible to render a poet anew without disturbing many readers’ relation to that poet; I expected my own translations of Herbert, a poet much adored, to be controversial, and they have not disappointed me. Translations are the fruit of interpretation and part of a larger, complex process of bringing a foreign poet into view. I set no store by the notion of a definitive translation; like the term “spiritual leader,” as Herbert is unfortunately called on the dust jacket of his Collected Poems, it reeks of church authorization or a sales pitch. A truly great text—whether a Bible verse or a Paul Celan poem—has no final translation. It will go on inviting new attempts by arrogant young poets who want to measure themselves against the greats. At best, translators engage in the ongoing unfolding of a text, seeing their occupation, as the great philosophers of translation have, as a branch of applied metaphysics. At worst they are like old prostitutes arguing about who gave Napoleon his best night. The insights one may gain from these squabbles may be thrilling, but they are rather narrow if not informed by broader knowledge.”

Anyway, the Valles is now in my Amazon shopping trolley and I’m looking forward to reading it, although I will be keeping half an eye on the Carpenters’ two Selecteds as I do so.

First Thoughts on Zbigniew Herbert

Back from my October Week break in rural Perthshire – wet, windy, but nonetheless enjoyable in a “we’re going to enjoy ourselves no matter what” kind of way.

I was blown away, not by the wind, but by the Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert (Oxford, 1977), translations by John and Bogdana Carpenter. Astounding poetry. In their introduction, the Carpenters paint Herbert as having an “insistence on a clear moral stance which can resist the fluctuations of history and ideology.” They’re not suggesting Herbert was a dogmatist or that his moral stance was handed down by state or church – far from it – but that the history he lived through (1924-1998) made values important to him. “Rarely have positive values been won against greater opposition and with greater struggle” – the Second World War and its devastating effect on Poland, followed by decades of communism shaped his outlook. A moral vacuum, for Herbert, wasn’t an option.

In his prose poem ‘What Mr Cogito Thinks About Hell’, (‘Mr Cogito’ is a persona whose views sometimes correspond with Herbert and sometimes ironically contradict him), Cogito says that the lowest circle of hell is populated by poets and artists:

Throughout the year competitions, festivals and concerts are held here. There is no climax in the season. The climax is permanent and almost absolute. Every few months new trends come into being and nothing, it appears, is capable of stopping the triumphal march of the avant-garde.

The poem ends with similar irony:

Beelzebub supports the arts. He provides his artists with calm, good board, and absolute isolation from hellish life.

The whole idea of following trends, embracing moral relativity, or producing art simply for art’s sake must have filled Herbert with horror – understandable given the historical circumstances he lived through – and his stance is intriguing when looked at from today’s western world where offering a reasoned moral opinion can often be viewed, in itself, as taking oneself too seriously. He wrote (in prose) in 1970:

‘During the war I saw the fire of a library. The same fire was devouring wise and stupid books, good and bad. Then I understood that it is nihilism which menaces culture the most. Nihilism of fire, stupidity, and hatred.’

However, Alissa Valles, in a Boston Review article says that Herbert was very much a poet of “ontological uncertainty” and feels that the Carpenters concentrated too much on his moral side:

‘The fine later translations by John and Bogdana Carpenter did a great deal to fill out the picture, as did Bogdana Carpenter’s important scholarship. But it, too, tended to concentrate on Herbert as a “poet of conscience” rather than of ontological uncertainty.’

I certainly found both the morality and the uncertainty in Herbert’s work and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. All great poets play with the fire of contradiction and it’s partly those oppositions that give their work tension and power.

I borrowed the Selected from the Scottish Poetry Library and would like to buy some Herbert poetry. But what to go for? Valles’s recent Collected would be the obvious choice, but the controversy surrounding it has been considerable. I’ll leave that for now, but will return to the issue over the next day or two.

Gabriele D'Annunzio

The poet, Gabriel d’Annunzio (1863-1938), is a legend, but his notoriety often has less to do with his poetry than with his life.

He was a ‘decadent’ and had affairs with many women, including celebrated actress Eleonora Duse, and took delight in scandalising the defenders of public morals. He also seemed fond of duelling. He was – without doubt – a man of action. His most famous exploit came after the First World War. D’Annunzio had supported the allies during the war and lost an eye in the fighting, but was furious when the city of Fiume was taken from Italy at the Treaty of Paris. He marched with 2000 men on the city and forced the Allied Powers to withdraw. However, Italy didn’t want to support his irregular action, blockaded the city, and demanded his surrender. D’Annunzio’s reaction was to declare the city an independent state with himself as autocratic leader. Incredibly, he held onto Fiume for more than 18 months and declared war on Italy before being booted out. He was disarmed and allowed to walk free.

JG Nichols, in 1988, called his exploits “a sort of elegant hooliganism.” However, in a 1922 speech to the Chicago Literary Club, Rudolph Altrocchi said that “the epic of his record during the war must, we repeat, redeem, in the sight of all, his previous lyric and moral shortcomings and prove besides that they had not fatally undermined his virile stamina.” Original newspaper reports (you can read them in full by clicking on the .pdf button at the link) from the New York Times in 1920 give some idea of the crisis he caused.

His politics were ambiguous, to say the least. The Italian fascist movement cite his ideas as a prime influence, but he often seemed hostile towards the fascists. He’s described (in the Wikipedia article at the link) as Mussolini’s mentor, but the article is also clear that Mussolini greatly feared d’Annunzio’s popularity and regularly paid him stipends not to enter the political arena. He opposed Hitler and all attempts to align Italy with the German Nazi regime. On the other hand, in Fiume, he “popularised the black shirts, the balcony speeches, the promulgation of ambitious charters and the entire choreography of street parades and ceremonies,” and some have accused him (without any hard evidence) of originating the practice of poisoning opponents and prisoners with an excess of castor oil, which Mussolini picked up on and used with relish. Although d’Annunzio never tiptoed around Mussolini, it would be foolish to suggest that his own ideas didn’t have much in common with the fascism that built on their foundations. D'Annunzio died in a large villa provided for him by Mussolini himself.

He was the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to get too close to. He’d double-cross you as soon as look at you and his main principle seemed to be to get what he wanted using any means necessary, as long as the price was right. His ego must have been huge. His first poem, written in school, was dedicated to the King of Italy. From 1923 until his death in 1938, he collected items for his own museum to ensure his commemoration beyond his own lifetime. Just try that one!

What about the poetry? Well, he is one of Italy’s greatest poets although comparatively little attention has been paid to his work in the English-speaking world.

I translated one of his poems recently, quite a ‘free’ interpretation, and I hope to work on several more in the next few months. My translation is below and, for those who read Italian, the original poem is below that. On one level, it’s about the Icarus story. But I think it’s really about poetry, the singular “mad flight” that only the greatest and most innovative artists make, by which even their common destination must be arrived at “alone”. With reference to the poem, it might be useful to know that Daedalus, father of Icarus and maker of the fatal wings, also made a wooden cow for King Minos's wife to hide in. She was in love with a bull (a curse sent by the god, Poseidon) and the contraption enabled her to satiate her lust in relative safety. She then gave birth to the Minotaur, but that's another story:

The Wing in the Sea

Ardi, in the sea’s haze a wing,
cast adrift, shudders like a wreck.
The feathers, severed and scattered,
ripple in the air’s uneven breath.

Ardi, I see wax, the wing of Icarus!
When its creator served the king’s court
he built a hollow, wooden cow –
with far from innocent import.

Who will raise it? Who can reunite
feathers with strength greater than before
and again attempt the mad flight?

Such exalted destiny for Daedalus’s son!
Courage drove him high above normal frontiers
and he dropped to the whirlpools alone.

*

L'Ala sul Mare

Ardi, un'ala sul mare è solitaria.
Ondeggia come pallido rottame.
E le sue penne, senza più legame,
sparse tremano ad ogni soffio d'aria.

Ardi, veggo la cera! E' l'ala icaria,
quella che il fabro della vacca infame
foggiò quando fu servo nel reame
del re gnòssio per l'opera nefaria.

Chi la raccoglierà? Chi con più forte
lega saprà rigiugnere le penne
sparse per ritentare il folle volo?

Oh del figlio di Dedalo alta sorte!
Lungi dal medio limite si tenne
il prode, e ruinò nei gorghi solo.

Suona per Te

Alexander Hutchison writes:

This is to let you know about an event on the evening of Thursday May 8th at 6pm (note new time!) in the Italian Cultural Insitute, 82 Nicolson Street, Edinburgh. I have been working with Alessandro Valenzisi on Italian versions of my poems – and we will be reading from and commenting on a selection of the poems and translations.

In the first part of the evening Professor Jonathan Usher of Edinburgh University has been invited by the Director of the Institute, Dr Luigino Zecchin, to provide an introductory critique and talk about the poems, and there will be an opportunity to put questions at some point to all participants.

Refreshments will be provided, and members of the audience will also receive a presentation copy of a booklet Suona per Te, printed specially for the occasion.

I do hope you will manage to make it along on the night!

If you are planning to go, can you RSVP the Italian Cultural Institute
on iicedimburgo [AT] esteri.it so they have an idea of numbers.


I certainly plan to be there. It should be really good.

Baltics

I was reading Sarah’s post on Transtromer and got onto talking about the Samuel Charters’s translation of Transtromer’s Baltics, a chapbook-length poem published in 1975 on Oyez Press.

This translation is hard to find. I’ve seen it selling for between £40 - £80. Imagine my shock when I went to Amazon.com and found several copies available at around $60-$110, and one copy via Powell’s bookshop for FIVE DOLLARS.

$5!!!!

Could it be the same book? Amazon didn’t give details of the translator, but it’s definitely Baltics by Tomas Transtromer, published in 1975 on Oyez Press. What else can it be?

I ordered it. The postage cost double that of the book, but that’s still only about £8 in total. It should arrive in a couple of weeks. But I still can’t believe it. There must be a catch. There must be something wrong…

Les Fleurs du Mal

fleursdumal.org is an incredible and exhaustive site. It contains everything you’d want to read by Charles Baudelaire – both the original French and a variety of English translations for each poem. I’ve just found the site and have read a few poems. It’s definitely one to bookmark.

The site is great for reference. However, I prefer paper. I can’t read any more than a few poems at a time on a computer screen. I don't know what it is, but I find it hard to concentrate on poems online. Often, if I really like a poem I find on the Internet, I'll print it out to read it properly.

Can anyone help by pointing me to the best book collection of English translations of Baudelaire?

Reflections on Translating Quasimodo - Part 1

Translation is a hard art. Before I began translating poems, I thought that was simply a case of finding words closest to the original words and then stringing them together. But it’s not so simple.

In my translation of Quasimodo’s Snow, I had many decisions to make, even though Snow is a short poem. In L3, the poor ones are chiusa within the soldiers coats. My “trapped” may be a bit strong. Is that what Quasimodo means? Or is it just that they are wrapped in them, dwarfed in coats to big for them? Or in some way the coats act as a metaphor for people closed off from each other, or from the world? I made the decision for “trapped.”

Then in L7-8, I had a real problem and I may not have translated it correctly. I went for “Strike/ at my forehead, strike towards my heart.” The Italian is “Battete/ sulla fronte, battete fino al cuore”, literally “Hit/ on the forehead, hit until the heart.” But whose forehead(s) and heart(s)? Is he exhorting the “dead” to beat on their own foreheads and hearts? “Fronte” and “cuore” are both singular but can refer to a generic plurality of foreheads and hearts. Or is he referring to the foreheads and hearts of the poem’s “we” – Quasimodo and whoever he is with at this moment, or perhaps humanity in general? Or is he thinking of his own forehead and heart - he, the narrator, the poet?

I went for that last option.

Oh, you dead. Strike
at my forehead, strike towards my heart.

However, I noted later that Jack Bevan, who translated Quasimodo’s poems for Penguin (remember the days when Penguin published stuff like this?) for the Selected Poems in 1965, went for the dead - a very different meaning, and I always suspect other translators know something that I don't know (especially those published by Penguin). My Italian can be really dodgy at times. Bevan writes:

…Ah, these dead ones! Beat
your foreheads, beat right down to the heart.

And finally, we have the final two lines, and the tricky image of the closure. Quasimodo writes:

Che urli almeno qualcuno nel silenzio
in questa cerchio bianco di sepolti.

Literally, “That someone at least may howl in the silence/ in this white circle of those having been buried.” Does Quasimodo really mean that there are graves arranged in a circle? Or is “cerchio” being used to connote completeness, like a circle, and by extension, a metaphor for the earth? And it was problematic to find a translation for “sepolti”, a participle being used as a noun, “the having been buried.” That image of burial was important, connecting the snow and the dead. I went for:

Someone should at least cry in the silence,
in this white sphere of the buried

Jack Bevan leans more to the literal:

Let someone, at least, howl in the silence,
In this white circle of buried ones.

There are no final answers. Each translation must stand as a poem. The translator can only hope against hope that he has communicated something of what was in the original writer’s mind.

Neve

Snow

Evening falls: once more the earth departs –
the images we love, trees,
animals, the poor trapped
in soldiers’ coats, mothers
whose tears have dried out their wombs.
The snow on the lawns shines at us
like a moon. Oh, you dead. Strike
at my forehead, strike towards my heart.
Someone should at least cry in the silence,
in this white sphere of the buried.

- Salvatore Quasimodo, 1947 (my translation)

The Deleted World

I’ve just read The Deleted World a new collection by Tomas Transtromer (translated by Robin Robertson), Sweden's greatest living poet. Only 15 poems, most of them short, which hardly seems worth a book.

But there’s no filler. Every poem is terrific, testimony to a stark, haunting vision, which isn’t content to rest on easily won melancholy. It's secular, but the spiritual is present as much in the absences as in the presences. I'll try to write more about it soon.

From A Winter Night, which starts with “The Storm puts its mouth to the house/ and blows to get a tone”:

A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid.
the storm will blow us empty.

Quasimodo Again

I’ve translated another two Quasimodo poems, the first two from his 1947 volume, Giorno Dopo Giorno (Day After Day).

On the Willow Branches

And we, how could we have sung
with a foreign foot pressed on our heart,
among the dead littering the piazzas
on grass brittle with ice, over the lamblike
crying of children, over the black howl
of the mother who stumbled upon her son
crucified on a telegraph pole?
On the willow branches, as offerings,
even our harps were suspended,
and rocked gently in the mourning wind.

Letter

This silence frozen in the streets,
this apathetic wind, which now slinks
low through dead leaves or rises again
to the colours of foreign flags…
perhaps my anxiety to send word to you
before the sky once more shuts
over another day, perhaps the inertia,
our most contemptible evil… Life
is not in this terrible, dark beating
in the heart, life is not piety, life
is no more than a bloodsport where death
is in flower. O my sweet gazelle,
I remind you of that bright geranium
on a wall riddled with bullet holes.
Now, does even death hold no consolation
for the living, even death for love?

Another Quasimodo

I’ve managed to translate another Quasimodo poem, but not one of his pre-war efforts. This is post-war, that hint of ever-present doom within the pastoral scene, and yet...

Almost a Madrigal

The sunflower bends to the west
and the day already accelerates
to ruin within its eye and the summer air
thickens and already twists the leaves and the smoke
of building sites. Everything recedes with the dry
flow of clouds and screech of lightning –
the sky’s final trick. Again,
as ever, my dear, we are struck by the change
in trees cramped within the circle
of canals. But it is still our day
and still that sun, which departs
with the thread of its tender ray.

I no longer have memories, I do not want to remember;
memory rises again from death,
life is without end. Each day
is ours. One will stop forever,
and you with me, when it seems late to us.
Here on the canal’s bank, feet
swinging, like children,
we watch the water, the nearest branches
in its shade of darkening green.
And the man who approaches in silence
does not conceal a knife in his hands,
but a geranium flower.

Don Paterson's Rilke

Mark Doty sings the praises of Don Paterson’s new “versions” of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. I can’t wait to read the book, but I’ll have to hang on for the paperback version. The price of hardbacks is crazy, considering the paperback will appear in (I guess) about 6 months time. I am trying not to give in.

“Don Paterson's new versions - his term, to distinguish the poems from more assiduously faithful renderings - of this legendary sequence… create a warm, far more earthbound Rilke. Paterson gives the sonnets, perhaps for the first time in English, a true sense of an inhabited skin, a pulsing body responding to the life of the senses.”

Quasimodo

Salvatore Quasimodo is an interesting figure because his poetry changed completely through extreme historical circumstance.

Before the Second World War, he was one of the “hermetic poets”, along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, who drew inspiration from the French Symbolists. They sought an unadorned verse in which an image would evoke its object in the purest form possible, but they used a personal and obscure set of symbols that can be difficult to interpret without knowing the “key”.

After WW2, Quasimodo’s poetry made a radical change. On receiving the Nobel prize for Literature in 1959, he referred to this in his acceptance speech:

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate "when the trees fall and the walls collapse ". At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician and the mediocre poets with their armour of symbols and mystic purities pretend to ignore the real poet. It is a story which repeats itself like the cock's crow; indeed, like the cock's third crow.

Quasimodo’s poetry became an exploration of Italian society in the wartime years and how that experience continued to affect it post-war. There is a search for meaning through the agonies of guilt, violence, and shame. I’ve translated one of these poems below, and it has a urgent and direct power (or at least, it should have if I've done my job adequately):

Man of My Time

You are still made of stone and sling,
man of my time. You inhabit the fuselage,
with evil wings, the sundials of death,
I have seen you – on the fire wagon, at the gallows,
at the torture wheels. I have seen you: it was you,
with your perfect science committed to extermination,
without love, without Christ. You have killed again,
as always, as your fathers killed, as the animals
killed on seeing you for the first time.
And this reek of blood is as the day
when a brother said to his brother:
“Let us go to the fields.” And that cold, stubborn echo
has reached as far as you, in your days.
Forget, O sons, the clouds of blood
risen from the earth, forget your fathers:
their tombs sink into ashes,
the black birds, the wind, cover their hearts.

- Salvatore Quasimodo, 1947.

A Translation from the Italian...

I'm really glad to have come across this poem from Bologna poet, Davide Rondoni, from a collection published in 2003. Really good, I think, although I can't vouch for the translation (I did my best):

To love someone…

To love one person
is a long journey –

cliffs, falls of water
and sudden, expansive darkness
the closure of forests,
flashes at times
on a silence vast as the sea

and streets high above, (shout)

avenues immersed unexpectedly
in unfamiliar light

To love one, a thousand, everyone
is like holding a map of wind.
We can’t succeed, but the heart
has been placed at the centre of the chest
for this great, marvellous failure.

On the plateaux of each night
here I am with repetitions and hands that have spilled poetry:
do not wish them ill, they are yours, do not make them go away.

- Davide Rondoni (from Avrebbe amato chiunque (He Would Have Loved Anyone) , Guanda, 2003), translated by me.