THE DRY AIR OF THE FIRE

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BARTOLO CATTAFI
THE DRY AIR OF THE FIRE:
SELECTED POEMS
EDITED & TRANSLATED BY
RUTH FELDMAN & BRIAN SWANN
INTRODUCTION BY GLAUCO CAMBON
TRANSLATION PRESS
ANN ARBOR 1981
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IN MEMORIAM
It was with great sadness that we learned of Bartolo Cattafi’s death in March of 1979, while we were
putting the finishing touches to this book. He was very Sicilian-mercurial, cultivated, a fine artist as
well as a poet. He was, in addition, a worm and generous friend.
We regret the fact that he did not live to see his book, the first in English. We offer it now as a
memorial.
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STATEMENT BY BARTOLO CATTAFI*
I began when I was twenty-one. Maybe it was the puttees, the hobnailed boots, the sores on my feet
while I was doing basic training, and the inadequate rations; perhaps it was the nervous collapse, the
military hospital, the key-turnings of the orderly, the thuds of epileptics hitting the ground, the steps of
sleep-walkers, the screams of malingerers, and the glassy eyes of madmen. Maybe it was the fault of
all of this, or of something else, something that wasn’t functioning properly inside me, but at any rate
as soon as I got my sick leave and arrived in Sicily (it was the spring of ’43), the war ceased to exist
for me as an exceptional monstrous event.
I began to write poetry – I don’t exactly know how. I was always prey to a kind of intoxication,
bewildered by oversharp, oversweet sensations. The thousands of things offered to me by that
unnerving spring were magically pregnant with meanings, rich in acute delicious radiations. As
though I were in a second childhood, I began to enumerate loved things, to compile in poetry an
ingenuous inventory of the world.
All around, the racket of bombs and the blasts of Hurricanes and Spitfires… I went off into the
colorful countryside nourishing myself on tastes, smells, images. Death was not an unnatural element
in that picture; it was like a flowering peach-tree, a hawk above the hen, a lizard flashing across the
path.
This is how I wrote my first poems. Then time passes, year after year, meetings, books read, business
matters, travel, the ordinary history that keeps on growing (or only growing clearer) day by day,
testing and pursuing the myths, the symbols that belong to us, repudiating them, embracing them
again, involving others in the play of the vital undertaking, always following the most urgent interests,
glandular secretions, ancestral legacies, the diagrams on one’s internal card-file, the furies, and the
changing and steadfast loves, the advances and retreats on the common road.
The history of my poetry must, of necessity, coincide with my history as a man. I reject and I consider
out of bounds the cold determination of the intellect, the exercises (no matter how civilized), the
experiments that slyly or ingenuously attempt the impossible throw of the dice.
I simply do not understand the “métier” of poet, the tools, the laboratory of this “métier”. That of the
poet is, to my mind, a pure and simple human condition. Poetry belongs to our most intimate biology,
conditions and develops our destiny, is a way like any other of being men. Beyond the mental
schemes, beyond foolish fancies, beyond chill volition and scholarly masturbation, poetry is born
under the visible sign of the unforeseen (there are mysterious ripenings, catalyzers that are not always
identifiable, unsuspected forces and forms that free themselves, shattering the state of “quiet”, that
leap and break loose according to the lines of a natural design to which one must, bravely, surrender
oneself, identifying and strengthening it, as much as is permissible, with wary vigilance in the middle
of the seductive forest of deceits, mirages, false representations). For me, then, poetry is adventure,
voyage, discovery, vital tracing of the tribal idols, an attempt to decipher the world, the capture and
possession of fragments of the world, naked denunciation of the world in which one is man, dreadful
existential act.
But perhaps, in today’s world, I am mistaken, I am naive, a simpleton: perhaps I should be writing
very different discourses. I have, however, a thousand reasons more than Apollinaire to appeal for
mercy.
Bartolo Cattafi
*
from Poesia Italiana Contemporanea, ed. Giacinto Spagnoletti, (Guanda, 1969)
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INTRODUCTION
As I re-read the many poems that came as transatlantic messages from my friend Bartolo Cattafi in
something like two decades, I brood over the harrowing timeliness this book of selected translations
will have now that the news of his death, foreseen but unacceptable, has reached us. And if such
demise makes me feel unequal to the responsibility of critical judgment, at least Cattafi’s joint
translators, whom the bond of friendship also includes, have not been caught unprepared. Ruth
Feldman and Brian Swann, poets in their own right, are wedded to modern Italian poetry, and they
have served its cause in this country as no one else has. Their sure touch is confirmed in the selection
of representative lyrics from the volumes Cattafi published during the quarter of a century that has
elapsed from his original appearance in Chiara and Erba’s anthology of postwar Italian poetry, Quarta
Generazione of 1954. Accordingly, it is far from inappropriate that just as Bartolo closes his earthly
career a new career can be opened for his work by these knowledgeable friends who are giving him
the voice of their land.
In this American voice into which Cattafi’s Sicilian soul has transmigrated, I am glad to hear and
recognize that early departure of his, “Departure from Greenwich” (1953), which like so many other
poems of his first books portrays the restlessness of a curious voyager ever ready to dock at, and
weigh anchor from, so many harbors around the world. Always a visitor, the roving persona at this
stage can take vivid snapshots of reality in which certain details obtain special focus to reinvest the
whole scene with further meaning. For instance, in “Arab Zone” of 1953, registering a visit to the
Algerian town of Philippeville on the eve of protracted anti-colonialist revolt, the initial scenery picturesque to the point of deliberately mimicking a picture-postcard effect- gradually makes way for
deeper exploration:
With today’s, tomorrow’s heat
children, fruit, fly-larvae
ripen quickly in the shade
of whitewashed things,
a restless swarm in the quarters
of natives, of insects.
And the conclusion, as the camera eye ranges, frustrated, over impenetrable alleys, brings out the
historical suspense that subsequent events were to define so dramatically:
We do not know the deadly
path that besieges us
full of bare feet, of whispers;
we do not see the scarlet
thoughts on the dog’s forehead
the patient seesaw
in the hyena’s breast.
In another poem from the same cycle, “From Nyhavn” (1952), the sailor persona, tattoo and all, gleans
the undefinable “contraband” of “music and libations” from a visit to a brothel-like waterfront dive;
“tomorrow [he] will steer the exact course,” but “now [he has] the example, the gut,/the straight dry
hunger of the gulls.”
The motif will recur, narratively developed, in “Guardian Angel”, a poem from the subsequent
collection, L’osso, l’anima (The bone, the Soul) of 1964, describing a visit to a real brothel. Still in the
earlier book, Le mosche del meriggio (The Flies of Noon), of 1958, which includes Partenza da
Greenwich (Departure from Greenwich), voyaging can take the form of a (disappointed) reaching
back for the mythic Greek past of Sicily (“History”):
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Where is ancient Greece
with drachmas sonorous
as Homer’s sea?
I haven’t a clue, I have a round
telephone token,
I move when the color of
the traffic light permits…
Archipelagoes, remembered or imaginary but always elusive, constellate these pages, and in one case
(“The Aeolians”) they provide the seascape backdrop for a historical evocation of the Sicilian
persona’s Hellenic ancestors –shipwrecked in today’s “City’s” metallic glare.
But the conflicting urges of the nomad soul looking back towards its roots and of the rooted existence
that yearns to pull itself free converge, at the limit, in moments of lyrical abandon like that “Agave”
(from the early Fifties, first published in Quarta Generazione and in Il nome sopra i muri, The name
on the Walls), which stands as an exemplary, and revealing, accomplishment:
Abandon the Sicilian sand, the music and the honey
of Arabs and Greeks,
break the sweet ties, this torpid
milk of roots,
descend into the sea drowsy queen
green beast with arms of sorrow
like one who is ready for the crossing; in the big
cities, in the snows, the woods, the desert,
caravans go by eternally;…
An apt embodiment of painful constriction, the weird tropical plant elicits utter release in the poet’s
imagination that can expand to take in the whole world’s space and movement, actual freedom.
Cattafi’s baroque sensibility has successfully vied with Garcia Lorca’s, and with Hart Crane’s (the
Crane of “Air Plant”) in creating a vegetal emblem of the existential condition.
At the same time, Cattafi has injected a specifically insular, and Sicilian, component in his emblem’s
semantic radiation; and for that matter, this poem reminds me of many another in the same eminently
Sicilian collection (like “Astro” or “Preghiera per il Signore”) which the translators have left out of
their choice. Metaphoric effusiveness and strong tone in such pieces tend to align our Sicilian poet
with the Continental Southerners of his generation, Bodini or Scotellaro. There is expansive breath
and color in his utterance at this point, but there will be less and less in Cattafi’s verse as it progresses
in the exploration of aridity; and of this development already “The Colors of the South” (from L’osso,
l’anima) supplies a clear portent:
Bone ivory chalk
quicklime and milk
of plaster
of lead camellia
lily magnolia jasmine
sand dust salt.
Deceitful sign
it is a shadow of color
in the blind eye, hugely white.
What is elsewhere a fluent diction has clotted here into a verbless style where nouns crowd one
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another like limestone fossils left behind by a vanished sea. It is the thingness of things that matters,
the secret hidden in their opacity.
Much less luxuriant and sinuous in the end than his fellow islander Lucio Piccolo’s, Cattafi’s poetics
makes for an increasingly drier kind of emblematism, which places individual objects under a
magnifying lens to the point of burning them, or else outlines allegorical “stories” and situations, quite
Kafkaesque, to encode a forever frustrated search for meaning and release. Relevant instances are
“Justice” or “Mimesis”: in the former poem, the executioner’s axe cannot be stopped by the judges’
last-minute change of heart, while in the latter, the unnamed soldiers who could not successfully
defend the mountain passes join the enemy and become their own killers. All in all, a feverish quest
for sense or liberation, but, whatever the resources (the “Wingspan”, as the title of a significant poem
has it),
A beating of wings up through
memory’s vast walls doesn’t save us
from the shadows that pursue us; the hyena,
the wolf, the abject
angels in crooked procession.
The wings of imagination are prisoners of a calcified history.
No wonder that a later collection, the eponym of Feldman and Swann’s volume, should bear the title
L’aria secca del fuoco (The Dry Air of the Fire, 1972). Sicily, the island to which Cattafi had returned
from so many travels and sojourns in the North, holds the center of vision; insular bitterness, historical
resentment, even revulsion alternate with occasional flashes of ecstasy to punctuate the poet’s longdrawn confrontation with his own heritage. Sicilian separatism militantly comes to the fore in “Mare
Grosso”. Rage can modulate into a movingly anachronistic faith in Mediterranean civilization (“In the
Mediterranean maquis”):
from Gibraltar to the Bosphorus
we stare at Homer’s sea
rich in deceits and certainties;
hidden under the wave
faithful to lares and penates
we hang garlands
on our huts
on our peasant Parthenons
set on a single coast
that at the gull’s scream
turns like a sweetsheer ring.
But in the last volume to date, Marzo e le sue idi (March and its Ides, 1977), the dominant trend is
another, and the poet concentrates on myriads of emblematic objects, each isolated in its moment of
nonhistorical vision; it’s as if he had given up the search for history’s meaning to become the
crystallographer of existence. There is still the vague possibility that he will capture “infinity in a
grain of sand”, in Blake’s footsteps; but the book, for all its strange beauty, strikes me as an act of
endlessly fragmented perception, like the emblem books of Renaissance and baroque fame which it
somewhat resembles.
Wholeness, once glimpsed, is now totally out of reach, and what is left is a whirl of monads which do
not add up to a cosmos but are inflexibly scrutinized by an eye addicted to the microscope.
Significance, then, becomes marginal, a byproduct of intentional alienation. The diction is as bare as
can be; no melodic effusion is left, only the sharp snap and twang of the jew’s harp which Cattafi, like
his fellow islander Quasimodo before him, extolled as ethnic badge. Pieces like “Thirst”, “Thistles”
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and “Cans”, toward the end of the present selection, may exemplify the poetics of March and its Ides,
though only by anticipation. For in these last years Bartolo was really getting down to the very bone
of words and things, in a desiccating gaze with no mercy in it. An intimation of death?
As I finish these notes, on Good Friday, 1979, the mail brings his last book, L’allodola ottobrina (The
October Skylark), with the warm inscription Bartolo managed to write on February 26, just two or
three weeks before his death. And a first glance at this last message still catches the poet at his
relentless game-testing every object, moment or event, for the desperate chance of an ultimate
decipherment.
Glauco Cambon
Spring 1979
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From LE MOSCHE DEL MERIGGIO/THE FLIES OF NOON (1958)
PARTENZA DA GREENWICH
Si parte sempre da Greenwich
dallo zero segnato in ogni carta e in questo
grigio sereno colore d’Inghilterra.
Armi e bagagli, belle
speranze a prua,
sprezzando le tavole dei numeri
i calcoli che scattano scorrevoli
come toppe addolcite
da un olio armonioso, in un’esatta
prigione.
Troppe prede s’aggirano tra i fuochi
delle Isole, e navi al largo,
piene, panciute, buone
per essere abbordate dalla ciurma
sciamata ai Tropici
votata alla cattura
di sogni difficili, feroci.
Ed alghe, spume,
il fondo azzurro in cui
pesca il gabbiano del ricordo
posati accanto al grigio
disteso colore
degli occhi, del cuore, della mente,
guano australe ai semi
superstiti del mondo.
DEPARTURE FROM GREENWICH
You always leave from Greenwich
from the zero marked on every map and in this
gray calm color of England.
Bag and baggage, fine
hopes at the prow,
scorning the tables of numbers
the calculations that release,
fluid as locks tamed
by harmonious oil, in a precise
prison.
Too many victims circulate among
the Islands’ fires, and ships out at sea,
loaded, bulging, good
for boarding by the rabble crew
that swarmed to the Tropics
dedicated to the capture
of fierce difficult dreams.
And seaweed, foam,
the blue depths in which
the gull of memory fishes,
set beside the gray
stretched color
of my eyes, heart, mind,
southern guano for the world’s
surviving seeds.
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L’AGAVE
Abbandona la sabbia siciliana, la musica e il
[miele
degli Arabi e dei Greci,
rompi i dolci legami, questo torpido
latte delle radiche,
discendi in mare regina sonnolenta
verde bestia con braccia di dolore
come chi è pronto al varco; nelle grandi
città, nelle nevi, nel bosco, nel deserto
carovane camminano in eterno;
viaggia assieme all’anima
fredda dei gabbiani
assieme al cuore fecondo al pesce pregno
che arricchisce la rete più lontana
e la mano lentissima di Dio
venuta in volo da un nido di nebbia.
THE AGAVE
Abandon the Sicilian sand, the music and the
[honey
of Arabs and Greeks,
break the sweet ties, the torpid
milk of roots,
descend into the sea drowsy queen
green beast with arms of sorrow
like one who is ready for the crossing; in the big
cities, in the snows, the woods, the desert,
caravans go by eternally;
travel together with the cold
soul of the gulls
together with the fecund heart the pregnant fish
that enriches the farthest net
and God’s slow hand
that has come flying from a nest of fog.
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From L’OSSO, L’ANIMA / THE BONE, THE SOUL (1964)
TIMONIERE
Quindi andai da lui e gli dissi
Ti prego accosta a dritta
è quello l’arcipelago del cuore.
Mi guardò e sorrise,
mi diede un colpo sulla spalla,
invertì come un fulmine la rotta
e fuggimmo agli antipodi dell’isole
mettendo nelle vele molto vento.
Aveva al timone mani salde,
occhi acuti per tutto,
isole, scogli, cuori.
Comunque ero caduto in tentazione.
Era questo lo scopo delle isole.
HELMSMAN
Then I went to him and said
if you please turn to the right
that is the heart’s archipelago.
He looked at me and smiled,
hit me on the shoulder,
reversed course like lightning
and we fled the antipodes of the islands
putting much wind in the sails.
He had firm hands on the rudder,
sharp eyes for everything,
islands, reefs, hearts.
However I had fallen into temptation.
This was the islands’ purpose.
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ARCIPELAGHI
Maggio, di primo mattino
la mente gira su se stessa come
un bel prisma un bel cristallo un poco
stordito dalla luce.
Dal soffitto si stacca
neroiridato ilare il festone
delle mosche,
posa su grandi carte azzurre
riparte e lascia
ronzando isole minime, arcipelaghi
forse d’Africa e d’Asia.
Intanto in cielo sempre più si svolge
la mesta bandiera della luce.
Prima di sera l’unghia
scrosta l’isole
le immagini superflue.
Le carte ridiventano deserte.
ARCHIPELAGOS
May, early in the morning
the mind turns on itself like
a fine prism a fine crystal somewhat
stunned by the light.
The gay black-rainbowed
festoon of flies
breaks away from the ceiling,
lights on large blue maps
takes off again and, buzzing,
leaves lesser islands, archipelagos
perhaps of Africa and Asia.
Meanwhile in the sky, light’s sad banner
keeps unfurling.
Before evening the fingernail
scrapes off the islands
superfluous images.
The maps are empty again.
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MIMESI
Venimmo per vedere
e per vincere.
Alla nostra ispezione risultò:
arnesi guasti, armi spuntate, altro.
Scalando gli alti passi di montagna
impossibile vincere, resistere.
Caduta massi, pericolo di frecce,
passaggi fin troppo custoditi.
Allora per mimesi cambiammo
colore. Adottato il mantello del nemico
andammo all’assalto di noi stessi.
I nostri colpi furono i peggiori.
MIMESIS
We came to see
and to conquer.
At our inspection this ensued:
Ruined tools, blunted weapons, other things.
Scaling the high mountain passes
impossible to win, hold out.
Rock-falls, danger of arrows,
passages all too well guarded.
Then by mimesis we changed
Color. Having adopted the enemy’s cloak
we went to the assault of ourselves.
Our blows were the worst.
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From L’ARIA SECCA DEL FUOCO/THE DRY AIR OF THE FIRE (1972)
CANCRO
Il sei luglio alle cinque del mattino
il tram a vapore partito per Messina
emise dall’imbuto fumo
faville e un lungo fischio,
appena nato girai la testa
verso quel primo saluto della vita.
Appartengo a una razza
bisognosa d’auguri
mi dolgo di non potere
stringermi la destra con la destra
baciarmi le guance
quando una volta l’anno
mi scorre accanto zampettando all’alba
l’acquatico figlio della luna
che porta la mia sorte sigillata
nel pentagono della sua corazza.
CANCER
July sixth five in the morning
the steam-tram headed for Messina
spewed from its funnel
smoke sparks and a long whistle;
newborn I turned my head
toward that first greeting of life.
I belong to a breed
that needs omens.
It grieves me I can’t
shake my right hand with my right
kiss my own cheeks
when once a year
the moon’s aquatic son
who carries my fate sealed
in the pentagon of his breastplate
runs beside me trotting at dawn.
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MARE GROSSO
Ciò che ancora resiste
ad una logora ruspa inesistente
creato con amore
dai padri prefascisti
fascisti postfascisti
su quest’ultima spiaggia chiamata Mare Grosso
sono baracche di tela legno latta
abitate da ragazze baldracche
che siedono in visione sulla soglia
sotto lampade accese a un filo bianco
con il mare alle spalle e la Calabria
mentre in Calabria le loro consorelle
hanno il mare alle spalle e la Sicilia.
Piemontesi fascisti americani
ultimi solo in ordine di tempo…
E lasciamolo perdere Mameli
il nostro inno la suona il marranzano
isolana lamina percossa
da un inutile fiato di dolore.
(Il vero inno però sarebbe l’altro
quello secco scandito bruciante
dei beretta e dei breda presi a loro
per noi per nostro conto
puntati scaricati su di loro.)
1
2
MARE GROSSO
The things that still resist
a worn-out non-existent bulldozer
created lovingly
by pre-fascist fascist
postfascist fathers
on this final shore called Mare Grosso
are shacks of cloth wood tin
lived in by young whores
who sit visible on the threshold
under lamps hung from a white wire
with the sea and Calabria behind them
while in Calabria their sisters
have the sea and Sicily behind them
Piedmontese Fascists Americans
last only chronologically…
and let’s not mention Mameli1
the marranzano2 plays our hymn
insular metal leaf struck
by a useless breath of sorrow.
(The real hymn however would be the other
that dry burning beat
of the Berettas and the Bredas taken from them
for us for our account
pointed discharged at them).
Mameli is the composer of a famous hymn celebrating Italy’s unification.
A Sicilian musical instrument similar to the jew’s harp.
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SETE
Dove anche l’ombra è sbiadita
dal riverbero che le balza addosso
certe freschezze aniciate
cilestrino d’imposte
ceramica di piastrelle
vetro di gazose
croste dipinte e sparpagliate
nel deserto bollente
sono limpidi segni
della sete abbagliante
gocciole della fonte.
THIRST
Where even shade is bleached
by the glare that leaps onto it
certain anise freshness
light blue of shutters
ceramic of tiles
glass od soft-drink bottles
painted crusts strewn
in the boiling desert
are clear signs
of dazzling thirst
drops from the fountain.
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SIC ITUR AD ASTRA
Amano gli dei
i numeri dispari
dice Virgilio
perciò amano l’asimmetrico
il dimidiato
il guercio
il cionco sbilanciato
il rimanente netto
il soggetto scempiato.
Vengono gli dei
li abbagliano con forbici d’argento
lestamente recidono ai diletti
un polmone
un coglione
un rognone
li ritoccano rendendoli
simili ad archetipi della disparità
truccati da umani.
Poi li mettono seduti in fila
d’inverno imbacuccati
sulle balze d’Olimpo tra le nuvole.
SIC ITUR AD ASTRA
The gods love
odd numbers
says Virgil
therefore they love the asymmetrical
the split-in-two
the one-eyed
the off-balance hobbler
the clean-edged remainder
the slaughtered subject.
The gods come
dazzle them with silver shears
deftly lop from their favorites
a lung
a ball
a kidney
retouch them making them
like archetypes of disparity
tricked out as humans.
Then they place them seated in rows
muffled up in winter
on the slopes of Olympus among clouds.
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I FICHI DELL’INVERNO
I fichi dell’inverno
vengono ai rami stravolti dal freddo.
Chiusi sodi caparbi
dissimili dagli estivi
svenevoli compagni
sono rossi di dentro come un tramonto
gelido senza giallo
selvatici sospettosi
a ogni stormir di fronda
serrano fra le labbra asprigne
una riga di zucchero.
Giunti inaspettati
se ne vanno così
come sono venuti
frammenti erranti
nel vuoto e nel buio
per un attimo colpiti dalla luce.
WINTER FIGS
Winter figs
arrive on branches convulsed by cold.
Tight-shut hard stubborn
unlike their easy-going
summer companions
they’re red inside like
an icy sunset with no yellow
wild suspicious
at every rustle of a bough
between sour lips they lock
a streak of sugar.
Arriving unexpected
they leave
the way they came
fragments roaming
in the void in the dark
struck for an instant by the light.
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ROBINSON
Su un’isola deserta
di sabbie finissime
sempre pronte a franare nel nulla
fu duro tirare fuori
tutto dal proprio sacco
la terra l’acqua
per farne fango
col fango fare la compagna la capanna
e tirare la barca i remi che spesso
si mettevano di traverso
l’amo l’arma l’aratro
cavare fuori caino con abele
ricci rose conchiglie
ombre d’estate
focolari con angeli d’inverno.
La fatica fu quella d’inventare
i nomi i colori le funzioni
e le tre dimensioni da tagliare
nell’amorfa miniera misteriosa.
Fu pesante finanche posare
le mani stanche inesistenti
sui fianchi d’aria.
ROBINSON
On a desert island
of finest sand
always on the point of collapsing
it was hard to pull everything
out of his own bag
earth water
to make mud
with that mud to make female companion and hut
and to pull the boat the oars that often
slipped sideways
fish-hook weapon plough
to bring forth Cain and Abel
chestnuts roses and shells
summer shadows
hearths with winter angels.
The hard work lay in inventing
names colors functions
and the three dimensions to be cut
in the amorphous mysterious mine.
It was also troublesome to place
tired non-existent hands
on the air’s hips.
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IL RESTO MANCA
Mancavano pagine
il marmo dell’epigrafe
era scheggiato
due sole parole
cetera desunt
il resto mancante
mancanti la testa e i piedi
e tutto il resto mancante
che testa e piedi divide
cetera desunt… cetera desunt…
parole sul frontone d’un tempio vuoto
vorticanti col vento come per dirci
solo noi ci siamo
tutto il resto manca
era questo che non sapevate.
THE REST IS MISSING
Pages were missing
The marble of the inscription
was splintered
two words only
cetera desunt
the rest is missing
the head and feet missing
and all the rest that divides
head and feet missing
cetera desunt… cetera desunt…
words on the pediment of an empty temple
whirling with the wind as if to tell us
only we are here
all the rest is missing
that was what you didn’t know.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
From LA DISCESA AL TRONO/THE DESCENT TO THE THRONE (1975)
ME NE VADO
Un bel giorno me ne vado
sono stanco e stufo
lascio le stanze
i gradini della scala
briciole e cenere
e tutto il resto avanzato
in pacchi e pacchetti
che qualcun altro aprirà.
Sull’uscio una luce
rade il cielo
lo fa concavo orrendo
mi chiudo nel guscio delle palpebre
cammino e incespico
in un pacco in un braccio teso
in un lamento che dice
non pestarmi col piede
dammi la mano.
TAKING OFF
One fine day I’ll take off
I’m tired and fed-up
I’ll leave the rooms
the stairs
crumbs and ashes
and all the rest that’s left over
in large and small packages
which someone else will open.
At the entrance a light
rakes the sky
turns it to a bald hollow horror
I shut myself into my eyelids’ husk
I walk stumble
on a package an outstretched arm
a lament that says
don’t trample me
give me a hand.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
QUESTI PICCOLI UCCELLI
Questi piccoli uccelli
vorrebbero in fondo darti la caccia
con un’unghiata
strapparti la faccia
questa è la loro tristezza
quando ti guardano
e abbassano le palpebre gialle.
THESE LITTLE BIRDS
These little birds
would really like to hunt you
claw
your face off
that’s why they’re sad
when they look at you
and lower their yellow lids.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
IN AGOSTO L’OLIVA
In agosto l’oliva
sovente cade sotto colpi di sole
grinze di scuro viola
e trova posto fra i piccoli
morti prematuri
che nell’ombra si mordono le mani
alla luce vengono a fare
terribili capriole
fingendosi vivi.
IN AUGUST
In August the olive
drops often under the sun’s blows
dark violet wrinkles
and finds a place among the small
untimely dead
who gnaw their hands in the shadow
come into the light to turn
terrible somersaults
pretending to be alive.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
LA DISCESA AL TRONO
Non è una pausa di riflessione
è un raccogliere forze
ed elemosine
seduti a sommo delle scale
prima di intraprendere
la discesa al trono
e tutto profondere
al fondo roccioso
aspro inebriante della disperazione.
THE DESCENT TO THE THRONE
It’s not a reflective pause
it’s a gathering of forces
and charities
seated at the top of the stairs
before undertaking
the descent to the throne
and squandering everything
on the bottom of desperation
rocky sharp intoxicating.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
UN PRATO
Dopo tante stazioni
un prato di trifoglio
di qualsivoglia erba
agibile palestra
pasquale officina
dominicale come un vangelo
gli ulivi d’allora
il Golgota vicino
il guanciale
i tre morti
i cieli assorti nella contemplazione.
A MEADOW
After so many stations
a meadow of clover
of whatever kind of grass
feasible gymnasium
Paschal workshop
dominical as a Gospel
the olive trees of that time
Golgotha nearby
the pillow
the three dead men
the heavens absorbed in contemplation.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
From MARZO E LE SUE IDI/MARCH AND ITS IDES (1977)
NATURA MORTA
Ecco un mare con una faccia
che non cambia più
secco duro gessoso
con bianche sbavature
orti d’alghe di carta
pesci di terra
cotta e colorata
ficcati a testa in giù.
STILL LIFE
Here is a sea whose face
doesn’t change any more
dry hard chalky
with white slaver
gardens of paper seaweed
fish of colored
terra cotta
stuck head down.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
MARZO E LE SUE IDI
Di tutto diffido
del pugnale di bruto
della tenera carne di cesare
dello stesso destino
che passi presto il tempo
vengano alfine marzo e le sue idi.
MARCH AND ITS IDES
I mistrust everything
the dagger of Brutus
the tender flesh of Caesar
destiny itself
may time pass quickly
may March and its Ides finally arrive.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
RITO DI PRIMAVERA
Ora che il ghiro si desta
e il sangue nuovo
entra nei tubi schiumando
dando il capogiro
su questa pietra cara agli dei
un bel collo ci vuole
– quei furbi fuggiti lontano –
di bella forma
di pelle fresca
con vene che si gonfino nei gesti
drammatici
mobile come un braccio
come una gamba con una carica
fortemente umana.
RITE OF SPRING
Now that the dormouse wakes
and new blood enters
foaming into the pipes
making you dizzy
on the stone dear to the gods
a lovely neck is needed –
those rogues having run off –
with a beautiful shape
fresh skin
and veins that swell in dramatic
gestures
mobile as an arm
a leg with a strongly human
charge.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
GABBIANI
Un punto un bruscolo di catrame
un forellino guarda
staccatosi da qui
portatosi in altre prospettive
i tuoi pensieri di vecchio seduto sulla scogliera
i gabbiani inerte
carta straccia
che non hanno più fame
e non è vero
hanno fame
girati da un altro lato
voraci come prima
cambiano faccia e tipo di mangime.
GULLS
A dot a speck of tar
a tiny hole watches
detached from here
carried off to other perspectives
your old man’s thoughts while sitting on the cliff
the gulls
inert waste-paper
who are no longer hungry
but it’s not true
they are hungry
turning in the opposite direction
voracious as before
they change both face and type of food.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
From L’ALLODOLA OTTOBRINA/THE OCTOBER LARK (1979)
IL TUO RILIEVO
Il braccio rapido e forte
l’occhio con lampi
un’indocile piega nella mente
rintuzzi il mondo
il tuo rilievo
appiattito dal tempo
dai lunghi contatti leviganti
rientra nel mondo
pelle
in mezzo a tutta l’altra
pelle del mondo.
YOUR RELIEF
The quick strong arm
the flashing eye
a rebellious fold in the mind
you humble the word
your relief
flattened by time
by long smoothing contacts
reenters the world
skin
in the midst of all the other
skin of the world.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
METAMORFOSI
Qui lasciata
priva di buccia
polpa al sole abbrunita
aggrinzita
essiccata
lieve essenza imprecisa
lieta polvere pronta
a un’umida vita
all’impasto al compatto
al disastro più vasto
d’una prossima forma.
METAMORPHOSIS
Left here
stripped of rind
pulp browned by the sun
shrivelled
dessicated
a slight inexact essence
joyful dust ready
for a damp life
for the mixture the solid
the hugest disaster
of a neighboring form.
http://www.bartolocattafi.it
PAGURO
HERMIT CRAB
Gusci e gusci cambiai
paguro vagabondo attratto
di casa in casa
non vidi mai la scia
che dietro le spalle mi lasciavo
ora fermo per sempre a questo guscio
mi domando che assorbo e che trasfondo
– protese le mie parti più porose –
nella torbida broda circostante
I changed shells one after another
wandering hermit crab drawn
from house to house
never seeing the wake
I left behind me
now I’m stopping for good in this shell
I wonder what I absorb and transmit
– with my most porous parts extended –
into the murky waters around me
qua vivo e viaggio
nell’ansimante flusso dell’osmosi.
here in the breathless flow of osmosis
I live and travel.