from Poesie 1963-2014 (2022)
Translated from the Italian by Nicholas Benson
Rome
1
Rather than a divine creation, today’s Rome
seems the offspring of dubious crossbreeding
or a careless puzzle-maker;
its topography chaotically extends
like an organism whose limbs
multiply without it knowing.
A city of illegal settlements
where the “recent past” is deposited
in the bowels of its sewers, and immediately
resembles mere remnants
due to the archaeological infantilism
of those who gnaw on antiquity.
By contrast, where civilizations
are uniformly layered,
time passes through rushing vertically
from bottom to top, and enduring monuments
acquire many-layered history.
But the flow of history, in both cases,
is no more conscious a creator
than the guy at the snack bar
layering the contents of a sandwich,
and crushing its living ingredients.
2
Between an ostrich and Narcissus
the difference is imperceptible;
sand and mirror resemble one another.
Faced with a multitude of immigrants
who populate ungovernable suburbs,
Rome regresses like a giant who,
in the place of a brain, has for a government
the childish mechanism of a toy.
It plays dice with its ruins
and entrusts them to the whim of chance
in an attempt to make them align
with their sublime original form.
Former gluttons for sweets, gorging
on the middles of layer cakes,
today profane the maternal soil,
overwhelming the deeper “past”
so as to extract its entrails/vestiges
and prophesy prestige.
Wouldn’t it be more honest to perform a miracle
on what has already emerged into daylight—
to resurrect with necromancy
the colossal statue of Constantine
that lies in anatomical disarray
in a courtyard of the Campidoglio?
So as to entrust it to orthopedic luminaries,
and reanimate its limbs.
3
The zealous prefects of one era
walled off Giorgio De Chirico’s Piazze d’Italia;
its shadows were out of sync
with the sundial, disturbing
the public peace and passersby.
The vengeful Modern spirit
makes cutouts of the metaphysical canvases:
towers, arches, bell towers and colonnades
become exhilarating subjects of italianità;
traces of nostalgia for the rural world.
Rationalism and Modernism live in symbiosis,
incompatible and spiteful at times,
exchanging physiognomies.
Functionalist architects create
sober buildings of new beauty: post offices,
train stations, fire stations
curved anatomically; avant-garde works alien
to the contradictory urban patchwork,
fitted into the staged mystery of the ancient.
4
Two world wars in forty years
have been fatal to the longevity of art
as well as to European civilization.
Widespread destruction and common decadence
have put an end to the conflicts
between opposing artistic movements.
In dying, the great isms
bequeathed to us their elements;
neo-style eclecticism leads us
to copy the past without innovating.
My modest investment advises
future toponymists not to devalue the names
of the poets—nor to conceal them too much.
Food Decadence
I
If ROMA fell into ruin
it wasn’t because of hostile lead
fitted to the various calibers
of mortal projectiles, nor
due to the future worship of tourists.
It wasn’t the fault of ballistics,
but of lead in the cups
that poisoned the wine,
over centuries and centuries of toasts.
If the West declines,
it will be because of
sweet sugar bullets,
alluring candies
that explode between the teeth;
they expose the nerves
and open craters: cavities.
Effects, on a smaller scale,
similar to those produced
by field artillery.
II
We’re already infantilized
by the food industry.
From novels to beverages,
nothing escapes sweetening.
The paratactic style triumphs
and imposes pre-chewed food on us:
smoothies, purees, liquefied foods.
The overconsumption of ice cream
anesthetizes our consciences.
Goodbye bitter semantic roots,
aftertastes of reflection
erased by insipidity.
Melancholy will go extinct
in a graveyard of words.
The dental alphabet
will fall from our mouths,
we’ll be left toothless.
It will be attributed to revenge
by some gluttonous deity
who, though immortal,
isn’t immune to diabetes.
And so the West will decline
into sugar-sweet banality.
“Guernica” (1937) by Pablo Picasso
Hallucinatory as
the screen’s canvas;
it switches on and off
between intermittent flashes
released by the phosphorus
of bombs dropped by Stukas.
Only the outlines
of things survive:
the features of a horse,
the filaments of a light bulb,
specters of former things.
A masterpiece unfinished
until placed beside
a notebook on hermeneutics;
a critical switch
that clicks and rotates,
turning like the propeller of an idea
“nosediving on the city.”
“Nosediving on the city” (1939) by Tullio Crali
Omens of imminent war.
The isms are also mobilizing:
Neocubism against Neofuturism.
A warlike fantasy
disguised as a sporting raid
traverses the Atlantic.
The cockpit
faceted like a crystal
configures the orbital eye
of a prehistoric insect.
That dark shape
within the transparency
is its brain at the controls.
The plane is in a nosedive,
wedging itself between axonometric
skyscrapers of nomen nescio.
The crude fascist technology
doesn’t alarm the invisible enemies,
as its science
is only inflated rhetoric,
not clairvoyant radar.
The Colosseum
Its sheer size increases
the wonder of tourists
making them binocular visionaries.
Its circular plan alludes
to an experimental aqueduct
to bend linear time.
The zeros of time ossified:
olive pits from two millennia ago
found in its depths
seduce many followers
of material culture.
Out of modesty, or cognitive limit,
no one dares ask:
who stripped the Colosseum bare?
The great architects of the sixteenth century
turned it into a marble quarry
to clad the Renaissance.
Fiume 1944
Imitating a crystal radio,
my cousin Tonci and I
exchanged large
talking seashells,
holding them to our ears;
from those caverns came
only the roar of B-17s
approaching,
headed towards Austria.
Reluctantly, we left
the radio on
to run to the shelter.
We asked our mothers
when we’d be able
to hear the sea again,
only a mile away
as the crow flies.
“Children, not now,
it’s agitated too
because of the war;
it will come alive again
when everything is over,
if we haven’t died.”
These translations from Poesie 1963-2014 (2022) appear with the kind permission of Mondadori Editore, Milan, Italy.
Poesie 1963-2014 © Mondadori, 2022
Valentino Zeichen was born Giuseppe Mario Moses in Fiume (Rijeka) in 1938, and passed away in Rome in 2016. He was the author of eleven books of poetry, and in Italy is widely considered among of the great poets of his generation. After migrating from Fiume to Italy in 1946, Zeichen eventually settled in Rome, living in an uncompromisingly humble manner in a shack near the Villa Borghese and the Piazza del Popolo. Zeichen addressed a wide range of subjects in his poetry, writing in an anti-lyrical, ironic manner, leading Alberto Moravia to compare him with the first-century Roman poet Martial.
Nicholas Benson is the translator of Attilio Bertolucci’s Winter Journey (Viaggio d’inverno, 1971), Aldo Palazzeschi’s L’incendiario (The Arsonist, 1910), for which he was awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship, and, with Elena Coda, Scipio Slataper’s novel Il mio Carso (My Karst and My City, 1912) which was awarded the John Florio Prize by the Society of Translators (UK).
More info at https://www.nicholasbenson.com/.