Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (26 page)

Michael Paul Novak and Bela Kiralyfalvi, 1968

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H u n g a r i a n

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It a l i a n

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Giuseppe Ung a r et ti
(1888–1970)

Little Monologue

Under the rinds of trees, as through a vacancy,

Sap is astir already, winding

In a delirium of branches-to-be-budded:

Uneasy in his sleep, winter

Telling February the reason

Why it must stay short; and moody

Th

ough he may be, he is no longer

Secretively cheerless. As if

Over some biblical calamity,

To all appearances, the drop lift s

Along a shore which from that moment

Seeks to repopulate itself:

From time to time, abrupt, re-emerging

Tower follows tower;

In search of Ararat once more

Wanders the ark, afl oat through solitudes;

Th

ey are climbing up to limewash the dovecotes.

Snow shift s from over the bramble stocks

Across Maremma

And

Near and far, a continuous

Cheeping whispering spreads through the air

Where birds brood;

Speeding from Foggia

To Lucera the car

Disquiets with its headlamps

Foals in their stalls;

In Corsica’s mountains, at Vivario,

Men sitting out the night about the fi re

Under the room’s kerosene light,

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With blanched and shaggy beards

Above hands heavy on sticks,

Chewing unhurried pipes, they are listening

To Ors’ Antone sing

Accompanied by the murmur of the
rivérgola

Vibrating between the teeth

Of the boy Ghiuvanni:

Your fate is as glad-

Hearted as mine is sad.

Outside a trampling of feet

Looms louder, mingled with the howls and gurgling

Of swine they bring to be butchered, and butchered

Th

ey are, for tomorrow

Carnival begins, and still

Th

rough the windless air it goes on snowing.

Forsaken, behind three

Minute parish churches,

Assembled in ranks across the slope

Roofs red with tiles

Th

e newest houses

And,

Covered in washing

Th

e oldest almost invisible

In the confusion of the dawn,

Th

e fragrant forest

Of Vizzavona is crossed

Without our ever being aware through the windows

Of its larches save for their trunks,

And seen only in scraps,

And

Th

ere is the time

We climbed out of the Levant through mountains

And the windings meandered even in the driver’s voice:

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Th

ere was sun here, there shadow, shadow there
,

On he follows, repeating it to himself

And whether east or west

Always mountains, and worse—

Where the knot of mountains begins to alternate—

Th

e spread of seclusion:

Is there no term to the tedium of it?

And,

At more than a thousand

Feet the car takes for its track

A road hacked through the chain

Narrow, icy

Leaning over a chasm.

Th

e sky is a sky of sapphire

And wears that clear colour

Which in this month belongs there,

February colour,

Colour of hope.

Down, down until it reaches

To Ajaccio, such a sky

As numbs one but not because it is cold,

Because it is sibylline.

Down, down the unending

Incline until it encompasses

A dark sea in whose

Hidden windings a continual

Roaring is stifl ed, and the processionals

Of Neptune fl ow forth.

It sails on into Pernambuco

And,

Alongside rocking skiff s,

And hesitant lighters

Over the lustre and elasticity of the water

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Th

rusts into the tiny port

Th

e dark and nimble presence of its blade.

Everywhere, up ships’ stairs,

Th

rough crammed streets,

On the steps of trams,

One meets with nothing that is not dancing

Whether thing, beast or person,

Day and night, and night

And day, because it is Carnival.

But at night they dance best,

When, hazardous amid the gloom,

Between sky and ground, hail down

From the whirling of fi reworks, fl owers of fi re—

Accomplices of the night,

Multiplying its ambiguities,

Speckling the livid sea.

All are suff ocating with heat.

Th

e equator is a couple of steps away.

Hardship harried the man from Europe

Who must accustom himself

To the upside-down seasons,

And by making his blood

More mixed than ever:

Is not February the month for graft ing?

And still more did he suff er

When his blood turned mulatto

In that accursed coupling

Of human souls with the labour of slaves;

But, on southern ground,

He found at last that he could oppose

To the glare of those dog days

Th

e stare of his own more unexpected mask.

And now he will never cease to charm

Th

is false February

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And,

Putrid with sweat and stench,

Rolling their eyes they dance without pause

Raucously, unendingly singing

With the intent ingenuousness of the place:

O irony, irony

Was all he used to say.

Recollection is the sign of age

And today I have recalled

A few halting places in my long stay

On earth that fell in February,

Because in February, I grow

More watchful than in other months

For what may follow.

I am more bound to it

Th

an to my own life

By a birth

And by a grief;

But now is not the time to speak of that.

And in this month I too was born.

It was stormy, rain never ceased to fall

Th

at night in Alexandria.

Th

e Shi’ite Moslems were holding their festival

Of moon amulets:

A child on a white horse gallops by

And the people throng around him

Drawn spell-bound into the circle of prophecy.

Like Adam and Eve they seem, stupefi ed

By the fate which has tied them to the earth:

Ear sharpens now

For divinations,

And a woman out of the mob of Arabs

Rears up, gesticulates where

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Lightning on a rock has clawed a form,

And with foaming mouth bears witness:

A prophet, still shapeless in the granite

Is outlining the grasp of his terrible arm
;

But my mother, woman

Of Lucca that she is,

Laughs at such tidings

And with a proverb replies:

If in February each pathway’s awash, that’s sure sign

It is plumping the cobbles with oil and with wine

Poets, poets, we have put on

All the masks; yet one

Is merely one’s own self.

With terrible impatience

In that vacancy of nature

Which falls every year in February, we have set

For ourselves a limit on the calendar:

Th

e day of Candlemas

With the re-emergence from shadow

Weak tremor of tiny fl ames

Where small candles burn

Of unpurifi ed wax,

And the day, aft er some weeks,

Of
Th

ou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return
;

In the vacancy, and because of our impatience

To emerge from it,

Each one, and we

Old men too with our regrets,

And none knows

Unless he prove it for himself

How illusion can

Th

rottle a man

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Who lives by regret alone;

Impatient in the vacancy, each one

Raves, futile, wears himself out

To be reborn in some fantasy,

Some vanity,

And terror comes of it,

Time is too swift varying its deceits,

Th

at we should ever take warning from it.

Dreams should be fi t

Only for boys: they possess

Th

e grace of candour

Th

at heals aft er all corruptions, once it renews

Or changes at a breath the voices within.

But why boyhood

And suddenly recollection?

Th

ere is nothing, there is nothing else on earth

But a gleam of truth

And the dust’s vacuity,

Even if, with incorrigible madness

Th

e living man seems to strain

Toward the lightning fl ash of mirages

In innermost depth and deed

Again and again.

Charles Tomlinson, 1970

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Lucio Piccolo
(1901–69)

Veneris Venefi ca Agrestis

She springs from the ground-clinging thicket, her face

—gay now, now surly—bound in a black

kerchief, a shrivelled chestnut it seems: no fi ne fl eece

the hair that falls loose, but a lock

of curling goat-hair; when she goes by

(is she standing or bending?) her gnarled and dark

foot is a root that suddenly juts from the earth and walks.

Be watchful she does not off er you her cup of bark,

its water root-fl avoured that tastes of the viscid leaf,

either mulberry or sorb-apple, woodland fruit that fl atters with lies

the lips but the tongue ties.

She governs it seems

the force of rounding moons

that swells out the rinds of trees

and alternates the invincible ferments,

fl ow of the sap and of the seas . . .

Pronubial, she, like the birds that bring

seeds from afar: arcane

the breeds that come of her graft ing.

And the mud walls of the unstable

cottage where the nettle grows

with gigantic stalk, are her realms of shadows:

she fi res the kindlings in the furnaces of fable.

And round the door, from neighbouring orchard ground

the fumes that rise

are the fi ne, unwinding muslins of her sibyline vespers.

She appears in the guise

of the centipede among the darknesses

by water-wheels that turn

no more in the maidenhair fern.

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She is the mask that beckons

and disappears, when the light

of the halfspent wicks

makes voracious the shadows in the room where

they are milling by night, working at the presses,

and odours of crushed olives are in the air,

kindled vapours of grapejuice; and lanterns come

swayed to the steps of hobnailed boots.

Th

e gestures of those who labour

in the fi elds, are accomplices

in the plots she weaves:

the stoop of those who gather up dry leaves

and acorns . . . and the shoeless tread and measured bearing

under burdened head, when you cannot see

the brow or the olives of the eyes

but only the lively mouth . . . the dress

swathes tight the fl anks, the breasts and has comeliness—

passing the bough she leaves behind

an odour of parching . . .

or the gesture that raises the crock

renewed at the basin of the spring.

She bends, drawing a circle:

her sign sends forth

the primordial torrent out of the fearful earth;

(and the foot that presses the irrigated furrow

and the hand that lift s

the spade—power of a diff erent desire summons them now)

she draws strength

from the breaths of the enclosures,

the diff used cries, the damp and burning

straw of the litters, the blackened

branches of the vine, and the shadow that gives back

the smell of harnesses of rope and sack,

soaked baskets, where who stands

Luc io Pic c ol o
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