Franca Mancinelli (3 poems)
translated from the Italian by John Taylor
*
and another day shatters, crashing
back against the sea rock without weeping.
All things unborn of me,
time thrust in like a broken seed.
Now I curl up, a clump of brown seaweed,
the salt sparkling, far from the shoreline.
*
before words become hot wax
hands beckon to each other:
a prehistoric language
deaf like a stone, a downpour.
I ask and something else you answer,
so close is your steady palm
to the cliff
then my chin on your shoulder, my ear
against yours, our noses pointing away.
*
at night an estuary your arms
are oak branches
a bottomless sieve
bright plummeting pebble
clump of dissolving dirt
I've always been here
at life’s onset
looking at these things
moving in your eyes.
-from Mala kruna (2007), now included in A un’ora da sonno da qui, Edizioni Italic Pequod, 2018
Original poems:
e un altro giorno si frantuma, torna
lo schianto sullo scoglio senza pianto.
Tutte cose che non nascono da me,
tempo conficcato come un seme rotto.
Ora rannicchio, sono un’alga bruna
il brillare di sale, distante dalla linea.
*
prima che parole siano cera calda
sono le mani a chiamarsi:
una lingua preistorica
come la pietra sorda come lo scroscio.
Domando e un’altra cosa rispondi
tanto è vicino il palmo
saldo, sul precipizio
poi il mento sulla tua spalla, le orecchie
una sull’altra, i nasi opposti.
*
nella notte un estuario le tue braccia
sono rami di quercia
setaccio senza fondo
sasso chiaro che precipita
un granulo di terra che si scioglie
sono sempre stata qui
all’inizio della vita
guardando queste cose
muoversi nei tuoi occhi.
Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. Her first two books of poetry, Mala kruna (Manni, 2007) and Pasta madre (Nino Aragno, 2013), were awarded several prizes in Italy. These two books have now been republished in a single volume, A un’ora di sonno da qui (Italic Pequod, 2018). In 2018, her collection of prose poems, Libretto di transito, appeared at Amos Edizioni, and this same book, in John Taylor’s translation, was published as The Little Book of Passage (Bitter Oleander Press). Her poems have been translated into French, Swedish, Croatian, Slovenian, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese. In January and February 2019, she served as the Chair Poet in Residence in Calcutta, India.
John Taylor has translated several French and Italian poets into English, including Philippe Jaccottet, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Pierre Chappuis, Pierre Voélin, José-Flore Tappy, Lorenzo Calogero, and Alfredo de Palchi. His most recent collections of poetry are The Dark Brightness (Xenos Books, 2017), Grassy Stairways (The MadHat Press, 2017), and Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (Bitter Oleander Press, 2018). Born in the United States, he has lived in France since 1977.