Maria Borio
Translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti
The green light of the river, the pink of the mountains
crosses the apartment south to north—a soft strip

of chalk that opens, contains. You try to distinguish
the rising voices from the scales of iridescent water.

How sincere these languages: fragments with few
consonants, closed vowels, black, equatorial, rhythmic

drums through sycamore branches. For each language
a scale of water, thrust from window to mountain

in disarming union. The rock circle amplifies,
the city is a stadium, this house its eardrum, we inside it

pulling out the roots of words like hooked fish.
What haven't we learned, what that's stronger, unwritten,

a sudden burst in the river, the radium that makes the riverbed
shimmer. Open vowels muddle in the grass, closed

vowels rouse dust and motors. We close our eyes:
here are all the scales, broken sounds, drawn in.



Fondale

La luce verde del fiume, quella rosa delle montagne
da sud a nord attraverso l' appartamento. È un lembo

sottile di calce, si apre, contiene. Provi a separare
le voci che salgono, le scaglie d' acqua iridescente.

Come queste lingue sono sincere: le frazioni con poche
consonanti e le vocali chiuse, nere, equatoriali, ritmiche

tamburi tra i rami dei platani. Per ogni lingua
una scaglia d'acqua, spinta dalle finestre alle montage

in un'unione disarmante. 11 cerchio della roccia amplifica,
la città è uno stadio, questa casa il suo timpano, noi dentro

tiriamo fuori come aghi da pesca le radici delle parole.
Cosa non abbiamo imparato, cosa non scritto e più forte,

una scarica improvvisa nel fiume, il radio che fa splendere
il fondale. Vocali aperte vanno confuse nell'erba, vocali

chiuse spingono polvere e motori. Chiudiamo gli occhi:
ecco tutte le scaglie, suoni rotti, aspirati.
from the book TRANSPARENCIES / World Poetry Books
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Philip Metres on "The Other World, and This One"

"If Victoria Chang’s recent poetry aptly demonstrates how grief work shakes the foundations of the idea of God and the recompense of afterlife, Yusef Komunyakaa’s Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (2022), a selection of poems from the last twenty years, illuminates a poet’s tenacious urge to call forth spirits and hold on to song in the face of dehumanization, cruelty, and war."

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Moira Egan on Franco Buffoni's "The Acne Eruptions of Eleanor of Aquitaine"


"Handling, embracing, paying extremely close attention: these are, I think, ways to describe the kind of close reading that is necessary to translation. To me, translation is an act of affectionate close reading in the original language, and then, 'close writing,' to the best of my ability, in the target language. As translators, we know that reproducing a poem in another language is a sheer impossibility."
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