Poetry Translation
I Want A Slow Painful Love, Gabriele D'Annunzio
I want a slow painful love, as slow
as a slow death and with no end
(I want it to be stronger than death) and
with no change either, no.
I want our two souls to undergo,
without a moment's peace, a dark torment;
and in a rapt silence the lament
at our doors of an ocean, alone, below.
I want the high tower made of granite
and rising so high in the serene sky
that it could with the polar star be entwined.
I want a bed of crimson and to find
when in that shade and on that breast I lie,
as if deep inside a tomb, the Infinite.
as a slow death and with no end
(I want it to be stronger than death) and
with no change either, no.
I want our two souls to undergo,
without a moment's peace, a dark torment;
and in a rapt silence the lament
at our doors of an ocean, alone, below.
I want the high tower made of granite
and rising so high in the serene sky
that it could with the polar star be entwined.
I want a bed of crimson and to find
when in that shade and on that breast I lie,
as if deep inside a tomb, the Infinite.
Delta, Eugenio Montale
Life that breaks when it is poured out
in secret, to you I have tied:
the kind that is restless and seems almost
not to know of you, smothered presence.
When time blocks up its own dams
you tune your affair to its immensity,
and you resurface, memory, more obvious
than the dark region where you would descend,
just as now after the rain, gathers again
the green on the branches, on the walls the red ochre.
All of you is unknown to me save for the mute
message that keeps me going along the way:
whether form you exist or caprice in the smoke
of a dream you are nourished
by the feverish riviera, muddy, and roaring
against the tide.
Nothing of you in the flickering of the hours
be they grey or torn open by a blaze of sulphur
save for the whistle of a tugboat
which from the mist comes into the gulf.
Life that breaks when it is poured out
in secret, to you I have tied:
the kind that is restless and seems almost
not to know of you, smothered presence.
When time blocks up its own dams
you tune your affair to its immensity,
and you resurface, memory, more obvious
than the dark region where you would descend,
just as now after the rain, gathers again
the green on the branches, on the walls the red ochre.
All of you is unknown to me save for the mute
message that keeps me going along the way:
whether form you exist or caprice in the smoke
of a dream you are nourished
by the feverish riviera, muddy, and roaring
against the tide.
Nothing of you in the flickering of the hours
be they grey or torn open by a blaze of sulphur
save for the whistle of a tugboat
which from the mist comes into the gulf.
The Fringe of Hair, Eugenio Montale
The fringe of hair that hides
your childish forehead, don't brush it away
with your hand. It too has much to say
about you, on my road lies all the sky,
the only light with the jades you circle
around your wrist, in slumberous tumults
the veil that your postponements
have stretched, the wing whereby you go
transmigrating Artemis and untouched, through
the wars of the born-dead; and if there
now blossom aerial wisps of hair
that background is marbled by you, who
jumped down, and your forehead is restless as it
converges with the dawn, conceals it.
your childish forehead, don't brush it away
with your hand. It too has much to say
about you, on my road lies all the sky,
the only light with the jades you circle
around your wrist, in slumberous tumults
the veil that your postponements
have stretched, the wing whereby you go
transmigrating Artemis and untouched, through
the wars of the born-dead; and if there
now blossom aerial wisps of hair
that background is marbled by you, who
jumped down, and your forehead is restless as it
converges with the dawn, conceals it.
Saba, Vittorio Sereni
Hat pipe cane, the worn out
items of a memory.
But I saw them alive on a
wanderer in an Italy made of ruins and dust.
Always of himself he'd speak but no one like him
I have known to, while speaking of himself
and asking life from others by speaking,
give just as much of it and even more of it
to who stayed and listened to him.
And one day, one day or two after the 18th of April,
I saw him roaming from one piazza to another
from one café to another across Milan
chased by the radio.
“Filthy – he was shouting – filthy”. He was watched
by astonished people.
He was saying it to Italy. Suddenly, as if to a woman
who unwittingly or not has wounded us to death.
items of a memory.
But I saw them alive on a
wanderer in an Italy made of ruins and dust.
Always of himself he'd speak but no one like him
I have known to, while speaking of himself
and asking life from others by speaking,
give just as much of it and even more of it
to who stayed and listened to him.
And one day, one day or two after the 18th of April,
I saw him roaming from one piazza to another
from one café to another across Milan
chased by the radio.
“Filthy – he was shouting – filthy”. He was watched
by astonished people.
He was saying it to Italy. Suddenly, as if to a woman
who unwittingly or not has wounded us to death.