EXTREME I LOVE YOU ITALIAN verses SELECTED AND EDITED BY BENJAMIN EPSTEIN With contributions by Gerardo BARBERA, SAM HUG, MATTHEW MCCUIRE, JOHNNY TABET AND BEATRIZ BELFRAGE Selected Drafts Naples Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth pierced by a ray of the sunlight And it’s suddenly night By Salvatore Quasimodo ……………….. I loved Banal words that No one dared write I was enchanted by the rhyme flower: love power (fiore: amore) The most ancient, most difficult of the world I loved the truth that is lying in the bottom Like a dream falling into oblivion, that pain rediscovers as a friend With fear the heart approaches it, and never will it be again abandoned By Umberto Saba …………………………. Morning: I light up of immensity By Giuseppe Ungaretti -------------------------- Often the evil of living I have encountered Was the strangled rivulet that gurgles Was the curling up of the parched Leaf, it was the horse heavily fallen to the ground. I did not understand that well, Excepting the wonder that the divine Indifference discloses: It was the statue in the drowsiness of the noon And the cloud, and the falcon high flying By Eugenio Montale An old man loved a boy. He, a little boy - cat untamed upon seeing – feared Punishments for his secret thoughts. Now, Two things leave in the heart a sweet impression: The woman Who adjusts her quick steps on you the first time And the child that, when you saved him, Puts trustingly his little hand in yours Youthful tyrant – eyes as sky, staring into an abyss. He begged the lullaby of His friend, a long lullaby. The lullaby was a story such as a rare and moving Experience filtered through his greedy adolescence: There’s some good, there’s some evil. “That’s enough” – he said suddenly – and he Turned against the wall. “I love you – he added after slight silence – you Always good to me, to your baby”. And immediately he sank into restless sleep. The old man, eyes opened, could sleep no more. Oblivious, insensible, still of an angel’s face. In your impatience, heart Don’t accuse him. Do think of it: he has a difficult task! He is alone He has life not behind, but in front of him. You, Hasten your death if you can Or forget him forever By Umberto Saba Lemons Listen, laureate poets Solely move about into plants with little used names: Box-trees, privets, acanthuses. I, for myself, prefer the paths that induce to the grassy ditches Where, in half-dried paddles, the little boys catch some gaunt eel: The lanes that run along the edges Slope down among the tufts of the giant reeds And penetrate into the gardens, among the lemon trees Better if the hubbubs of the birds die out swallowed by the Blue: More clearly you can listen to the whisper of the friendly branches In the air that almost does not move And the senses of this smell That cannot come off the earth And inside the breast it is raining a worried sweetness Here of the amused passions the war is miraculously silent Here our part of richness befalls us too, wretched people And is the smell of lemons You see, in these silences in which things abandon themselves And seem close to betray their last secret Sometimes one expects to discover an error of Nature The dead point of the world, the ring that does not close The thread to unravel that finally puts us into the middle of a truth The eyes search high and low The mind enquires, tunes, disjoins In the smell that is spreading when the day more and more languishes These are the silences in which one can see in every human shadow that is leaving Some disturbed Divinity But the illusion is absent and the time brings us back In the noisy cities where the Blue appears only in pieces High, among the mouldings The rain tires the earth, then; the tediousness of the winter Thickens over the houses The light becomes miserly –the soul bitter When one day from a gate improperly closed Among the trees of a courtyard The yellow of the lemons shows itself to us; And the ice of the heart melts, And in the breast the golden trumpets of brightness for us Roar their songs By Eugenio Montale Soldiers (July 1918) You are always Like the autumn leaves On the Trees By Giuseppe Ungaretti --------------------------- Loneliness But my cries Hurt like thunderbolts The faint bell of the sky They sink Frightened By Giuseppe Ungaretti ---------------------------- Attrition With my hunger as a wolf I haul down My sheep body I am like The miserly boat And like the libidinous ocean By Giuseppe Ungaretti --------------------------- Tonight Balustrade of breeze To lean tonight My sadness By Giuseppe Ungaretti For the death of my brother One day, if I am not always fleeing From people to people, you will see me Seated on your stone, my brother Lamenting the fallen flower of your gracious years Our mother, now drawing her late day only Speaks of me with your dumb ashes But I offer my disappointed hands to you both And only from afar I greet my roofs I can feel the adverse fortunes, and the secret Anxieties that were storm to your life And I pray too, in your harbour peace Now, what remains to me of so much hope is this! Foreign people, at least his bones To the melancholy mother’s breast return By Ugo Foscolo Ben, the age of twenty Threatens you Grey-rose cloud that little by little Closes itself in you You understand that and you are not afraid Submerged we will see you In the smoke that the wind Lacerates and thickens Then, from the ashes you will come out Burned like never before
Posted on: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:15:43 +0000
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