THEME OF FAREWELL AND AFTER - POEMS - Milo De Angelis (The University of Chicago Press)

Today's book of poetry:

THEME OF FAREWELL AND AFTER - POEMS

Milo De Angelis.  Edited and translated by Susan Stewart & Patrizio Ceccagnoli.  The University of Chicago Press.  Chicago & London.  2013.

These tight translations reveal Milo De Angelis, one of Italy's most important living poets, in splendid and somewhat sadly melancholy splendor.  Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli, the translators, have found that elegant space between languages where syntax and sensibility are shared.  There is nothing foreign about this voice.

V.  Hotel Artaud

You greet me, you put your bra back on, you feel

you can lose the terrestrial code, demolish

the nucleus, collapse into darkness.  You go toward the shower.

You remind me of a top score in a gymnastics exercise,

the skin's Spring, a perfect diagonal.

You take a hairpin out of the nightmare, you fix

your hair, put on the shower cap, you ask only

to be spared.

~

Here we stand, separated by our gestures.  You block

the flow of seconds with a groan.  We compose

the old rhyme and right away we fall down.  The walls

stay there, stained with mascara.

Dawn's angel looks at you, naked and taciturn.

The key flickers in the breath.  Every door,

every lightbulb, every splash of the shower they say

that the alliance has split apart.

~

You stand up and dive, you want to swallow life

and you summon the moon's flower, the great

obscure hosanna that gives every pleasure

to lovers.  You summon the unison of bodies

and the spark, reawakened, the blood in turmoil,

the shoulders in the absolute.  Outside signs of diesel oil,

suspension cables, pieces of requiem.  You feel the menace

until the screeching of the sheets.  You ask me

if they will come here, if we still will be able to save ourselves.

~

In the final feats of strength, in the tender lips

in the impulse that doesn't turn into speech, you look for yourself

and you devour yourself, you rise to the surface, scratch, cling

crying that this is the eternal good, that the stars

catch fire on the forehead, that we'll remain

here forever.  I answer that every dwelling

recedes from those who live in it, that this is our

last performance.

~

Divine and absent-minded, carried along by a soft breeze,

you lie down, fiddle with the sheets, you pretend,

whisper, pull faces, repeat that the night

is enchanting in Brera.  Every silence is dispelled,

everything speaks a language of lace and melodrama,

a cunning spell, a solo that ends

at the hot pants' hem.

~

We took one another down, breathless and circumspect faces,

above a floor tile, measuring the breath,

checking the fingerprints, kissing

the surrendering throat, the kneepads

of a judo match, the kimono, the defeated shoulders, the sound

of the forgotten moment, the certainty of having

made a mistake in the translation.

~

When on a beloved face you catch a glimpse of the sign

of too many seasons and a vein, much too dark,

stretches out into the room, when life's

cuts well up, a host of them, and the blood slows

inside the wrists that we've held tight until dawn,

it's not only there that the swelling current

stops, then it is night, it is night on every face

we have loved.

...

These poems are sad business as De Angelis writes through the loss of his wife, writer Giovanna Sicari, with insight and tenderness.

How does one fight an unvanquishable foe?  How to face loss, live with it.  Milo De Angelis takes us swimming in this deep, turbulent water.

II. The Siege's Ending

This was how it started, between the ruins

and the wheel of fortune.

Love was silent as a conspiracy

no one could tell if life was immense

or nothing, if time was flooding

beyond the hills or if a revered

god blocked the growth of any gesture or blocked

the blackberries' sweetness at the lips.

~

Night leaves the hands,

the irresistible space spreads like wildfire, the space

that seemed to surround

this sheet of paper.  The piazza shifts.

There is no circle showing where to stop, no full

name to be chanted on the lips.  The apple

gets mixed up with time.  Every sentence

turns into a lost line, sign of a time.

~

It's late

precisely.  Life, with its

lost pivot, floats vaguely

along the streets, thinking

of all the love that's been promised.

What does it expect from me?  Where

is the heartbeat of the forsaken?  Is this

the mysterious destination of all

that lives?

Home turns away

from the house, everything

is surrendered to the obvious

end, everything has fled...

...but the syllable

that gripped the throat

is this.

~

The motif of the great awakening tolls

in the voice of the taxi driver trolling the avenues

of Milan, judgment's circle,

all the work of front doors that seemed so lost, all

the blood's collapsing; you were alone

in the forsaken bodies' confusion

I was where you were not looking,

in the secret clamor where they return.

~

The barrette is still here,

near the temples.  Everything has been

what it has been,

the silence on the pillow

echoes this.  We ask for

a year of complete light, a flight

that traces on high

the same earthly scene.  But nothing

is nothing and the thorns are always

pricking into us more deeply.

~

Thus they return and feel

a long lightless kiss, a muteness

that follows a pulse,

they escape from that room

into the streets' terror

with an invisible face, and a torn one,

they leave no trace as they go back

into this bar in Affori, where I wait for them

with one foot in the void.

~

I couldn't get it

I still don't

if the goal posts' highest corner

is wood or legend

if kisses are cold

in my poetry or in the first glimpse

of the sealed lips,

if love passes soundless

among naked bodies

that no shade is protecting.

~

But then that blocked anxiety

found her lips.  Everything

was inside the words

carried one at a time.

Carried to those who wait,

Only to them, in the bottleneck

of the scream.  It was the bread that

stirs itself in the blood.  It was the same

syllable that calls us

from the subways, lost

fingerprint, glance

of big eyes without eyelashes.

~

The infinite appears in the little,

like the last note of a cry

as it fades away.  The moment chases us.

What did I love?  Maybe that air,

two centimeters, between the vaulting body and

the high bar that illuminates every applause.  Or that

invisible breath over the mast

where it smiles girlishly and has no limit.

And those injured in an ancient race

who found in this bar

an inner music.  Then it was enough.  Then

a word that presents itself,

the interminable word, passed.

~

That's how it is.  The memory

of a man was only this

handful of syllables.  Only they

come back fr

om the wine cellars

where they live rent-free

and well-timed, they are

thrown beyond the rocks, they whisper

astonished words, they are a flapping

of wings, reaching forward, faithful

to a secret order.  Now you

must do the translation.

...

Milo De Angelis' Theme of Farewell and After - Poems is an elegy, an eulogy and an elegant love letter.  Milan has never been so beautifully sad.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in 1951, Milo De Angelis is the author of eight collections of poetry and two volumes of essays and is the translator of numerous works of European philosophy and criticism.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Susan Stewart is a poet and the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.  Her most recent books are Red Rover and The Poet's Freedom, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Patrizio Ceccagnoli teaches Italian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

COVER BLURB

"Milo De Angelis is surely among the most important Italian poets of our day, and this supple and subtle translation of his two most recent books is a gratifying event.  These are poems of dense abstraction and rugged lyricism, and they come to life in grief, amid the asphalt of the poet's native city, Milan.  Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli have done a terrific job of bringing them to America."

     Geoffrey Brock, Editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry

"This careful work by Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli is the most capacious English rendering so far of this major contemporary Italian poet.  One is able to follow the poetic and spiritual journey of Milo De Angelis as revealed in his passage from a gently eloquent tone to a more urgent language (perhaps precipitated by a lacerating personal loss).  To be sure, the poet remains faithful to his distinguished elaboration of the post-symbolist heritage, such as the phrase repetitions with an emotional tinge, certain softly surreal images ('And you will fly across the courtyard / while someone you don't know leans / from the balcony with asphalt in his hands'), and well-rounded, quotable lines placed at strategic points ('in the secret clamor where they return').  But in the poetic development documented by this important volume, the Milanese poet—exploring his particular city-within-the-city-enters more and more deeply into a courageous exploration of self and past, resulting in a new opening to the world."

     Paolo Valesio, Columbia University

Un Nome Della Via/A Street Name - Milo De Angelis

(video by Dedaluspoem)

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