Fabio Pusterla

TRANS. BY WILL SCHUTT

WITNESS

Convincing him was hard; in the end, laziness and that clot of shame and fear won out. There’s nothing to worry about, we said, just tell her what you’ve always told us. Omit the names, fumble the telling. At least it won’t have been pointless, it won’t get forgotten. And we reminded him of what seemed to us the most important details: the ice, the frostbite, the maggot soup in Metz, the escape in an officer’s uniform, the SS on the trolley from Como to Cernobbio, the smuggler in the woods along the border. Or some of what got said, like “Shoot me, go on, shoot me” and “I spit in your face, I spit on you” (though that was much earlier, involved a factory, a secret war). For our part, we wanted to know who had pulled the strings and why and who had sat in the best seats, facing the orchestra. And most off all that he understood it, that he saw the salamanders had made  it through the fire. The wormery.

At first, there was a problem with the microphone; next, the sound test. Embarrassment. The journalist was kind, she understood. Relax, she kept saying, there’s no rush. When you’re ready. But, having finally made up his mind, looking at her for what may have been the first time, recovering his voice from a dusty, deep recess, he spoke slowly. Go away. Go away, please, this minute.

That, I think, was the last he spoke of it.

Fabio Pusterla was born in Mendrisio, Switzerland, in 1957. He is the award-winning author of eight collections of poetry. His most recent, Cenere, o Terra (Ashes, or Earth), was published by Marcos y Marcos in 2018. An active translator and essayist, he lives and works between Lombardy and Lugano, where he teaches Italian language and literature.

Will Schutt is the author of Westerly (Yale, 2013) and translator, most recently, of My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin, 2018). His translation of Fabio Pusterla’s selected poems, Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.