Alfonso Gatto
trans. by Lisa Mullenneaux
Returning at Dawn for San Vittore
You await the dead’s verdict, the stone that seals history.
And maybe nothing makes sense anymore
except the first grip of frost.
The setting sun seems to rise on prison windowpanes.
Thirty years have passed, you lived on love,
on happy injuries. The wrong that crushes
is the need to be right, and you weren’t,
you were losing. You return for San Vittore’s dawn,
you return to the sky that is only the sky.
You have nothing but yourself—let’s say it—
and the evidence of being a man.
For each wound that heals itself slowly,
a quiet dismay. And shyly your hand opens
on the marble, showing its veins, the veins of every sorrow
Translator’s Note: San Vittore is the prison in Milan where Gatto was held for six months.
Alfonso Gatto (1909-1976) was one of Italy’s most important modern poets, especially as a voice for the resistance to Mussolini during WWII. But for the poet, who was imprisoned for anti-fascist activities, resistance was a way of being rather than a response to political circumstances. Gatto was one of a second generation of Hermetic poets, following in the tradition of Eugenio Montale, who was one of his greatest supporters.
Lisa Mullenneaux’s poetry and essays have appeared in The New England Review, The Tampa Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Among modern Italian poets, she has translated Maria Attanasio, Anna Maria Carpi, Patrizia Cavalli, and Amelia Rosselli. She is the author of Naples’ Little Women: The Fiction of Elena Ferrante. More at http://umgc.academia.edu/LisaMullenneaux.