Mariangela Gualtieri
Trans. by Olivia E. Sears
3 poems
Celestial Madness
Go slow. Let the hand
carry out its fragile dictation.
Have faith in the nothing
that’s coming—the nothing
unfolding.
Don’t seize the word.
Leave it up to her. Become
the prey. Let her catch you.
The Road Back
I approach the center
of a foul stench.
In the big field a death
spreads its putrid song
mute through the grass.
I shield my breath.
Move forward with fear.
Who lies there? Who has died?
Marvel of fetid air
power at once silent and screaming
so loud it overwhelms
the whole panorama.
Enters inside the inside
of the voice. Unsettles. Unnerves.
No death scene in painting,
in film, has the invisible force
of this fetid air.
Here, the aftermath of the battle,
when some merciful woman
walks through the mud and turns over bodies
searching for a face, a breath,
a faint moan. This stench
will be ours, everyone’s. We carry it
within us. I tell myself, don't forget this.
Here, death unadorned. The great
reshuffling of creatures. Don’t forget
this undoing of the body. The road back.
Lying in tatters, alone—what had been
graceful, elegant. Amid the high grass
lying in this stink. The young buck.
The Daily Falling In Love
My love has so many names.
It strikes the leaves sometimes
like falling drops of sky. Pulls the dry
ones off and carries them away in flight.
Sometimes my love rises shining
sometimes on the path my love
watches me a moment
with the frightened eyes of a deer.
My love has many faces. Human faces
and muzzles. It has all the words.
It has notes, symphonies, voices singing.
And a chasm so deep
that calls to me welcomes me
and terrifies me too. My love.
It soothes me and wounds me.
And it doesn’t die—it doesn’t die.
Whatever form it takes it blooms.
Mariangela Gualtieri was born in Cesena, Italy, in 1951. She has devoted her career to the art of reciting poetry and the fellowship of poetry and music, performing her poems from memory in the major Italian theaters, alone or with international musicians. She has published a dozen collections of poetry and theater as well as an essay on the poetics of orality.
Olivia E. Sears (she/her) is founder of the Center for the Art of Translation and serves on the editorial board of Two Lines Press. Her most recent book-length translation was Ardengo Soffici’s Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms (World Poetry Books, 2022). She is currently completing a manuscript of poetry by Mariangela Gualtieri.