By Valerio Magrelli.
I.
That matter engenders contagion
That matter engenders contagion
if interfered with in its deepest fibres
cut out from its mother like a veal calf
like the pig from its own heart
screaming at the sight of its torn entrails;
That this destruction generates
the same energy that blazes out
when society turns on itself, the temple’s veil torn
and the king’s head axed from the body of the state
until the faith healer becomes the wound;
That the hearth’s embrace is radiation
nature’s pyre which unravels
helplessly before the smiling company
so as to effect the slightest increase
of the surrounding temperature;
That the form of every production implies
breaking and entry, fission, a final leavetaking
and that history is the act of combustion
and the Earth a tender stockpile of firewood
left out to dry in the sun,
is hard to credit is it not?
From Esercizi di tiptologia (Exercises in Typtology), 1992
II.
The Embrace
As you lie beside me I edge closer
taking sleep from your lips
as one wick draws flame from another.
And two night-lights are lit
as the flame takes and sleep passes
between us. But as it passes
the boiler in the basement shudders:
down there a fossil nature burns,
down in the depths prehistory’s
sunken fermented peats blaze up
and slither through my radiator.
Wreathed in a dark halo of oil,
the bedroom is a close nest
heated by organic deposits,
by log pyres, leafmash, seething resins…
And we are the wicks, the two tongues
flickering on that single Palaeozoic torch.
From Esercizi di tiptologia (Exercises in Typtology), 1992
III.
Our City: Landscape with Skateboards
To play on monuments, to make them sound,
they turn stairways into keyboards,
from railings and ramps extracting
heraldic arpeggios
and gliding, glissando, at such length
they wear themselves out, this excluded
brotherhood of music
with their coded manners
and wounded integrity,
their tribal, adolescent dandyism.
From Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale
(Instructions for Reading a Newspaper),1999
IV.
The Shadow
Sunday morning
I’m woken by my daughter’s voice
who shouting
asks her brother
if it’s true the Bomb
when it explodes
leaves the shadow
of man on the wall.
(Not of “a man”
but “of man” she says.) He
agrees that it does.
I turn in my bed.
From Disturbi del sistema binario
(Disruptions of the Binary System), 2006
From Valerio Magrelli: The Embrace, Faber & Faber 2009, translated by Jamie McKendrick.
For this remarkable undertaking, McKendrick won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the John Florio Prize.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valerio Magrelli (Rome, 1957) is the author of five poetry collections, for which he has won among other prizes the Mondello, the Viareggio, the Montale as well as the Premio Antonio Feltrinelli: Ora serrata retinae (Feltrinelli, 1980), Nature e venature (Mondadori, 1987), Esercizi di tiptologia (Mondadori, 1992), Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale (Einaudi, 1999), and Disturbi del sistema binario (Einaudi, 2006). He has published three books of prose: Nel condominio di carne (Einaudi 2002), La vicevita. Treni e viaggi in treno (Laterza 2009) and Addio al calcio (Einaudi 2010), as well as critical studies on Dadaism, Paul Val éry and Charles Baudelaire and notable translations of Mallarm é, Verlaine and Val éry.
A Professor of French literature at the University of Cassino, he is also a frequent contributor to the cultural pages of several Italian dailies. His poems have been translated into French, Spanish and a number of other languages. In English: Nearsights: Selected Poems (translated by A. Molino, Graywolf Press, 1991), The Contagion of Matter (translated by A. Molino, Holmes & Meyer, 2000), “Instructions on How to Read a Newspaper”, and Other Poems (translated by Anthony Molino, Riccardo Duranti and Annamaria Crowe Serrano, Chelsea Editions, New York, Chelsea Editions, 2008), and The Embrace (translated by Jamie McKendrick, Faber & Faber, 2009, which won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the John Florio Prize – Vanishing Points, the bilingual edition of this book, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
