Matthew Ted > Books: lit-writ-italian‎ (30)

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice—they won't hear you otherwise—"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more. All its glittering viscosity wa

Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more. All its glittering viscosity was left in its wake, for the split instead revealed a dry and compact surface, whose purplish-brown hue made it resemble the sliced end of a miniature bresaola.

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

In my country, when you joke you say something and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.

"More than Babylon or Eridu, it was the Underworld that was the Great City. Walking through it, one came across one palace after another. Some said: 'This is Nergal's palace, this is Ereshkigal's.' But there were others, too, palaces of minor gods, Hushbisha, Dimpimeku, Ninazimue. There were temples, too, and towers. Darkness was constant, except when Utu, the Sun, made a brief visit to pass judgement. The inhabitants wandered in the dust, dressed in feathers down to their feet, like birds that cannot fly. They ate clay."

"At first bewilderment and confusion ran riot. Then people began to split up and withdraw into different regions, well protected from one another. A dim veil came down on each of these places. But the veil could be torn open by curiosity and study."

Autobiography—and my mother’s is no exception—is the bastard genre of literature, at least according to the old cliché of the literary elite: to these readers, it lowers the threshold, is fodder for anyone, refugees, women, people with disabilities, Holocaust survivors, survivors of all kinds.

Years ago, on Facebook, we spoke of ourselves in third person and this felt right, like narrative; we became characters and no was bothered by this; then we went back to I, to publishing in first person, abut the idea of making ourselves important through autobiography seems dirty, and we’re back to harbouring suspicions about the genre, though every day we reinforce it with our contributions, rendering it a collective autobiography.

Buna

Wounded feet and cursed earth,
The line long in the grey mornings.
Buna's thousand chimneys smoke,
A day like every other day awaits us.
The sirens are terrific in the dawn:
'You, multitude with wasted faces,
Another day of suffering begins
On the monotonous horror of the mud.'

I see you in my heart, exhausted comrade;
Suffering comrade, I can read your eyes.
In your breast you have cold hunger nothing
The last courage has been broken in you.
Grey companion, you were a strong man,
A woman travelled next to you.
Empty comrade who has no more name,
A desert who has no more tears,

So poor that you have no more pain,
So exhausted you have no more fear,
Spent man who was a strong man once:
If we were to meet again
Up in the sweet world under the sun,
With what face would we confront each other?

The Survivor

To B.V.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till his ghastly tale is told,
His heart within him burns.
He sees his comrades' faces
livid at first light,
grey with cement dust,
Vague in the mist,
Dyed by death in their restless sleep:
At night they grind their jaws
Under the heavy burden of their dreams
Chewing a nonexistent turnip.
'Back, away from here, drowned people,
Go. I haven't stolen anyone's place,
I haven't usurped the bread of anyone,
No one died for me. No one.
Go back to your haze.
It's not my fault if I live and breathe
And eat and drink and sleep and put on clothes.

There came to me, needing no further sight,
Just by that strange, outflowing power of hers,
The old, old love in all its mastering might.

And, smitten through the eyesight unawares
By that high power which pierced me, heart and reins,
Long since, when I was but a child in years,

I turned to leftward—full of confidence
As any little boy who ever came
Running to mother with his fears and pains—

To say to Virgil: "There is scarce a dram
That does not hammer and throb in all my blood;
I know the embers of the ancient flame."

But Virgil—O he had left us, and we stood
Orphaned of him; Virgil, dear father, most
Kind Virgil I gave me to for my soul's good;

And not for all that our first mother lost
Could I forbid the smutching tears to steep
My cheeks, once washed with dew from all their dust.

Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

Ay me! how hard to speak of it—that rude
And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey
The tale, I'll write what else I found therewith.

A long way round we had to navigate
Before we came to where the ferryman
Roared: 'Out with you now, for here's the gate!'

Thousand and more, thronging the barbican,
I saw, of spirits fallen from Heaven, who cried
Angrily: 'Who goes there? why walks this man,

Undead, the kingdom of the dead?' My guide,
Wary and wise, made signs to them, to show
He sought a secret parley. Then their pride

Abating somewhat, they called out: 'Why, so!
Come thou within, and bid that fellow begone—
That rash intruder on our realm below.

A place made dumb of every glimmer of light,
Which bellows like tempestuous ocean birling
In the batter of a two-way wind's buffet and fight.

The blast of hell that never rests from whirling
Harries the spirits along in the sweep of its swath,
And vexes them, for ever beating and hurling.

When they are borne to the rim of the ruinous path
With cry and wail and shriek they are caught by the gust,
Railing and cursing the power of the Lord's wrath.

Into this torment carnal sinners are thrust,
So I was told—the sinners who make their reason
Bond thrall under the yoke of their lust.

I thought I saw a shady mass appear;
Then shrank behind my leader from the blast,
Because there was no other cabin here.

I stood (with fear I write it) where at least
The shades, quite covered by the frozen sheet,
Gleamed through the ice like straws in crystal glassed;

Some lie at length and others stand in it,
This one upon his head, and that upright,
Another like a bow bent to feet.

Nothing is known about the mechanism by which the knall kills, or at least nothing about it has been published to date. Knall, in German, means crack, bang, crash; abknallen, in the slang of the Second World War, came to mean “kill with a firearm,” whereas the firing of a knall is typically silent. Maybe the name—unless it has a completely different origin, or is an abbreviation—alludes to the moment of death, which in effect is instantaneous: the person who is struck—even if only superficially, on the hand or on the ear—falls lifeless immediately, and the corpse shows no sign of trauma, except for a small ring-shaped bruise at the point of contact, along the knall’s geometric axis.

I don’t think you’ll find a baker or an accountant […] you’ll look in vain for a plumber, an electrician, a welder, a mechanic, or a chemist, and I wonder why […] You’ll find a flood of explorers, lovers, cops and robbers, musicians, painters, and poets, countesses, prostitutes, warriors, knights, foundlings, bullies, and crowned heads. Prostitutes above all, in a percentage absolutely disproportionate to the actual need. In short, it’s better not to seek here an image of the world you left.

Here you will not find a sea captain who has not been shipwrecked, a wife who has not been an adulteress, a painter who does not live in poverty for long years and then become famous.

The opinion arrived two months later, and was highly favourable: he, Di Prima, had painted himself from head to foot, and then spent four hours under a ladder, on a Friday, in the company of thirteen black cats, without coming to any harm.

Chiovatero also tried it [and] all the traffic lights he came to were green, he never got a busy signal on the telephone, his girlfriend made up with him, and he ever won a modest prize in the lottery. Naturally it all came to an end after he took a bath.

The expiration date wasn’t always the same: it could be years ahead, or months or days, for no apparent reason, he felt that this was an injustice. Nor did it seem reasonable that there were no rules regarding age: some days he was handed hundreds of cards for newborns. Then, the boss complained if Arrigo kept to generic formulas: the man must be a sadist or a fan of crime news. It wasn’t enough for Arrigo to write “accident.” He wanted all the details and was never satisfied.