About the translator: Ned Condini, writer, translator, and literary critic, was the recipient of the PEN/Poggioli Award for his versions of poet Mario Luzi (New York, 1986) and of the Bordighera Prize for his rendering of Jane Tassi’s ANDSONGSONGSONGLESSNESS (Boca Raton, Florida, 2002). Short stories and poems of his have appeared in TRANSLATION, New York, THE MISSISSIPPI REVIEW, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, THE PARTISAN REVIEW, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, ITALIAN AMERICANA, CHELSEA, YIP REVIEW (Yale, Connecticut) & THE VILLAGE VOICE. Other publications include RIMBAUD IN UMBRIA, Multigraf, Venice, 1994, and quartettsatz, VIA, Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, 1996. In November 2002 Condini placed first in the Winning Writers War Poetry Contest, New York. At present he is completing a selection of Modern and Contemporary Italian Poetry (1890-2003) for the MLA, New York.
FUNNY HOW ADOLESCENCE LEAVES YOU
You don’t dare run anymore.
You don’t leap into a waterfall, dive off a cliff.
You are afraid of looking ridiculous or weak
& when you think of the past, your forehead wrinkles
& life is like that possum twitching
in agony on the pavement, his blood flowing out.
Your face stares at you from the mirror
& you deny it’s yours. Yours was handsome,
stretching back in time to the beginning of things,
more like a titan’s than a human’s.WOODCLIFF LAKE
Tenuous the fog rises over the lake,
showing the blue underneath in ragged streaks only.
But in the distance a flowering of golds
is coming into view and, round the corner, fires
of oak leaves stir the limited horizon
of our restricted lives.A sudden melancholy strikes you from nowhere
as the paean of leaves majestically swells:
is it your youth that’s fleeing, winter approaching,
or are you falling with the fall of nature,
feeling your limbs go up in flames, your hair
caught in this milky mist that drowns the heart.You’re not the child from Grimm who forgot to shudder
at the sight of death, but your ride today is a silent
search for the face of someone who was your friend:
you do not want the fall of leaves to grieve you.
You are their gold and their red, as you were their green.
So every journey contains the seeds of its end.Let her be green, you Mover that I’m seeking,
once more with a child’s fresh vision.
Let her be water, clarity stripped of colors,
but with the idea of rainbow in it.
And with these yellows anchored in her like suns
of ripened wisdom, mayher ride every morning be a salutation to winter.
Pause for a tree reduced to a geometry of lines,
a blade of grass made into a blade of steel,
an acorn resting under feet of snow
but growing into a thing of utmost beauty.
The yearning is the essence, not the Spring.A BEGINNING
Captured in these northern mountains
flawed with the greening sticks of spring,
I hear in the ice far, fiery fountains,
the free, muted fountains beginning.Then stairs and hills of ice dissolve,
prisons fall open at a whisper,
the winds in the turned worlds revolve,
the gray jails of the fish surrender.I ride in them down the rough shallows,
endlessly on as streaming swallows
entering, unerring, everywhere
the new blue levels of the air.My father’s statues lie in pools of wax;
the dark devoured, the rocks unlocked.
The bird, the unbridled horse, plunge in the light.
The wells break open and the world is fountaining,
with slivering sound and nightingale-noise night,
a breathless start, a heart, and a beginning.