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Two poems from Transparency by Maria Borio, translated by Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe

Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe and Maria Borio

the walk / credit: de
the walk / credit: de

Miniatures 2

You’re asleep and breathe
nearby something of me that dissolves the air.
Heel to brow
at your side unmoving
in the idea that above us
something – it can be called
Something – in the dark levitates us.
In the dream you walk head down.
In the sound of jaws – an animal
sleeps between us – Someone continues…
We’re in a lake,
holograms, clepsydra up high,
project stretched on blank pigment
composes in slow motion
like monitored species in a glasshouse.
And a silence… from us
some far distant man
tests the lens, not the dark.

Miniature 2

Sei addormentato e respiri
qualcosa di me vicino che scioglie l’aria.
Dai talloni alla fronte
immobile al tuo fianco
nell’idea che sopra di noi
qualcosa – può chiamarsi
Qualcosa – nel buio ci fa levitare.
Nel sogno cammini con la testa all’ingiù.
Nel suono delle fauci – un animale
dorme tra noi – Qualcuno continua…
Siamo in un lago,
ologrammi, in alto la clessidra,
il progetto steso sul pigmento bianco
compone al rallentatore
come nella serra la specie monitorata.
E un silenzio… di noi
qualche uomo lontanissimo
prova l’obiettivo, non il buio.

1980

The provincia has filled with new houses.
There is a happiness. None of you had yet been born.
Houses solid with eternizable couples.

We thought the tar ring expanded via
the tallest cranes and transplanted trees
ending in the field and the field calm

as if before a show. You say
none of you had yet been born, but a form existed
over the worksites and families: roots exerting pressure,

the tar, cranes erected, children born,
one by one an automobile, happiness
like supple reptile skin.

A hot springtime cuts you now
midst plastic bags and cellophane bulbs:

cuts us where I say look at the field with its image-
remnants, shattered cathode-ray tube.

In the stable sound of the television
the houses at the back crumble into the video:

we pull them out, fasten roof with grain.
Without us you age as if we hadn’t been born—

a finished miniature, mineral turpentine, holograms
inside all the landscape.

1980

La provincia si è riempita di case nuove.
C’è una felicità. Non eravate ancora nati.
Le case salde di coppie eternabili.

Pensavamo che si espandesse per gru altissime e
alberi trapiantati l’anello di catrame
che terminava nel campo e il campo sereno

come di fronte a uno spettacolo. Dici
non eravate ancora nati, ma esisteva una forma
su cantieri e famiglie: le radici che forzavano,

il catrame, le gru montate, i figli nati,
uno per uno un’automobile, la felicità
come pelle nutrita di un rettile.

Una primavera calda vi taglia adesso
fra le buste della spesa e i bulbi nel cellofan:

ci taglia dove dico guardate il campo con le rovine
delle immagini, il tubo catodico spezzato.

Nel suono fermo della televisione
le case indietro si sbriciolano nel video:

le tiriamo fuori, allacciamo il tetto con il grano.
Senza noi invecchiate come non fossimo nati –

miniatura finita, acqua ragia, ologrammi
dentro tutto il paesaggio.

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Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe

Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe is an Italo-Australian translator completing her MA in Italian Studies, where she is writing on the ventriloquism of voice in seventeenth-century Italian poetry. She also works as a language teacher with Latin and English and as a research assistant in the digital and computational humanities.

Maria Borio

Maria Borio is an Italian poet and poetry editor of the journal Nuovi Argomenti. The author of two prize-winning poetic collections, she has poems published in larger collections and journals, and academic publications on Italian poetry. The traversal of borderlines initiated in Borio’s first collection, L’altro limite (2017), is continued here in Trasparenza (2019), where boundaries between humans are semi-opaque, flickering, hybrid.

Author: Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe and Maria Borio Tags: translations Category: Poetry February 14, 2020

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Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

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