Franca Mancinelli’s « Fuori dal fuoco » / « Out of the Fire » in English

• Post By: johntaylor
• Date: 18 octobre 2018
• Category: News

Franca Mancinelli’s poetic sequence « Fuori dal fuoco » has been translated into English by John Taylor as « Out of the Fire » on Ron Slate’s litzine-website On the Seawall. Here are the translated poems:

with footsteps that would like to plant

seeds in a cadence

I’m going to give back to the leaves

the tree they have lost,

to the fallen feathers the animal.

Then I cross my arms

and my heart returns to its cage.

 

*

a need to dig

to hide one’s bones from the dog.

Without seeds or promises,

mislaid at the first roots

between larvae and their

never sated caresses.

*

they all believed like sheets of paper

they would be whatever is written:

in the moistness that raises books

inside the lairs of the copycats

rasping with their tongues

and standing upright on their own skeletons.

*

the proud puff up the pages

like birds swelling their tails,

books to hide their faces.

 

*

everything cleansed

of voices in the room, fallen papers

eyes walking towards the window.

 

Erasing itself at the very moment

what you see is described

slowly withdraws

out of focus

out of the fire

 *

translate the flight

of the sparrow still locked in at home

—by force of beating its wings it has vanished

into the biggest wave of the awning

into the thumping shutter.

*

within a few hours returns

the ritual geometry

of dishes preceding the glasses.

I sit and have to

lay down my hands

mimic with my mouth

like praying before going to sleep.

*

 

I breathe, I pass my warmth to the dark

 

keyhole that saw

only once

and closed

 

I was a felled trunk

at each rendezvous, a Judas

witness of the blaze.

 

*

orienting itself toward the earth

as toward another heaven,

carried to term the cathedral

of the flesh will collapse.

*

in the circus where they drill affections

only the two of us enter, with all the others

vanishing into a shower, escaping

like fumes from the fire.

*

you return to sink in here

putting your back into it

lay the foundations in the mud.

*

come beyond the cleft

sink in with the others

to feed the peat.

*

I tuck my arms against my chest

like a dirty duck,

I brood, and my joy spreads into wrinkles.

*

 

 

they may not be mine

these hands like flies

fleeing from me. You find them

placing themselves on skin

—a single trajectory—

chased off they come back

filthier. You should keep them

alive in a jar.

I breathe, I pass my warmth to the dark

 

keyhole that saw

only once

and closed

 

I was a felled trunk

at each rendezvous, a Judas

witness of the blaze.

 

To read the entire sequence, with the original texts in Italian, click here. The sequence is published, in Italian, in Franca Mancinelli’s book A un’ora di sonno da qui (Italic Pequod, 2018).

These poems are not included in The Little Book of Passage (Bitter Oleander Press), which can be ordered from the Bitter Oleander Press website or from Small Press Distribution.