To Mary, the Goddess Announced in Florence

Antonio Geraldini


Infinite maternal, eternity born in you as heaven's king. Your heart a vestal vessel, receiving the angel when he announced himself. With your name elevated in Etruria, your body a bright Tiberian torch, you happily approach with healing hands all Italian visitors, all flocks of the foreign who seek your sacred rites. Maiden of the people, your temple is made greater than the three-pronged seat of the Delphic oracle, your altar more celebrated than the horned god's Libyan fountain, more famous than the deciduous oaks in Dodona. Your altar is richer than Epidaurus's; you altar is grander than Jupiter's.


Hail.                                                                                                                      Hail.


When feverish flames lick sickened foreheads, you heal them, casting out heat as if arthritic joints were volcanic as Etna. You bore disease from the breastbones of the weakened. When knuckles draw together in a gnarled congregation beneath skin, you align them and make light the steps of the lame. You banish cloud cover from blinded eyes. You open deaf ears so they hear honeyed sounds, golden and flowing. Dumb tongues once lead-heavy carve marble with their words. A sailor cries wretched pleas as he weathers the froth and foam of flooding swells, fearful of a shipwreck. You hear him.


Hail.                                                                                                                      Hail.


You hear the prayers of men with heads unhelmeted, with wounds exposed and incurable by Chiron, Melampus or Machaon, men for whom the last hour is visible. Men who have seen death kneel and send glimmering prayers swimming into night's current and you hear them, goddess. You work these wonders of which the lyre cannot sing with strings and sound. The earth fertile, the sea winged with sails, the celestial sky: all these are swollen with your services. Cleanse and strengthen me and all in the star-bearing house; may our voices resound in a way pleasing to men, in a way pleasing to God.

 

translated from the Latin by Emily Wilson

Read the original in Latin

This translation was influenced by H.D.'s and Anne Carson's approaches to reframing classical texts into English, specifically Carson's warning that "to live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing." If any language has been the source and medium of canonized myth, it is Latin. My liberal translation choices and the resulting poetic interpretation are a small step in preventing Geraldini's work from living past the end of its myth.

Stylistic choices were implemented to allow form and content to reciprocally create both tension and cohesion in this piece. "To Mary, the Goddess Announced in Florence" visually occupies the page as a representation of the columns and architectural aesthetic of Mary's temple. "Hail," originally spoken by an angel in Geraldini's Latin, is extracted from its position in the text and is used instead as the temple's visual cornerstones. I also intentionally emphasized Geraldini's choice to identify Mary as a goddess. This decision speaks to the tradition of H.D.'s feminist restructuring of classical texts and allows Mary to be granted agency outside of her sexuality. These unconventional renderings are intended to infuse modernity into the myth of Geraldini's work and to allow the two to occupy his poems harmoniously.

Geraldini's interest in the lyre's role in myth is embodied in his line, "You work these wonders of which the lyre cannot sing with strings and sound." He found the instrument both facilitated lived experience and was inadequate in expressing the full beauty of it, an instrument incredible and insufficient. The same can be said of translation; it is both incredible and insufficient. Just as there are things which the lyre can and cannot convey, so too are there poetic moments which translation both captures and allows to escape. This translation hopes to maintain a balance between all the things of which Geraldini's lyre can and cannot sing.

Antonio Geraldini was born in Amelia, a town in the central Italian region of Umbria; scholarly estimates place his birth in 1449. Beginning in his early twenties, Geraldini began writing and traveling extensively. Spain became his second home. He received the poet's crown and was appointed as Spain's ambassador to Florence by Ferdinand and Isabella. He used his political influence to advocate for the Spanish support of Christopher Columbus's expenditures until his own death in 1489. Geraldini's eclogues are considered to be his most prominent poetic work. Though most classical eclogues focus on pastoral imagery, Geraldini's verses are concerned with the life of Christ and were intended to be used as instructional material in Christian-based curricula. Heavily interested in how culture and geography act as our collective contextual framework and as the medium through which we relate, many of Geraldini's other works are individually dedicated to Italian intellectuals of his time.

Emily Wilson was born and raised in North Carolina. She graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in creative writing and religious studies. Currently pursuing an M.F.A. in poetry at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, she works as a graduate teaching assistant and served as the 2013-2014 Kert Green fellow. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Passages North, and Raleigh Review, among others. She received the 2012 Emma Howell Memorial Poetry Prize, was first runner-up in the Indiana Review 2014 Poetry Prize, and has a pending nomination for Best New Poets 2014.