Franca Mancinelli (b. 1981) is one of the leading poets of her generation and has received several important prizes in Italy. I have had the pleasure of translating all of her published poetry to date: her prose poems in The Little Book of Passage (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018) and her verse poetry in At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019). Her writing is cherished by readers because of the way she grapples with wounds, losses, and what she has called “fault lines”—sometimes personal in origin, sometimes not. By writing, she often seeks to transform these negative events or situations into something potentially affirmative. The title of her new book of poems, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto, which is forthcoming in September at Marcos y Marcos, comes from a line in one of her poems that expresses this new possibility of vision: “All the eyes that I have opened are branches I have lost.”
Over the years, Mancinelli has also written compelling personal essays. Published in anthologies and journals, these texts often evoke her hometown of Fano or meditate on works of art. Such is the case with “Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of Vision.” Mancinelli bases her text on a fifteenth-century Italian painting that is found in Urbino at the National Gallery. The painting represents an “ideal city” from which all, or nearly all, the inhabitants seem to have fled, arguably because of some invasion or plague-like disaster. Her text is a kind of reverie on this painting: its architecture, its empty city square and buildings. It raises the question of stepping into the painting, of having “the courage to cross the threshold, [to] enter the darkness, hollow and round like a belly that has taken you back into itself.”
—John Taylor
It emerges when I close my eyes. As clearly as an island suddenly appearing beyond the haze and the mist on the horizon. You see it and can only believe your eyes even if you know you are daydreaming. It happens every time in a different light, as if that square and those streets were the setting of a story. Perhaps only the ghost of a voice that has taken a breath, a gust skimming over the cobblestones, whirlwinding dust across the space, beating lightly on the windows like a bird that has lost its flock.
With sure footsteps, I was heading towards the half-open door. That of the large pagoda a magic spell had brought to a stop at the center of this gently drawn desert. I was moving forward over the large, ash- and sand-colored marble slabs. I could not take my eyes off the geometry seemingly guiding me to the center, like a rolling marble that gathers speed, approaching the hole where it must fall. The darkness beyond the door and a growing fear could have gripped my body and kept me from moving, but it was impossible: my steps continued towards the center while my terror was blooming like a black flower. The door might have opened slowly, then widely, to the breath of the void barely covered by the constructions that now seemed made of cards. They have been aligned in a lukewarm light, but, as you see, they cannot halt the fathomless blackness pressing outwards from the windows and the half-open doors. If you enter the pagoda you sink into the center of the universe, in an endless fall. The beast looks at you, awaits you, pretending to sleep with its hollow eyes: six large square pupils in a clear mellow sky that tells you not to believe in the darkness, not to be afraid. Come to the center; enter. You can imitate a childhood game and jump only on the light or the dark slabs. Precisely, calibrating each movement as if your life depended on it. With such concentration, obediently, you can advance to the foot of the staircase. Now you’re there, standing in front of the dark crack. You have gathered all the soft light of this scene; you have the balmy sun concealed by buildings but warm and sure, as in a late morning without school. You can see the pagoda slowly turning on its axis like a carousel without horses and without music, so slowly that it seems almost motionless; yet it rotates—of this you are sure—rotates like the earth. At the top, the almost invisible thread supporting it could lift it up again, restoring its airy foundations.
What you see has been done so that you can sleep without fearing the void between the stars. We have cut it out in the form of windows and slits. Look at it like this, delimited in the gleam of our geometry. There is still time before each line disappears. Before this city is scattered or rises like a curtain over the void. Keep living in it, believing in this space, stay.
The night has washed everything away. A dark rainy night that wouldn’t end. A darker streak remains in the distant, high part of the sky. Every inhabitant vanished, ran away into the darkness, after the water started flooding the thresholds of the houses and kept pouring down heavily. It would have submerged every door and window, leaving only the small cross on the baptistery dome as if to indicate a sepulcher at the center of the lake that was expanding, barely disturbed by ripples on the surface. Insects or something that was still moving, in the depths. Then the sun and the light returned, and day after day the city resurfaced as you see it now. Those two white doves on the building ledge were the first to arrive, when the façades were still being reflected in the water. Now bathed in light, the city, you would say, was made of sand, so complete and fragile in the hands of the child who built it and who, on a whim, could trample it. He would indeed start with the baptistery dome, the contours breaking and collapsing, the surfaces sinking back into matter.
Will anyone ever come back here to live? Whoever fled did not even take care to lock the doors, to fasten the windows. One by one slowly, or everyone together all at once, they left and never returned. It’s needless to wait, to peek at signs at the back of the rooms. Or outside, on the balconies, on the windowsills between the flowerless vases. It’s the morning that attends to them with its light rain, its light seeming to bring life even where it is no longer possible. A raindrop penetrating into the silent rooms is the sole event. The whole space, the darkness in which everything has remained as it was, trembles because of this: the unmade beds, the jug on the table, the dirty breakfast dishes. Only these things know what has happened.
It’s needless to investigate the fate of this city: it has been entrusted to the light. This is why the city varies, like moods. I can see it extinguished together with the blue that descends in the twilight from the window next to the day bed. I can brush up against it with the nape of my neck, or, when sitting, feel it against my back while its outline opens in my mind, putting itself together and then falling apart figure by figure. Or I can turn around and run my finger over its lines like a child learning to read. Sometimes lying on the other end of the bed, I barely caress it with the tip of my foot. For an instant, I seem to reach the other pole of the world, the back side freed from all dregs, cleansed by time, like the empty, transparent half of an hourglass. Today I believe, today I entirely entrust myself to, the gleam of the pastels. I think that everyone is still there, between the walls, asleep: it is only the cloudy dawn of a festive day; soon they will be out on the streets again, the children next to their mothers, in their best clothes, heading for the cathedral at the back of the square. This lasts only a few moments. The time in which something can be avoided. Then the blackness of doors and windows returns, and it speaks for itself, as if sending signals from the building fronts. A mysterious language made of voids, which allow themselves to be concealed by different measures, and of doors and windows from which you might glimpse an outstretched hand emerging, or a turned neck, half of a face that immediately hides. Don’t believe the inhabitants of the building. They are just demons chasing each other from one floor to another. They are waiting for noon, to stretch out on the pavement of the square. This is a city of the dead; its apartments are orderly burial niches. It has been left to the government of the wind and the light, and left unattended so that your prayers can enter. Here one can live only in silence. Don’t abandon the city. Don’t run away. Come back.
Do you believe in the horizon that opens out beyond the streets, in the white roads that vanish in the distance, in the dark trees that accompany them faithfully or move off for a while, alone, into the middle of the fields? Those outlines of hills form the green margin of a mirage, built with the stone of illusion, in the subtle tremor of a fever pervading the air. Beyond the mirage is a nameless openness. For this reason, you continue to be called here, to this square, whose edges are marked by two water receptacles. You can approach and lean over the rim to see if there is truly still water preserved in this deserted city. If it’s a goldfish basin or a well in which something flickers. Or if the bottom is empty, illumined by a shower of coins. If you have one in your pocket and also toss it in, with your back to the baptistery, its door will open wide. It is waiting only for your footsteps. If you have the courage to cross the threshold, you will enter the darkness, hollow and round like a belly that has taken you back into itself. There, the voices of the former inhabitants are circulating; they can tell you the history of the city. When all of a sudden they stop whispering, as crickets sometimes do in the middle of a summer night, you are on their side too, having entered among them to keep watch.
They say you can go in and not die. You won’t be swallowed up. You will remain in the center of the darkness with the ears of a trembling animal. Then ever quieter until you are filled with water, like something empty. You won’t know what footsteps to take to get back out. Once you reach that place, space doesn’t matter. You will move, but you will always be in the center of that darkness. Do not talk. You just have to make sure that your breathing is not obstructed. Resounding like a hollow reed. Now you go away. Lightweight like those who can no longer forget.
This painting does not allow itself to be looked at. It does not allow one’s gaze to approach and go away like any visitor. The city is under siege. Closed up in a large room, the little princess girl sleeps. You start to walk through each apartment slowly. You open all the doors. Open the windows wide to the light. You think you are the prince who awakens everything. For a moment the square and the streets are crowded with people. Then silence again falls over everything. The mystery that governs this place is more powerful than any imagination. Every story begins and ends here, in this desert of walls dazzled by light.
The city keeps changing before your eyes, half revealing figures that it removes without your noticing. You don’t even notice how, after staying here, your gaze has now become different. Behind these lines is a force field. One single point, like the one at which your eyes sometimes inadvertently stare.
You haven’t seen anything yet, you haven’t known how to see. Here each image is the duplicate of itself, coming back as it appears in the depths, in the dark water of the mind. It is your thought that is seeking a place to lodge without entering and leaving every time like a dispossessed stranger. If your thought manages to come to a halt it will open out like the city, a receptacle of darkness, preserving silence.
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These fragments in the form of a vision were born from long immersions in the lake of the “Ideal City.” They are one motionless breath, an apnea fragmented by brief returns to the surface.
When I learned that this panel was probably the headboard of a day bed for meditating, I was no longer able to detach myself from this image that could be inhabited while lying down, between wakefulness and sleep. I stopped off there for a long time because I have no place, and as something placeless cannot happen, therefore I also stay, going and coming back across the threshold of this space that appears and disappears. A space transported and transmuted by thoughts like clouds by the wind.
I am happy that this painting bears no one’s signature. In the Ducal Palace of Urbino, where no place shuns its owner’s name, where every corner reiterates the glory and obsession of an identity, from the ceilings to the thresholds, from the fireplaces to the stuccoes on the walls: FD Fe Dux, the anonymous space of the ideal city remains protected from any attribution. We have designed it in many ways, walking through it as we continue to do.
Translated from the Italian by John Taylor
“Ideal City” (“Città ideale”), by an artist from central Italy, formerly attributed to Luciano Laurana. Oil painting on wood, 67.7 cm x 239.4 cm, date uncertain (1480-1490), Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche.
The original Italian text was first published as “Abitare la città ideale: Frammenti in forma di visione” in S’agli occhi credi: Le Marche dell’arte nello sguardo dei poeti, edited by C. Babino, Macerata, Vydia Editore, 2015.
Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. Her first two collections of verse poetry, Mala kruna (2007) and Pasta madre (2013), were awarded several prizes in Italy and later republished together as A un’ora di sonno da qui (2018)—a book now available in John Taylor’s English translation as At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (Bitter Oleander Press, 2019). In 2018, her collection of prose poems, Libretto di transito, was published by the Bitter Oleander Press as The Little Book of Passage. She has participated in international projects such as the Chair Poet in Residence (Kolkata, India, 2019) and Refest: Images and Words on Refugee Routes. From this latter experience was born her Taccuino croato (Croatian Notebook), now published in Come tradurre la neve (How to Translate the Snow, 2019).
John Taylor is an American writer, critic, and translator who lives in France. Among his many translations of French and Italian poetry are books by Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Pierre Chappuis, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, José-Flore Tappy, Pierre Voélin, Georges Perros, Lorenzo Calogero, and Alfredo de Palchi. His translations have been awarded grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, Pro Helvetia, and the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation. He is the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently The Dark Brightness, Grassy Stairways, Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, and a “double book” co-authored with Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges.
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