the series of Latin endings recited at school
has become a prognosis in retrospect:
though in the first two cases—doing, having—
fewer days were spent
(to my own shame, I admit)
than in the dative and accusative,
being done to, being had.
Next the vocative,
awake at dawn or at night,
prayers of direct address
to unresponsive faces, listening
always tensed against itself:
turned another way or toward others
or in expectation of a call.
Now I live in the ablative
*
how many elevators I’ve taken up to now!
hotels condos offices museums
schools libraries hospitals
each different from the last
in form upholstery color smell:
Deco, inlaid and laid open
on the stairwell side,
or hermetically sealed in stainless steel
rocketing up the skyscraping scale
or slow and creaky in an apartment block
of a distant and deserted Prague.
The sensation, even going up
of moving downward instead
in headlong freefall.
And getting out each time, turning
to see if my shadow
had followed faithfully
or willfully hung back
curled on its square of floor
*
From the Alcantara pier, a walk made different times, mostly winter or spring but always in the wake of some festivity (bars emptied out, a few boats on their mooring, a fine rain, the number 5 tram leaving for its long tour of the city), there comes into focus, turning one’s back on the river, the hill of Prazeres. Here and there, between dense, dark-green cypresses, parts of a city wall peek through, gleams of gray marble, the roof of some small, familiar shrine. In the humid air, each thing seems near without looming. The same prospect facing a similar place one recognizes now—years apart—in this park right beside the sea. From here, too, the gaze climbs up a little hill, meets the same cypresses, just a little more distinct, the stairs that wind up the terraces, these tombs presumably different from those only in a few minimal particulars of ornament or design. It’s not the time to ask which of the two places prompts recognition of the other. Also because the more ancient and the more famous now appears this way only after having seen the first, far off and foreign. It comes to mind that the present place makes sense to one who looks for it only on the drawn bow of a movement that marries it to somewhere else.
*
I stand for the proper nouns
of person and place
(Giovanni Francesca
Rupanego Calacoto)
for the somethings possiblies
proverbial wisdom
even clichéd or dull
and the olden ways of speech:
the seismic stratigraphy of language
whose author (if ever there was)
is lost to us:
for the bricks fired
in the common furnace
and not for the fine and fragile vase
thrown by the potter alone
at his wheel
*
elma in Turkish means apple.
Iridescent prism of letters
reflecting parting rejoining
even here amid walls and minarets
dark cypresses, Asia’s coast—
or spiderweb frail and unsteady
that even without its object
(fly or first light) holds us
—scorning, stumbling, tying up tight—
still bound together
from Ablative
Enrico Testa
translated from the Italian by Henry Walters
I came to the work of Enrico Testa late in 2020, a year in which I, like so many others in lockdown around the world, had little human contact outside of my immediate family. The world was as rich and inviting as ever, but links to it had grown tenuous. Loved ones smiled flatly at us from a screen, and we did what we could to reflect them, feeling our own smiles flattening. Even to those we lived with, marooned in each other’s company, we often seemed shadows of our former selves, our skins thinning. Time’s arrow began to boomerang. Memory itself developed a stutter, struggling to keep one day from caving in upon the next.
Into this state of mind and body, Testa’s book Ablativo dropped like an alarm waking a sleeper. The poems ratified my sense of dislocation but also irradiated it—in both the diagnostic and the therapeutic senses. Under their breath they seemed to say, with the gentlest of bedside manners: “Your links were always tenuous, even before. You never were singular. Your gestures are the gestures of others. If your inner life is going to sustain you, it will be because it is not your own, but a heap of hand-me-downs worn and loved to pieces by others, who are now no more than shades themselves. That pronoun, ‘I,’ will not keep you warm forever. It is an expedient, a borrowing, a fig leaf to hide the fact of your own frailty. But under the glow of this lamp, look—how myriad and intricate its veins.”
Translation has always been a conduit for such whispered intimacies and intimations. I soon began my own English versions, which I eventually sent to Testa himself; his work, despite relative notoriety in Italian literary circles, had not previously appeared in English. It deserves to be widely known. He wrote that I had “caught” something, that in many instances he preferred the translation to the Italian original. If this is so, it testifies less to the translator’s instincts than to the author’s careful and generous collaboration, one which continues to this day.
Into this state of mind and body, Testa’s book Ablativo dropped like an alarm waking a sleeper. The poems ratified my sense of dislocation but also irradiated it—in both the diagnostic and the therapeutic senses. Under their breath they seemed to say, with the gentlest of bedside manners: “Your links were always tenuous, even before. You never were singular. Your gestures are the gestures of others. If your inner life is going to sustain you, it will be because it is not your own, but a heap of hand-me-downs worn and loved to pieces by others, who are now no more than shades themselves. That pronoun, ‘I,’ will not keep you warm forever. It is an expedient, a borrowing, a fig leaf to hide the fact of your own frailty. But under the glow of this lamp, look—how myriad and intricate its veins.”
Translation has always been a conduit for such whispered intimacies and intimations. I soon began my own English versions, which I eventually sent to Testa himself; his work, despite relative notoriety in Italian literary circles, had not previously appeared in English. It deserves to be widely known. He wrote that I had “caught” something, that in many instances he preferred the translation to the Italian original. If this is so, it testifies less to the translator’s instincts than to the author’s careful and generous collaboration, one which continues to this day.
Enrico Testa (b. 1956) is a Genovese poet and scholar of the history of the Italian language at the Università degli Studi di Genova. He is the author of six collections of poetry and nine books of criticism, including L'italiano nascosto (The Hidden Italian; Einaudi, 2014), for which he was awarded the Premio Mondello, and a biography of Eugenio Montale. He is also the translator, into Italian, of Philip Larkin's High Windows. The poems published here first appeared in Ablativo (Ablative; Einaudi, 2013), which won the Premio Viareggio, one of Italy’s foremost poetry prizes.
Henry Walters is the author of two collections of poetry, including The Nature Thief, finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and published in October 2022 by The Waywiser Press. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in journals such as The Yale Review, Orion, The Threepenny Review, New Letters, Raritan, and Literary Imagination. He lives in New Hampshire with his young family, a hawk, and a hive of bees.
