la litania dei casi recitata al ginnasio
s’è fatta prognosi postuma dei giorni:
se tutto sommato poco frequentati
– anche colpevolmente, lo ammetto –
i primi due,
tra dativo e accusativo invece
s’è consumato il maggior tempo.
Seguiti dal vocativo
per veglie albe notti,
preghiere a volti muti, ascolti
sempre in duplice tensione:
rivolto altrove e ad altri
o nell’attesa di una chiamata.
Ora vivo all’ablativo
*
quanti ascensori ho già preso fin qui!
di alberghi condomini uffici musei
università biblioteche ospedali
ciascuno diverso dall’altro
per foggia arredo odore e colore:
déco, intarsiati e aperti
sul vano delle scale
o ermetici di metallo lucente,
rapidissimi su per l’erta di un grattacielo
o lenti e cigolanti nel casamento
di una Praga lontana e deserta.
Con la sensazione anche salendo
di muovermi invece verso il basso
in precipitante discesa.
E ogni volta uscendo voltarmi
per controllare se la mia ombra
mi seguisse fedele
oppure, riottosa, dentro rimanesse
adagiata sul quadrato del pavimento
*
Dal molo di Alcantara, percorso in tempi diversi, per lo piú invernali o primaverili ma sempre postumi a qualche festività (bar desolati, poche navi all’attracco, pioggia sottile, il tram 5 in partenza per il suo lungo giro della città) si scorge netta, volgendo le spalle al fiume, la collina dei Prazeres. Qua e là, dietro i fitti cipressi verdescuro, s’intravedono parti del muro di cinta, barlumi di marmo grigio, i tetti di qualche piccolo tempio familiare. Nell’aria umida ogni cosa sembra vicina senza essere però incombente. Una prospettiva uguale rivolta a un luogo simile si ritrova adesso – distante negli anni – in questo parco appena a ridosso del mare. Anche da qui lo sguardo risale su una collina, incontra gli stessi cipressi appena un poco piú chiari, gli scalini che s’inerpicano sulle terrazze, le tombe presumibilmente diverse da quelle solo per alcuni minimi particolari di addobbo o di costruzione. Non è il caso di chiedersi quale luogo dei due spinga al riconoscimento dell’altro. Anche perché il piú antico e il piú noto si lascia ora vedere cosí solo dopo aver visto quello, nello spazio, remoto e straniero. Viene da pensare che il luogo presente conceda il suo senso a chi l’interroga solo sull’arco teso dal movimento che l’unisce all’altrove.
*
sto per i nomi propri
di persona e di luogo
(Giovanni Francesca
Rupanego Calacoto)
per i forse e i qualcosa
per i proverbi,
anche banali o insulsi,
e i modi di dire antichi:
le concrezioni geologiche della lingua
di cui (se mai c’è stato)
s’è perduto l’inventore,
per i mattoni cotti
nella fornace comune
e non per i fragili e raffinati vasi
foggiati dal ceramista solitario
nel suo studio
*
elma in turco significa mela.
Iridescente prisma delle lettere
che riflette separa ricongiunge
anche qui tra mura e minareti
cipressi scuri e costa d’asia
o ragnatelo esile e incerto
che se pure manca la sua cosa
(luce prima o mosca)
ci tiene – tra sbreghi impacci e nodi –
ancora legati insieme
da Ablativo
Enrico Testa
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.
