from Secret Death (1976)
And I abandon death. Plaything of God.
The muses hurry along only if what’s gone
returns, separated into pain and confession,
oscillating between tender images and yesterday’s
lucid thought crumbling, rendering the memory
of impossible realities, those never wanted
and all enlisted to the vice of remembrance.
Those unjust and unlivable past entities
that made me a boy like so many others and now
a dead man who walks, an eternal breath of pity
and sorrow, dragging my cadaver-body
mornings that I wake and dress, wheeze around the house,
lock in the bathroom, and listen to in his chatter
of insults and daily routines, asking the muses
for counsel ironically, like a desiccated plant
somehow fragrant of flowers. Within
the heart that key word stirs in vain, death,
earthly death, eternal death, and it’s the body triumphant
beast that sweats as proof while waiting
to become cold as a slab of marble.
This corpse I dress and feed and wash
and reconcile to other corpses, I’m forced to love,
I manhandle it and ask forgiveness of its perennial
putrefaction with a limp and impotent erection, sterile,
with neither severe nor cheerful children to comfort old age.
This entire decomposed, frail body cadaver
I need to tire-out to brighten a night without insomnia
whetted by toxic pills; diabolical hearts wave
their neurotic flag in bed. “You too are one of us, dear,
choose the orgasm you want. We’ll wait impatiently
farewell!” The dead, the astounding dead living in dreams
terrorize them until the delirium of the most excessive
insomnia and the bruises of childhood placate me, lying
lifeless far from the center of my life.
“Don’t yell, Dario, don’t yell, you’re crazy.
A living melodrama of lunacy!”
Divided from myself, I watch my cadaver,
I think about the thousand epochs it’s survived
about the illusions, the fleeting happiness of a kiss,
prey of wise nocturnal thieves who understand
how to wait until that ultimate extreme gasp.
from Lovebook: “Lover” (1982)
In my night the worst of your mornings
on the pavement while I go to sleep
and you have no home. You’re alone in a storm.
Yes, on the pavement, sidewalks to walk,
sleep you never slept. Worthlessly I’m
in bed beneath sweaty bedcovers
and you beg to me whining about your day
to appease my primordial ferocity.
Now I’ll confine this unkind day to the air
all the way to the castle of your bones that
an English lover stokes.
There’s no mourning for you, or bed, used
bedframe or underwear . . .
You no longer enter into my unraveled
life. You wait in ambush at the door
and knock and piss slowly or loudly
while visible lines from the runoff
happily web beneath the entryway
crack—ephemeral chronicles
of a Time when Eros
bound us and I drank all of you.
Someone’s horrified. I tremble
hesitating and pretend my desire’s
gone and I don’t open.
I’m terrified you might kill me
and I pity you. Murder is
suicide—spectacle of a poor madman
who still has an adolescent face.
Where you sleep I watch over.
I ripen the vendetta and fuel it
till it’s soothed by the last
kiss.
How strange this repetition!
The end of love after love,
when the decrepit heart knows
at last to beat in peace. How
peacefully that dark animal
sleep waits for him!
Now that everything’s shriveled and squinting
eyes do nothing but seek out vice,
only this age of raising Cain
appeases the chanting of the Furies
rabid in their knowledge of being neglected—
the riot’s certainly easy listening
unfazed by the cock
that in its codpiece sings.
from What Sex Is Death
Dario Bellezza
translated from the Italian by Peter Covino
In Italy, during the Anni di piombo (Years of Lead), roughly between 1969 and the early 1980s, socially minded poets and poetry readings flourished in the wake of right-wing terrorist campaigns and bombings that also incited retaliatory attacks by the paramilitary left-wing Red Brigades. Dario Bellezza was one among such poets and a key figure of Europe’s Gay Rights Movement. His early poetry is lush, energetic, and fearless in its engagement with transgressive topics such as restrictive social mores and liberated ideas of sexuality.
The macabre rendering of death as a bifurcated, outer body or second entity in “[And I abandon death]” is typical of the Viareggio Prize-winning collection Morte segreta (1976) in which it appears. One imagines a sullen Hamlet railing against his boundary-less world while musing over Yorick’s skull. The sublimity of the poem is reinforced by the tension between complex memories of youth and the “perennial / putrefaction” that renders its speaker at once impotent, delirious, and sleepless. Equally remarkable are the medial caesuras, created through enjambment and punctuation, that enact the divided consciousness of the poem, which toggles between short, declarative sentences and somewhat unwieldy descriptive clauses.
Morte segreta as well as Bellezza’s debut collection Invettive e licenze (1971) were full of invective and presaged the AIDS crisis of the eighties and nineties. His later poems are somewhat more tempered, often prayer-like or meditative. The three poems from the sequence “Lover” presented here are from his 1982 collection titled Libro d’amore. “[In my night]” hinges upon the mundanity of sleeping and (un)dressing, contrasted against an emotional “storm” of “primordial ferocity” that leads to an immolation of sorts in which nothing remains: no traces of a lover; even the bed and tattered bedframe seem strangely evanescent. “[You no longer enter]” is much more direct, though just as sonically playful, especially in the consonance of f in the second stanza. I tried to render this in my translation by alternating f and l sounds, which are echoed again in the final two stanzas. “[Where you sleep]” represents a daring integration of Bellezza’s themes and modes. I suppose I was thinking of Hamlet when I translated braghette as “codpiece,” to get at the existential angst of the poem while preserving a sense of the sardonic.
These four poems are part of my manuscript-in-progress, What Sex Is Death: Dario Bellezza Selected Poems.
The macabre rendering of death as a bifurcated, outer body or second entity in “[And I abandon death]” is typical of the Viareggio Prize-winning collection Morte segreta (1976) in which it appears. One imagines a sullen Hamlet railing against his boundary-less world while musing over Yorick’s skull. The sublimity of the poem is reinforced by the tension between complex memories of youth and the “perennial / putrefaction” that renders its speaker at once impotent, delirious, and sleepless. Equally remarkable are the medial caesuras, created through enjambment and punctuation, that enact the divided consciousness of the poem, which toggles between short, declarative sentences and somewhat unwieldy descriptive clauses.
Morte segreta as well as Bellezza’s debut collection Invettive e licenze (1971) were full of invective and presaged the AIDS crisis of the eighties and nineties. His later poems are somewhat more tempered, often prayer-like or meditative. The three poems from the sequence “Lover” presented here are from his 1982 collection titled Libro d’amore. “[In my night]” hinges upon the mundanity of sleeping and (un)dressing, contrasted against an emotional “storm” of “primordial ferocity” that leads to an immolation of sorts in which nothing remains: no traces of a lover; even the bed and tattered bedframe seem strangely evanescent. “[You no longer enter]” is much more direct, though just as sonically playful, especially in the consonance of f in the second stanza. I tried to render this in my translation by alternating f and l sounds, which are echoed again in the final two stanzas. “[Where you sleep]” represents a daring integration of Bellezza’s themes and modes. I suppose I was thinking of Hamlet when I translated braghette as “codpiece,” to get at the existential angst of the poem while preserving a sense of the sardonic.
These four poems are part of my manuscript-in-progress, What Sex Is Death: Dario Bellezza Selected Poems.
Dario Bellezza (1944–1996) was a prize-winning and controversial Italian poet, novelist, and playwright who died a premature death related to complications from AIDS. His work was championed by such luminaries of twentieth-century Italian literature as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and Elsa Morante. He was also Pasolini’s secretary for a time and wrote an important nonfiction exposé that revealed the political motivation behind Pasolini’s murder in 1975. He won wide acclaim, including the Viareggio Prize, Italy’s most prestigious poetry recognition, for Morte segreta (Secret Death) in 1976, as well as the Montale Prize (1994) and the Gatti Prize (1971). Yet until Mondadori’s 2015 publication of Bellezza’s Tutte le poesie (Collected Poems), all of his collections were out of print though widely coveted especially by poetry aficionados and members of the international LGBTQ community.
Peter Covino translates Dario Bellezza, Patrizia Cavalli, Maurizio Cucchi, Livia De Stefani, and Vivian Lamarque, among others. His translations have been featured recently in Atlanta Review, Colorado Review, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, Italian Americana, Italoamericana, The Journal of Italian Translation, New European Poets (whose Italian section he co-edited), and Witness. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island and founding editor/director of Barrow Street Inc. (1998) as well as a scholarly writer and a prize-winning poet. He is the author of Cut off the Ears of Winter (2007 PEN American Osterweil Award) and The Right Place to Jump (2012 Paterson Poetry Prize), both from Western Michigan University Press, among other publications.
