da Morte segreta (1976)
E abbandono morte. Giocattolo di Dio.
Le muse si sveltiscono solo se andate cose
rigirano, sezionando in dolore e confessione,
oscillando fra tenere immagini e pensiero
lucido di ieri, friabile rendendo la memoria
delle realtà impossibile, quelle mai volute
e tutte assoldate al vizio del ricordo.
Le trapassate entità ingiuste e invivibili
che fecero di me un ragazzo come tanti e ora
un morto che cammina, un fiato eterno di pietà
e tristezza, trascinandomi un corpo-cadavere
che di mattina alzo e vesto, rantolo per casa,
chiudo al gabinetto, ascolto nelle sue chiacchiere
insulse e quotidiane, chiedendo udienza alle muse
ancora con ironia come una pianta secca
dai fiori profumati, chissà perché. Dentro
il cuore si agita invano la parola chiave, morte,
morte terrena, morte eterna, ed è il corpo trionfante
bestia che si accalda a dimostrarlo in attesa
di diventare freddo come un marmo.
Questo corpo che vesto e nutro e lavo
e accordo ai separati corpi altrui, costringo ad amare,
manometto, chiedo il perdono della sua putrefazione
perenne in una erezione instabile e impotente, sterile,
senza figli severi e solari per confortare vecchiaia.
Tutto questo decomposto, gracile corpo cadavere
devo affaticarlo per sbiancare una notte senza insonnia
uncinato da pasticche velenose; cuori diabolici nel letto
agitano la loro bandiera nevrotica. “Anche tu sei dei nostri
caro, scegli l’orgasmo che vuoi. Ti aspettiamo impazienti
addio!” I morti, gli strabilianti morti vivendo nei sogni
li terrorizzano fino al delirio della più enorme insonnia
e solo le botte dell’infanzia mi placano, giacendo
senza vita lontano dal centro della mia vita.
“Non urlare, Dario non urlare, sei pazzo.
Un vivente melodramma da strapazzo!”
Così diviso da me, osservo il mio cadavere,
ne contemplo le mille epoche sopravvissute
alle illusioni, alla felicità passeggera di un bacio,
preda di sapienti ladroni notturni che sanno
aspettare fino all’ultimo l’estremo rantolo.
da Libro d’amore: “Amore” (1982)
Nella mia notte il pessimo tuo mattino
sul lastrico mentre io vado a dormire
e tu non hai casa. Sei solo nel temporale.
Sì, nel lastrico, i marciapiedi a camminare,
sonno mai dormito per te. Invano io
nel letto e le sudate coperte
e tu mendichi a me piangendo la tua giornata
per accontentare la mia primordiale ferocità.
Che ora costringo il mio cattivo giorno all’aria
fino al castello delle tue ossa che un amante
inglese scrocchia.
Non c’è lutto per te, letto, usate
brande o mutande . . .
Sulla mia vita scatenata non entri
più. Resti in agguato sulla porta
e bussi e pisci piano piano o forte
e quelle visibili righe che dallo scroscio
si formano allegre sotto la fessura
dell’entrata – effimere efemeridi
di un Tempo quando Eros
ci legava e io ti bevevo tutto
Qualcuno inorridisce. Io tremo
esitando e fingo assente
la mia volontà e non apro.
Ho di te orrore che mi uccida
e pietà. L’omicidio è
suicidio – sfarzo di povero
matto dal volto ancora adolescente.
Dove riposi io guardo.
Maturo la vendetta e la scaldo
perché si plachi fino all’ultimo
bacio.
Come è diversa la ripetizione!
La fine dell’amore dopo l’amore,
quando il decrepito cuore sa
di poter battere in pace. Che
tranquillo l’aspetta
l’oscuro sonno animale!
Ora che tutto è vizzo e cerchiati
gli occhi non guardano che il vizio,
solo questo tempo di prede-caine
acqueta il canto delle Furie
furibonde di sapersi trascurate –
la sommossa certa orecchiabile
impunita del cazzo
che nelle braghette canta.
Quattro poesie
Dario Bellezza
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.
