from Transparencies

Maria Borio

Isola

At night Isola’s high-rise glass
seems a fault on the horizon,
a half circle of building that commands
the power to make water solid
then liquefy at the moment
you’re done circumscribing.

Here the hours distinguish by dark
the tidy silence, the rumble of trains,
drops in the air, fibers—
but the dawn halts us in contorted sound:

the curves of empty time,
the tunnel escape
elevators, defrosted food, an open charge between them—
the architects of this glass neatness
or a human attempt to still the fragilest
blue.

Seated on the fountain’s edge
here’s the takeover: incorruptible
the cold of dark
shrinks back and the usual crowd

scales the face’s lines. At the café
you tell me it’s a metaphor for our world
hoarding food in its mouth
the huge glass of these buildings
and the food organ-deep:

machine and flesh toil, invisible,
and their imperfection wraps pure and impure
entering exiting from the huge glass
that’s cut into sections
like a mute obscure Duchamp.

If you squeeze your hand, it could break

or resist as the ether resists, 

and there self-conscious or self-removed

pure and impure

Isola’s vast screen 

or a continent.




Dorsoduro

I

The houses on the water will stand firm
but the eyes around them aren’t human.

Atmosphere to atmosphere everything transforms.
 
A human sound is inhuman.



 
II

They resist water plants. We imagine
they reach us from a nucleus deep within.

The garden is balanced without atmosphere,
its reflection on the water is a summary of light

across a city that, though fish-shaped,
flows with a nature neither animal nor vegetable.

Now Papadopoli makes invisible energy,
balance hanging between atmospheres.

This garden has no nature. It’s not a garden.

Is balance on water real balance?

 


III

Evil is hidden by the fog on the sea.
A hook brings it forward and back.

At night we get lost on this bank,
the lights oscillate on our shoulders.

We’re no longer human but sound
that stitches Dorsoduro to the Ghetto.

The motors write the water densely.

Now a fixed silence in the real delivered.

translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti

Read the original in Italian

Listen to the original read by the poet:

Maria Borio’s poems explore vital questions of technology, urbanism, and the fracturing of the self with deeply felt humanism. Her first full-length collection, Trasparenza, in which these two poems appear, has won praise for its poems that consider the line between the virtual and the physical world, attempting to establish a vocabulary for the interpersonal crises of contemporary life. Borio’s poem “Isola,” inspired by a neighborhood in Milan, conflates screens, windows, and high-rise glass, portraying these spaces of transparency as ironically distancing. In “Dorsoduro,” even the reflective waters of Venice become a source of deceit that undermines the setting’s authenticity.

As an English-language reader, poet, and translator, I was immediately struck by Borio’s sharp, contemporary lyricism and willingness to confront political themes, as well as her work’s uniquely Italian portrayal of globalism, which simultaneously critiques and seeks continuity with tradition. I was also taken by the reference to both Italian and English poetry in Borio’s unusual metaphors and refined rhythms; it was her familiar cadence and striking imagery that drew me to the challenge of translating her work. Borio describes Trasparenza as “the story of a person who in today’s world searches for the meaning of human relationships, and tries to secure the scenes and situations in which they occur: digital communications, emotional ties, large spaces covered by plane and train, places with glass architecture that allow an immediate view between the inside and the outside.” Borio examines these settings with the eye of an outsider peering through a window, simultaneously confounded and, as a writer, complicit in their reproduction.

Maria Borio has published three books of poetry: Trasparenza (Interlinea, 2019), Dal deserto rosso (Stampa 2009, 2021), and L’altro limite (LietoColle, 2017). A selection of her works entitled “Vite unite” that was included in XII Quaderno italiano di poesia contemporanea (Marcos y Marcos, 2015). She holds a Ph.D. in contemporary Italian literature and is the poetry editor of the journal Nuovi Argomenti, previously directed by Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Danielle Pieratti is an American poet and translator whose work has appeared in Boston Review, Words Without Borders, Mid-American Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Her first book, Fugitives (Lost Horse Press, 2016), was selected by Kim Addonizio for the 2015 Idaho Prize for Poetry and won the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for poetry. Transparencies, her collected translations from Maria Borio’s Trasparenza, is forthcoming from World Poetry Books.