Postcard from Saint-Gilles-du-Gard
Stones, behind the gate and chain. Behind the barrier’s
rust. A guidebook describes the miracle
ending in nothing: sand and dust. It narrates
persecutions and war. The cathedral of all
cathedrals, once. Now it’s laughable. A joke
for the few tourists.
On the façade only one head is left:
the prostitute, squatting between the legs of passersby
amid spit-stains and dirt. The other faces are empty, erased
by a few hammer-blows.
Not her. She’s still got
two eyes to look around with. Free of shame
now. No longer anyone scrutinizing her from on high.
No longer anyone deciding on her pardon.
Postcard from Herisau
From the hills you see San Gallo, reassuring,
with its stadium. Elders cluster to welcome
the soldier heading back to the barracks.
Immaculate houses and façades rebuke
the too-green meadows. Vague pride stagnates:
our women, our lands, our animals.
It’s strange that in the woods, right here,
there’s the lifeless body of a little girl.
So out of tune. It’s strange that a place like this
also gives, sometimes, such a death.
Conversation with Maria (a fragment)
“We’d run to gather up the sugar caramelized
by the bombing. Secretly, two tiny girls,
during breaks in the fields or later at night.
The elementary school had been closed for ages.
One time, under a lead-heavy sky,
when we got to the carriage we heard lots of voices
and sounds. We ran away without turning back, only earth
and legs and our banging hearts.
Someone was machine gunning. Reaching the village,
I could barely breathe. My big sister
punched me in the head with her knuckles,
kicking me. My friend, though,
didn’t come back. And no one was able
ever to find her.”
On the train to Zurich
The train to Zurich is also the train of these ruins,
these houses at the margins caked with dust,
their walls peeling and pulling away from the beams.
(Invaders, says the man on the phone. The foreigners,
illegals, immigrants: all of them.)
This is the train of the dead, too: those who died at work
among many, and those who’d willingly die but live
cast off in their usual stifling spaces, forgotten
by faraway, hazy promises.
from New Days of Dust
Yari Bernasconi
translated from the Italian by V. Penelope Pelizzon
Listen to a recording of:
I grabbed the lifeline of Yari’s Bernasconi’s Nuovi giorni di polvere during the Covid lockdowns of 2020–2021, when I was living part-time in Milan. The atmosphere of the poems haunted me in the same way I often felt spooked by northern Italy. History weighs on you there; there’s no way around it. And during Covid in Lombardy—scurrying through empty piazzas to the grocery store with my police pass, tiptoeing into churches whose fonts held not water but industrial-sized pumps of hand sanitizer—the most banal moments were transformed into surreality.
Now here were Bernasconi’s poems, where the historical surreal lingers below the apparently serene present. War survivors tell their stories in fragments, elders gather in the idyllic town square unaware of a murder just beyond, and every lovely view reveals the scars of long habitation. There is irony here, too, and a deeply moral questioning of the ways humans might live together in the twenty-first century.
The challenge for me was capturing the simultaneous moods of the ominous and the everyday in Bernasconi’s Italian. Sometimes his tone is borderline sarcastic and his diction quite deadpan. In English this can come across as flat. But Bernasconi uses enjambment dynamically to create tension, and I relied on that to give each English line its snap.
Now here were Bernasconi’s poems, where the historical surreal lingers below the apparently serene present. War survivors tell their stories in fragments, elders gather in the idyllic town square unaware of a murder just beyond, and every lovely view reveals the scars of long habitation. There is irony here, too, and a deeply moral questioning of the ways humans might live together in the twenty-first century.
The challenge for me was capturing the simultaneous moods of the ominous and the everyday in Bernasconi’s Italian. Sometimes his tone is borderline sarcastic and his diction quite deadpan. In English this can come across as flat. But Bernasconi uses enjambment dynamically to create tension, and I relied on that to give each English line its snap.
Yari Bernasconi (b. 1982) is an Italian-speaking Swiss poet. His first full-length poetry collection, Nuovi giorni di polvere (New Days of Dust; Casagrande, 2015), won the Fondazione Schiller’s 2016 Terra Nova Prize. His most recent poetry collection, The Empty House (Marcos y Marcos, 2021), received the 2022 Swiss Literature Award. New Days of Dust has been translated into French and German. Together with Andrea Fazioli, he has coauthored other publications including the literary reportage A Zurigo sulla luna (In Zurich, On the Moon; Gabriele Capelli Editore, 2021). Bernasconi lives in Hinterkappelen, near Bern, Switzerland.
V. Penelope Pelizzon is the author of A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye (Pitt Poetry Series, 2024). Her translations have appeared in Poetry, The Seneca Review, and The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry. She is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
