If you must be stronger than yourself when you write,
If you must be stronger than what you write,
then you should realize how it is not
the force: the center, the fire, the fork; then
you should regard that way
as a road with no opposite direction
in one voice or another
you follow it, without remedy.
*
I
On this train I think of you like a man without whereabouts,
the omen that I ignore and suffer. Being lost
isn’t voluntary, it just naturally follows
when I wake up and everything still has to happen
you write me
something we both yearn for and have
already lived through.
II
Tonight the moon strips the olive trees bare
a kiss to a thousand cuts inflicted—
where we must go to heal.
I would like to quarry your enigmatic smile
to see
the root of the joy you secret away.
III
Fever 35 degrees
my delirium wants me here and pitched to the world, love me.
To know something is to fight from inside,
a clean movement that leaves nowhere to go
if I stay out. To block my skyward escape
I need your hands.
IV
The man said: You seem like you’re afraid of the visible edge of things.
I’m frightened, the woman answered, as if something had hit me.
For perfection? he asked.
No, she said, for its crimes.
We exorcise death in the house-water lily’s bed
You tell me the house mouse can’t kill itself
I love you for the first time in a wrong life.
V
November, one year later.
The sky is not whiter than this sheet,
it’s just held snow, the ice
you steal from my slender veins.
If I try to run away, I lose myself.
VI
Christmas is the next absence we’ll have to live
/ Stephansplatz, a memory, or maybe Schiele
the Mozartkugel. I’ve been dreaming
your tongue into the shape of language:
this silence stronger than what never stops
possessing us.
VII
The sonatina by Diabelli is an endless winter
we touch across a great distance / we are
the bedraggled skies in a painting by Van Gogh.
I’m looking for a tender gesture, like a wild dog
you refuse your death a living. O love
if it were not for certain transparencies,
maybe I would have stabbed your heart.
*
Find the right time for writing?
I can’t write when
I’m down
I can’t write when
I’m up.
There is a wastage in being: it’s not before,
not after.
Time is a man’s idea:
I am a woman.
Poemetto in G-minor
Pamela Proietti
translated from the Italian by Stephen Eric Berry and María Rodríguez Santiago
Listen to the original read by the poet:
With many thanks to my co-translator María Santiago Rodriguez, I would like to share some thoughts on the process of translating Pamela Proietti’s poem “Poemetto in Sol Minore” from Italian into English.
Translation is a bit like chaperoning two people on a series of awkward first dates. The couple—the two languages—might be shy at first, but soon they start figuring each other out. If things go well and you do your job, they find their own secret ways of sharing. Then it becomes time for you to get out of the car, to ease the door shut so very quietly, to back away from the car, and to find your way home in the dark.
My favorite stretch of translating this poem was exploring how to render un delirio psico pubblicitario into English, a delirium that the author described as one that sells the self short of its poetry by making itself public. We considered incorporating the word “pitch” as what one does when one throws something: a ball, a rock or, in this case, the speaker throwing herself out of herself. Pitch black also connotes the darkest black imaginable. This moment in the poem is complex and deranged, since the psycho-public-delirium wants the speaker to do two diametrically opposed things at the same time: to stay in herself (where the poetry is) and to pitch herself out of where she needs to be to perform or publicize an escape that she knows will leave her hollow and lost. We hope that our translation captures some of this beautifully conflicted state of affairs.
As a translator, my views of the source text and the target language are in a state of constant flux. The languages back-translate and cross-energize one another. It is difficult to specify what is not in transit. The asymptote of this process is one of constant approach through a series of better, worse, and truly bad choices with no acceptable option for indecision. Along this arc, one finds a myriad of pitfalls and falsi amici (“false friends”) waiting to lure the translator down blind alleys. Along the wild paths between Italian and English there are countless examples of such poison mushrooms. An excellent safeguard against making bad decisions is to keep drafts of annotated translations moving between the translators and the author. We hope readers find this record of our journey rewarding.
Translation is a bit like chaperoning two people on a series of awkward first dates. The couple—the two languages—might be shy at first, but soon they start figuring each other out. If things go well and you do your job, they find their own secret ways of sharing. Then it becomes time for you to get out of the car, to ease the door shut so very quietly, to back away from the car, and to find your way home in the dark.
My favorite stretch of translating this poem was exploring how to render un delirio psico pubblicitario into English, a delirium that the author described as one that sells the self short of its poetry by making itself public. We considered incorporating the word “pitch” as what one does when one throws something: a ball, a rock or, in this case, the speaker throwing herself out of herself. Pitch black also connotes the darkest black imaginable. This moment in the poem is complex and deranged, since the psycho-public-delirium wants the speaker to do two diametrically opposed things at the same time: to stay in herself (where the poetry is) and to pitch herself out of where she needs to be to perform or publicize an escape that she knows will leave her hollow and lost. We hope that our translation captures some of this beautifully conflicted state of affairs.
As a translator, my views of the source text and the target language are in a state of constant flux. The languages back-translate and cross-energize one another. It is difficult to specify what is not in transit. The asymptote of this process is one of constant approach through a series of better, worse, and truly bad choices with no acceptable option for indecision. Along this arc, one finds a myriad of pitfalls and falsi amici (“false friends”) waiting to lure the translator down blind alleys. Along the wild paths between Italian and English there are countless examples of such poison mushrooms. An excellent safeguard against making bad decisions is to keep drafts of annotated translations moving between the translators and the author. We hope readers find this record of our journey rewarding.
—Stephen Eric Berry
Pamela Proietti released her first book of poetry Il nome bianco through Gattomerlino Edizioni (Rome, Italy) in 2021. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Columbia Journal, Interim, La Repubblica (Italy), Belas Infiéis (Brazil), and in anthologies La nuova carne poetica, Vol.1 - della femmina intelligenza (PesaNerviPress, 2008) and Il mare è poesia (Edizioni Progetto Cultura, 2015). She has served as an editorial director at Metropolis Zero magazine where she oversaw the “Letters to the Director” section and wrote on the “Mind the Gap” page. Ms. Proietti collaborates with NiedernGasse magazine and the House of Ink cultural association. She lives in Rome, Italy.
Stephen Eric Berry is a writer, filmmaker, composer, and a recipient of a Jule and Avery Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan. His poems and translations have appeared in: Puerto del Sol, Tampa Review, Columbia Journal, Asymptote, The Mailer Review, Interim Poetics, and the Brazilian publications Belas Infíéis and Voz da Literatura. In 2017, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to be a visiting scholar at Amherst College. He just released The Children's Holiday, a film exploring the artwork of Detroit-area artist John Elkerr. To view the film, go here. He lives in Chelsea, Michigan (USA).
María Rodríguez Santiago is a native of Puerto Rico and a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico. She is currently an Italian Ph.D. student at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan where she teaches several foreign languages. A Rackham Merit Fellow and a polyglot with proficiency in English, Spanish, French, and Italian, she lives in Westland, Michigan.
