Hermetic Poetry

I love translating poems I like on this blog, I really do. Translating is one of the most complicated jobs, because you have to help authors touch foreign readers the way they did with natives. Dealing with emotions is always challenging in itself. 

Italian hermeticism is obscure and difficult poetry, as of the Symbolist school, so it gets even more changeling because of the language and imagery that are subjective, and because the suggestive power of the sound of words is as important as their meaning. But Quasimodo is one of my favorites, I can't limit you with this joy to miss his little masterpieces of sophisticated style and abstruse symbolism.

So here I try ...

SUNKEN OBOE

Stingy pain, delay your gift
in this hour of mine
of whispered leave.

A cold oboe flutes
joy of perennal leaves,
not mine, and confuses;

It is evening in me:
the water goes down
on my grassy hands.

Wings oscillate in a dim sky,
labile: the heart migrates
and I feel rough,

and the days are a ruin.


IMITATION OF JOY

Where the trees still
make the nigh more abandoned,
the indolent last last step you took vanished
and it appears when the flower
limes and insists on its fate.

One reason for looking for affection,
experiencing silence in your life.

Another adventure reveals
this mirrored time. It mourns
like death, like beauty now
lightning in other faces.
I have lost every innocent thing,
even in this voice, surviving
to imitate joy.

ALLEY

Sometimes your voice calls me
and I forget that skies and waters
wake up in me:

a network of sunlight reflects
on your walls that were in the evening
a swing of lamps
late in the workshops
full of wind and sadness.

In another time: a frame pounding in backyard
and a cry was heard in the night
of puppies and children.

Alley: a cross of houses
that are called floor
and they do not know who is afraid
of being alone in the dark.

And then, my favorite: 

And then my favorite of all: 

MIRROR

And here on the trunk
the gems break:
a green newer than the grass
that rests the heart:
the trunk looked already dead,
folded on the ditch.
And everything sounds like miracle;
and I am that cloudy water
that reflects in bluer its piece of sky,
that green that breaks the zest
that even tonight was not there.