BY TIFFANY SCIACCA
The third featured poet of this series is Alda Merini, an Italian poet and writer born in 1931. Her writing style was said to be influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke, and to be both fervent and transcendent. Some of her works include L'altra verità. Diario di una diversa (The Other Truth: Diary of an Other), La presenza di Orfeo (The Prescience of Orpheus). I discovered Merini quite by accident on Netflix. I was looking for an Italian film to study, as I am trying to learn the language, and La pazza della porta accanto: Conversazione con Alda Merini caught my eye. Merini started writing at a young age. Her childhood is a mystery, except that she was very good in school. Though ironically was not accepted into Liceo Manzoni, a prestigious High School because she did not pass the Italian language test. At the age of 16, she was admitted to a clinic after what she would describe as meeting the "first shadows of her mind."
Giacinto Spagnolétti published her first works in The Anthology of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1909-1949 when she was 19. Giacinto was an Italian literary critic who had earlier recognized her talent. With this publication, she had introduction to writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Maria Corti, and Luciano Erba. Merini’s work flourished and consistently found publication throughout the 1950s. A great deal of her later poems dealt with her experiences while committed by first her husband to the Psychiatric hospital Paolo Pini for almost 10 years. (There were breaks in between.) After her husband died in 1983, it took some time to reestablish herself in the literary world, as she may not have had quite the support system she benefited from at the start of her career. Although continuously haunted by the shadows of her mind, she went on to find resurgence and redemption. Merini was awarded the Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale Prize in 1993 (which she won for La Terra Santa, which featured many works based on her experience in Paolo Pini) and in 1996 she was awarded the Premio Viareggio and was later nominated for the Nobel Prize by the French Academy.
Alda Merini put a lot of poetry and other writings into this world, but it is hard to find a lot of it translated! Below you will find both poems and aphorisms, or as Merini called them "spells of the night."
RELATED: A Poet I’ve Never Heard Of: Alfonsina Storni
Roman wedding
Translated by Susan Stewart
Yes, this will be our house,
today I’m here to see it;
but you, lusty man, who are you?
I take your measure: an eternal formula.
You take on an inexorable look.
You will dig me down to my roots
(not to search for me, not to help me)
you will strip away everything hidden
through the savagery of your crazy habits.
You will overpower my core
man who forces me:
you will wound my flesh with your teeth,
you will settle into the fervor of my yearning
to choke its sense of urgency.
Like a rock dividing waters,
a young and raging current,
recklessly, you will break me up
in the arms of a painful delta…
[Io ero un uccello]
Io ero un uccello
dal bianco ventre gentile,
qualcuno mi ha tagliato la gola
per riderci sopra,
non so.
Io ero un albatro grande
e volteggiavo sui mari.
Qualcuno ha fermato il mio viaggio,
senza nessuna carità di suono.
Ma anche distesa per terra
io canto ora per te
le mie canzoni d’amore.
[As for me, I used to be a bird]
Translated by Susan Stewart
As for me, I used to be a bird
with a gentle white womb,
someone cut my throat
just for laughs,
I don’t know.
As for me, I used to be a great albatross
and whirled over the seas.
Someone put an end to my journey,
without any charity in the tone of it.
But even stretched out on the ground
I sing for you now
my songs of love.
Il pastrano
Un certo pastrano abitò lungo tempo in casa
era un pastrano di lana buona
un pettinato leggero
un pastrano di molte fatture
vissuto e rivoltato mille volte
era il disegno del nostro babbo
la sua sagoma ora assorta ed ora felice.
Appeso a un cappio o al portabiti
assumeva un’aria sconfitta:
traverso quell’antico pastrano
ho conosciuto i segreti di mio padre
vivendolo cosí, nell’ombra.
The overcoat
Translated by Susan Stewart
A certain overcoat lived at our house for a long time
it was made of good wool
a finely-combed wool
a many-times-made-over overcoat
well-worn, a thousand times turned inside out
it wore the outline of our father
his very figure, whether worried or happy
Hanging on a hook or on the coat rack
it took on a defeated air:
through that ancient overcoat
I came to know my father’s secrets
to live that life, in the shadow.
[Night, if it is not swift]
for E.C.
Night, if it is not swift,
has no time to cover the dream.
My eyes are lanterns and you
the breath that clouds them.
You sleep on everyone’s heart
oh little asphodel
and as soon as the fingernails
have scraped the winter cold
you will return, a blossoming arunculus,
to make me happy.
Eager your ivory cups
eager your testicles of desire
and the fingers filled with plums
blossom into vast perfumes.
Here are a few of Merini’s aphorisms.
Calumny
is a toothless word
that, once it arrives
at its destination,
puts on iron jaws.
There are nights
that never
happen.
The next two are translations by Douglas Basford.
Psychoanalysis
always looks for the egg
in a basket
that has been lost.
If God absolves me
he always does so
for insufficient
evidence.
There is a poem entitled My First Mother-Theft that I held off including in this list. It is very evocative in regards to some; I pray not all of the men who entered Alda Merini’s life. It hurt to read. You can find it here under Susan Stewart translations.
In the second stanza of Roman Wedding, you get a taste of what she endured:
You will dig me down to my roots
(not to search for me, not to help me)
Such a punch in two lines! It takes a certain type of cruelty to work one’s way to the core of you only to destroy. Roman Wedding starts off wide eyed and hopeful but this bliss crumbles before you hit the next stanza.
In As For Me I Used to Be a Bird, this is another that begins with a whisper; I used to be a bird—gentle white womb. Then digs in the gut,
Someone cut my throat
Just for laughs,
I don’t know.
I had two interpretations of this poem but I will keep them to myself, but please comment below if you would like to discuss it more.
In The Overcoat, the overcoat is a symbol almost a fetish. The attention to detail, finely combed wool—the many times made over. How it held the outline of the father, which called the idea of a shroud to me, then it hangs defeated, holder of secrets.
I encourage you to look up Alda Merini’s work or watch the documentary if you can find it, she may not be everyone’s cup of tea but someone will surely appreciate her blend.
Tiffany Sciacca is a writer who has recently moved to Sicily from the Midwest. Her work has appeared in the Silver Birch Press, SOFTBLOW and DNA Magazine UK. When she is not learning a new language or trying to blend in, she is reading horror anthologies, binging on Nordic Noir or plugging away at her first Giallo screenplay. @EustaceChisholm