Franca Mancinelli
Translated from the Italian by John Taylor
in the middle of the square sea
or in a suburban park.
You can have a sword with you,
or a book, a town,
a martyr’s palm leaf
—as a perch your past
is useful to pigeons.
al centro della piazza
o in un parco di periferia.
Puoi avere con te una spada
un libro, una città
o una palma del martirio
– come poggiolo il tuo passato
è utile ai piccioni.
I clasp my hands like a bud sea
—that’s all I give
standing on the ground— it is
no name. A rose is rolling
or you, life on the move.
intreccio le mani a bocciolo
–è tutto ciò che dono
in piedi, ferma sulla terra –non c’è
un nome. Rotola una rosa
per te vita in cammino.
without cracks of doubt sea
befell what is
fallen from the hands of a god
laughing in the light.
senza crepe di dubbio
è accaduto ciò che è
caduto dalle mani di un dio
ridente nella luce.
on the asphalt torn apart
a name spelled by stones.
When the holes fill with water,
the face returns, mirror of the sky.
nell’asfalto squarciato
un nome sillabato dai sassi.
Si colmano d’acqua le buche,
torna il viso, specchio del cielo.
near the river, poets
halt, mill blades
to grind the grain
for us it is different, but over the centuries
the same bread.
fermi accanto al fiume
poeti, pale di mulino
a macinare il grano
per noi diverso, ma nei secoli
lo stesso pane.
made to measure, the body
in time gets too tight
leaves buttonholes unbuttoned
—we watch you all unstitching
conceding to the night
wider slits
we who live in the darkness
like flowers in a vase of water.
fabbricato su misura, il corpo
nel tempo stringe
lascia asole vuote
–vi guardiamo scucire
concedere alla notte
più ampie fenditure
noi che viviamo nel buio
come fiori in un vaso d’acqua.
day’s end a suitcase sea
the room. Every gesture put
back in the skin’s sheath.
And yet
from the depths of night a footstep
—something falls—and the body
of darkness becomes darkness.
fine del giorno una valigia
la stanza. Rientrato ogni gesto
nella fodera della pelle
Eppure
dal fondo della notte un passo
– qualcosa cade – e il corpo
del buio ritorna buio.
mouth inside the bone sea
this cold shatters
and swallows what we are emptiness
between the stars, flesh and blood
between the orifices.
bocca dentro le ossa
questo freddo frantuma
e ingoia ciò che siamo: vuoto
tra le stelle, carne e sangue
tra gli orifizi.
the hollow between the ribs, the flowery seasea
mouth of a jug
—I exhale—back it goes
into bud—I inhale.
l’incavo tra le costole, la bocca
fiorita di un vaso
–espiro–, in boccio
ritorna, –inspiro–.
head bowed sease
at the altar of the sea
the weight, like sand,
comes undone.
chinata la testa
all’altare del mare
il peso come sabbia
si scioglie.
Also Read: Selected Poems from Béatrice Douvre’s ‘Prisms’
Translator’s Note:
Franca Mancinelli has gained a wide readership in her homeland and internationally because of her unique way of probing existential predicaments and raising fundamental questions about how “wounds” can be turned into a “new possibility of vision,” as she puts it. She begins with a concrete fact or happenstance, which she has experienced or witnessed, and then, with penetrating insight and exacting stylistic concision, she distills the essence—be it a state of mind and body or an enigma of our being-in-the-cosmos—that we can no longer avoid because it is also ours or can become ours. All of her published work is available in John Taylor’s English translations.
The line “mouth inside the bones” takes into account that the word “bocca” (“mouth”), in the dialect of Fano, the poet’s hometown, can also be an imperative meaning “enter.”
This sequence will appear in Italian, in a slightly different version, in the book Poesia, prima persona plurale, edited by Lorenzo Mari, Rossella Renzi, and Gianluca Rizzo, and published by Argolibri in 2025. It is previously unpublished in English.
Franca Mancinelli (b. 1981) is one of the most important voices in contemporary Italian poetry and her writing is not unknown in India because she was the Chair Poet in Residence in Calcutta in January-February 2019. The Bitter Oleander Press has issued The Little Book of Passage (2018), At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (2019), as well as a volume gathering Mancinelli’s prose narratives and personal essays, The Butterfly Cemetery (2022). Her most recent Italian volume, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (Marcos y Marcos, 2020), which won two national Italian prizes, was published in English in 2023 by Black Square Editions as All the Eyes that I Have Opened. The sequence All’altare del mare, selected for this presentation in The Space Ink, represents some of her most recent writing.
Photo Courtesy: Chiara de Luca, Rituparna Mukherjee
Sea
John Taylor (b. 1952) is an American writer, poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, and Modern Greek), he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. His most recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Jean Frémon, Charline Lambert, Franca Mancinelli, Veroniki Dalakoura, and Elias Petropoulos. His own volumes of poetry and poetic prose include Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, a “double book” co-authored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges, and What Comes from the Night.
