[inkwellpoetess]

Is anyone familiar with the Poetry of Primo Levi?
I've been reading his collected poems and found two that struck me as exceptionally beautiful:

The Girl-Child of Pompei

Since everyone's anquish is our own,
We live yours over and over again, thin child,
Clutching your mother convulsively
as though, when the noon sky turned black,
You wanted to re-enter her.
To no avail, because the air, turned poison
Filtered to find you through the closed windows
Of your quiet thick-walled house,
Once happy with your song, your timid laugh.
Centuries have passed, the ash has petrified
To imprison those delicate limbs forever.
In this way you stay with us, a twisted plaster cast,
Agony without, terrible witness to how much
Our proud seed matters to the gods.
Nothing is left of your far-removed sister,
The dutch girl imprisoned by four walls
who wrote of her youth without tomorrows.
Her silent ash was scattered by the wind,
Her brief life shut into a crumpled notebook.
Nothing remains of the Hiroshima schoolgirl,
a shadowed print on the wall by the light of a thousand suns,
Victim sacrificed on the alter of fear.
Powerful of the earth, masters of new poisons,
Sad secret guardians of final thunder,
The torments heaven sends us are enough.
Before your finger presses down, stop and consider.


Pearl Oyster

You - hotblooded, hasty, course -
What do you know of these soft limbs of mine
Except thier flavor? And yet
They feel both cold and warmth,
And,deep in the water, the impure and the pure.
They contract and relax, obedient
to intimate mute rhythms,
And, quick-moving stranger, they enjoy food,
Cry out in hunger like your limbs.
If walled between my stony valves
I had memory and intelligence like you,
And cemented to my rock, I divined the sky?
I'm more like you than you imagine,
Condemned to secrete, secrete
tears, sperm, mother-of-pearl and pearls.
Like you, if a splinter injures my mantle,
Day after day I cover it silently.



------------------
Regards,
Terri

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks, Terri. I particularly like the Pompeii one.

As a rule am not too keen on pearl poems, particularly if they come down to the making-a-pearl-of-one's-irritations epiphany. (It is a powerful metaphor, of course, and a true one, but you know what I mean...) I like the twist on this that it is the oyster comparing itself to the man, secrets and secretions.

Do you know who did the translations? (I presume these are from the Italian?)

[Patti McCarty]

Thanks for sharing those, Terri. Not familiar at all with Primo Levi but I'm lightyears behind in that department. The first was especially timely, given the situation between Pakistan and India. ~Patti

[inkwellpoetess]

Hi Alicia,

The translations were done by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann.



------------------
Regards,
Terri

[FasterG]

Monday

Is anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it's supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There's nothing sadder.

Except perhaps a cart horse,
Shut between two shafts
And unable even to look sideways.
Its whole life is walking.

And a man? Isn't a man sad?
If he lives in solitude a long time,
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.

--Primo Levi
January 17, 1946


And listen to this narrative -- quoted
from The Monkey's Wrench :

You see, it was a job like any other job, with the tricks of the trade, big and little, invented by God knows what Faussone at the beginning of time, and to tell you all the details it would take a whole book, and it's a book nobody will ever write, and actually that's a shame.

[This message has been edited by FasterG (edited July 07, 2002).]