Journal of Italian Translation

Michael Palma/Giovanni Raboni
Recovery
Of all this
there’s nothing left anymore (or maybe something
if I had to guess, there’s still a street or two
with cobblestones down the middle, and a bar).
Down here, my father said, you were well advised
to carry a knife with you... Ah yes, the Canal
is just a few steps away, the fog was thicker
back then, before they covered it... But what
they’ve gone and done, destroying all the houses,
destroying neighborhoods, here and other places,
what good does it do? The sickness wasn’t there
inside them, in the stairways, in the courtyards,
in the galleries, if anything it was
the dampness that could hurt you. If my father
were alive today, I’d ask him: Does it seem
good to you? Is this the way? It seems to me
that the sickness is never in things, I’d say to him.
Lessons of Political Economy
What do you want me to tell you? Later on
the mask may be cut away in the end and you’ll be able
to see with your own eyes the natural,
the hallowed motions of your heart... too late
to follow them, in all likelihood; but then
when we were eighteen, nineteen, with no one
to call us “little shits” right to our faces, our way
of rebelling was like that, conformity,
restraint, a cold disgust
for all the excesses of youth;
a cultivated disdain for revolution...
It goes without saying, you understand, that someone
like him was our man, with his hard round collars,
his tie-pin, his bloodsucker’s shoes. And you recall,
we didn’t miss one of them: sitting up
at those high old desks (through the French windows
the garden of the Royal Princesses or whatever
the hell they called it), immobile, falling asleep
and into uncertainty but all the same
stiff with pride, and I made every effort
to be at his altitude, to be clearheaded
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