Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

Santina’s gatethat creaks whenever Luisín visits,someone who’s winding the clock sitting on a bed,Malvinawho’s fiddling with the rosary in her pocket,and Giulia who’s furiously knitting away,and then whatever’s going to happen, happens,a stone in a well, the water’s deep, splashing,the music of the carousel with its signaljust before it starts to turn,the bus at Borghiwheezing under the Arch like a human being,all that discoursing in the piazza, the spitting,yawning, cursing,the hogs from Caléccia when they’re beingslaughteredwho screech like a tool being sharpened on thegrinding stone,and underneath the bucket for blood,the filth that comes out of Minerva’s mouth,which afterwards she’s ashamed of,when she makes love to Doctor Tosi,a doorbell that rings and no one’s there,two who are running, one right after the other,they’re here, they’re past, they’re far away,the thud Tisbe heardthat night passing by the fishmarket,it was Vincenzo who had thrown himselfoff the town wall,the holy-hell Ruggero from Zoppa let loosewhen he lost his van playing cocincina,the guns at the time of the Front in the field for thefairand way up as far as Poggio, it was like a string ofrosary beadswhich when they were hitting us, we’d, out offrightstart laughing,someone chomping on a celery stalkwith his front teeth, Baghego’s finch whistlingthat sounds like an aria,a woman’s voice:“not there, the mark’ll show there,”the money Primo threw out the windowwhen he went bankrupt,and his wife in the hallway, sobbing,it was all just loose change, bouncing,altogether there was five thousand lire,the lightening crack that Sunday on the town hallwhich set the archives on fire,people arguing, the insults,the name-calling,and others talking in low voices, spying oneveryone else,a boy kicking a can,a ripe watermelon being cut, the crunch,the words she said that you couldn’t understand,Teresa, in the hospital before she died,her people all around her,with those hands and veins in her neck,her breathing slowing down,Critic Dante Isella, to whom “E’ malàn” is dedicated,describes this accumlation as “a metric equivalentin the accumulating of verses that speed up as they comeone after the other.”Brevini argues that in “E’ malàn,” as well as in thepoems, “La cucagna,” “La firma,” “L’amòur,” and “Lanàiva,” this listing characteristic, “(l’)elencazione caro aBaldini.” (this listing dear to Baldini) has acutally shifted,and the listing has become instead an expansion ofthe images into terrible dimensions. (8)This accumulation is found in other Baldini poemsas well. In “La chéursa” (La corsa, Running), a terrifiedboy flees other boys who are chasing him; as he runspanicked through town, he names all the places he passes,and these named landmarks, added layer by layer,give the poem its urgency. In “La nàiva,” (La neve,Snow) the narrator watches the town’s landmarks disappearone by one in a terrible, apocalyptic snowfall; thenaming and description of places accumulating, as thesnow does.In Baldini’s poetry and in his theatrical works thereis the overriding the sense of monologue. In his introductoryessay, Mengaldo refers to them as “monologuesyou lose your breath with.” (9) Isella argues thatBaldini’s various narrative and descriptivetechniques,“result in every way in achieving a spoknnessthat barely floats above the continuum of the prose, amonologal voice in which what is at stake is no longerthe ‘I’ of the writer but of each and every component ofhis own community.”(10)In this language that mimics spoken conversation,there is no pause or break, and it is often a series ofqualifications, of adjustments and asides. As in his theatricalmonologue Carta canta (Page Proof), or in otherpoems such as “E’ solitèri” (Solitaire), “E’ malàn” uses alanguage that mimics one particular kind of spoken conversation,that of an extended self-argument, whereby thespeaker sets up a hypothesis, projects it to someone else,36 Translation Review