Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Italy’s gods.”
Joseph Tusiani / Giosuè Carducci
Oh, how throughout this chain of lovely mountains
the sun smiled forth with his reviving splendor
when high Spoleto sighted, lost and howling
in ruinous flight,
the giant Moors and the Numidian horses
obscenely blended, and upon them tempests
of steel, and floods of burning oil, and chantings
of victory!
Now all is silent. In the limpid current
I watch a tenuous vein that’s hardly rising:
it shakes, and seems to crack with a light bubble
the waters’ mirror.
A narrow forest buried at the bottom
is smiling, spreading, motionless, its branches:
with winding love the jasper seems to mingle
with the amethyst,
and all its blossoms seem of sapphire, showing
reflections of cold diamond: with rigid
luster they seem to call one to the silence
of the green depth.
Below the mountain, in the shade of oak-trees,
with rills, O Italy, your songs are springing.
Here lived the nymphs, one day, and their immortal
being now wed: alcove is here
Tall in their flowing veils, blue-dripping Naiads
emerged, one day, and in the quiet evening
they sent their known, loud call to their dark sisters
over the hills,
and all of them beneath the bending moonlight
merrily danced, in one glad chorus singing
of deathless Janus and his ardent longing
for Carnesena.
From heaven he, from earth was the Virago;
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