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Poets of the Italian Diaspora - France
GIAN CARLO PIZZI
Translated by Justin Vitiello
Recordant
Let’s stop floating the corpses
of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht
virtually sunk in the dark wave,
in the nocturnal fog!
From the duty to be they surface
in the pale fields where
every morning without silt
a recurrent river leaves those bodies
with hair flowing
in the clear light
loosed by the fingers of death
by the clinging of
the autumn grass.
Here you don’t leave
slamming the door,
tact and memory are useless,
it’s not enough to raise your voice:
by these bodies we are called
to face the solitude of history.
Here totally undone
with amazement they approach
the substance of life.
Forever. Beyond the fall these suns
and the extinguishing of meaning.
Memory reaches oblivion.
We have been –
in other bodies with other names.
This grave awareness of existing –
when the old parapets of Europe
sink into the night.
May 5, 1978
(from Rémanence de l’oubli, 1999)
349
to Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof