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

Journal of Italian Translation
Chest’ è ancor’ogge Napule,
‘o mare, ‘o sole, ‘a vita assaie luntano
e ‘a croce ch’è pesante
p’’o Cristo senza Dio Napulitano.
This is still Naples today,
the sea, the sun, life so far away
and the cross that is heavy
for the Neapolitan Christ without God.
It has been a powerful emotional experience, as a non-Neapolitan
(albeit as a connoisseur and one who loves the South), to let
myself slide over the crests of the notes drawn by Luciano. Because
in my opinion, it is rightfully of notes that one must speak, even
before poems. So very many, almost infinite notes that weave a
body of melodious poetry, recited by the feeling voice of a dialect
- Neapolitan, precisely - that, above all when expressed with so
much mastery as this and even formal sensitivity, already in and of
itself possesses the precious gift of knowing how to (and to be able
to) enter between the most secret and unknown bends of the heart.
To speak of Luciano’s poetry, no matter how, is not easy. In
fact so much has been written about him and even more, I am convinced,
shall be written in the future. On the other hand, who better
than he, today, in Italy, knows how to narrate about ‘o sole e ‘o vico
[the sun and the alley], and the millions of expressions of one and
the same Cristo napulitano, a Christ made of humors, and passions,
and of common people? Of people, above all people... Because
Luciano today remains truly one of the few poets still capable of
revealing to us how true poetry – the only form of poetry possible
– is necessarily born from the inexhaustible font of one’s own daily
life, and hence far from any rhetorical affectation, and how it speaks
only the words that the eyes have taught it, the simple objects that
it has round about it, the wretched images, thin and shabby, that
the mood of the current day have on such occasions assigned. Luciano
in sum is one of the few contemporary poets that through
this sort of complicated simplicity – simplicity made of impulses
and of sudden sadnesses (as sudden and hallucinatory the journey
of a man is) – still manages to hold closely the popular dimension
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