Come creare il proprio Destino (Eterna saggezza) (Italian Edition)

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A general amnesty allowed him to return to Italy in where he began a career as a journalist and political commentator. Giulio Camber Barni Born in Trieste, he studied law and philosophy in Vienna before being drafted into the Austrian army on the outbreak of war. Along with a friend, he deserted and volunteered for the Italian infantry. He rose through the ranks to become a captain, was twice decorated for gallantry and survived a gas attack. After a career as a lawyer, he was called up again in and served as a major in the Frontier Guard in Albania, only to die there after falling from a horse.

He then studied law, but very soon became a popular and proliic novelist, journalist and essayist. He wrote one novel based on his war experiences Giorni di guerra and published two collections of poetry, Poesie and Bassa marea Clemente Rebora Having studied for a degree in literature at the Accademia scientiico-letterario in Milan, he became a teacher and began con- tributing poems to the leading Florentine literary journal La Voce.

Having already done his national military service, at the outbreak of war he was called up as an infantry lieutenant and suffered a serious head injury from an Austrian shell. He spent the next three years in military hospitals recovering from the physical and psychological shock, but was able to resume his teaching career until a religious crisis in He destroyed all his books and papers in the following year and eventually took holy orders as a Rosminian priest.

He continued writing poetry in a religious vein and two editions of his collected works Le poesie were published in and In he irst joined the Italian Red Cross, then served as an infantryman from Alongside of his work as a classics teacher and translator of the classics, he was a noted amateur botanist, especially of lichens. He continued to write poetry and also published a many works of prose.

Ardengo Sofici After studying painting at the Florence Academy, Sofici spent seven years in Paris , mixing with the artists and writers of the day, including Picasso, Braque and Apollinaire. Called up in , Sofici served in the infantry and wrote about his experiences not only in his poetry but in two memoirs Kobilek and La ritirata del Friuli Carlo Stuparich Born in Trieste, then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Stuparich was an irredentista who believed that the great port should return to Italy.

Although he had moved to Florence to study in and joined the literary circle around La Voce, he quickly volunteered for military service against the Habsburgs and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the famous Sardinian Grenadiers. Unfortunately cut off during an attack, and having lost all his men, he took his own life rather than surrender to the enemy as an Austrian citizen, he would have been condemned to death as a traitor. He was thus receptive to Futurism, which he tried to introduce to Sicily with his own short lived literary journal, La Balza. Like many other young Italians, he was inluenced by patri- otism to volunteer for active service against Austria-Hungary and served as an infantry lieutenant.

He was wounded and on conva- lescence in Syracuse wrote a prose-poetry diary in French. At the end of the war, he lost interest in the avant-garde and turned to dialect poetry and the study of Sicilian culture. After many years as a schoolteacher he became a professor of Sicilian culture and language at the University of Messina. Giuseppe Ungaretti Born — like Marinetti — in Alexandria, Egypt, and educated in French there, he went to Paris in intending to study law at the Sorbonne. He met the leading French and Italian writers and painters in Paris and also the Florentine Futurists, who invited him to contribute to Lacerba.

On the outbreak of war he moved to Milan and was drafted into the infantry as a private, ighting on the Austrian and later French fronts. The poetry he wrote in the trenches was irst published as Il porto sepolto and later ampliied in Allegria di naufragi in In it he proclaimed a new dawn in aesthetics for the new century, praising the virtues of the technological age, which he saw as a potential for spiritual renewal.

It caused a sensa- tion throughout Europe. Marinetti was perhaps a little late in his praise of machines, which had been around for well over a century, but it was the irst time an aesthetic movement had lauded the speed, mobility and sheer power of the very latest in industrial in- novations and proclaimed them almost as moral virtues to enhance the soul of man and save it from its comfortable bourgeois sloth. This idealism had a darker side. Marinetti also saw war as a source of renewal: Noi vogliamo gloriicare la guerra — sola igiene del mondo We want to glorify war — the only source of health in the world.

In ive years time the poet was able to see for himself what a healthy effect war had on the world. But Marinetti was an un- daunted and enthusiastic combatant, twice decorated for bravery. Unfortunately, after the war his militarism and patriotism led him into Fascism. Many Italians had gone to war against Austria-Hungary because of Hab- sburg rule over Italian speaking territories on the Adriatic coast, which they thought should be under Italian rule.

Like Marinetti, Ungaretti had been born in Egypt, educated in French there, and was drawn to Paris as an ar- tistic centre before the war broke out. This too was a familiar model for young Italian writers and artists who were ardent promoters of the latest French movements, most notably Cubism. In Florence, Giuseppe Prezzolini had founded the cultural and political review La Voce in order to disseminate the latest movements from Paris, although not — at irst — the Futurism of Marinetti. Sofici later joined with writer Giovanni Papini to found the more radical Lacerba which was ultimately to champion Futurism, although it was wary of and contested the theatrical antics of Marinetti and his follow- ers in Milan.

This was the situation then in These were granted Italy by the Treaty of London the following year, inducing it to declare war on Austro- Hungary and a wave of patriotic idealism swept many young men into combat. Austro-Hungarian forces held the higher ground and for the Italians it was literally an uphill battle. That is, when movement was possible. The many fronts in this war Asiago, Carso, Isonzo saw the stalemate of trench warfare very much the same as in France and Flanders, with the exception that trenches in the mountains had to be hewn out of stone and ice and armaments hauled up by mule or manpower alone.

It will subvert syntax, use surreal imagery and manipulate voice as some of these poems show. But the experience of war tempered many poets to react against avant-gardism. The selection offered here is taken from shorter works and showcases poets who may be less familiar than the famous names of Ungaretti, Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale, the latter two also writing poetry during the war. Antologia dei poeti italiani nella Prima guerra mondiale a cura di Andrea Cortellessa Mondadori, which gives details of irst publication and irst collections of the poems.

Nei boschi di freschi nocciuoli La mitragliatrice canta, Le pallottole che siorano la nostra guancia Hanno il suono di un bacio lungo e ine che voli. A machine gun sings in the neighbouring woods of fresh hazelnuts. The bullets that graze our cheeks have the sound of a long delicate kiss lying by. Were it not for the appalling overwhelming stench of these enemy corpses we could light up our cigarettes and pipes in the this trench turning to mush in the sun and, as soldiers more than brothers to each other, calmly wait for death, which perhaps will not dare to touch [us, young and good looking as we are.

The air is as riddled as a piece of lace with the gunshots of men withdrawn into the trenches like snails in their shells.

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It seems that a whole host of breathless stone-cutters is striking the basalt pavement of my streets and I listen to them half asleep seeing nothing. Have mercy on us survivors who hear your death rattle and still the hour never comes, the death throes quicken, but you can let go and comfort be yours in the madness that leaves no one insane.

Meanwhile the moment brings pause, the brain sleeps and you leave us in peace — thank you, brother. In that soft whiteness of broidery and lace the pupils become animated by dreams: Ed i soldati scrutarono le stelle e il irmamento, pesarono respirando il fremito del vento. But on the 9th you could see a ring gleaming around the moon: The soldiers and the oficers who had waited 30 days for the offensive looked at one another and wanted to embrace. At dawn on the 10th it began to rain.

Nei campi vi sono segnati ventagli, dove spuntano le piumetti del grano.

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Gli uomini accanto hanno orecchi di ma- dreperla. Una fanfara, e i cavalli vanno a passo di musica come portassero le cavallerizze per la sabbia del circo. La strada galoppa il mio passo. Dovunque sono nate le violette. Intravvedo la dolcezza della sua carne rosa- celeste. In the ields patches sprout with little feathers of grain.

On the ground, light is relected from the mirror of the sun in waves that break up on the last snows left on the moun- tains. The men nearby have ears of mother of pearl. A peak opens up in the distance, the air rings with the C note of the earth. The road gal- lops to my steps. Everywhere violets are born. I glimpse the sweetness of its rose and sky blue lesh.

This spring is all the more gentle seen through a shattered wall. The gap frames me with its harsh jagged edges of stone, the soft colour of nascent things. Quasi a credere stenti che vivi. I boschi, le quote della vittoria, gli urli, il sole, il sangue dei [morti, Io stesso, il mondo, E questi gialli limoni Che guardo amorosamente risplendere Sul mio comodino di ferro, vicino al guanciale. It is hard to believe they Are still alive in the breeze.

Rain sounds like the lullaby Of a sad little girl; And the earth is a cradle Where I see a body curl. You can sleep for weeks on end; The body we had demobbed Still inds it hard to believe in this happiness: Clear pause, melting pot of multiple senses, Here everything converges in an inexpressible oneness; Mysteriously I feel a golden time start to low Where everything is equal: The woods, the odds on victory, the cries, the sun, the blood [of the corpses, Myself, the world, And these yellow lemons I look at lovingly, gleaming On the black iron bedside locker beside my pillow.

It cheats the earth. Although out of my mind, I cannot weep. Perhaps someone can do it, or the mud. But, man, if you return, Do not speak of war To those who do not know; Do not speak of it where men And life still understand it. And if you can return, Take hold of a woman And one night, after being seized by kisses, Whisper to her that nothing in the world Can redeem what is lost Here of us, the putrefying corpses. Bring a lump to her throat so that it chokes her: And if she loves you, You will come to learn this Later in life, or may be never.

Povere le mosche senza fortuna! E ognuno guarda sereno come se fosse straniero al giuoco. Everything seems like summer, life crouching in the sun waiting for dusk. Still many soldiers in line behind the embankment. Contemplation of the still air, and within it the stillness of appearances. It leaves men thinking: The six poems translated here are from a new work in progress: Hahn, a poet, essayist, and translator, has published ive volumes of his own poetry, most recently All Clear South Carolina and No Messages Notre Dame.

La fantasia e la voce Maledetta, luttuosa fantasia che esige un cuore mite e anche feroce Fingi di averlo e levamela via: Cretino E mi fai saltellare sui ginocchi dicendo: Trotta, trotta cavallino; poi mani nelle mani, occhi negli occhi… Ti siedo sopra il cazzo. Cetriolo Prendilo in mano.

Mettitelo sopra, struscialo come fosse un cetriolo; usa me solo, lascia che ti copra tutta la vita in un minuto solo. Parole Ora lo sai: Devi imparare a amarmi a modo mio. Fantasy and Voice This is a doomed and mournful fantasy, seeking a heart both ierce and sweet. Then fake the feeling—free me from the dream: I want your voice to enwrap me. Moron You make me hop up on your lap, you say, Giddy-up, giddy-up little horsy, gazing in my eyes and clutching my hands.

Sit on my stick, you say. Cucumber Hold it up, squeeze it in your hand, rub it like a cucumber; lose yourself in me, and let this instant be all you ever remember. Words I need words: Learn to love me my way. The sick mind insists on it. He holds a Ph. Giancarlo Pontiggia Milano, ha pubblicato due raccolte poetiche Con parole remote, ; Bosco del tempo, , tre volumi di saggi Contro il Romanticismo. Esercizi di resistenza e di passione, ; Selve letterarie, ; Lo stadio di Nemea, e un testo tea- trale Stazioni, Note on the translation Anne Schmid, a classical singer based in Switzerland, contacted me in the summer of to ask if I might be interested in help- ing her with a recording project she was working on at the time.

Her aim was to craft an "Arcadian soundscape" by incorporating baroque cantatas, for instance, with other musical forms and poetic texts. The "Arcadian" poems were provided by Giancarlo Pontig- gia, who also wrote a sort of poetic essay regarding the presence of Arcadian themes in his works and practice, "La mia Arcadia. To build the brief essay and accompanying translation into a fuller segment for Journal of Italian Translation, I contacted Pontiggia to ask if I might translate some of his poems properly-so-called as well, texts that might comfortably reside with his essay. He very generously passed along a suite of poems that had never before been published, gathered under the title Le muraglie del mondo.

If my translations are sonorous at all, or incisive at all, or illu- mined at all, or even remotely worthy of Arcadia-infused pursuits, it is because my source materials and primary purposes of transla- tion were so inspiring and inspired, enlightening and enlightened. La suggestione del mito arcadico nasce da questa intuizione: Se devo restare alla pura presenza del termine, tre volte: He knows quite well that poetry is something that requires places of secrecy and suspense, gardens of the soul where common percep- tions are inverted through lipped perspectives.

The locus of the Arcadian myth is one of poetic autonomasia, an interior landscape where every word deines its own metaphorical parameters, its own imaginable cor- respondences, its own initiatory rites. Every poet has a personal Arcadia, one that is likely, if not necessarily informed by places of origin and primary encounters with the world—a place that can be both fascinating and disturb- ing, that can stun and surprise with the force of an unexpected apparition. Within such a fantastic yet very real world, we need not do anything more than write down the words that most clearly evoke how we experienced it, words that acted almost as mes- senger gods to convey intuited truths, and that continue to work within us as remembrances of things greater than we are.

Con parole remote With Remote Words is the book in which I tried to draw a map of such secrets buried deep in a primitive, ancestral world: To what extent is Arcadia present in my poetry? Regarding the term itself, it appears three times. I protagonisti, un vi- andante e un musico, dibattono sulla forma del tempo e sul senso della vita, mentre il vecchio millennio cede il passo al nuovo: Come nella prima ecloga virgiliana, due uomini si confrontano sui temi del destino e della storia da due fronti opposti, ma egualmente veri.

Here the protagonists, a wayfarer and a musician, engage in a lively discussion of time and the meaning of life as the old millennium gives way to the new one: Thus does Arcadia reveal itself to be, once more, that which it has always been: His verse translations, mainly from Italian and Latin, have appeared in his books and in journals such as Prairie Schooner, The Formalist, and the new renaissance. Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, but grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and became an early expatriate, living for extended periods in London, Paris, Rapallo, and Venice.

One of the greatest twentieth-century poets, he was also a wide- ranging translator, theorist of Imagism and Vorticism, impresario of Modernism, trenchant literary critic, and indefatigable trumpeter of the genius of friends such as James Joyce and T. A series of speeches he made over Rome Radio during the war set the stage for his outdoor coninement in a steel cage at a U.

Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, from which he was released in Pound believed this portion of the epic, sometimes styled the Nekuia, or Book of the Dead, was the oldest stratum of the poem and thus con- stituted a it opening to his own long poem on the vicissitudes of human civilization.

Just as Divus and the Cretan brought the riches of ancient Greek literature to Renaissance readers who knew Latin but needed a handy trot to puzzle out the Greek, so in his introductory canto Pound makes accessible to modern readers of English a slice of cultural history that now must almost always be approached via translation or not all—and this, with varying degrees of success, is the chief project of the page museum- and anthology-like poem that follows. A Note on the Translation Pound translated the bulk of Canto I into an English exhibit- ing an archaic cast in vocabulary and diction.

The ocean lowing backward, came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe. Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin; Poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with [white lour. Qui eseguirono riti, Perimede ed Euriloco, E sguainando la spada dal ianco Scavai il fossetto di un cubito quadro; Libagioni versammo ad ognun dei morti, Idromele e poi vino dolce, acqua mista con farina [bianca.

Poi pregai molte preghiere ai teschi infermi: Che tornato in Itaca, dei buoi migliori Sacriicherei, cumulando beni sulla pira, Una pecora solo per Tiresia, nera e da campano. But irst Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth, Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other. And I cried in hurried speech: And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away And unto Circe.

E gridai con parole precipiti: Dormii nella magione di [Circe. Paolo Valesio is the author, among various other works, of seventeen books of poetry. He is currently engaged in the parallel writing of a trilogy of journal-novels whose text by now runs to more than 20, manuscript pages. The poems of Spoleto, though sustained by description and narrative and set on the very real stage of the Umbrian city, seem nonetheless to take place in the mind.

A walking exegesis, of sorts — at every encounter, every scene and object, the poet cocks his head and considers its symbolic resonance. And where all is performance, all is interpretable. How will the exactitude be preserved? Which meanings will be sacriiced in the exchange? I thank Paolo Valesio for the challenge, and for his careful sugges- tions and explanations in the course of translating these works.

A Spoleto non passeggiavano, ma si trasferivano: Queste che nelle pagine verranno sono le scene di Spoleto su cui ancora medita, che ancora non ha afferrato. In Spoleto, they did not stroll, they ushered themselves from one strange occasion to another. Every nook a barren stage, still fresh with the litting ghosts of actors ghosts of ghosts who, in their leeing, left behind— on the stones and planks scattered through the city—the kernels of a mystery whose shells he could not crack; the fruit totters in his palm, in his gaze, impenetrable.

What follows in these pages are scenes from Spoleto still ixed in his mind, still ungrasped. She says to him: Spoleto was where Francis grew ill, where he rose up and resumed his walk to Assisi— in Spoleto, he returned to his calling. And I, his unworthy follower my solitude is not sanctitude I, too, have my frail mind set on a return—but where to?

Discesero poi cauti una scaletta di legno lungo il muro di sinistra coi resti di un affresco — picchiettato come gli altri in quella conchiglia di chiesa da tante piccole chiazze di lebbra bianca — in cui si mostra il santo vescovo Tommaso Beckett e la sua morte. Le sue mani risaltano guantate inanellate sottili mani gotiche estenuate con dita affusolate ed elegantemente ripiegate: Escono nella pioggia lasciandosi alle spalle il murmure delle parole antiche: Respectfully, they stammered through four lines of Latin inscribed on a scroll beside the absence of an altar.

His hands grace the foreground, gloved, bejeweled, slender, gothic hands with tapered ingers, elegantly curled: His murderers approach, head-to-toe in plated armor even their faces visored, showing only slits of eyes. They step back out into the rain, abandoning the murmur of ancient words: Si sente a casa soltanto quando cammina impolverato e solo lungo certi isolati di Manhattan o quando sosta, celato nella folla di certi vestiboli: Born in Italy, as the records attest, and true to his native soil, nevertheless he knows himself a Renatus in New York, at home only when walking certain back roads of Manhattan, or lingering in the crush of certain vestibules: Spoleto, city of theatres: He draws them back.

Che cosa fa la mente con gli anni del peccato? Tutto in ordine, dunque — il paesaggio si adatta alla sua propria descrizione, si traveste da locus amoenus. Adesso solamente sotto il segno di questo avvertimento, egli quando distende sopra gli occhi il ricamo delle palpebre la vede: Or go hotly seeking their sense? Each hour in life must serve— even the stoniest even the muddiest— must pave the way to the Ascent of the Mountain. Questo interno viaggio — nella sala che con gli ori i velluti gli affreschi si ribella contro il sole che invisibile da ogni parte assedia — li ha presi di vertigine.

Escono sulla discensiva piazza del Duomo battendo palpebre di pipistrello. Noon Concert The harpsichord its lid with an apricot underside lined with pale olive green, in the Empire style retreats on little wheels, well-tempered and invisible, reversing on a parallel through the curtain backdrop: This internal voyage — in a room that with its golds, velvets, and frescoes rebels against the invisible siege of the circling sun — struck them with vertigo.

They exit down the sloping cathedral square, licking their littermouse eyelids.

Diderot, The Paradox of Acting Little heaven with an arch of its frescoed ceiling grazing our heads: Poi, il buio; ma presto si rivela la luce, doppiamente artiiciale, della scena denudata, al segnale degli orchestrali in basso. E non importa quale poi sia il dramma in questa mattinata: Then, darkness; but soon, a sign from the orchestra pit and a light reveals itself, doubly artiicial, on an empty stage.

E intanto alla tarda delle otto il tramonto mantiene un suo orlo sontuoso sottonube e minaccia un altro lusso: Meanwhile, nearing nine, the sunset holds its hem, cloud-covered and sumptuous, threatening a further luxury: Though as it stands, it seems well satisied, having hurled that lightning-cross at the house, which, for all we know, may not have been a church before it struck. The day is red, but in its passing the only worthwhile politic is that of contemplation.

Ma il vento sbalza e volteggia e scoperchia: Pressing the heels of his hands into the spheres of his eyes, the disc between sound and noise suspends and transforms into a darkness framed in calmness— austerity, no less, a calling to clearer than the stroke of any bell. But the wind leaps, loops and overturns: Torna il daino alla fonte: Phonic As the hart panteth after the water brooks so panteth my soul after thee, O God. The fawn returns to its spring: A fold of Umbrian faces: But the empathy of the eye is insuficient— an alibi for a heart detached from spirit; such virtue can be measured only plumbing a pool of mud.

Lambent tongue, like a deer in a rushing stream, plangent lame. She gradu- ated in foreign languages and literature at Pisa university, where she attended a post-degree course in literary translation of postco- lonial texts in English. She also contributed to the volume Canto un mondo libero. She currently teaches English language and literature at an upper secondary school and works as a translator. Andrea Sirotti was born in Florence, where he teaches English language and literature. He has taught post-graduate courses in his areas of specialization at the University of Pisa and elsewhere, organized international poetry festivals, and co-authored with Shaul Bassi Gli studi postcoloniali: He has recently begun working as a freelance literary scout and editorial advisor.

In the Uk he published stories in Darker Times and Panurge and he has published poetry in Italian and English in this journal. He recently completed a collection of stories and novellas entitled The Melting Point which he is trying to ind a publisher for. These two stories are taken from that collection. In addition to writing he also pursues music, having recorded an EP of original songs Floto- We Specialize in Broken Dreams, available on itunes , and he is a keen amateur pianist. He can be contacted at baretbmagarian hotmail.

They rested for a few minutes, only to succumb to gravity again. By the time they did, a shaft of sunlight pierced the cloudy, ilmy lines and something exotic crept into her nostrils, an aroma of something half forgotten. She was ready for her dance with the world, she was shining and beaming, a newly minted coin. The trees made way for her, passers-by admired her from near and from far.

They smiled at her nonchalance, they tried to guess her age, whether or not she had any interesting birthmarks, or was hiding the insignia of childbirth or loss, whether or not she had a husband or boyfriend, whether she was a iery lover or a passionless one. See if you can catch me! At a street corner life leapt at her like a newly released cat, claws exposed. I need sequins, raisins, spices from Morocco, French wines. What would they say if they saw me tailspinning out of control, intravenous needles hanging from me, would I be like that astronaut from as he enters the star gate, perpetually glazed eyes?

When was I really me? And what would it take to make me lose myself? Era pronta per la sua danza col mondo, era splendente e radiosa, come una moneta nuova di zecca. Lavata, pulita, profumata, ho i capelli immacolati, la pelle porosa e gli occhi luminescenti. Vediamo se mi prendete! Ho bisogno di lustrini, uvetta, spezie del Marocco, vini fran- cesi. Cosa direbbero se mi vedessero precipitare senza controllo, con aghi di lebo che mi penzolano addosso? Reine de joie par Victor Joze That bit of French caught her attention. She came to a standstill in front of a window pane.

Behind the window was another pane of glass, all around this was a wooden frame, underneath it all there was a poster. Grace and squalor were combined as the slightly emaciated woman with a skeletal arm planted a somehow tender kiss on the nose of the old, bald, half sleeping fatty with the bloated belly. The woman looked in- nocent despite it all with her neck wrapped in a brown ribbon and her red dress. Had she ever really looked at a poster or a painting, she thought? Had she ever really noticed its contents?

Later, in the evening in her lat, outside which vines crept upwards, inside which cat smells spread, she was in the kitchen mixing spaghetti and a sauce she had carelessly prepared. In her hand, on and off, a goblet of red wine. In her mouth, on and off, a rolled-up cigarette. In her eyes a far off look. She was thinking of that Toulouse-Lautrec print and how nice it would have looked next to her book case which was not full of books at all, but magazines about furniture, motor bikes, graphics, landscape gardening, tree surgeons, lingerie, package holidays, mountaineering.

Quando mai son stata me stessa? E cosa ci vuole per farmi perdere? Forse se mi capitasse un incidente veramente brutto, se fossi pugnalata da uno sconosciuto, se bevessi una bottiglia di brandy liscio Aveva mai guardato prima un poster o un dipinto? Aveva mai fatto veramente caso al suo contenuto? Nella mano appariva e scompariva un calice di vino rosso. Nella bocca appariva e scompariva una sigaretta autoprodotta.

Aveva uno sguardo assente negli occhi. Pensava a quella stampa di Toulouse-Lautrec e a come sarebbe stata bene accanto alla libreria che non era per nulla piena di libri, ma di riviste. Riviste di computer, di arredamento, di motociclismo, di cartoni animati, di graica, di giardinaggio, di arte topiaria, di biancheria intima, di pacchetti vacanze, di alpinismo. In her dreams that night she entered the Toulouse-Lautrec poster, or rather, its essence turned into a scenario she became part of.

The clientele was an elegant one, dressed in velvet, in capes, and dinner jackets, dressed like the three igures in the painting. She regarded them from a stool at the bar and sipped a glass of absinthe. On turning her attention to the bar again she knew that the old fat slob was expecting a kiss from her now, the very same kiss she had seen her counterpart in the poster plant on his nose.

A tall man in a top hat licked a pair of dandyish black gloves across her hands until she inally had to relent. As she kissed him everything altered. She was aware of the sounds of the ocean. A blue sea ebbed and pulsed with virile life. When she woke up groggily the next morning she had for- gotten about the dream but then it came back to her as she sipped a cup of weak Earl Grey tea.

In the evening she was reading, her eyeglasses slowly slip- ping down her nose. La clientela era elegante, portava abiti di velluto, mantelline e abiti da sera, era vestita proprio come le tre igure nel dipinto. Un mare azzurro che si alzava e pulsava di vita virile. Avrebbe potuto permettersi di comprarlo, non era quello il punto; stava cominciando a pensare che rubarlo avrebbe rappresentato una sorta di vittoria sulla vita, un atto di sida necessaria.

Quella sera stava leggendo, e gli occhiali le scivolavano lentamente sul naso. A man is on his way to the bakery in search of a loaf of bread. On his way there he comes across a fresh loaf of bread lying on the road. It still lies in its wrapping. For a moment he hesitates. Should he pick up the loaf and so save himself a visit to the bakery? Or should he go through with his original plan? In the end he decides to pick up the loaf of bread, which lies in the middle of the road. As he leans over to pick it up he is run over by a bus.

By a miracle the loaf stays undamaged. As an ambulance arrives a man turns up and seeing the bread takes it home and eats it. Afterwards she kept thinking about it. She rang a friend, his name was Gilbert, he was extremely myopic and owned a pet snake. Or maybe the second man gets away with taking the loaf of bread because he never had the intention of going to the bakery as the irst man had, which leads me to the second interpretation: What do you think?

Un uomo sta andando al forno per comprare del pane. Per un istante esita. Deve raccogliere il pane per risparmiarsi la visita al forno? O deve continuare a perseguire il suo proposito originale? Alla ine decide di raccogliere lo silatino in mezzo alla strada.

Mentre si china per raccoglierlo viene investito da un autobus. Per puro miracolo, la pagnotta rimane intatta. Che ne pensi tu, Gilbert? She stayed awake until 4 am, reading and drinking wine. She was by then so drunk that if someone had pricked her with a sewing needle she would have felt nothing. Her limbs were relaxed and inert and her eyes glazed and bloodshot.

She rummaged around for an empty bottle of Glenmorangie, a fairly hefty bottle which she had always kept for sentimental reasons. She stuffed it inside her overcoat and began to walk to the shop drunkenly. She stopped a few feet away from the shop and looked around her. The street was deserted and quiet.

The moon seemed to be burning up the sky. Slowly she removed the bottle from her overcoat and crept towards the shop. Gripping the bottle tightly she looked at the poster, admiring it more than ever, its inesse, its subtlety. She scrutinised the pane of glass, judging it to be quite limsy, no match for the bottle of Glenmorangie. The resulting alarm would probably be dismissed by those awaking to its vile whining as a malfunction.

She steadied herself, took aim and hurled the bottle, and it became a missile. The glass shattered with shocking loudness. A little bit stunned, she scrambled towards the display, avoiding the shards of glass now showered across the pavement. It was only then that she noticed no alarm was sounding. A second later a dog started barking insanely. She grabbed the poster, which was small enough to it under her sprawling overcoat. But nothing, no one. She was back at her lat in a matter of minutes and on her way there she encountered no one.

The world had hardly even batted an eyelid. When she got home from the surgery she breathed a sigh of relief and stared at the poster. Dopo un calice di vino rosso lei concluse che avrebbe dovuto rubare il poster. Rimase sveglia ino alle quattro del mattino, a leggere e bere vino. I suoi arti erano rilassati e inerti e i suoi occhi vitrei e iniettati di sangue. La strada era deserta e silenziosa. La luna bruciava feroce nel cielo color inchiostro.

Solo allora si accorse che non suonava alcun allarme. Il mondo non aveva quasi battuto ciglio. There was a new pane of glass there, thicker. But now, rather than giving her pleasure, each time she looked at the poster, she felt pangs of guilt. Eventually she wrapped it up, shoved it in a parcel, and mailed it back to the shop with an anonymous apology.

She was reading an article about Japanese gardens, in the oven vegetable moussaka was cooking, on a little table stood her goblet of red wine. She was back to normal, she had practically forgotten the whole thing. Then the phone rang. Why not in a dustbin? Non riusciva a credere di averlo fatto. Il primo tizio vuole uno silatino, ne vede uno per strada, viene messo sotto; il secondo tizio vede lo silatino, lo prende e lo mangia, giusto? And he was just coming back to claim what was rightfully his?

Eventually she went back to the shop and was greatly relieved to see the poster in its frame back in its original spot in the window. He responded to her generosity by taking special care when wrapping it up, tying it in a single brown curling ribbon. Once she was the rightful and legal owner, clutching it proudly, the fog in her brain inally lifted and life took on a new clarity.

As she walked she felt the irst intimations of spring.

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She stopped in the middle of a quiet street, where hardly any cars passed. Looking around furtively as though she was about to carry out another crime she laid the poster down gently in the middle of the road. Then she walked home. Ed era semplicemente tornato a riprendersi quello che era legit- timamente suo. Una volta divenuta la legittima proprietaria, stringendolo con orgoglio, la nebbia nel cervello inalmente sollevata, la sua vita assunse una nuova chiarezza. Poi si diresse verso casa. That underwater world was as rich and variegated as the one above.

In three they went and they had no need of words, just gestures and signals that they all instinctively understood. Eve- rything down there was disembodied, slow moving, the divers were shadowy, stripped of their faces, hidden behind masks, their skin hidden behind diving suits, their mouths concealed by their breathing apparatus, oxygen cylinders turning their backs bumpy and rounded.

The odd refraction of light; soundwaves quelled by the cushioning glory of water and unimpeded space. Shoals of ish darted this way and that, undisturbed by the three divers, who watched them in fascination. Every now and then a weirdly shaped ish, a tapered apparition rolled and passed by and then twos and threes followed, perfect replicas of one another, clones, recurring moments; their gauzy, distorted forms made the divers think the sea contained more mysteries than any earthly realm.

The truths and feelings to be found down there could not be communicated to anyone who had not been down there, in that dark, luminous abyss, that abstract underwater garden. One of the drivers pointed to a distended shell, half-hidden by a faintly glowing shrub. The shrub seemed to be coated in a phospherescent substance and the tallest of the trio extracted the shell, which resembled a human ear stretched into weird plastic- ity.

It sank from end to end like an overburdened rope bridge. The shell was promptly set down in an underwater case where it took its place with a hundred others like it and yet different. Later on those shells, small, large, odd, intricate, gaudy, plain, would be glued together to create mosaics, mosaics that depicted scenes from Greek mythology.

The works went on show at the Mediterranean Art Gallery in the small town of Caphos on the Island and they usually attracted quite a lot of attention and plaudits. Quel mondo sottomarino era ricco e va- riegato quanto quello soprastante. In tre andavano e non avevano bisogno di parole, solo di gesti e segnali che tutti loro istintivamente capivano.

Sprofondava da lato a lato come un ponte di corda sovraccarico. He also ran a taverna with Dora, his wife and fellow diver who was loating close by him. She reached out an ungloved hand to touch the skin-like surface of the shell. She smiled through her mask and the couple executed a little dance of triumph. As they did so Kirsten, who was the youngest of the trio, felt a little displaced from them. They, after all, were bound by marital vows and the activity of their loins.

Kirsten had no such connection to another human soul and she was wary of people. Only in the sea, in its underwater chambers, in its caress- ing, silent embrace, did she feel truly complete, truly whole and peaceful. Up there, in the earthly world, in the terrestrial shell of noise and strife life was heavy, and people made no sense, with their changing patterns of behaviour, contradictory, selish, and sometimes downright cruel.

The divers began to rise, drifting upwards like elongated shadows of birds borne skywards. They passed great gold corru- gated leaves of macro-algae, moving slowly up and down like giant feather fans, palpitatingly alive. As the divers spiralled upwards towards the shimmering ceiling of light small ish with black and yellow vertical stripes imitated the arc of their movements, almost as though setting up some wondrous homage to their human coun- terparts.

Then the ish sped away, gone, vanishing into the secret places only they knew how to reach. The divers, one by one, glided up to their little diving boat, and climbed up over the side by means of a small metallic ladder, removing their gear and breathing apparatus and placing it all on the stern. The sun was setting and the air was full of the heady vivid sensations of summer.

Overhead the sky was beginning to fade to a pinkish red glow. The moon was already visible and Kirsten spied it with her furtive, shy eyes. How different this scene was to those of her childhood and teenage years, before she had come to embrace her new Mediterranean life. In the past summer had only ever been at best a tepid affair, in England, where the temperature never rose above the twenties and where the sky was more often than not a screen of clouds and greyness. In England where were the beautifully tanned people, with their miraculously well pro- portioned igures and Grecian elegance and love of life?

Gestiva anche una taverna con Dora, sua moglie e compagna di immersioni, che gli luttuava vicino. Kirsten non aveva un rapporto del genere con un altro animo umano e difidava delle persone. I subacquei cominciarono a risalire, trascinandosi su come ombre allungate di uccelli diretti verso il cielo. Mentre i subacquei salivano a spirale verso lo scintillante sofitto di luce, piccoli pesci a strisce verticali nere e gialle imitavano i loro movi- menti arcuati, quasi a preparare un qualche mirabile omaggio alle loro controparti umane.

Poi i pesci ilarono via, lontano, sparendo nei luoghi segreti dove soltanto loro sapevano arrivare. She preferred this richer, more luscious backdrop, its subtle light, dying now, but all the more beautiful and poignant for it, the endless surface of the sea, ever changing, ever moving, but always a harbinger of calm and joy, the tiny vantage point afforded by their boat, and the salt air, which seemed to hold all the textures of life in its invisible embrace. They started making their way back to shore, silent and slightly overwhelmed as they tended to be after a dive.

Kirsten said goodbye to the couple and walked over to her Volkswagen Beetle, dusty and battered in the sandy driveway that led down to the beach. As a child she had always been accumulat- ing bruises and blisters and seemed to have a knack for harming herself, bumping her head, scraping her knee caps, falling off slides and breaking her wrist, her hip, her nose. Underwater everything was lighter, friction was robbed of its power to hurt, weight was dissipated. Maybe that was why she loved to dive … She drove back to the village, where she was staying at a villa that the parents of her friend Melissa had bequeathed to her for a few days.

The villa contained worlds of old style grace, illed with ethereal pleasures that only Kirsten she liked to think was allowed to taste. From outside the simple beauty of the indigo blue wooden front door with no lock, just a latch, tantalisingly hinted at the magical dimensions of what lay beyond its threshold. The door remained without a lock because the locals and the village still existed in a universe of guilelessness. In Caphos everything slowed down, buses were late, coffee was sipped rather than swallowed, the souvlaki was cooked slowly, the hours passed slowly and it did not matter because either the sun or the sea or something ensured that purposefulness could be discarded and it was ine to do abso- lutely nothing and yet somehow it was never boring or oppressive.

Life could be lived merely by observing, meditating, being. Sebbene non capisse le persone, quantomeno preferiva quelle vive e decise a godersi la cosa. La villa conteneva mondi di grazia vecchio stile, colmi di eterei piaceri che soltanto a Kirsten amava pensare lei era permes- so gustare. Si poteva vivere la vita semplicemente osservando, meditando, essendo. She strove to become one with the water, to move in tireless, perfect patterns as each stroke, each length she managed became a better and better embodiment of technique and elegance.

There, in that midnight shrine, outside, as she loated on her back, looking up, she peered into the basin of the night sky and the constellations and clusters of stars were freckles on the face of the universe. Here was the perfection she had dreamed of: She swam in wonder and gratitude as the night reached out and made love to her. Further off, walking away from the sea -- a complex of new, ugly apartments which had just been built. Far, far off, away in the distance, the wreck of a ship was embedded into the horizon.

A Turkish freighter with a cargo of timber had got stuck on the twisted rocks some fourteen years earlier and there it sat, a rusty, static monolith of steel and decay. Tourists sighted it and wondered why it was always there day after day and never shifted until someone pointed out that it would never move again. Eccola la perfezione che aveva sognato: Vicino alla riva mucchi di scogli formavano minuscole isole che catturavano la luce del sole; i bambini vi si arrampicavano, i genitori si allungavano su di loro.

In lontananza, venendo via dal mare, un complesso di appartamenti nuovi, brutti, appena costruiti. She stared at it for hours and some- times shuddered as its dark form became symbolic of pure evil. An unmoving malevolent presence that, as the shadows of night gathered, became even darker and evocative of damnation. The perpetual stasis of this great decomposing entity seemed truly to carve an incision in the sea. When Kirsten drove her car along the dust road, running parallel to the beach, but at an elevated point, she would always look out for the shipwreck.

And it never failed to appear, it always came round eventually and in a way it had become part of the sea, even as it tarnished it, ensnared by the rocks with which it had begun to fuse. Kirsten began to feel that in that shipwreck the secret of life lay hidden and gradually it occurred to her that she must somehow confront that shipwreck, come face to face with it.

One windy night when the moon was almost full she took out the little diving boat and gradually drifted all the way out towards the shipwreck, afraid and uncertain of what she would ind there but she knew that confronting her fear would bring her some kind of peace. She half-expected to see grinning corpses. She felt her skin crawl as some nameless dread gathered all around her.

She sat frozen at the back of the boat, trying to arrest even the tiniest of bodily movements, even her breathing, looking out for a predator which would leap out at her from the darkness. The moonlight caught patches of the watery membrane around her and the water was illed with unknowable things, and a dark beauty was born. She inched forward and her horror grew as the waves snarled and crashed ever and again into the derelict hull, as though trying to knock dents in it, and weird phantoms were made in that clash between dead metal and water, weird reverberations that scurried across the body of the ship.

Lo issava per ore e a volte rabbrividiva mentre la sua forma scura diventava il simbolo del male puro. Quando Kirsten guidava lungo la strada polverosa, che correva parallela alla spiaggia, ma in un punto sopraelevato, con lo sguardo cercava sempre il relitto. E quello non mancava mai di fare la sua comparsa, alla ine si faceva sempre vedere e in qualche modo era diventato parte del mare, persino mentre lo ossidava, preso in trappola dagli scogli con cui aveva iniziato a fondersi.

Una parte di lei si aspettava di vedere cadaveri ghignanti. Adrenaline was shooting through every part of her as she pulled out her torch and pointed it at the ship. There, in its strong beam, she could make out a large rip in the metal and she lashed her torch into it, and inside a cold, abandoned world was partially revealed.

All that remained was the terrible shell of the exterior, locked into the rocky matrix below which had seized it and would never ever relinquish it.

She moved her boat in closer, then closer still until it was shaking violently in the cur- rent. Then, when her little vessel was touching the great side of the freighter, she stood up and walked uncertainly towards the edge, her knees pressed against the side of the boat, and craned forward and passed both her hands through the great rip in the hull. Her hands, then her arms, had slipped through to the other side, and she spread out all her ingers, then placed her ear against the cold hard metal wall and listened.

The waves smashing against the ship boomed into her eardrum; the sound was magniied, colossal, it plunged into Kirsten with groping tentacles. She was engulfed in reverberating sound, sound compressed her every ibre. She was deafened, stupeied. What was it that lay on the other side? Why was she so desper- ate to reach it, to touch it?

Why was she putting herself through this mad experience? What was it there that she was trying to touch with her outstretched ingers, their knuckles white and burning with tension? Maybe that inal day which expires in night with no hope of remedying sunrise its cleansing hand thrust into the cor- ners of gloom and murk, lifting both as the purifying light exiles all shadows.

Maybe she sought an ever lasting dusk, an ever-lasting shadow, a cessation of the senses. Scariche di adrenalina la percorrevano in ogni parte mentre tirava fuori la torcia e la puntava verso la nave. Le onde che sbattevano contro la nave le rimbom- bavano nei timpani; il rumore era ampliicato, colossale, si tuffava in Kirsten con tentacoli annaspanti. Lei era inghiottita dal rumore riverberante, il rumore le comprimeva ogni singola ibra.

Ne era impregnata, assordata, stordita. She just lay there, half dead, caught in that vortex, the sea had been festooned into a knot and she was suspended there, rattled about in its inexhaustible epicentre … But at long last she regained a fragment of strength and she crawled on her hands and knees over to the tiller and started up the engine and began to move off. In the distance she could make out small dots of lights scattered along the shore and she was heartened by them. She resolutely ixed her gaze on the lights as the boat pulsed onward. Looking at them, crouched down there on the deck, the waves of terror subsided and she felt safe, almost protected.

She felt she had done enough now, she could go back. She deserved a drink, a strong drink. She was beginning to reach the shore. A text message came through on her mobile phone, which was strange as there was no signal out there.

It was from Dora asking if she wanted to go diving tomor- row. Then, brushing these thoughts aside, she remembered the midnight swim at the villa that still awaited her and this gave her a warm glow, a feeling of almost physical warmth. She moored the boat.

On glancing at herself in the mirror she thought she looked a bit shaken and haggard. So she splashed her face with bottled water, dabbed herself with Kleenex, and put on some bright scarlet lipstick, smoothing her lips evenly. She combed her hair carefully, almost with love. And she noticed that these actions, which normally did not come easily to her and often ended in disaster, were rather enjoyable. Aveva dimostrato qualcosa, affrontato il terrore, il terrore non mappato del ventre molle della vita.

Si meritava qualcosa da bere, qualcosa di forte. Stava per raggiungere la costa. Now she was ready. As she walked along the shore she noticed that she was still breathing very quickly; it was taking a long time for her to come back down to normal. Some way down the beach she found a little bar, whose rows of fairy lights announced it, and ordered an ouzo, and sipped it, beginning to feel quite good. A few old unshaven Greeks were playing backgammon, a giant tv screen sat in an ugly corner, some small children splashed in a water pool.

Two men in their twenties were smoking cigarettes and chatting easily. They wore ripped jeans and were gorgeously tanned. They both had a cultivated, intelligent air and they sipped Greek coffees and were sharing a plate of baklava. It was as different a situation to the one she had just been in as was possible to imagine.

She was illed with a sweet exhaustion, which at the same time was the residual joy that had slipped through the meshes of overwhelming physi- cal exertion and fear, and life was ineffably sweet. The beautiful surroundings, the ocean that was hers, the future beckoning with its promise of as yet unsampled pleasures and the possibility of love, which was like a menu she had just been handed, illed with subtle, exquisite dishes. At that moment nothing would have sad- dened or vexed her. Would she go diving tomorrow with Dora and Giorgios?

They could tell that at that moment Kirsten was light, that she was illed with helium, was on the point of rising, wonderfully imper- turbable. And when she lashed them both a dazzling smile they were caught off guard, not knowing whether to be embarrassed or to be encouraged or to be self-conscious or to be charmed so they both ended up being all of these. Qualche vecchio greco mal rasato giocava a backgammon, uno schermo televisivo gigante occupava un angolo brutto, dei bambini piccoli sguazzavano in una piscina.

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