BRIEF HOMAGE TO PLUTO
and other poems
Fabio Pusterla trans Will Schutt
ISBN 978-0-691-24509-6
Forty-five poems, dual-language, all left-justified, some prose-poems, no
strict forms and little use of rhyme. Pusterla was born in Switzerland but
doesn’t like the label Swiss-Italian. He is well-known and highly regarded
in Italy. The poems here were written between 1994 and 2019.
He is a poet of great tact and subtlety. Not all the poems are easy to
interpret, yet none seems deliberately obscure. He keeps his poems away from
rhetoric , even when they deal with highly political matters. History of
Language (Storia della lingua) for example, evokes Italy’s
fascist past through children’s games. It’s a beautiful example of his
capacity for allusion, his extraordinary skill in decorum:
In Chiasso, in an anonymous
courtyard at the close
of the ‘50s, kids
play…
small voices shout
we’re monkeys
beautiful brown apes orango-tangos
tiny monkeys doing the Petash….
“Petacci”, they’re corrected…
And remember
she wasn’t the only one
to hang.”
His vocabulary is generally simple and his style high conversational. He can
embrace the ugly side of human nature with great seemliness, as in
Testimonies:
Two thuds. It could have been anything:
a chair knocked over, a book dropped.
After that I heard a cry
and figured it was the dog next door…
The scariest part was the sheet
when they carried the body down the stairs.
He has the true poet’s capacity
to keep his ego at bay. The excessive subjectivity in poetry of which Holub
complained is absent. Even when a poem is rooted in personal experience he
has the natural courtesy not to intrude:
Having happily made the decision years ago
to do without television, we will not see
the bombs dancing over Baghdad…
Sitting beside the radio, in silence…
everything will be clearer, more unbearable.
He is always interested in something other than himself, nor has he any
desire to display his literary skill. The poems don’t draw attention to
themselves. Their skill is quietly present. The translations, of course,
have to make choices. The parallelisms which pull the poems together in the
original aren’t always easy to replicate in English:
Qui piove per giorni interni, talvolta per mesi
I sassi sono neri
d’acquate
i sentieri pesante
becomes:
It rains all day for days here, sometimes months.
The stones are black with rainwater,
the trails heavy-going.
Pusterla’s poems are replete with these graceful, unobtrusive yet powerful
poetic means. Schutt does an excellent job overall, but there are one or two
questionable renderings: Signora al bar becomes Woman at Café.
Perhaps this works in American English but it sounds odd in the UK;
desolata davanti al lutto is rendered as rattled by her grief (desolated
in the face of the struggle might work); che arrivi da non si sa
dove, da ponti/che non esistono più becomes you who come from
nowhere, from bridges/ that have given way (perhaps from who
knows where/from bridges which no longer exist); se i
padroni/decidono disgrazia in the English is if the masters/court
disgrace (why not if the bosses/ decide on misfortune ?);
la cui estrema negazione finale becomes its final extreme
string of no’s which, leaving aside the greengrocer’s apostrophe, might
be more readily whose extreme final negation; the final line of the
book is Un’ultimissima cosa which Schutt makes One more one last
thing which could be one absolutely last thing. These and others
may be quibbles, but Pusterla is such a careful writer it’s probably better
to err on Nabokov’s side and render the meaning clearly. Literature in
translation, even the rumbustious prose of Balzac, is always an
approximation. Dante is a case in point: most of the translations mangle his
work.
The final piece is a long poem in six sections, Dragonfly (Libellula).
It’s partly an exploration of our place in nature:
How hopelessly cut off from words,
the green eye of the little lake, so green
its green appears improbable…
Amongst the capacities which define us as human, language is arguably the
most salient. It’s ours alone and no more than about fifty thousand years
old. Everything which preceded it is, in a way, “hopelessly cut off from
words”, which works both ways of course: we are cut off from
our pre-linguistic ancestors and their world.
Is equilibrium found
in the absence of meaning, in the wise
surrender to the uncertain winds…?
We are part of nature, our human capacities pre-determined by it, but unlike
other creatures we are our own problem because along with language come
abstract thought and reflexive consciousness. Part three of the poem pulls
it back to disturbing contemporary social reality:
“We’re doing a survey,
you got a minute?”
What do I think…
About all these foreign criminals seeking asylum?
Do
I agree it’s time we clean house,
Build a beautiful wall for these Black
and mongoloids?
The interpolation of this section with its sudden foregrounding of human
conflict, ignorance and prejudice brings sharply into focus the odd status
of our species; nature may be red in tooth and claw but no other creatures
let themselves down by failing to realise their endowments. Granted the
capacity for reason, we deny it for the sake of delusions of supremacy.
There’s a lovely, tender poem, Sand:
You don’t know this, but often I wake at night.
I lie next to you a long time in the dark
and listen to you sleep..
an exemplar of Pusterla’s modest, extraordinary poetic skill and the simple
fastidiousness, dignity and elegance which are his hallmarks.