The beginning of a ford— Franca Mancinelli

Feb 20, 2024 | Poetry | 0 comments

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY JOHN TAYLOR

 

The beginning of a ford

 

from one body to another this blood passes
slicing the air like a signal

in the cold it indicates the earth
of spring.

*

bare branches, an interlock
of bones in the cold

I’m recomposed by the wind
mother of the undrunk blood

who is wrapped in the fibers
of what was killed.

*

from your pillow you return:
night shatters and starts again
skull to skull
stone to stone
in the clay of the same dream
we sleep a beginning
– with neither walls nor door – of home.

*

so we became ourselves
expected guests
– steaming dishes, displaced
more and more on the whiteness
of the table, of the open walls
blank pages

invited to paradise –
we eat the silence.

*

From the waters of sleep the weight beckons
in the depths: you can put a foot down,
it’s the beginning of a ford.

*

you can also lift this
weight that seems
immeasurable

beyond your height
you can find the strength
of an ant.

*

ant in the trail that connects
anthill to food—daily
work at the devastation
beckons—legs on the way
matter arranged in this form.

*

it is a shore of seaweed and broken shells
with each step you survivors touch the ground
drink the sea
—love comes back to you wave by wave

(the storm has written this on the sand)

*

for each body a shadow
extends its life
on the pavement of the present
dances with the light.

*

go forth by returning
blind destination
– your assigned seat
facing backwards
the nausea, the beginning – riding in you
is an egg cell.

 


Also, read a book review of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk , written by Arya Chatterjee, and published in The Antonym 


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About Author

Franca Mancinelli

Franca Mancinelli

Born in 1981, Franca Mancinelli is one of the most important new poetic voices in Italy, where her books have won several national prizes. The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose 2008-2021 (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2022) and her recent collection of poetry and poetic prose, All the Eyes that I Have Opened (Black Square Editions, 2023), are respectively her third and fourth books now available in bilingual editions. Her poems and prose poems have also been translated by John Taylor and published by The Bitter Oleander Press: The Little Book of Passage (2018) and At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (2019).

About Translator

John Taylor

John Taylor

John Taylor is an American writer who lives in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, Greek) and as a critic who has written books of essays about contemporary poets from all the European countries, he has long been one of the bridges between European literature and English-speaking countries. Besides his translations of four books by Franca Mancinelli, he has recently translated Elias Petropoulos’s Mirror for You: Collected Poems 1967-1999 (Cycladic Press), Frémon’s Portrait Tales (Les Fugitives), and Philippe Jaccottet’s La Clarté Notre-Dame & The Last Book of the Madrigals (Seagull Books). He is also the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (The Bitter Oleander Press), and a “double book,” A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridge (Fortnightly Review) co-authored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis. John Taylor’s website: https://johntaylor-author.com/

  1. Can you please cite the original poem ? Where to find it in Bangla?

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