Carlo
della Corte: Poems from The Journey Ends Here,
translated by Emanuel di Pasquale
I
| II | VI
| LII
 Gradiva
Publications: P.O. Box 831, Stony Brook, NY 11790
Carlo
della Corte is a native and current resident of Venice. For many
years, however, he worked for a major Milanese weekly newspaper
while publishing two dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays.
He has won two Selezione Campiello for his work and, in l968,
was awarded the prestigious Veillon Internazionale, which had
previously been won by Emanuelli, Ginzburg, and Pratolini. Among
his many admirers were Federico Fellini and Andrea Zanzotto.
X.J.
Kennedy wrote: "The arrival on these shores of Carlo
della Corte's professedly unfinished masterpiece is a literary
event of prime importance. An astonishing book, it gives us a
dreamlike tour of Venice, that city perpetually dying and yet
immortal, in the company of the shades of the poet's father and
mother. Like Ulysses of James Joyce, whom della Corte dismisses
as a madman, it tells of communion in a brothel of father and
long-lost son. Other ironies abound, also bitter humor and surprise.
I can't imagine a better trasnlator for this bookthan Emanuel
di Pasquale, sensitive and passionate, with is deft command of
both poetic diction and the American vernacular."
From:
THE JOURNEY ENDS HERE:
Introduction,
by Emanuel di Pasquale
The
driving force of The Journey Ends Here is love, human love
in all its aspects,
love for a place (Venice), and ultimatelylove for all living things,
with
all their faults and glory: family, prostitutes, starving dogs,
copulating birds,
whose love-making makes "and embarrasing joke" and a
cosmic marvel of "The
love that drives the sun and all the other stars." Journey
is also about the
love for literature. Love
for his parents causes della Corte to bring them back from the
dead for
one more night , for one more stroll around Venice, to reminisce,
clarify the
past, and evaluate both past and present. In a real way, della
Corte, now in
his sixties, is trying to cleanse himself of angerover thepremature
death of his
father. The parents, too, wanting to ssee their child, break out
of their hell:
"two
stowaways breaching the circle/of the concentration camp pens,"
and journey
far to be with him. Here, the book sparks an epiphany and becomes
holy as
it deals with deepest human love and deepest human insanity, man's
inhumanity
to man, the hell of human suffering, its epicenter the Second
World War's
"pens."
Like
Dante's Commedia, Journey is rich with characters. Like Dante,
della Corte
has the genius to make them come to life in a few lines. Clelia
De Pasquetti,
his wet-nurse/muse:"...small goddess/of the hearth, who'd
bring messages
from caves,/ravines and hills...twinkling from gnomes and goblins/in
winter
sunsets when windoes/are shaken by the winds."...Della Corte
respects all
that is living, with the exception of those who turn against life:"...with
the
dog hung on a mulberry tree/by the barbaric bully who doesn't/want
to feed any
mouth other than his own..." Otherwise, his compassion for
the family of the
living extends even to the god he rages against for having killed
his father
and for allowing so much misery:"...perhaps even he subdued
by a chaotic History."...della
Corte writes prose when he deals with the living and great poetry
when he deals with dead, ...the world of the imaginatiion...Journey
is also
a book about Venice...which is a metaphor for life itself, all
that water echoing
the womb...
....Reading
della Corte's The Journey Ends Here is like traveling
on a river: steady and calm (prose) wild
and cataclysmal (poetry). The writer, a new Virgil with no destination,
no
'solid' point, wanders about Venice finding hell, purgatory, and
heaven inthe
realities of the senses, and in human feeling and intellect. His
Beatrice is
his own compassion,his love for life, for wine, for art, for Venice,
for his own
father and mother, for a flawed god and for manking, god's flawed
but brillianat
progeny. (Sample poems follow here:)
I
Here,
from a portico (if the quoin
is
still the architectural custom),
perhaps
you, nonagenarian,
could
quietly look at your aging son.
Birth
certificate in hand,
I
talk to you as if you were alive,
you,
who died when a fissure,
a
pit, an abyss of years
kept
us away from each other.
And
now I am you,
with
your mannerisms,
young-old,
doubled over,
bundled
up and dried up,
while
you, with your eyes
of
the dead, pierce this fog.
II
Yes,
nonagenarian, why could you not,
like
a bionic actor, rise,
pearl
hearing aid, titanium teeth,
but
your eyes your own: green and whole,
for
another chat on a Leopardian night
on
the balcony suspended over Passeggi.
You
ussedto say: "My boy grows sad
under
these stars. God help me if a poet is
born
in my house." Lord, no, all
is
useless, even the name-poet-
verse-making
is fruitless, a pagan
spell
to transfix unruly things.
In
any case, come, one lamp
still
lights the field, a flexible
barrier
against a mass of
scrawny
eels and blues, like
us
in the dar: others lacking a soul
that
is not a puff of air or a flag
trembling
on a shattered pole.
So,
we find ourselves at Rialto
and
share some laughter.
VI
Counting
the cobblestones,
let's
go and stay close now,
both
new and worn,
and
because we're worn, new
in
the fine mist that falls
on
the city of shining stones.
From
a murmur like a flow of blood:
"It's
still the same soul
or
some other. More like
some
other," I assert,
and
even I wavear at the shade
that
holds me. The luminescence
in
his eyes pierces people's
thick
armor, and I am shamed for him,
for
him (absent for too many years),
who
knew the heft of his own absence.
Yet,
they call such absence a steadying force,
almost
unshakable. Not true.
"My
barber?" he asks,distracted.
I
pull his hand and drag him
someplace
where a pizzamaker
doesn't
fry his slop.
LII
Death
is recycled, but so is life,
with
the genome, the long chain dragged
from
year to year, century to century,
eons
of galazies, among quasars, black holes,
long
rays that like obsidian blades slice the cosmos
to
reach your muscle bathed in blood, silly pump
that
goes on, goes on, small beetle,
sprightly
Volkswagen that retreats to an old poster,
an
instrument the poet claims is out of tune
like
my tobacco-stained, moth-eaten guitar
in
a place where for thirty years
the
dead leaves' wind no longer blows.
Translated
by Emanuel di Pasquale. Copyright 2000, Gradiva Press. All rights
reserved.
Gradiva
Publications: P.O. Box 831, Stony Brook, NY 11790
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