1.Franca, you come from a country that has tradition of poetry from Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi. What or who have been your influences in poetry?
You can realize what an author has given to your writing only when you have fully inherited what has been left for you. This means that you have to arrive at a distance from that author, as if he were buried in you. You have to carry out the hard work that Eliot wrote about in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Although we always strive to achieve self-awareness, most influences in poetry are often hidden and remain unconscious. So I can’t really say which authors are still alive in my poetry, but I can tell of those whom I have loved the most. I met them during my teenage years, during that period when everything that happens in your life seems to mark it permanently, with its incandescent signs. I plunged into reading so deeply, during those afternoons after school, that I had the feeling of being an amphibian, of living in two nearby yet different kingdoms. I loved reading while lying in bed or in the garden, feeling the book as my “third lung” opening and closing. A book is an extension of our life, of our breathing. During that period, I received a kind of intense oxygen transfusion from Eliot, Rilke, Dostoevsky, Proust, Pavese, and Pessoa. I used to copy the phrases and passages, which were the most important ones for me, into my notebook, putting together a kind of personal anthology. That kind of copying work was my way of keeping what I love in my body, in the rhythm of my blood. With some of the books, such as Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, I could have copied them entirely… With such kinds of shining beauty, we can’t do anything but stay as much as possible inside it.
2. What is your writing regimen? Do you write daily or occasionally? What discipline do you follow?
In poetry, my only discipline is listening, and making a space in myself for it. This means that, whatever happens in my daily life, I have to preserve a kind of fissure, a gap, from which I can still be connected to a kind of other dimension and be “saved.” It’s not an escape, it’s more like an ancient, original umbilical cord that can still nourish me. In language, in the very matter of words, we can still perceive this possibility of being rejoined by and receiving a kind of love, a strength, that goes beyond our individual and human contours.
3. As a poet you have to be both locally specific as well as universally accessible. How do you bridge this challenge or do you at all see this as something that needs to be overcome?
I think that this is everyone’s duty, in every day of life. Trying to take root in every gesture, in every step, so as not to be swept away by destructive and negative currents. In our time, these can also consist of the global financial power with its invisible face. Through this genuine relationship between ourselves and our living environment, we can feel the universe in any ant crawling near us.
4. Your poems have been translated into English. Western theories on translation stress on fidelity with semantics or meaning but Indian theory concentrates on conveying the emotional effects and impact. What is your opinion on translation of poems especially relating to your poems?
My poetry is very dense, usually concentrating in few verses a lot of meaning and possibilities of meaning, such as a “Mother dough” that needs time to rise. Above all, my poetry needs the attention and care of the Other. The reader needs to carry out a task, to give that dough a shape, the one closest to his own listening, to his experience. A translator to another language is a special reader of a poem, a reader with a big responsibility. His duty is to carry this deep possibility of meaning into another language, without explaining it, without killing all the lives moving inside the original language, but instead trying to save them—not to choose one single street but rather to leave the intersection open to readers.
A translator, more than any critic, can be the best reader of a poem. That is what I realized while I was working with John Taylor, the American translator of my third book, The Little Book of Passage. It’s a book of prose poems or, perhaps, a book of verse poems without line breaks. Silence and what remains unwritten are as important as the few sentences actually written down. As in my previous book, Mother Dough, I leave some pages entirely blank, as a space that marks the rhythm of the book, a rhythm of wakefulness and sleep, of vision and a return to the place where the images arise. Thanks to John’s close and attentive gaze, I was able to discover the meaning of some words that have gone through me. For example, thanks to him, I now know the full Italian meaning of “falda” (“water table”). This meaning reached me with a healing power. In fact, the imagery of a “water table,” a “fault line,” a “crack,” or a “gap” runs through the entire book. I struggled a lot against them, with all my energy, suffering from a kind of defeat and frustration for “not being able to repair” them, until I realized, thanks to John, that the “water table” is located inside the earth, that it’s not repairable, that from it comes water (life), and that we have just to accept and recognize it as a source of life, in whatever form life appears: as an ordered garden, or a chaotic ground. As in this text from The Little Book of Passage:
In the evening, a cigarette between his fingers, watching the sky darken like moistened soil, my father waters his garden. When he’s standing down there in the farthest corner, hidden by the tomato plants, I can hear the water pouring from the well, streaming down between the dirt clods to the roots awaiting it. Here, where the flow has trickled out, sprout plants with poisonous fruit, stiff stalks of grass with tiny flowers. I haven’t succeeded in hoeing them away, in repairing the water table.
Now, thanks to this awareness that the American translation has given to me, I can read the last sentence of this prose poem with another tone—free from pain.
5. You belong predominantly to a monolingual country. What has been your experience in a multilingual country like India?
Italy only appears to be a monolingual country. In fact, there are other languages, or regional languages, and a lot of dialects, some of them still strong and alive, with literary traditions. During my residence in Kolkata, I had the opportunity, thanks to the program you coordinated, to meet artists and poets who live in this city and usually grow up knowing almost three languages: Bengali, Hindi, and English. It was my first time in India and I realized, at the end of my residence, that I was only beginning to live in Kolkata – it took me ten days to rebuild a kind of daily life. In fact, as soon as I came out of the airport, I experienced a complete “reset.” I can remember the first night I slept in Kolkata, on Manoharpukur Road, with the crows and honking cars accompanying me for such a long time, the dogs, some voices from the street, and finally, for a few hours, a mysterious total silence. The third day I went out of the flat, to throw away the garbage. And I felt joy when I could perform this little chore. (I had to ask for help also for understanding where the garbage was.)
6. How do you see the poetry scene in Italy as well as the world? Where are we heading? What are the prospects? And what would you advice the aspiring poets?
This kind of question incites me to say everything and, at the same time, nothing… But I will try to be concrete, starting from my own experience, which is mostly in Italy, Europe, the Western World. I think that poetry is suffering from a form of spiritual poverty, a reduction of the power of vision, a kind of desertification of the imagination. It’s probably a general trend that involves all kinds of artistic expression. But maybe the “arts of the word” are the most affected by this. We must continuously built a dam against the overflow of debris and residues that the communication industry has brought to us with its logic of simplification, immediacy, and obedience to trade-market rules. Up until a few years ago, I thought about poetry as a marginal place of resistance; now I realize more and more how much poetry has also been infected by the same virus. The poetry series issued by the main publishing houses seem to privilege a kind of poetry that can be immediately “readable,” “clear,” and consequently, as they believe, “sellable.” In this way, they try to accommodate a need for poetry that is inherent to our humanness, but with a poetry that demands no work and effort to elaborate that need by means of a search inside ourselves, through our emotions and feelings, so that we can get beyond ourselves. Such poetry only duplicates mirrors, extends the labyrinth, and feeds the monster (that can live inside us), instead of helping us to go through the mirror and find the way to be free.
7. What new did Chair Poets in Residence Program 2019 add to your literary career?
To think in terms of a literary career paralyzes my writing. I think in terms of what is important for my life, and try never to lose that focus. There is an image, a sequence of images, to which I’m really attached. They offer a clear guide on how to proceed. The images belong to Nostalgia, a Tarkovskij film. A man is walking with a candle in his hand, across an empty pool. He has the duty of bringing the candle, with its burning flame, to the far end of the pool. If he is able to do that, the world will be saved (so he has been told). He moves forward very slowly: the flame is so feeble that it needs to be shielded with his palm, with all his attention and care. The fate of the world lies in that flame. Sometimes it goes out. So he relights it and again starts to walk on slowly. When he reaches the far end of the pool, he draws his last breath. The world is safe. He has dedicated himself completely to this duty, until his sacrifice. In this same way, we too are called upon to live in every instant, protecting the fragility of beauty, the origin of life.
My stay in India as the Chair Poet in Residence has been a fundamental experience, something that remains engraved in me. It is as if it had been my calling to be there, to live in Kolkata for a month, to learn to walk in its streets, to listen its constant flock of honking cars, the ringing of small bells and the shells for calling to prayers. It’s something that I still have with me, that I can listen to inside myself in order to remember the density of life, that marvelous opening of thresholds.
You can realize what an author has given to your writing only when you have fully inherited what has been left for you. This means that you have to arrive at a distance from that author, as if he were buried in you. You have to carry out the hard work that Eliot wrote about in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Although we always strive to achieve self-awareness, most influences in poetry are often hidden and remain unconscious. So I can’t really say which authors are still alive in my poetry, but I can tell of those whom I have loved the most. I met them during my teenage years, during that period when everything that happens in your life seems to mark it permanently, with its incandescent signs. I plunged into reading so deeply, during those afternoons after school, that I had the feeling of being an amphibian, of living in two nearby yet different kingdoms. I loved reading while lying in bed or in the garden, feeling the book as my “third lung” opening and closing. A book is an extension of our life, of our breathing. During that period, I received a kind of intense oxygen transfusion from Eliot, Rilke, Dostoevsky, Proust, Pavese, and Pessoa. I used to copy the phrases and passages, which were the most important ones for me, into my notebook, putting together a kind of personal anthology. That kind of copying work was my way of keeping what I love in my body, in the rhythm of my blood. With some of the books, such as Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, I could have copied them entirely… With such kinds of shining beauty, we can’t do anything but stay as much as possible inside it.
2. What is your writing regimen? Do you write daily or occasionally? What discipline do you follow?
In poetry, my only discipline is listening, and making a space in myself for it. This means that, whatever happens in my daily life, I have to preserve a kind of fissure, a gap, from which I can still be connected to a kind of other dimension and be “saved.” It’s not an escape, it’s more like an ancient, original umbilical cord that can still nourish me. In language, in the very matter of words, we can still perceive this possibility of being rejoined by and receiving a kind of love, a strength, that goes beyond our individual and human contours.
3. As a poet you have to be both locally specific as well as universally accessible. How do you bridge this challenge or do you at all see this as something that needs to be overcome?
I think that this is everyone’s duty, in every day of life. Trying to take root in every gesture, in every step, so as not to be swept away by destructive and negative currents. In our time, these can also consist of the global financial power with its invisible face. Through this genuine relationship between ourselves and our living environment, we can feel the universe in any ant crawling near us.
4. Your poems have been translated into English. Western theories on translation stress on fidelity with semantics or meaning but Indian theory concentrates on conveying the emotional effects and impact. What is your opinion on translation of poems especially relating to your poems?
My poetry is very dense, usually concentrating in few verses a lot of meaning and possibilities of meaning, such as a “Mother dough” that needs time to rise. Above all, my poetry needs the attention and care of the Other. The reader needs to carry out a task, to give that dough a shape, the one closest to his own listening, to his experience. A translator to another language is a special reader of a poem, a reader with a big responsibility. His duty is to carry this deep possibility of meaning into another language, without explaining it, without killing all the lives moving inside the original language, but instead trying to save them—not to choose one single street but rather to leave the intersection open to readers.
A translator, more than any critic, can be the best reader of a poem. That is what I realized while I was working with John Taylor, the American translator of my third book, The Little Book of Passage. It’s a book of prose poems or, perhaps, a book of verse poems without line breaks. Silence and what remains unwritten are as important as the few sentences actually written down. As in my previous book, Mother Dough, I leave some pages entirely blank, as a space that marks the rhythm of the book, a rhythm of wakefulness and sleep, of vision and a return to the place where the images arise. Thanks to John’s close and attentive gaze, I was able to discover the meaning of some words that have gone through me. For example, thanks to him, I now know the full Italian meaning of “falda” (“water table”). This meaning reached me with a healing power. In fact, the imagery of a “water table,” a “fault line,” a “crack,” or a “gap” runs through the entire book. I struggled a lot against them, with all my energy, suffering from a kind of defeat and frustration for “not being able to repair” them, until I realized, thanks to John, that the “water table” is located inside the earth, that it’s not repairable, that from it comes water (life), and that we have just to accept and recognize it as a source of life, in whatever form life appears: as an ordered garden, or a chaotic ground. As in this text from The Little Book of Passage:
In the evening, a cigarette between his fingers, watching the sky darken like moistened soil, my father waters his garden. When he’s standing down there in the farthest corner, hidden by the tomato plants, I can hear the water pouring from the well, streaming down between the dirt clods to the roots awaiting it. Here, where the flow has trickled out, sprout plants with poisonous fruit, stiff stalks of grass with tiny flowers. I haven’t succeeded in hoeing them away, in repairing the water table.
Now, thanks to this awareness that the American translation has given to me, I can read the last sentence of this prose poem with another tone—free from pain.
5. You belong predominantly to a monolingual country. What has been your experience in a multilingual country like India?
Italy only appears to be a monolingual country. In fact, there are other languages, or regional languages, and a lot of dialects, some of them still strong and alive, with literary traditions. During my residence in Kolkata, I had the opportunity, thanks to the program you coordinated, to meet artists and poets who live in this city and usually grow up knowing almost three languages: Bengali, Hindi, and English. It was my first time in India and I realized, at the end of my residence, that I was only beginning to live in Kolkata – it took me ten days to rebuild a kind of daily life. In fact, as soon as I came out of the airport, I experienced a complete “reset.” I can remember the first night I slept in Kolkata, on Manoharpukur Road, with the crows and honking cars accompanying me for such a long time, the dogs, some voices from the street, and finally, for a few hours, a mysterious total silence. The third day I went out of the flat, to throw away the garbage. And I felt joy when I could perform this little chore. (I had to ask for help also for understanding where the garbage was.)
6. How do you see the poetry scene in Italy as well as the world? Where are we heading? What are the prospects? And what would you advice the aspiring poets?
This kind of question incites me to say everything and, at the same time, nothing… But I will try to be concrete, starting from my own experience, which is mostly in Italy, Europe, the Western World. I think that poetry is suffering from a form of spiritual poverty, a reduction of the power of vision, a kind of desertification of the imagination. It’s probably a general trend that involves all kinds of artistic expression. But maybe the “arts of the word” are the most affected by this. We must continuously built a dam against the overflow of debris and residues that the communication industry has brought to us with its logic of simplification, immediacy, and obedience to trade-market rules. Up until a few years ago, I thought about poetry as a marginal place of resistance; now I realize more and more how much poetry has also been infected by the same virus. The poetry series issued by the main publishing houses seem to privilege a kind of poetry that can be immediately “readable,” “clear,” and consequently, as they believe, “sellable.” In this way, they try to accommodate a need for poetry that is inherent to our humanness, but with a poetry that demands no work and effort to elaborate that need by means of a search inside ourselves, through our emotions and feelings, so that we can get beyond ourselves. Such poetry only duplicates mirrors, extends the labyrinth, and feeds the monster (that can live inside us), instead of helping us to go through the mirror and find the way to be free.
7. What new did Chair Poets in Residence Program 2019 add to your literary career?
To think in terms of a literary career paralyzes my writing. I think in terms of what is important for my life, and try never to lose that focus. There is an image, a sequence of images, to which I’m really attached. They offer a clear guide on how to proceed. The images belong to Nostalgia, a Tarkovskij film. A man is walking with a candle in his hand, across an empty pool. He has the duty of bringing the candle, with its burning flame, to the far end of the pool. If he is able to do that, the world will be saved (so he has been told). He moves forward very slowly: the flame is so feeble that it needs to be shielded with his palm, with all his attention and care. The fate of the world lies in that flame. Sometimes it goes out. So he relights it and again starts to walk on slowly. When he reaches the far end of the pool, he draws his last breath. The world is safe. He has dedicated himself completely to this duty, until his sacrifice. In this same way, we too are called upon to live in every instant, protecting the fragility of beauty, the origin of life.
My stay in India as the Chair Poet in Residence has been a fundamental experience, something that remains engraved in me. It is as if it had been my calling to be there, to live in Kolkata for a month, to learn to walk in its streets, to listen its constant flock of honking cars, the ringing of small bells and the shells for calling to prayers. It’s something that I still have with me, that I can listen to inside myself in order to remember the density of life, that marvelous opening of thresholds.
