Geoffrey Brock / Mezzo cammin

Mezzo cammin

by Geoffrey Brock

Today, as I jogged down the center line 
of a closed-off, rain-glossed road, lost in a rhythm, 
the memory of a boy returned: fifteen

or so, barefoot in faded cut-off jeans, 
sprinting past neighbors’ houses, tears drifting 
into his ears, heart yanking at its seams—

he hoped they’d rip and didn’t slow at all 
for more than a mile. After crossing Mission,
the boy collapsed beneath an oak, his whole

body one cramp. (But later the secret smile, 
imagining Guinness there—the clock-men stunned!) 
Twenty years gone, that race so vivid still,

yet I can’t for the life of me recall the gun:
who was it, or what, that made me start to run?

Geoffrey Brock / Introduction to Six poems by Umberto Saba

Umberto Saba

Introduction 

to Six poems by Umberto Saba

by Geoffrey Brock

Geoffrey Brock’s introduction to Saba’s poems

In 1911, two years after Marinetti spawned Futurism, the all-but-unknown Umberto Saba (1883–1957) wrote his own manifesto, which sadly never had the impact of Marinetti’s; it remained unpublished until after Saba’s death. His tract, titled “What Remains for Poets to Do,” begins with typical directness: “It remains for poets to make poetry honest.”

Today, when much poetry seems merely honest, it may be difficult to appreciate Saba’s prescription. But Italian poetry was emerging from the decadentismo of Gabriele d’Annunzio, who could falsify “passions and admirations … for the sole wretched end of gaining a more striking stanza or a more resonant line.” Saba’s charge mirrors Auden’s indictment of his younger self for espousing in “Spain” a “wicked doctrine … simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective.”

The Italian avant-garde in 1911 was even more dishonest than the arrière-garde. In their zeal for newness, Futurists jettisoned what Saba (a classicist at heart) saw as the virtues of their poetic heritage. Their innovations, as Joseph Cary points out in Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, “were the dragooning of so-called ‘free-verse’ as a counterblow to the traditional hendecasyllable, eccentric suspensions of normal syntax and punctuation, a plethora of short-lived onomatopoetic coinages, the cultivation … of the fragment, … and an impudent, jazzy, informal ‘oral’ style.” It was, Saba felt, mere novelty that arose from what he dubbed their “uncontrollable desire to be original.”

The path to authentic originality led, he believed, through the forest of the self, and his was more dense and difficult than most. Religion, nationality, sexuality—elements that, for many, are cornerstones of identity were for Saba lifelong question marks. Born Umberto Poli to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father who left before his son was born, Saba grew up among Jews but admits, “I never felt myself anything but an Italian among Italians.” This national identification was complicated, however, since for half his life his native Trieste was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His sexual identity, too, was blurred: homosexual love poems stand alongside love poems to his wife. Even that emblem of personal and familial identity, the patronymic, was abandoned—as his father had abandoned him. Giuseppe Ungaretti once referred to Saba as “the poet of himself,” and indeed he seemed to forge his vexed identity in the reflective, autobiographical poetry of his principal work, Il Canzoniere, first published in 1921 and revised and enlarged until his death.

Saba ignored trends such as Futurism and Hermeticism all his life. While this fact makes him hard to pigeonhole, it helps explain why the honesty and updated classicism evident in these poems remain compelling long after the fashions changed.

Geoffrey Brock is the author Weighing Light and the translator of several books from the Italian language.

THE NEW CRITERION

Geoffrey Brock / Weighing light

Weighing light

by Geoffrey Brock

Often the slightest gesture is most telling, 
as when he reaches tenderly in passing 
to pluck the yellow leaf from the dark fall

of her hair, or even the absence of all gesture:
the way she doesn’t need to turn to know
who, in this gathering of friends, has touched her.

It was as if he dreamed some private garden.
Perhaps he woke from it, mid-reach, to find
his hand too near her hair in this crowded yard,

and maybe even now she’s shuttering in
(she’s even better than you or I at that)
a storm of worry and recrimination—

did anyone notice? how could he do that here!—
by seamlessly continuing to tell you
about her trip to see her favorite Vermeer

this morning in the Delft show at the Met:
“So now they say she isn’t weighing pearls
or gold or anything—it’s just the light

gleaming off empty scales.” So much is hard
to know for sure. If I confronted her,
she’d say it was just a leaf—who could afford

to disagree? Could we? Now she’s explaining
how the girl faces a mirror we can’t see into
and how behind her hands a gloomy painting

of the Last Judgment: “Over her head God
floats in a cloud,” she says, “like a thought balloon.”
But you don’t hear. You’re watching me. I nod.

Geoffrey Brock / Ovid old

Ovid old

by Geoffrey Brock

As  a pale gauze 

rose over Asia, he awoke 

             surrounded by, not Rome, 

                            but huts, hanging 

like tattered effigies of home 

             from threads of cedar smoke; 

                            Europe was dark. 

The woman by him also woke,

             gently helped him to stand, 

                            wrapped him in fur, 

and led him outside by the hand 

             to see the sun’s great yolk 

                            push up against 

the horizon’s rim. After it broke

             and bled into the bowl 

                            of the Black Sea, 

it rose again, transformed and whole. 

             For minutes, neither spoke. 

                            “Time,” he recited,

“tames the bullock to the yoke.” 

             He laughed, more blithe than bitter, 

                            the way he did 

these days when he could find no fitter 

             punchline to some old joke 

                            than himself. The woman 

knew the laugh if not the joke, 

             the moods if not the meanings 

                            of his strange words, 

uttered aloud, to no one—keenings 

             that once had made him choke 

                            with grief, but that 

evolved, as Daphne’s cries (a cloak 

             of bark abrading her body) 

                            gave way to birdsong 

in her branches. Some things no god 

             or Caesar can revoke.

Geoffrey Brock / One morning

One morning

by Geoffrey Brock

The boy is wide awake:
he climbs into our bed
and clambers toward my head,
wielding a yellow rake.

Combing my hair, the boy
giggles with every stroke.
His is a simple joke:
he knows his plastic toy

is not a comb, my hair
is not disheveled sand,
and yet his furrowed mind
has seen a likeness there—

delight grows from small seeds.
And for now I won’t worry
what else might, as we hurry
toward what the future breeds.

Umberto Saba / A Winter Noon

A Winter Noon

by Umberto Saba

Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock

 

Who in the moment of my happiness

(God forgive my using a word so grand,

so terrible) reduced my brief delight

nearly to tears? No doubt you'll say: "A certain

beautiful creature who was walking by

and smiled at you." But no: a child's balloon,

a blue, meandering balloon against

the azure of the air, my native sky

never so clear and cold as it was then,

at high noon on a dazzling winter day.

That sky with here and there a wisp of cloud,

and upper windows flaming in the sun,

and faint smoke from a chimney, maybe two,

and over everything, every divine

thing, that globe that had escaped a boy's

incautious fingers (surely he was out there

broadcasting through the crowded square his grief,

his immense grief) between the great facade

of the Stock Exchange and the café where I,

behind a window, watched with shining eyes

the rise and fall of what he once possessed.

 

                                

Geoffrey Brock / Drive

Drive

by Geoffrey Brock

The parched pasture
passing my window
isn’t empty;

the shadow cast
by the lone willow
isn’t shadow merely:

a herd of black cattle
has pooled there
like ink in a bottle,

has remade for itself
out of the glare
a deeper shade.

Umberto Saba / Ulysses

Ulysses

by Umberto Saba

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

Umberto Saba / Ulisse

Once in my younger days I sailed the length
of the Dalmation coast. Islets of rock
lilied the surface of the water, perches
for the occasional bird intent on food.
The rocks were slick and algae-draped and bright
as emeralds in the sun, but when high tide
or night concealed them, any sail with wind
would veer toward deeper water to avert
their treachery. And now I am the king
of no man’s land. The harbor-lights are lit
for others; I again turn to the sea,
still driven by an unextinguished spirit,
by this excruciating love for life.