Swans Commentary » swans.com July 3, 2006  

 


 

Three Thousand Worlds
in Just a Flash of Life

 

by Guido Monte and Vittorio Cozzo

 

Poetry

 

Translated by Maria Patricia Mastruzzo

 

 

(Swans - July 3, 2006)  

GUIDO'S INTRODUCTION

To Mario Turrisi

For a long time I had collected
what Vittorio was telling me on the phone
about his dreams—
he dreamt
and I scratchily wrote,
through immediate inspiration,
according to my long-wrought way.
then I read Kirimura, Ikeda
T'ien T'ai's Ichinen Sanzen:
I found the title ready-made.
Here are eight microcosms.

 

1. PROTOTYPES

In that world there existed
three prototypes of men and women,
then multiplying to infinite
in millions of copies.
Women were the hypocrite, the sensuous,
the apparent tame—men were the drunken,
the violent, the slave.

 

2. THE WAR

Anselmuccio had promised to be a good boy—
Try again and try, he succeeded one day.
Just then, his sister, smiling
murmured to his ear: the war!
Didn't want to believe it—went to the window
and saw a crowd of people running away.
His father, in front of the laid table
hopelessly cried: it's the end.
Anselmuccio again went to the window
and shouted to make his throat bleed.

 

3. FREE

In the end one found himself alone
under a bridge at night,
with the fear the river would overflow.
The day after he wandered again
the place where work in obsession,
went up the stairs of a building,
one of a thousand,
got to the top and jumped down.

 

4. AN OLD RAP

A man hid in the carriage of a train
and listened from the radio
to an old rap of a few years before—
It was the story of a penniless terminal-operator
who never managed to get his old age pension.

 

5. ILLUMINATION

He saw images clear and images more internal,
he was unable to recall—
then he woke up and went to work,
thoughtful. One morning he got up
and saw a kitten peeping at him
bewildered, from the kitchen calendar.

 

6. FRAGILE

Two, friends since their childhood, aged together,
sitting on the steps near the town hall.
A child gets near, scorns them and runs away.
One of the two old men rages and runs after him,
gets him, gives him a kick:
the boy falls to pieces like a crystal bowl.
A mother, crying, picks up
The crystal bits, the pieces
of a son too soon grown up.
Among the losers in that town
faceless, someone had dialled 999
thinking of a riot in the neighbourhood.
Just arrived, their lights all glimmer
the bored policemen asked: who?

 

7. A NON-EXISTING WORD

He was a middle-aged man, on a bus,
complaining of a theft he'd just witnessed.
While he was getting off, a young girl
pointed a gun at him
and shot him right into his face,
under his eye
shouting a non-existing word.

 

8. LAST WORLD

In the last world there's a kind of paradise,
the essence of pure bliss
in which you are oddly conscious you exist—
you can't see anything.
Not even there it's possible though
to speak to God, not even as dead men—
each manages his own light.

 

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Poetry

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About the Author

Guido Monte teaches Italian and Latin literature in Palermo, Italy. He blends living and dead languages, and ancient and modern poets, in search of deeper relations between different people and cultures. He was born in 1962. You can find more creative writing of his own on happano.org, Words Without Borders, Segue, the multilingual magazine Litterae, and on BlazeVox (PDF file), an online journal of voice. Vittorio E. Cozzo was born in Palermo. He is a free-thinker who against all odds publishes experimental works with Guido Monte (e.g., "Nothing recalled and the mysterious life of God." He continues to live and operate in some remote part of Palermo. Maria P. Mastruzzo teaches English literature at the Liceo A. Einstein of Palermo. Mario Turrisi is a former student of Guido Monte who helped him prepare the original Italian version of this work.

 

Legalese

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Swans -- ISSN: 1554-4915
URL for this work: http://www.swans.com/library/art12/gmonte03.html
Published July 3, 2006



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