My Poems Will Not Change the World
Cavalli, Patrizia30 USD
Date
1998
Category
Poetry
Description
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli that she has written "the most intensely ‘ethical' poetry in Italian literature of the twentieth century." One could add that it is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, My Poems Won't Change the World is her first substantial American anthology.
The book is made up of poems from Cavalli's collections published by Einaudi from 1974 to 2006, now freshly translated by an illustrious group of American poets, some of them already familiar with her work: Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Galassi, Rosanna Warren, Geoffrey Brock, J. D. McClatchy, and David Shapiro. Gini Alhadeff's translations, which make up half the book, are the result of a five-year collaboration with Cavalli.
Excerpt
When in the morning I awoke and you entered
The constitution of thoughts
That in infinite phrasings spelled out
The enigmas to be solved, the sacrifices and gifts...
I was guilty. Of not being able to reach
For having aimed too straight at it the cloistered softness
Of your heart…
Of not being able to find
The door that wasn’t there, the dreamed-of door
That locked you away in goodness multiplied,
Which even you, tired keeper, knew
Was not there, but which even you dreamed of,
Hoping that the keys the laborious
virtue of my keys, could bring into existence
what wasn’t there, for if only I had found out
the right sound, the right combination
of words, managed the right
description, we might bother have entered
into that invention. To finally discover
pleasure has no doors and that
if it does they’re wide open, and
that we could have stayed outside
both of us ill equipped and surrendering equally
playing at doors and keys
with me as the door and you as the keys.”
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