Peter Dale on Erminia Passannanti's poems. Peter Dale's translation of "Macchina",

Erminia Passannanti is an Italian poet and the translator into Italian of, among others, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath, R.S. Thomas.

(...) Her use of the free verse is unusual from an English-speaking view, or maybe merely from a current British perspective, in that it is dominated and controlled by considerations of syntax-structure alone.

 This is further characterized by a large amount of disruption to normal syntax in the interest of irony, elegy, farse and point. Added to this, there is the use of language from a variety of registers and periods to create telling juxtapositions and sometimes expressionist and surreal effects. Phrases of memorial cultural significance are scrambled, rearranged and connected in surprising and shocking ways; the tone context of images is subverted and thwarted by such collocations and the vision travesties and contravenes expected codes of languages as with a dissociating mind. These shifts and contrasts are frequently slight - but deep and subtle in meaning. It is not possible to match all of them in another language. (...) 

Despite the quirky individuality of the Passannanti style, all of the poems presented here are forms of dramatic monologue with clear and sometimes weird personas.

They are centrally concerned with proclaiming the right of human individuality and freedom, despite, and because of, the ties and fetters imposed by culture, history, religion, politics, and the familial system. Underlying this passion for freedom, runs a deeper motive force for it: a

sense of vacuity of human endeavours and desires in face of the cosmos and society...

(Published in "Agenda", 2000)

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Erminia Passannanti

‘Machine’ 

("Macchina")

(translated by Peter Dale, 1999)

She runs the trolley

along the track of madness.

Slowly follows the rail.

Who knows

What happens

At dead of night!

(the trolley

along the track of madness

keeps me aloft).

Things happen in the small hour,

One must stay alert.

Better to avoid too much know-how.

(Doctors come and go, they keep on causing scars,

while my arm is dripping).

The say ‘Too many smells in this room!’

I haven’t notice it

At the distance I keep…

Just sounds striking my ear,

Pains, noises that are produced

By the machine.

Strange vibrations producing

Doleful notes during the night duty:

The machine is broken.

Much better to do without it.

I’d prefer not to be bothered.

They come and sabotage it on purpose.

There are those who

Sit and work at it

To stop those who owned the machine

Sitting and working.

Those who owned it struggle and despair.

They don’t want to baste linen any more.

I mourned life. Oh, yea, but now I laugh.

Because of it, that machine.

(Look how the scar meanders,

unnoticed, in the material).

I stood there, like a Lucifer,

My fair name cast by filthy suggestions.

Then they were erased.

I feel myself reborn.

If it vanishes, I can’t but weep. It it reappears,

I start feeling a rag, a beggar at my own door,

A mendicant in my own home,

My destiny instantly decided:

Trapped in the mechanism. Like this!

All of a sudden arose a noise that annoyed me,

An annoyance caused by someone

Who’d gone to the trouble

Of releasing the spring.

At night, it would not proceed.

I wanted to see how far

It would perform its task,

To show it to those who use it to stake

The living being that every day

Functions (thanks to it).

We are talking of the machine, a black machine

That I cannot operate any more – since its tools

Are missing. The tools useful to people like me.

And, tell me: if someone took

And used those them, to whom did she pass

The instruments essential to work that machine?

Did she pass them to someone without a machine?

Someone rampaging out of control,

Who is keeping my trolley without any right,

Flying off the handle while claiming, from me,

The hammer, the spring mechanism, everything

Required to get up with? Does it matter to anyone

My need of a pen, a pencil?

They keep me shut in this room

Together with a black contraption

That exploits my recourses.

The girl doesn’t know how to work it

And has moved the device elsewhere:

A small sewing machine

That distracts her thoughts.

If she pays attention, she will learn to use it,

…while I lose my way after simple basting.

I can no longer manage to thread a needle,

Turning the handle,

To feel myself humiliated, annihilated. ‘Poor me!’,

I said, ‘to feel myself at zero degree

In these irrelevant tasks

That anyone else can do and now I cannot.

No, I can’t see. I cannot.’

But I do know how to speak, express desires:

I’ll get a needle, take it by the window.

I’ll make it work.

I’ll make those

Who can’t read my thoughts

Gulp it down

Those marching or sewing a hem.

My machine works

With all the beauty of winter,

With those who perfected my hearing.

I know the beauties of winter

And believe they may be those

Which exalt the weaving.

Let all of them leave my house.

I don’t want typewriters around.

They come here pretending to be poets!

This annoying hammering

Reminds me of my broken window.

I think it might lead to the dissolution of my house.

Everywhere, works have began.

There’s no silence around here. No peace.

Hammering. Clacking. Endlessly.