Questi giorni invernali cosi chiari/These winter days so very clear by Corrado Govoni

Questi giorni invernali cosi chiari

Corrado Govoni

Questi giorni invernali così chiari,

e queste notti ancora più serene

mi mettono nel cuore tanto gelo:

come se mi scorresse nelle vene

il freddo dei sessanta inverni amari;

e fosse tutto un vetro terra e cielo

col tuo ghiaccio disciolto dal mio pianto,

dalle Pleiadi al vischio al calicanto.

These winter days so very clear

Corrado Govoni

These winter days so very clear

and these nights even more serene

fill my heart to the brim with rime:

as if that which streamed through my veins

were sixty cold winters severe;

and of glass were both the land and sky

with your ice dissolved in my sobs,

Pleiades to mistletoe to calycanthus.

Translation ©Matilda Colarossi

The poem is from the collection “Aladino”, published in 1946 and is dedicated to Govoni’s son who was shot by the Naziis during the Fosse Ardeatine massacre of March 24, 1944. It represents the highest and purest poetic moment in the collection. In these very brief verses we find the inconsolable anguish for the death of his son: the days are, therefore, cold and very clear like the rime in the poet’s heart. Everything is coldness. He, the father, is sixty, sixty are the cold winters drowned in the surrounding silence. His endless pain is projected in nature and the cosmos.

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