“My name was wrong to believe in continuity.” – Mario Benedetti
| TERSA MORTE
Mario Benedetti Mandami le ossa, mandami il cranio senza gli occhi, la mascella aperta, spalancata, fissa nei denti, e i calzini sotto la tuta, eri rigido, eri rigido, eri una cosa come un’altra, senza la forma che hanno i tavoli, morso dallo stento del vivere, una cosa inservibile, indecisa, un terriccio che non si nota, un pezzo di asfalto di una strada anonima, eri tu, quella cosa, eri tu, quella cosa, eri uno che è morto. Così fragile il tuo sorriso, lo sguardo blu e gli zigomi, il metro e settantacinque portato come un uomo che piace, che vive per sempre, per sempre dentro una vita che per potere essere vissuta deve sembrare una vita per sempre, mentre eri della carne, quello che io sono uno per sempre ancora. |
LUCID DEATH
Mario Benedetti Send me the bones, send me the eyeless skull, the open maxilla, gaping, fixed in teeth, and the socks under the slacks, you were rigid, you were rigid, you were a thing like any other, without the shape that tables have, trapped in the toil of living, something unusable, unsure, a soil unnoticed, a piece of asphalt of an anonymous road, you were that thing, you were that thing, you were one who is dead. So fragile your smile the blue gaze and the cheekbones, the five foot eight paraded like one who is appealing, who lives forever, forever inside a life that in order to be lived must seem like life forever, while you were of flesh, that which I am one forever still. Translation ©Matilda Colarossi 2020 |
Mario Benedetti was an Italian poet and translator. He was born in Nimis on November 9, 1955, and died in Milan on March 27, 2020. For years he had been fighting an autoimmune disease: he is one of the many victims of the coronavirus.
The poem is from the collection Tersa morte by Mario Benedetti (Mondadori 2013).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
