“I have studied myself thoroughly, not to understand myself―that would be impossible―but to understand others and to hurt them as little as possible.” Alda Merini

This poem, found in La poesia luogo del nulla, Manni Ed., 2015, is a stark self-analysis.  It expresses Alda Merini’s emotional and psychiatric struggles.

Alda Merini’s first collections of poems were published in 1953, La presenza di Orfeo, and later in 1961, Tu sei Pietro, followed by a twenty-year hiatus which marked deep mental suffering and a painful experience in a mental hospital. She returned to poetry in 1984 with La Terra Santa, and published various collections that include: Vuoto d’amore, 1991; Ballate non pagate, 1994; and Poesia, 1995.

The “cord of wind” that holds the poet prisoner is, in my opinion, the constant state of mental alienation that draws the poet from the place in which active life moves. I chose the word “cord” here, instead of the word I most preferred, which was string, because in Italian corda is both the musical chord and the material cord. I hope that with adagio and later canta (all musical terms) the reader might hear “chord” while also imaging the yoke that cord evokes. This wind moves “above useless exhaustions”, that is, the physical effort to be productive, to engage in life as others around her do. This is both exhausting and useless (as we see in the following lines). If “barring my room in vain”―if she retreats into her mind―it means she is taking refuge in the only place she can find protection, safety, even if the song of the wind obscures her reason, even if this means not communicating with the world around her.

I found the poem wonderfully simple and wonderfully complex. I love poems that offer numerous interpretations, but this makes the work of a translator almost impossible, open to criticism, and sometimes as intangible as the wind that moves “adagio” above the poet’s daily efforts to be a part of life and what others consider “normal”. -M.C.

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