From the French

 Guy Goffette (1947 – 2024), who died the March before last, was quite a frequent visitor to the Veneto, and my friend Danni Antonello, who, alas, himself died a few years back at half the age Guy reached, was his Italian translator. I visited Guy on a couple of occasions in Paris, where he had small book-crowded flat by Les Halles (“Layz Halles, as you English say”), his library including some exotic livres d’artiste, often of his own production, some of them existing in only two copies, one for himself and one for the artist

 Don’t say a Word

 Don’t speak, she said, if you’ve come here to stay.

The rain is enough, and the wind on the tiles,

the silence enough that the furniture hoards

like dust after centuries without you.

Stay quiet now. Listen to what has been searing

my flesh: those footsteps, and laughter far off,

the mongrel baying, the car-door slamming, this train

that rumbles and rumbles over my bones.

Don’t say a word. There is nothing to say.

Let the rain be just rain again, and the wind

a tide under the rooftiles, let the dog

cry out his name in the night, the car-door slam,

the stranger’s footsteps recede into the nowhere

I’ve been dying in. Stay if you’re going to stay.

But living, I thought

But living, I thought, is something again,

not these hours soon forgotten and the havoc

of love, the attrition – what we deal with

from morning to night: splitting the skies,

delving the earth and the seas, by turns first bird                           

and then fish, even mole: we play at displacing

the air, the fruits on the trees, the dust; acting as if,

aching after, marching towards, accumulating

what? the worm in the apple, the wind in the crops?

– given that all things fall back, everything resumes

and nothing the same as before,

neither better nor worse, endlessly

churning – living is something again.

Two more 2oth-century géants littéraires

Philippe Jaccottet (1925-2021)

Interior

A long time I’ve been trying to live a life here,

in this room I pretend to be fond of,

the table’s unthreatening clutter, the window

that opens each dawn onto altered greenery,

a blackbird’s heart ticking in the dark ivy,

light-splinters throwing quaint shadows everywhere.  

I make myself believe it’s a milder day than most,

I’m at home, and the morning bodes well.

There  is  just  this  spider, at the foot of the bed

(because of the garden), I can’t have stamped

on her adequately, she seems busy still

setting her nets to enmesh my frail ghost . . .

(this poem was included in French Poetry, Everyman Library Pocket Poets Series, 2017)

Jean Follain (1903-1971)

October Thoughts

Nothing beats

an old wine

savoured alone

as early evening

coppers the hills,

no huntsman now

drawing a bead

on the beasts of the plain.

Our friends’ sisters

(the radio bleats

of wars to come)

look lovelier

(an insect settles

and moves on again).

Five poems by Eugenio Montale

(Nobel Prize for Literature 1975)

The first and third are among his best known.

Dora Markus

It was where the wooden pier at Porto Corsini

thrusts out into open sea

and solitary men, hardly seeming to move,

cast and retrieve their nets. With a vague hand

you gestured to your real country

on that other invisible shore,

and we followed the canal downtown

to the docks in their sheen of soot

where a stagnant Spring ebbed away

unmourned.

And here where a sweet Middle Eastern unease

perturbs the centuried calm,

your talk glittered like the scales

of their basketed catch.

Your restlessness recalls

those birds of passage that dash

against the harbour lighthouse

on hurricane nights;

tempestuous too your allure

that simmers without seeming

(and how rare its abeyance).

I don’t understand how it is

you contrive to survive

in that lake of indifference, your heart.

Is it your talisman saves you,

– the one that you keep with your

nail-file, your lipstick, your powderpuff:

that miniature ivory mouse?

Is he your secret?!

1926