Source Language: Italian

I have been learning (badly) Bach’s Contrapunctus 14 while reading this collection of poetry from Franca Mancinelli, warmly translated by John Taylor. They complement each other very well. Both music and poetry are full of the deep compassion and elemental reverence for the life-force which is so often the stuffing of fine art.

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Mancinelli’s collection draws from various sources of inspiration- refugees waiting to cross the Croatian border, bronze figurines unearthed in San Marino, and paintings of St Lucy, to name a few. In her meditations on human suffering she shows a gift for moving little turns of phrases; the engine of a boat ‘starts to break into tears’; air is ‘missing like a mother.’ She combines this with a knack for noting arresting details. Her description of a manuscript abandoned by refugees in the woods is at once beautiful and sad, ‘a soul among the forks of some branches,’ ‘lacerated,’ ‘[k]ept tightly against someone’s chest and abandoned after a long journey.’ The testimonial of a ‘volunteer met in Zagreb’ highlights in quietly heartbreaking fashion the impotence of small kindnesses in the face of such tragedy: ‘You give a woman clean laundry and see twenty other people who are left without any. Whatever you do, it melts like a snowflake in your hand.’ A painting of Lucy perhaps ponders the limits of the poet’s power to heal the world; Lucy must ‘clutch the pen it writes nothing/like a cut-off branch/nothing but the shining air.’

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But what struck me most was Mancinelli’s radiant hope in the face of hardship, channelled through her celebration of life. There is an exuberant spontaneity to her description of growth- in her words, ‘‘a law of joy.’ ‘The sky has the/smell of my sap. I have circumscribed myself. My majestic stature.’ She seeks ‘to open my chest wide/with the strength that comes from a seed.’ She embraces the smallest gifts of life: ‘‘every day you tread on/the slightest grace.’

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There is faith in the supportiveness of nature. Sometimes Mancinelli singles out, with much affection, individual parts of the ecosystem which afford us protection. Trees ‘watch over us/like heavy rain waiting’; it is a beautifully accurate image, relatable to anyone who has ever gazed up at a sumptuous canopy. Elsewhere she ponders the magic of the larger system. If we scrub off society’s needless complexities, she muses, we find ourselves cocooned in a beautifully designed cycle, which allows us to relish the present moment in all its sublimity: ‘[W]hen you see again, you’ll find everything supported by branches./ Nothing has happened. We’re here on this framework of leaves.’ It reminded me very much of an equally comforting line from Philippe Jaccottet: «Peu m’importe le commencement du monde. // Maintenant ses feuilles bougent/maintenant c’est un arbre immense/dont je touche le bois navré. » She admires the finer intricacies of this system. ‘[T]he body/is a merry-go-round of minute wings’; ‘life overturns/becomes Morse code.’ She celebrates the spontaneous, instinctive knowledge of natural organisms: ‘trees come toward me. Alone and just themselves, they know the secret of resisting in this landscape.’ The world communicates in mysterious ways: ‘an invisible signal suffices, something goes by in the air.’ The heart of this system is perhaps ungraspable- ‘at the centre the mystery, the stamen/of time.’ There is something more than, but complementary to, the material, which we can only sense: ‘This breathing that moves through me asks to have body. It asks/to have a place.’

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Mancinelli is deeply aware of the cyclicality of these spirits. Sometimes this may seem to justify futility: ‘[A]ny going is a going back’; ‘The where’s are all provisional.’ We are, perhaps, trapped in a meaningless system: ‘a hand pressing againt the wall of a cave.’ But she leans towards the case for optimism in renewal (‘What has been/will come back with the rain/uncovering minute clues/and fragments of a god’) and eternity. ‘Passing through the earth/in sleep we keep going down/in circles between organs and planets.’ This eternity is a sort of immortality: ‘Every blow erased, I’m alive beyond all your hands,’ she rejoices. She further implies that the transience and complete uncontrallability of the individual life heightens its heartbreaking beauty, observing how debris in a raging river are constrained to ‘[o]bedience to a white, devastating language.’ We must make the most of what we can: ‘I have time in my mouth, its grains of sugar. A gift, as a child, held/between two fingers.’

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Of course, this links back to the particularities of Mancinelli’s humanitarian concerns. It is this interconnectedness of our world which means we must never send to know for whom the bell tolls. ‘My body has an open texture from which hangs a thread. Someone/at the other end, without even noticing, pulls it, and slowly I grow thin.’ It is because everything is provisional that, to quote Larkin, ‘we should be careful// Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time.’ ‘The snow has fallen on all this, restoring the peace that we now trample,’ she observes while following the paths of refugees through Europe. We cannot count on nature to more than superficially mend society. Through our actions and words (written and spoken), we must channel the eternally hopeful life-force for good.

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