The Found Poems of Goliarda Sapienza

Feature image © Archivio Sapienza/Pellegrino.

After Goliarda Sapienza’s death in 1996, her husband Angelo Pellegrino opened a locked-up chest and gave her a new life. Inside he found the manuscript of her seminal novel, The Art of Joy, and published it at his own expense. Today the novel is published in Italy by Einaudi and translated all over the world, including English-speaking countries, and is on its way to becoming an international TV series adapted by actress and director Valeria Golino who was a student of Goliarda’s growing up, and has stayed in love with her hypnotic voice ever since.

Goliarda wrote mostly fiction, but in recent years Pellegrino rediscovered, in the same mysterious treasure chest, a collection of poems called ANCESTRALE. There is something so magical about unearthed manuscripts and misunderstood writers getting their dues post mortem. Goliarda started writing poems while mourning the death of her mother to whom she dedicated some of the most touching verses in the collection, but she also wrote to mourn her own stilted beginnings as a fiction writer, which were packed with rejection and heartache. Many of her poems are about Sicily and longing, but also family, nature, and ghosts.

When I found the collection, I read and reread the poems obsessively seeking hidden insights about Goliarda’s desire and melancholy. I also discovered that the very neighborhood where she spent her restless writing nights and processed her grief, was the one where I live now in Rome. Pellegrino didn’t edit the poems before publishing them in  2013, something that makes her texts jump from the page. They are vibrant, strange, and completely wild, and read a bit like micro fictions in poetic form. Some of them are in Sicilian dialect.

© Archivio Sapienza/Pellegrino

Goliarda Sapienza had an amazing family and was raised by radical Communist parents with eleven brothers and sisters. Her mother was one of the first feminists in Italy. She grew up in a nonconformist environment for the time, one that opened her up intellectually, culturally, and sexually.

All this is very much alive in her work. In some ways she reminds me of writers like Lucia Berlin or the Italian poet Alda Merini who found more glory after death than in life. She was in and out of psych wards, overdosed on sleeping pills in 1962, attempted suicide more than a few times, and underwent a series of electroshock therapies in Rome, which caused her to lose her memory in part.

Maybe there is a trace of this in her poems, their fragmentary nature sometimes feels like a map of a brain that is trying to hang onto a thought or an image before it slips away: plagues awakening veins to new thirsts, roars of uncovered teeth, sun drenched lusty bodies, the jolting silence of birds, dormant lives awaiting on laps, and death appearing at the bottom of wells. Her strange world is haunting and evanescent at the same time.

To sustain herself while writing The Art of Joy, Goliarda committed some petty thefts and ended up in prison. She often spoke about how her time behind bars improved her as a writer. Her language became more interesting, less bourgeois, less stagnant there. She considered prison as a salvation from what she referred to as the “life sentence of living in a metropolis.” Even though her poems were written before her time in prison, they contain the same audacity and desire to break the rules. Perhaps when she was incarcerated she had time to reconnect to her original voice.

In the introduction to her poetry collection, Pellegrino, whose novel about his life with the Goliarda is to be released in October in Italy by Einaudi, wrote about his adventure with Goliarda’s work. Every publication felt like a mission to salvage the wreckage of a ship. As he put it: “a sunken boat often scatters some of its parts in the water. Remnants of its original self, wash up on desolate beaches and those rescued parts are all the more precious because the original body is no longer there.”

In the past year I spontaneously started translating these disembodied treasures from Italian into English. I’ve loved seeing them transform into another language and giving them a new sense of wholesomeness. I also loved thinking that they were written so close to where I live now,  in the same city and neighborhood where I have also been trying to make sense of the bewildering losses of the past years, the ongoing grief for a life and a world that is no longer. Being with her has been an adventure and a consolation and I hope that her wild poetic voice will live on in many more languages as well.

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A Mia Madre

Quando tornerò
sarà notte fonda
Quando tornerò
saranno mute le cose
Nessuno m’aspetterà
in quel letto di terra
Nessuno m’accoglierà
in quel silenzio di terra

Nessuno mi consolerà
per tutte le parti già morte
che porto in me
con rassegnata impotenza
Nessuno mi consolerà
per quegli attimi perduti
per quei suoni scordati
che da tempo
viaggiano al mio fianco e fanno denso
il respiro, melmosa la lingua

Quando verrò
solo una fessura
basterà a contenermi e nessuna mano
spianerà la terra
sotto le guance gelide e nessuna
mano si opporrà alla fretta
della vanga al suo ritmo indifferente
per quella fine estranea, ripugnante

Potessi in quella notte
vuota posare la mia fronte
sul tuo seno grande di sempre
Potessi rivestirmi
del tuo braccio e tenendo
nelle mani il tuo polso affilato
da pensieri acuminati
da terrori taglienti
potessi in quella notte
risentire
il mio corpo lungo il tuo presente
materno
spossato da parti tremendi
schiantato da lunghi congiungimenti

Ma troppo tarda
la mia notte e tu
non puoi aspettare oltre
E nessuno spianerà la terrà
sotto il mio fianco
nessuno si opporrà alla fretta
che prende gli uomini
davanti a una bara

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To My Mother

When I will return
the night will be deep
When I will return
things will be silenced
Nobody will be waiting for me
in that bed of earth
Nobody will welcome me
in that that silence of earth

Nobody will console me
for all the dead parts I already carry inside me
with resigned impotence
Nobody will console me
for the lost instants
the discordant sounds
that have been traveling by my side for so long
they make the breath dense, the tongue like a swamp

When I will come
a small opening will be enough to contain me and no hand
will flatten the soil
under the freezing cheeks
and no hand will oppose the shovel’s haste
its indifferent rhythm
for that estranged, repugnant ending

If only in that empty night
I could rest my forehead
upon your forever large bosom
If only I could dress myself
with your arm and hold your wrist
sharpened by stinging thoughts
by cutting terrors
if only in that night I could
feel
my body against yours
maternal potent
burdened by terrible parts
crashed under long junctures

But my night is delayed
and you cannot wait longer
And nobody will press the earth
under my hip
nobody will oppose the haste
that takes over men
in front of a coffin

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Notte Siciliana

La luna mente
la lingua fra le labbra
sanguina
sul silenzio convulso degli uccelli
dietro c’è un sole

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Sicilian Night

The moon is a liar
the tongue between the lips
bleeds
upon the jolting silence of birds
behind is a sun

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Untitled

Sapere che tu esisti
parli, ti muovi
fra visi estranei
ammucchiati alle pareti
fra grappoli di mani
ammonticchiati
sui tavoli di latta dei caffè.
Sapere che tu esisti
che ti muovi
ordinando gli oggetti
con gesto lento
scansando
cauto il vuoto che ti preme
alle dita. Sapere
questo, sapere
che ti volgi senza parlare
al mio passare.
Sapere
questo mi spinge a ricercare
tra il fragore di denti scoperchiati
la pausa del tuo viso.

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Untitled

To know that you exist
speak, move amongst unknown faces
amassed along the walls
between clusters of hands
heaped
upon the tin tables of cafes.
To know that you exist
that you move
putting objects in order
with that slow gesture
cautiously moving aside
the emptiness that pushes against your fingers.
To know this, to know
that you turn without speaking
at my passing by.
To know
this makes me search again
between the roar of uncovered teeth
the pause of your face.

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Untitled

La paura ha una faccia grande di luna
e due soldi per occhi. Se mentre dormi
ti guarda sei perduta
senza figli vivrai e morirai
disprezzata da tutti senza lenzuola

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Untitled

Fear has a great moon face
and two coins for eyes. Is she looks at you while you sleep
you are lost
you shall live without children and will die
despised by everyone with no bed sheets

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Untitled

Ventre vuoto
bara senza fondo
notte d’agosto
grida le sue stelle

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Untitled

Belly empty
bottomless casket
August night
screaming its stars

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Copyright © 2013 The Estate of Goliarda Sapienza. Published with kind permission of the
Proprietors in agreement with Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency (PNLA). Originally published in Italy by La Vita Felice.

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Goliarda Sapienza’s works in English have been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (The Art of Joy) and Other Press (Meeting in Positano).