This poem has disappeared from the site, if you’re wondering why, click HERE.
To listen to or download a podcast of this poem, click HERE
To see the photography of Cesare Bedognè click HERE
Tag: poetry
The Poetry Evangelist: by Bonnie McClellan
This poem has disappeared from the site, if you’re wondering why, click HERE.
per ascoltare la poesia in italiano, fare clic sul lettore qui sotto:
To listen to or download a podcast of this poem in English, click HERE. To listen to the Italian translation, use the audio player above.
To read more poetry by Bonnie McClellan, click HERE.
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Dog Bones: by Octavio Solis
EPLUCHER LE SABLE: by Gilles-Marie Chenot
Willow: by Chris Fillebrown
I’m in love…with dictionaries!
I’m in love with this dictionary…really, it’s a two volume set that my sweetheart bought me for christmas. He picked it up at the second-hand store because he liked the font. I have a very fancy Italian-English dictionary, brand new 3″thick…”Oxford / Paravia” complete with online reference resource included.
The dictionary in the picture was published in 1951 as the revised edition of a revision that had started in the 1940’s and then stopped because of the war. The editing house, F. Casanova & C, explain this in the introduction and then go on to talk about how they’ve not only finished the revision but added hundreds of new entries that:
“…bring to you the very latest words and modes of speaking, the result of the rapid changes that both languages have undergone in the course of the conflict.”
On the other side of the frontispiece is the name of the publishing house beneath which is an emblem, stamped by hand in red ink, a lion rampant standing on a globe.
So, you might think, well Nuovissima in 1951 has to be out of date by now, but it’s really not that way. Today I was looking up the verb “dole” as in “to dole out”. In the fancy new dictionary they offered the following: dare, distribuire in piccole quantità (to give, to distribute in small quantities). Pretty straight forward but I was translating a poem. I was looking for something more subtle. I went to find Volume One of Dizionario Lysle e Gualtieri. They told me that this word was not used much in English anymore, that today people said “distribute” but they gave me a new verb: scompartire (to divide into parts). I glanced up at the noun form, gold! parte, porzione, elemosina, pietanza, spazio lasciato senza aratura, piccolo pezzo di pane (part, portion, alms, pittance, a space left unploughed, a small piece of bread) Now, the next to last one I’ve never heard…but I found the word that fit into the poem, “elemosina”. I made the noun form work by finessing the line a bit.
Although I have to give credit to Oxford/Paravia in that they went on to give an entry for “on the dole” (a phrase current in England since 1920 and yet not to be found in Lysle even in 1951); for the noun form of “dole” they only offered two synonymous Italian words for “pain”.
All this to say that old dictionaries are a treasure trove for both the translator and the word hound and that the latest up-to date version doesn’t always tell the whole story…
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Mavet v’chayim b’yad lashon: by Liliane Richman
We Are Poets: by Angel Raiter
IPM 2MXI – Una Selva Oscura
Dante’s Divine Comedy took him thirteen years to write. I’m not a Dante scholar so I don’t know, but I think he probably revised, crossed things out, rewrote and re-composed over the course of those 13 years and the poem still sings, still makes me blush, and cracks my heart with fear. Dante’s work is, in part, my answer to Charles Bukowski’s so you want to be a writer as it was my answer to two young Latvian poets that I met while living in the hills outside of Florence who asked me: You’re a poet, tell us, it all has to come out in a burst of passion that burns onto the page, yes? Well looking at Dante, and Shakespeare, and William Carlos Williams…no, in part.
The other part of the answer is yes: this is how poetry is: blood and fire, especially when you’re a young poet. Some poets write like this for a lifetime. I am not such a poet, nor am I bound to become a titan of World Literature. I’m about 13 years younger than Dante was when he died, incidentally – just as he finished up Paradiso. I may yet have a Divine Comedy somewhere in me but I doubt it.
I can say that in my life, words have become dense and encrusted with associations over the years. Sometimes I need a poetic structure to bear their weight, to keep them from collapsing in on themselves so that the song of each word can be heard. Other times they do fly out suddenly, as light as startled birds and I have to stop in a parking lot or in the middle of cooking dinner and pen them down, sometimes I don’t and I lose them. Sometimes I write down a bustling crowd of dense images and a year later begin the process of picking the poems out, finding that what I thought was one poem turns out to be three. It is work; but what joyous, intense, full work.
So I write, other poets write, each with their own motives and methods. You read and the poem sings to you, or it doesn’t. We’re all trying: poets to give you, the reader, the gift of an image that cannot be offered in any better way, that cracks you a bit and frees something; you readers are giving us the gift of your searching, your curiosity, your attention. This month we have a proliferation of gifts to offer, I hope that you will find something in the next 28 days that sings to you.
Buona lettura e grazie,
Bonnie M. McClellan
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These things happen when you’re not looking!
I was just checking up on all of the blogs that I follow when I looked at my dashboard and saw that I had a new follower! Wow, how cool was that…who could it be? I clicked; it was me! Somehow, I’ve ended up following myself. I felt like Pooh tracking the hefalump prints in the snow. Maybe at least now I’ll be able to find out what I’m up to.
I still have the flu, or something like it that gives me a sinus-headache-of-death every day. My daughter is well! She even went to school today without a fuss. My sweetheart went off to work in Varese so I was finally able to finish my second essay about poetry and catch up on reading my favorite blogs. I love writing about poetry, I just wish that I were faster.
The sun has come out since my last post and that’s a relief. I have sworn off sponges and cleanser this year and replaced them with hand knit dish cloths and scrub-cleaner made with dish-soap, baking soda, and a few drops of lavender oil (all stuff I have in the house anyway). Now it’s time to go and pick up my girl from school…nice to take a walk in the sunshine.
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 