This woman once was made of flesh
firm and fresh: when she carried a baby
she lived hidden and saddened by herself.
She didn’t like to appear deformed in the street.
The other times (she was young and without wanting it
she had many children) she went in the street
with confident gait and she knew how to enjoy the moments.
Clothes become wind in the evenings of March
and they clasp and shiver around the women who pass by.
Her body of woman moved confidently in the wind
that vanished leaving it firm. She had no other wealth
than that body, which now is worn out for too many kids.

In the windy evenings a scent of lymph fills the air,
the same scent her body had, young,
between the superfluous clothes. The flavour of wet soil,
which returns every March. Even where in the city there’s no avenues,
and the breath of wind cannot reach with the sun,
her body lived, exhaling with juices
that fermented, between stony walls. With the time she, too,
who fed other bodies, has broken and bent.
She’s not nice to look at, she’s lost any strength,
but, out of many, one daughter returns to pass
in the streets, in the evening, showing off in the wind
under the trees, firm and fresh, her body that lives.

And there’s a son who travels and knows how to stay alone,
and alone can have fun. Yet he looks in the panes
smug of the way he keeps by the arm
his girlfriend. He likes, playing with his muscles,
to pull her near while she riots and kiss her on the neck.
Especially he likes, after he generated,
on that smooth body, to leave it to sadden and return to himself .
Sex only makes him smile and a son
would outrage him. The girl knows that, she waits,
and prepares herself to hide her deformed belly
and enjoys with him, complaisant, and admires the strength
of his body which is useful to many other things.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on February 29, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

A Season was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Right under the arbour, the dinner eaten.
Some water’s down there, flowing, hushed.
We don’t speak, listening and watching the noise
of water through the furrow of moon.
This is the sweetest lingering.

The girlfriend, who lingers,
seems to be biting still that bunch of grapes
so lively her mouth is, and the taste persists,
as the lunar yellow, in the air. Gazes, in the shadow,
are as sweet as grapes, but the solid shoulders
and the bronzed cheeks lock up the whole summer.

Grapes and bread are left on the white table.
Two desert chairs look at each other.
Who knows what the furrow of moon is brightening,
with its sweet flare, in remote woods.
It could happen, before dawn1, that a colder blow
turns off moon and vapours, and that somebody appears.
A feeble light would show his throat
shuddering and the feverish hands grasping
vainly on foods. The water keeps shuddering,
but in the dark. Neither the grapes nor the bread were moved.
Flavours are haunting the hungry shadow,
who neither can lick up a bunch
the dew that’s already condensing. And, everything screaming
under the dawn, the chairs look at each other, alone.
Sometimes on the bank of the river a scent,
like of grapes, of woman stagnates on the grass,
and the moon silently flows. Somebody appears,
incorporeal traverses the plants, and moans
with the gruff groan of the voiceless,
and lies down and finds no earth:
only, his nostrils tremble. It is cold, in the dawn,
and the clasp of a body would be life.
More diffused than the lunar yellow, which has a horror
of filtering into woods, is this unexhausted anxiety
of contacts and flavours that macerate the dead.
Some other times, rain torments them in the soil.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on February 29, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

The Sad Dinner was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two men are smoking on the bank. The woman who swims
without breaking the water sees but the green
of her short horizon. Between sky and the plants
this water spreads and the woman there slides
bodiless. In the sky the clouds settle
as motionless. The smoke stops mid-air.
Under the freezing of water there’s grass. The woman
passes there, suspended; yet we trample on there,
on green grass, with our body. There is not along the waters
any other weight. Only we can feel the earth.
Maybe her stretched body, which is submerged,
feels the greedy cold absorbing the torpor
of her sunny limbs and melts her on the shore
in the motionless green. Her head does not move.
She also was lying where the grass bends.
Her face ajar resting on the arm
and looking in the grass. Nobody breathed.
In the air that first swash still stagnates
that welcomed her into water. On us smoke stagnates.
Now she got ashore and she speaks, exuding
in her blackened body that rises among trunks.
Her voice really is the only sound you can hear on the water.
-gruff and fresh, it’s the same as before.
We think, lying
on the bank, to that dimmer and fresher green
that submerged her body. Then, one of us
jumps in the water and traverses, uncovering his shoulders
among foamy arm strokes, the motionless green.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on March 1, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

Landscape IV, paesaggio IV was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not a man can leave any mark
on this lady. What has been flees in a dream
like: away in one morning, and what’s left is her.
Wasn’t her forehead slightly touched by a moment,
she would look astonished. Her cheeks smile
each time.

Neither the days heap up
on her face, to mutate the light smile
radiating to things. With hard firmness
she does everything, but every time it seems the first;
yet she lives till the last moment. She uncloses
her solid body, her intent stare,
to a hushed and slightly gruff voice: the voice
of a tired man. And no tiredness touches her.
If you stare at her mouth, she uncloses her gaze
and waits: nobody can dare to rush.
Many a man know her ambiguous smile
or her sudden wrinkle. If that man was there[1]
and knew how she moans, humiliated with love
would pay, day after day, ignoring of her
for whom she lives today.

She smiles by herself
The most ambiguous of smiles while she walks the street.

[1] The original sentence ( Se quell’uomo c’è stato) literally translates as: If that man was there. However, it also contains the Italian idiom starci that is, to be game, most often used in sexual contexts to express availability for an intercourse.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on March 4, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

A Memory was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sometimes in the tepid sleep of dawn
alone in her dream, it happens she married a wife.
From the maternal body a woman detaches
slender and white who lowers her small head
in the room. In the cold glimmer the woman
does not wait for the morning; she works. She lets it go
silently: no word is needed between women.
While she sleeps, the wife knows the boat’s on the river
and the rain’s smoking on the man’s back.
Yet the small wife quickly closes the door
and leans against it[1], and raises the eyes into hers.
The window rattles for the pouring rain
and the woman lies, calmly chews,
hands over a dish. The small wife fills it
and sits on the bed and starts to eat.
She eats hastily, the little furtive wife
under the maternal eyes, as if she was a child
and resists to the hand that searches her nape.
She suddenly runs to the door and opens it: the boats
are all berthed at the pole. Come back,
barefooted to the bed, they quickly embrace.
Frozen and slender are the juxtaposed lips,
but a deep warmth melts in the body,
tormenting. The small wife now sleeps
lying next to her maternal body. Thin
she is, and as harsh[2] as a boy. But she sleeps as a woman.
She could not drive a boat, under the rain.
Outside the rain pours in the opaque light
of the door ajar. A little wind enters
in the desert room. If the door opened
the man would enter as well, who saw everything.
He wouldn’t say a word: he would drop his head
with a scorning face, to the deluded woman.

[1] Leans against it: the Italian original does not specify where the second woman is actually leaning to: it may be against the door (as received in our translation) or against the boatman’s wife.

[2] Harsh as a boy: the Italian adjective translated with harsh, aspro, also means sour, tart

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on March 7, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

The Boatman’s Wife was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The old woman, too, likes to lie in the sun
and stretch her arms out. The heavy wave of the heat
squashes the small face as it squashes the earth.
Out of burnt things only the sun is left.
Man and wine betrayed and wore out those bones
that lie bronzed in her dress, but the fissured earth
buzzes like a flame. No word is needed
no regret is. The vibrant day returns
when the body was also young, more scorching than the sun.
In the memory the big hills appear
alive and young as that body, and the gaze of that man
and the sourness of wine come back anxious
desire: the heat darts in the blood
as in grass the green does. Through vineyards and tracks
the memory turns flesh. The old woman, eyes closed,
motionless enjoys the sky with her body of then.
In the fissured earth a healthier heart beats
like the robust chest of a father or a man:
the wrinkled cheek cuddles to it. The father
and the man as well, died betrayed. Flesh
deceased on them, too. Neither the warmth of the hips
nor the sourness of wine would ever wake them again.
Through the stretched-out vineyards the voice of the sun
whispers sour and sweet in the diaphanous blaze
as if the air was trembling. The grass trembles all around.
The grass is young as the heatwave of the sun.
Young are the dead in the lively memory.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on March 7, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

The Drunk Old Woman was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Memories start in the evening
under the breath of wind if you raise your face
and listen to the voice of the river. The water
is the same, in the dark, of the dead years.
In the silence of darkness a swash rises
where remote voices and laughs pass;
it goes with the buzz a vain colour
that’s of sun, of shores and clear gazes.
A summer of voices. Each face contains
kind of a ripe fruit a gone taste.
Every gaze that returns, keeps the taste
of grass and things drenched with sun and evening
on the beach. It keeps a breath of sea.
Like the night sea is this wandering shadow
of anxieties and ancient shivers, which the sky slightly touches
and that each evening returns. Dead voices
resemble the slamming of such a sea.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on March 16, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

Landscape VIII was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That boy who vanished this morning, he’s not coming back.
He left the shovel, still cold, on the hook
-it was dawn- nobody wanted to follow him:
he ran on certain hills. A boy,
the age when one starts cursing blasphemies,
can’t give a speech. Nobody
wanted to follow him. It was a burned dawn
in February, each trunk the colour of blood,
clotted. Nobody could smell in the air
the tepid future.
The morning has passed
and the factory frees women and workers.
In the beautiful sun, somebody — working starts
again in half an hour — lies down and eats, hungry.
Yet a sweet moisture is there that bites in the blood
and gives green shivers to the earth. They smoke
and they see that the sky is clear, and afar
hills are violet. It would be worth
staying there lying stretched on the ground in the sun.
Anyway they eat. Who knows if he actually ate,
the stubborn boy? A skinny worker says
that, it’s OK, working breaks your back,
but at least one can eat. One can even smoke.
Man is like a beast, and would like to do nothing.
It is beasts that can feel the weather, and the boy
felt it in the morning. And there are dogs
that end up rotten in a ditch: the earth
takes everything. Who knows if the boy would end
into a ditch, hungry? He fled at dawn
without a word, with four blasphemies,
his nose up in the air.
Everybody thinks of him
waiting to work, like a listless herd.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on March 25, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

Exterior was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

He has taken me to listen to his band. He sits in a corner
and puts the clarinet to his lips. A hell of a racket starts.
Outside, a furious wind and the slaps, between flashes,
of rain, make the light to go out
every five minutes. In the dark, their faces
crank up distorted, playing by heart
a dance tune. Energetic, my poor friend
keeps everyone together, from the rear. And the clarinet twists,
brakes the sonorous dim, he ventures in, it burst
like a lonesome soul, into a dry silence.
These poor brasses are too often dented:
peasant are the hands that clasps on the buttons,
and the foreheads, obstinate, that barely rise.
Miserable weaken blood, exhausted
by too many a labour, you can hear it moo
in the notes and my friend hardly can lead them,
he whose hands were hardened beating a sledgehammer,
waging a plane, tearing his own life off.
Once he had comrades and he is just thirty.
He’s among those born after the war, raised by hunger.
He also came to Turin, searching a life,
and found injustice. He learned to work
in the factories without a smile. He learned to measure
on his own labour the hunger of others,
and everywhere he found injustice. He searched some peace
walking, sleepy, the endless streets
of night, but only he saw thousands of street lights,
shining lucidly, on iniquity: gruff women, drunkards,
stumbling lost puppets. He had arrived to Turin
one winter, among flashes of factories and smoke slags;
and he knew what working was like. He accepted work
as the hard destiny of man. All men
should accept it for the world to be just.
Instead he found comrades. He suffered long words
and had to listen to them. Every house had families of them.
The city was surrounded by them. And the face of the world
was all covered by them. They feel in themselves
so much despair to win the world.

He plays drily this evening, despite of the band
which he instructed one by one. He doesn’t mind the hubbub
of rain and light. His severe face
attentively stares at some pain, biting the clarinet.
I saw these eyes of him one evening, when alone
with his brother, ten years sadder than him,
they kept vigil over a missing light. His brother studied
on a worthless lathe he had built.
And my poor friend accused destiny
for nailing them to the plane and the hammer
for feeding two old folks, unwanted.
Suddenly he shouted
it was not destiny if the world suffered,
if the sunlight extorted blasphemies:
it was man the culprit. At least being able to leave,
living the free hunger, answering no
to a life that employs love and pity,
family, a parcel of land, for tying our hands.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on March 25, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

Smokers of Paper was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A boy used to come playing in the meadows
where now the avenues stretch. He found in the meadows
other lads, also barefooted, and he jumped for the joy.
It was good to strip with them in the grass.
One evening far lights were echoing gunshots,
in the city, and with the wind it came, fearsome,
an interrupted clamour. Everybody got silent.
The hills shucked dots of light,
on their sides, stoked up by the wind. The night,
dimming out, eventually turned everything off.
and in the sleep only the freshness of wind lasted.

(Tomorrow morning the boys are back around,
and nobody remembers the clamour. In prison
there’s silent workers1 and some died already.
On the streets blood stains have been covered.
The city, afar, wakes up in the sun
and the people go out. They look each other in the face).
The boys thought of the darkness of meadows
and looked women in the face. Even women
said nothing and let it happen.
The boys thought of the darkness of meadows
where some girl even came. It was good, making girls
cry in the dark. We were the boys.
We liked the city during the day: in the evening to be silent
and watch the far lights and listen to the clamours.

Boys still go to play in the meadows
where avenues reach. And the night is the same.
Passing through it you can smell the grass.
In prison there are the same ones. And there are women
as before, who make children and say nothing.

Originally published at http://eliomarpa.wordpress.com on May 20, 2016.

Working Wearies, a retranslation of Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca, is available on Amazon here

A Generation was originally published in Working Wearies on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.