Three glittering space-time poems from Alberto Pellegatta are in the spotlight for Translation Tuesday. The poems’ ambitions are vast: using words to give definition to the scale and depth of the universe, as if applying a coating of dust to an invisible wall. Pellegatta’s imaginative particulate adheres to and notices things beyond “intermittent actuality”: edges of space, time and experience. They make you feel very small, and very cold.
Pinwheels of gas in the concave vacuum
that contains us all. There is no centre and the rim
is sewn onto itself. Time is space, expanding.
Time is hunger and space is cold. I will inhabit
luminous infrastructures.
We will be further apart, worlds from worlds
and it will be colder, until it’s reabsorbed into a hole.
Or it will refocus until it reignites.
But now, this very moment, is the capital of Time.
*
In the beginning it was barely a stain
a neon. It was not vacuum
nor was it matter, or fire.
Now it expands and contracts
it refocuses. The mechanism, as a whole
is spherical, musical. Yet quantic
fragile and infinitesimal
in detail.
*
Memory has enormous rooms
rooms filled with mirrors
unviable dust. Whereas
actuality is intermittent
like a broken image.
Translated from the Italian by Marco Malena
Alberto Pellegatta (b. 1978) is a poet and journalist from Milan (Italy). His books—Ipotesi di felicità (2017) and L’ombra della salute (2011)—published in the most important Italian poetry collection, Lo Specchio Mondadori, won different literary prizes. His work has appeared in many European magazines and anthologies, including London Poetry, Magma Poetry, Erostepost, La Stampa, Nuovi argomenti, Poeti di vent’anni (Stampa, 2000), Nuovissima poesia italiana (Mondadori, 2004), Almanacco dello Specchio (Mondadori, 2008) and elsewhere. He was awarded the Amici di Milano Prize and the Cetonaverde Prize. He works as a critic for newspapers and magazines.
Marco Malena is a writer and translator of contemporary Italian poetry. From Bari, Italy, he lived in Manchester for four years before returning to his homeland, where he currently works.
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