Seven Poems

Franca Mancinelli

for Antonella Sabatini

every morning at the white wall
I leave the core of my gaze

on the floor have fallen
cherry blossom petals.

The earth’s work, my art.




mother majolica
between my watery hands
to the light you deliver every shape
pierced by a chant
—a weeping that flowers   
as a face in everything.




sprouting up from my soles      
I will bear fruit—through the seed
that gave me life

if there are no hands
the earth will pick me,            
everything in me will germinate.




the sacrifice becomes milk
—jolts of pain in the body
or the wind in the trees—

my newborn with all the past
behind—now a cat
on my arms becomes a monkey.

(existing is an earthquake.
From birth find shelter).




this circle of arms doesn’t  
begin, doesn’t end          
it’s an orbit, a streambed
of life: where the claw was
in Solomon’s knot, it hugs us.




you come as the translation
of a stele dissolved in the body,
take the shape of a desert
rose, open your petals
wings in my bare branches
and weep, and sing
with your reddish nightingale-cheeks.




a beating of palms on the floor
and you arrive from another room of life

low tide, things come back
illuminated by your saliva

each shell gathers your sounds
awaits the pronunciation of a name.

translated from the Italian by John Taylor



Read Adele Bardazzi and Roberto Binetti’s interview with Franca Mancinelli from the same issue.

Read the original in Italian

Listen to the poems read in the original by the poet:

Ever since Franca Mancinelli and I met at a literary conference in Ljubljana in late 2017, and I began translating the prose poems of The Little Book of Passage, we have worked closely together over e-mail on my translations of her writing. We discuss everything from commas to etymologies, from word order to enjambments, from syllabics to alliteration. This dialogue fills the margins of the translation manuscripts that go back and forth between us.

In comparison to her first book, Mala Kruna (which is included in At an Hour’s Sleep from Here), her poetry, which was already concise, has in recent years become even more succinct—“bone dry,” as she puts it. Her latest volume, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, which also comprises prose pieces, offers many examples of some of the most intense poetry written in Italy today. She often now focuses on traces or signs or vestiges of something essential that has happened. In consequence, the fragmentary, elliptic quality of her poetry creates a fascinating interpretative openness. In fact, when we discuss the pros and cons of two or three synonyms that can render one of her Italian words, she often advises me: “Choose the most open one.”

This is certainly true of these seven new poems. The first group of three is dedicated to Antonella Sabatini’s terracotta artwork, which Mancinelli admires and with which she senses affinities, whereas the second group evokes the poet’s experience of motherhood: the birth of her daughter, Maria, two years ago. The two short sequences interact, for a potter also gives birth. When Mancinelli writes, with respect to Sabatini, “alla luce dai ogni forma,” she puns with the expression “dare alla luce,” a literal “giving to the light” that also indicates “being born.” Whence the need to seek out a less obvious verb, “to deliver,” to catch the double meaning: “to the light you deliver every shape.”

This example can stand for several similar instances of semantic resonance in this sampling and for countless others in Mancinelli’s published books. Confronting these rich, at once specific and metaphorical, meanings often involves choosing between a word with a Germanic root and a synonym with a French-Latin derivation, that is, between a noun or a verb which might pin down a fact (and Mancinelli’s poetry always stems from a factual origin) and a more abstract word which, despite its relative vagueness, might nonetheless offer a greater semantic aperture. Such is the pleasurable challenge of translating her remarkable imagery which, ever vivid, unfolds into personal and universal dimensions.

Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. She is widely considered to be one of the most compelling new poetic voices in Italian poetry. Her poems and prose poems have been translated into English by John Taylor and published by The Bitter Oleander Press: The Little Book of Passage (2018), At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (2019), as well as a volume gathering her prose narratives and personal essays, The Butterfly Cemetery (2021). Her most recent collection, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (Marcos y Marcos, 2020), has been awarded two national prizes: the Europa in Versi Prize and the San Vito al Tagliamento Prize. Taylor’s translation of this book, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, will be published by Black Square Editions in 2023. Taylor and Mancinelli also carry on a dialogue about literary, philosophical, and spiritual issues: the first part was published in the special feature on her writing, in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Bitter Oleander; a second part appeared online in Hopscotch Translation (July 2021); and a third part, which was originally broadcast on Trafika Europe Radio, was published in Eurolitkrant (April 2022). Mancinelli has been selected for the ongoing European poetry project “Versopolis,” was the Chair Poet in Residence (Kolkata, India) in January–February 2019, and participated in the European program “Refest: Images and Words on Refugee Routes” in February 2018. Visit her website here.

John Taylor (b. 1952) is an American writer, critic, and translator. He is the author of twelve collections of stories, short prose, and poetry. As a polyglot literary critic, he has long been a bridge between European literature and English-speaking countries. He translates Modern Greek, Italian, and especially French literature. His most recent translations include books by Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Louis Calaferte, José-Flore Tappy, Pierre Chappuis, Catherine Colomb, Pierre Voélin, and Georges Perros. In 2013, he was awarded the Raiziss-de Palchi Translation Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for his project to translate the poetry of the Italian poet Lorenzo Calogero—a book published as An Orchid Shining in the Hand: Selected Poems 1932–1960 (Chelsea Editions, 2015). His most recent translations are three books by Franca Mancinelli, The Little Book of Passage (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018), At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019) and The Butterfly Cemetery (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2022), José-Flore Tappy’s Trás-os-Montes (The MadHat Press, 2021), as well as Philippe Jaccottet’s A Calm Fire and Other Travel Writings (Seagull Books, 2019), Patches of Sunlight, or of Shadow (Seagull Books, 2020), and Ponge, Pastures, Prairies (Black Square Editions, 2020).