Today we read Presagio, by Ada Negri.

Ana Negri was known for her interest in social reform, and her early poetry reflects that, later morphing into patriotism after the experience of the First World War.

This poem was written at a later stage of her life, when she was sixty, and attests to her shift towards more intimate and lyrical themes, lingering on memory.

Here she describes the end of winter, the first glimpses of spring, and likens this liminal moment to the awakening of adolescence in a young woman’s life. The longing for, and anticipation of, the fullness of love; and the warning that when it does arrive, it might not be all that one expected it to be.

The original:

Today we read Mio padre è stato per me l’“assassino”, by Umberto Saba.

Saba’s mother was abandoned by the poet’s father while still pregnant. Understandably she didn’t harbour good memories of him, but went as far as referring to him as “the assassin” when talking to Umberto all through his childhood.

In this sonnet Saba recounts meeting his father later on, when he was twenty. He is presented not with a killer or a mastermind, but with a child, drifting without cares through his life and the world (and his many lovers).

The poet contrasts his mother, who felt all the heaviness of life, with his father’s attitude, his slipping from her hands like a balloon, light and ethereal: not a bad person, really — simply unable to keep his responsibilities.

The original:

Today we read Trasformazione di Dafne in lauro, by Giambattista Marino.

In the full glory of baroque flourishes, Marino presents here the notorious rape of Daphne by Apollo. And the poem, though offset by the beauty of the language and technique, is brutal.

The first quatrain focuses on Daphne, shown in distress, running away, looking for her father, likened to a hunted-down doe. Still, slowly but surely, as she turns into a tree as the last resort to escape from the god, the poet’s sympathy also seems to recede. As if saying: she’s just an object now.

And so in the last terzina there is almost no trace of her left. There’s only the triumph of the god: he might have not gotten her fruit, but he will forever adorn his head with the branches of the laurel: her branches. Violence and god’s will prevail in the end, of course.

The original: