CARLA BURANELLO
SLAPSTICK TWIST
My heart is old this evening,
an old heart
wearing a wig of words,
absurd dentures of metaphors,
his lips tinged with borrowed blood,
he fakes a fervour he doesn’t feel.
He twirls, winks, somersaults,
showing off on a worn carpet
of vocables,
he bows,
to incite applause, poor wretch.
He gets stuck in a pitch accent,
he bumps his head on a concrete noun,
he’s breathless, in a sweat,
he doesn’t know what to say,
he doesn’t know how to say.
The greasepaint of rhymes drips
and the mascara of devices
glues his eyes.
He gasps,
he wants to weep,
but an old dude
-the caregiver of the Muse-
takes his arm
and swaying they head
towards the words:
THE END
translated by the author
*
LITTLE SNAIL
Pretty little snail,
agreeable surprise
on this crinkly green
lettuce leaf
we are sharing for supper,
neat and mathematical
soft oyster flesh
coiled in a glossy shell,
you know nothing
of the logarithmic spiral,
about the golden mean
and Fibonacci
you don’t give a damn,
but slowly, implacably,
self-centered through the ages,
you carry on your back
your own private property,
keeping a fragile balance
between chance and necessity.
Translated by Anne Stevenson
Carla Buranello was born in Venice, where she still lives and where she graduated at Ca’ Foscari University in Modern Languages and Literature at the Anglo-American Faculty. She worked for a business in management for several years. When she could resume her long neglected interests, she decided to become a translator and to translate poetry, mainly of English and American authors. Via the internet, she became friends with the Anglo-American poet Anne Stevenson and started translating her poems. Anne Stevenson appreciated her work and encouraged her to continue. The outcome was the first Italian collection of Anne Stevenson’s poems, published in 2018 by Interno Poesia Editore with the title Le vie delle Parole. She also translated an English book of science inspired short stories, still unpublished. Her love of the poetic language e the close relationship with it determined by the translating activity, gave rise to a wish to write her own texts, and to translate some of them into English. Anne Stevenson took part in this game of reflections by translating one of her translator’s poems, Little Snail. She never published her poems but gladly accepted to deliver some of them to Margutte.