Winter Fragments: Selected Poems, 1945-1979

by Bartolo Cattafi, Rina Ferrarelli (Translator, Editor)

Selected poems 1945-1979

205 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Bartolo Cattafi was born in Sicily, in the town of Barcellona, province of Messina, on July 6, 1922. His father, a physician, died four months before he was born. Raised by his mother in Mollerino and Barcellona, he was from a well-to-do family and was educated in the liceo classico or school of literary studies with a stress on classical sources. He was drafted into the army during World War II, and while he was undergoing training to become an infantry officer at Forli, he suffered a nervous breakdown. After his medical discharge from the army, and his discharge from the military hospital in 1943, he went back to school and earned a law degree, but never practiced. In 1947 he moved to Milan, where he worked in journalism and advertising. He also traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa. He died of cancer in Milan on March 13, 1979.

Cattafi has a firm place in the canon of contemporary Italian literature as a poet who spoke uncompromisingly in the post-World War II period about human illusions and delusions, hopes and betrayals. Cattafi’s poetry is the embodiment of post-war disillusionment. It dramatizes and echoes the absurdities of war and the chaotic experiences that followed the war. His tone is often dry, ironic, sometimes sardonic. According to his wife, Ada De Alessandri, who was an interpreter of his work, the journey that Cattafi undertook was always a spiritual quest.

Cattafi started writing after his medical discharge from the army, when he was in his early twenties. That traumatic beginning has colored his attitudes, his subjects and themes.

Reviews

[Caterina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sensual, Shell-Shocked, Searching

Winter Figs*

Winter figs
come to the branches contorted by the cold.
Closed, hard stubborn
unlike their languidly soft
summer companions
they’re red inside like a sunset
an icy red without yellow
wild suspicious
at every rustle of a branch
they hold a streak of sugar
tight between sour lips.
They get here unexpectedly
and they leave
the way they came
fragments wandering
in the void in the dark
struck for an instant by light.



Sicilian poet Bartolo Cattafi was born in 1922 in the province of Messina where he was raised by his mother after his father’s death. Drafted into the army during World War II, he suffered a nervous breakdown, was hospitalized, and then discharged from the army and returned to Sicily, an experience that may have catalyzed his genesis as a poet.

It started when I was 21. Maybe it was the puttees, the hobnailed boots, the blisters on my feet during basic training, the meager rations; maybe it was the nervous breakdown, the military hospital, the sounds of the orderly turning the key in the lock, the epileptics falling on the floor with a thud, the steps of the sleepwalkers, the screams of the malingerers and the glassy eyes of the madmen. I could put the blame on all this or on something else, something that was not working right inside of me; as it happened, as soon as I was discharged from the hospital and I arrived in Sicily (it was the spring of ’43) . . . I began to write poetry. . . I was always in the throes of some kind of intoxication, dazed by the oversharp, oversweet sensations. . . As in a second childhood, I began to number the things I loved, to spell out in verse a naive inventory of the world.

All around me the crashes of bombs and the blasts of Hurricanes and Spitfires . . . But I roamed the colorful countryside feeding on tastes, smells, images; death was not an unnatural element in that scene. It was like a peach tree in bloom, a hawk on a chicken, a lizard dashing across the path.

One of Cattafi's best-known poems, Bees, expresses a shocking, violent vitality that refuses imposed rule.

Bees

Those wild bees
which you often see quivering head first
over yellow corollas
come from unknown frontiers
a swarm hatched outside
any law and order
like the stubborn flowers
they favor and defend
—the honey they engender
is an untamed honey—
vehement brazen violators
of spaces reserved
for model colonies
they are messengers
and message of a strong something
splendid with arrogance
yet they still place
eggs and larvae in the Saints’ pockets
and die on All Souls’ Day.

On the other hand, his poem Anthracite conjures the hell of war, of labor, the weary disillusion with the once-bright futurist visions of modernism, in an ambiguous blackness below the earth that entices but defeats the human.

Anthracite

Factories and trains lose their gloss,
get old, fade with time,
disappear into the grey of fog.
Anthracite endures, below, black
brittle, hard, glints of metal,
land enclosed and remote
all the lights out.
I understand its signs,
the whitewashed pillars in the border,
the fossil wing stuck in the shore,
the stiff hands of mates
shipwrecked dead in the gulf without sea.
There might be another pyre tomorrow
not the open the cheerful blaze
that stains the air with smoke and amaranth,
the stifling loss of the soul
us embedded in the shadows.

I think of the rain, the ashes, the silence
that the hurricane leaves behind
mixed in the virgin stone of mud
where bands of men and beasts
will come once more to impress
a passage in the world,
ignorant at dawn on the black
heart of the world.

Cattafi spent his later adult life in the industrial northern Italian city of Milano (Milan) where he worked as a journalist until his death of cancer in 1979, but many of his poems conjure the land and people of Sicily, ancient island of Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Spanish, Italians, Germans, even Americans, colonized and occupied from every direction. In Agave the tough, ancient plant of the deserts of Mexico and the American Southwest that long ago colonized and naturalized throughout the Sicilian island becomes a melancholy symbol for the Sicilian diaspora whose labor and brains fed the more powerful economies of others.

Agave

Leave the Sicilian sand, the music and honey
of the Arabs and Greeks,
break the tender bonds, torpid
milk of roots,
go down into the sea somnolent queen
green beast with arms of sorrow
like one who’s about to cross; in the big
cities, in the snow, the woods, the desert
caravans go on forever;
go, travel with the cold
spirit of gulls
with the fruitful heart the pregnant fish
that enriches the most distant net
and the slow slow hand of God
come on the wing from a nest of fog.



Similarly, in Sage Juniper Rosemary he wishes he could trade the characteristics of these enticingly scented, unrealistically hopeful native plants for something more effective in repelling ill-intentioned invaders.

. . .
The three patient plants
perfume the air for centuries
and wait in vain
for a ship to arrive
from some faraway place
loaded with who-knows-what . . .
Bearers of good-scented tales
meek heirs of chaste scions
if I can I’ll trade you in bulk
for strong animal items
executioner armies
vipers scorpions black widows
springing all together
at the first sound of that foot.

Although he describes his first forays as naive and later claims to “reject and consider forbidden the cold determinations of the intellect” his short lyric verses are far from naive, concealing a searching intellectual intensity, distilling both bitterness and beauty, a surprising contrast of sensuality and disillusionment, a near-hopelessness tinged with spiritual longing.

According to editor/translator Rina Ferrarelli, Cattafi has a firm place in the canon of contemporary Italian literature as a poet who spoke uncompromisingly in the post-war period about human illusions and delusions, hopes and betrayals. . . I feel that affirmation despite everything is also expressed by the act of writing. According to Ada De Alessandri, who was an interpreter of his work and also his wife, the journey that Cattafi undertook was always a spiritual quest. In an era when so many dreams, ambitions, beliefs, systems, and lives have been crushed to nothingness, how far, it seems to ask, can things be reduced before there truly is nothing left?

Tabula Rasa

All right, love. Let's delete
from the text water pearls
on petals,
the fancy frills,
the bubbles of froth.
Those delightfully necessary things.
Let's also take out
water air bread.
Down to the bone
shall we also toss out of life
the bone, the soul
to believe in your
tabula which will never have
the icon, the idol, the beloved magnet?

A number of gentler, even playful, poems address writing itself, the inspiration, the work, and the physical manifestation of the word, ink on paper.

A Tree

Here is a well-written tree
in black in green and brown
with its creases
its tender spring leaves
the birds on the branches
and a procession of insects
tiny monsters
who revere it
up and down and across
and little by little eat holes in it
but not in winter
when they sleep
in the thick of the ink.

This bilingual collection with facing-page translations was published in 2006 by Chelsea Editions, associated with the New York literary journal Chelsea that brought so much good poetry in translation to English-speaking readers. Brought together here are nearly 120 poems from seven of Cattafi’s books, some of them issued posthumously.

Le Mosche del Meriggio / The Flies of Noon (1958)
L’Osso, L’Anima / The Bone, The Soul (1964)
L’Aria Secca del Fuoco / The Dry Air of Fire (1972)
La Discesa al Trono / The Descent to the Throne (1975)
L’Allodola Ottobrina / The Lark of October (1979)
Segni / Signs (1986)
Chiromanzia d’Inverno / Winter Fortune Telling (1983)

Sixty-nine of Ferrarelli's translations gathered here were previously published in poetry and literary journals.

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*In Italian, a gendered language, nouns are either masculine or feminine. By general rule, the names of trees are masculine and the names of their fruit are feminine. An exception (perhaps the only exception?) to this is the fig: both tree and fruit are masculine.

**Full disclosure: the translator and editor, Rina Ferrarelli, is my mother.