Scipione (Gino Bonichi)
Translated by Maurizio Brancaleoni
I Hear the Screeches of the Engels
Sento gli strilli degli angioli
Sento gli strilli degli angioli
che vogliono la mia salvezza,
ma la saliva è dolce
e il sangue corre a peccare.
L’aria è ferma,
tutto è rosa come la carne;
se pervade beatitudine
bisogna rompere e cadere.
Il sole entra nel mio petto
come in una canestra
e io mi sento voto,
la mano si stacca da terra,
tocca l’aria, la luce, la carne.
La lancia si sprofonda nelle reni della cavalla
che corre – e urla con la testa nel cielo.
I Hear the Screeches of the Engels
I hear the screeches of the engels
who want my salvation,
but saliva is sweet
and blood runs to do sin.
The air is still,
everything is pink like flesh;
if beatitude pervades
one ought to break and fall.
The sun seeps within my bosom
as into a basket
and I feel hollow,
the hand detaches from the ground,
touches the air, the light, the flesh.
The spear sinks deep into the loins of the mare
that runs – and screams with her head in the sky.
Translator’s Note: In my translation I used the Old English term “engels” in the attempt to replicate the original Italian word “angioli,” which is an archaic and literary variant of the common modern term “angeli.”
Gino Bonichi, better known as Scipione after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, was born in Macerata in 1904. He moved to Rome in 1909, where he studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts. Together with Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël he was one of the founders of the so-called “Roman School” or “Via Cavour School,” a group of Rome-based expressionist artists who opposed Fascist-approved Novecento movement. His paintings were first exhibited in 1927, and then, two years later, at the Venice Biennale. In 1931 he also exhibited at the first Rome Quadriennale. He probably wrote his poems between 1928 and 1930.
Maurizio Brancaleoni received his MA in Translation Studies from Sapienza University of Rome in 2018, but he has been translating since 2012. His Master’s thesis aimed at providing an extended commentary and a rendition into Italian of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous work Passage to England. In recent years his translations of poems by Amelia Rosselli, Herman Melville, Dylan Thomas, Jean Toomer, Adrian C. Louis and Justin Phillip Reed have appeared in Synchronized Chaos, Fischi di carta, Rivista!unaspecie, Soglie and Testo a fronte. He has also published his own poetry and fiction in various journals and anthologies.