This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders:
https://martijnbenders.substack.com/p/ark-oorbellen-waaier-in-de-slaap
Ark, Earrings, Fan, In the Sleep
What makes the translation project into Italian so enjoyable is that I am working at a very relaxed pace of ten pages per day while also engaging three LLMs to better familiarize myself with Italian literature by consistently asking them to place my work within the Italian canon. Today, they introduced me to Guido Morselli, yet another writer I had never read before. The more research I conduct, the deeper my astonishment at how rich Italian culture is in terms of writers.
Morselli immediately fascinates me. A writer discovered only after his death, whose work—despite repeated rejections from publishers—is now considered visionary. His Dissipatio H.G., a novel about the disappearance of humanity, written with melancholic precision, reminds me of how I sometimes see the world: a place where absurdity embeds itself ever more deeply, where the last true individuals exist only as shadows, vanishing into the mist of a society that no longer leaves room for inspiration.
What I notice as I reshape my work in another language is that the literary canon in Italy feels much more dynamic than in the Netherlands. Here, writers like Morselli, Landolfi, and Savinio emerge—authors who never gained the widespread fame of a Calvino or Eco but are nonetheless regarded as essential voices within literary circles. In the Netherlands, the literary space appears much more rigidly defined, bound to institutional judgment, whereas in Italy, the possibility of carving out a place outside official channels remains very much alive.
I immediately ordered Dissipatio H.G.
Today, a few poems by Eugenio Montale:
In the Sleep
The song of owls, when a rainbow
fades with interrupted heartbeats,
the moans and sighs
of youth, the error that grips the temples
and the vague dread of cedars
shifted by the thrust of night—
all this can return to me,
rise from the ditches,
burst from the roundabouts, wake me
at your voice. Sharply pierces
the sound of a cruel gigue,
the adversary closes
the visor over his face.
The moon enters,
amaranth red in closed eyes,
it is a cloud swelling;
and when sleep carries her further,
it is still blood, beyond death.
*
The Earrings
No shadow of wings remains in the soot mist
of the sphere. (And of you, not a trace remains.)
The sponge has passed and erased
the defenseless gleams from the golden circle.
Your stones, the corals, the mighty realm
that abducts you—I searched for it; I flee
from the deity that does not incarnate,
the desires I bear until their lightning fades.
Outside, elytra hum, the delirious vigil
buzzes and knows that two lives have no weight.
In the frame, the limp
jellyfish of evening return.
Your imprint will descend: beneath your lobes,
pale hands, overwhelmed, will encounter the corals.
*
The Fan
Ut pictura… The lips that confuse,
the glances, the signs, the days already fallen,
I try to capture them there,
as in the circle of an inverted telescope,
still and motionless, yet more vivid than ever.
It was a carousel
of people and machines in flight
amidst the smoke that Euro struck,
and though the dawn marks us
with a tremor and breaks the mists.
Pearl-hued light, the dizzying
cliff still swallows victims,
but your feathers pale on the cheeks
and perhaps the day is saved.
O dense strokes,
when you open, or rough flashes,
or downpours upon the hordes!
(Does the one who recognizes you perish?)
*
The Ark
The spring storm has
dislodged the willow’s umbrella,
in the April whirlwind
the golden fleece has caught in the garden,
which hides my dead,
my loyal dogs, my old
maids—how many have since then,
(when the willow was blonde and I
shot its rings with a slingshot)
descended, alive, into the snare.
The storm will surely gather them again
under that former roof, but far,
farther than this lightning-struck land
where lime and blood boil
in the imprint of a human foot.
The ladle steams in the kitchen,
its circle of reflections
accents the bony faces, the pointed snouts
and shelters them, in the back,
the magnolia—as a sigh drifts them there.
The spring storm shakes with a bark
of loyalty my ark, oh lost ones.
*
No reply from Robert Kruzdlo to my letter yesterday. Should I start worrying? Has he retreated into the caves?
*
For now, the last one, as I must focus on clearing out the house.
Greetings,
Martinus Benders, 19-03-2025