
(Speech At The Launch Ceremony Of “Golden Bird In The Sun” And The Copyright Export Ceremony Of “Epic Of Eurasia” At The 31st Beijing International Book Fair)
By Lamberto Garzia(Italy)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back, and may everything be enjoyable for you once again… Honoured by this invitation, I would like to thank the publishing house and the organisers of this very important Book Fair, and I am moved by the interest shown in my modest work as a writer of verse… I do not use the word poet, because, in reality, there are very few true poets in the world, and in China you are fortunate to have Professor OUYANG JIANGHE, whom I consider a universal giant and whose works I am literally going crazy trying to translate into Italian, but also enjoying…
What can I say about my Canzone di cavaliere (Song of the Knight), except that I have tried to recover Western epic and myth and re-propose them in the form of fragments and flashes… in a clearly modern perspective, including the language, which I consider very simple… But also trying to recover and amalgamate, albeit imposed by my personal limitations, the culture of the Far East that I have been studying for about 15 years and that I seek… I try to understand not so much in the style so often used by postmodern second-hand dealers…
My shyness leads me to greet you with some poems from the future book… but then again, what else can an author do but read his own texts?
FROM THE COLLECTION ‘LEDA”
1
ANCESTORS 祖先
My ancestors are not tree trunks
stuck in the ground and carved
in the image of grandfather….
and even less an engraved stone stele…
– and no intuition of heroic divinity.
My ancestors are not the father
of my father whom I never wanted to love,
nor my mother’s father whom I never
ever known and died in the war…
My ancestors begin, Leda,
with my father’s hand clasped in mine
who first made me perceive the smells
that salt has on summer mornings –
and the sand of the shoreline
that captured the cast of my foot
the cast of my little foot and fixed forever
my things: to the sea – to love.
2
LEDA AND SHOOTING STARS (10 AUGUST)
In the crescent-shaped harbour of Monte
of Corno Grande there are some shooting stars
that do not want to fall:
hanging in the sky of our avidity….
And I know this is what I long for:
you and me, and the eyes motionless in the light…
FROM THE COLLECTION “FIGHTING AND LOVE” 战斗与爱情
3
HANAMI THE DECLINE OF PETALS
(Eur area – Rome)
I took him to the cherry blossom festival,
and there, isolated and undressed just enough,
we made love: him in the amused lotus position
with his back to the trunk,
me above him trying to catch in flight
the pink petals
suspended between life and death:
a bit like our hearts,
misty.
4
CHINESE SHADOWS
From behind the shoji
you played the magic
of Chinese Shadows –
showing off the magic of the Peacock
at the height of his excitement…
and of your ambiguity.
5
SPRING AND TRANSPARENCY
(Second voice of a woman from the East)
It was almost spring when you told me
to turn my kimono into a cherry petal
stretch out sinuously on the ground
and bring my nakedness to rice paper.
and do moderate pressure as a woman …
It was almost like spring
when you got the brush
and in a precise space of shoji
portray with black ink and immediate sign
my breast in the shape of a sea gulf:
perfect, as small as almonds in the shell
and the idea of wanting to pierce the washi …
There was also spring between me, the washi
and the modern outcast of a modern West.
There had been …there had been …
there had been …there had been.