From Redefinition (Redefinizione)

[1]

in the early morning looking at the room surrounding the notebook he is astonished how far necks can rotate how eyes can move   this since early childhood    when there were needs we could not express   to cry was to examine the real            head rolled back          hands unable to grasp
 

now that thought has no truth to question seen from darkness much of what he says actions we could perform are celluloid in an unlit projector          certain situations have occurred somewhat unidentical to the first description provided              there was a time we thought of ourselves at the centre


[2]

since the delivery                      even when nobody is home it persists in the pot with its thorns on the green sphere crosses the oblique light mixes with the knick-knacks performs actions we are not informed about      goes against things

 
they see to it that we wonder if fainting is a dress rehearsal for death if the box is still there when i turn away   and we find ourselves on the other side smelling the people in the corridor before departure eyelashes half-closed to the sea behind the door we see them from inside like the wings of an insect              watching transparent placenta spheres in the screen       if after all it’s true that the guy sitting next to me always remembers to breathe if he thinks everything is a linear relation       and if there’s really somebody beyond the seat   inside the phone   behind the counter and in the wardrobe      under the stairs    among the dunes      waiting for food


[3]

he enters unexpectedly looks around opaque eyes jutting out of his transparent body his presence produces an increase of possibility                  they want to stick a muffled life                              but firs facilitate the view of the building      they render it in negative      at night we tried to release childhood traveling the path with the car behind the park close to home the balloon’s colors have been bleached             the toys deformed                  left panting         writing about it would have been necessary before the firs

we forget to breathe we sink into people in the streets finding oneself motionless happens                   at high speed on the side

at that point two women walk before sea and into the wardrobe                                   the elder looks fixedly into summer      she’s losing her hair        she neither says nor wants a thing       she has chosen not to return     to go on albeit staggeringly         she perceives one of her daughter’s arms clutching her transparent neck

The France Issue

Summer 2010

Poems

Alessandro De Francesco

Alessandro De Francesco (b. Pisa, Italy, 1981) studied philosophy, literature and music in Pisa, Paris and Berlin. Lives in France. Poet-in-residence at the European Graduate School in 2008, contemporary poetry lecturer and Ph.D. candidate at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. The Italian-language originals of the texts presented here have appeared in Anterem n. 77 (november 2008), Semicerchio, n. 37 (spring 2008) and Nazione Indiana (2009). Other translations from Redefinition have appeared in Gradiva, OR and Fence, and in French in Nioques. Books: Lo spostamento degli oggetti (Verona: Cierre Grafica, 2008, with an afterword by Martin Rueff), da 1000m (www.gammm.org, 2009), Redéfinition (Paris: Mix, 2010), Redefinizione (Rome: La Camera Verde, forthcoming in November 2010).

From 2010: associate curator for literature and film at Centre Pompidou, Visiting professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at University of Paris 4 - Sorbonne and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.

Website: www.alessandrodefrancesco.net

English translations by the author and Noura Wedell

Noura Wedell (San Francisco, 1972) is a Franco-American writer and translator currently based in Lyon, France. She published the book Odd Directions – Direzioni dispari (Verona, 2009, translated and with an introduction by Alessandro De Francesco) and translated into English Babylon Babies by Maurice Dantec, The Porcelain Workshop by Toni Negri, Coma by Pierre Guyotat, etc. Her poetry appears in the reviews Nioques, To, Ere online. She is Associate professor at Centre d'études poétiques, Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines in Lyon, France, where she teaches American contemporary poetry, Creative Writing and Critical Writing. Some web-links:

http://slowforward.wordpress.com
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog
http://metamitsu.blogspot.com
http://www.booksonboard.com