Emptiness
When one is in the presence of the Colosseum, an enormous cylinder with empty eye sockets, one has the sense of emptiness. Naturally, having the sense of emptiness, one cannot help but also have the dread of emptiness. Those things piled up, coming from every direction, so that not a bit of space is left, of free space, everything is filled, nothing is left, nothing freed. That dread of emptiness, one can feel it in Rome infinitely more than in any other place on earth, more even than in the desert. I believe that from the dread of emptiness issues, not the need of filling that space with it-matters-not-what-thing, but all the drama of the art of Michelangelo.
When I said that the Baroque provoked the sense of emptiness, that the aesthetic of the Roman Baroque had been initiated by the dread of emptiness, I mentioned the Colosseum. I’m afraid I haven’t been clear enough. The dread in the Baroque originated with the intolerable idea of a body without a soul. A skeleton evokes the dread of emptiness.
- Giuseppe Ungaretti. Selected Poems, introduction. Translated by Andrew Frisardi. FSG, 2002
foto Miseraestupendacittà 2010
Telling
fast-food 
junk-food = cibo spazzatura
(not only cheap or worthless but lit. ‘trash’, ‘rubbish’)
No discounts or miracles
foto Miseraestupendacittà 2011
(written in a fine romanesco/romanaccio [you choose]
informing all that the client is always right
so long as no discounts or miracles are requested)
Epochal
this infinitely complex city…it is hard to imagine an epoch in which Rome has not been crowded, corrupt, maddening, shallow, gross, hypocritical, and yet, at the same time, heavenly. The city, indeed, is riddled with places where divine and earthbound are said to have met.
- Ingrid D. Rowland. New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011.
Two poems
deadly seriousness
don’t take life
too seriously
i thought –
and immediately
by a deadly seriousness
was struck
*
who needs the view
who needs the view
onto the flavian ampitheatre
included in the price of the room
with the regal bed
in which heart-heavy you fall asleep
with book, glass, and fully dressed
- Leonard Mokrzycki
*
Mr Mokrzycki was born and lives in Gdańsk, Poland. Poems have appeared in Grenzenlos/Bez Granic and in 2009 the collection SŁOWA PRAWIE NIEUŻYWANE (nearly unused words) was published as a free book.
http://mehibezeder.com/pesodellaparola.pdf
Translation Miseraestupendacittà together with the poet.
*
(śmiertelna powaga: nie wolno życia brać/zanadto serio//myślę -/i w tej samej chwili/spada na mnie/śmiertelna powaga)
(cóż po widoku: cóż po widoku/na teatr flawiuszów//wliczonym w cenę pokoju/z królewskim łóżkiem//w którym zasypiasz niechętnie/z książką szklanką i w ubraniu)
Krapp
L’ultimo nastro di Krapp
di Samuel Beckett
con Glauco Mauri
Teatro Argentina
Lunedì, 5 dicembre
And afternoon
..you think of Rome and sleep Rome asleep how long a terminal sunsetting until it too shall set the city waiting drifting it out until ultimate ending here where it’s not (was it ever?) morning over the world dead leaves fall like chipping flakes of plaster (such strade sparite)
Artaud a roma
Follie d’amore di Antonin Artaud
con Carole Bouquet
Sunday, December 4
Teatro Argentina
(foto: La Casa Encendida)
