Misera e stupenda città

Be there or be

miseraestupendacitta — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:01:14 +0000

Where you goin’ with that thing?

miseraestupendacitta — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:52:39 +0000

foto Stanley-Price 2011

Emptiness

miseraestupendacitta — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:22:16 +0000

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

miseraestupendacitta — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:27:39 +0000

fast-food junk-food = cibo spazzatura

(not only cheap or worthless but lit. ‘trash’, ‘rubbish’)

No discounts or miracles

miseraestupendacitta — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:14:32 +0000

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

miseraestupendacitta — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:00:14 +0000

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

miseraestupendacitta — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:56:45 +0000

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

miseraestupendacitta — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:16:23 +0000

L’ultimo nastro di Krapp
di Samuel Beckett

con Glauco Mauri

Teatro Argentina
Lunedì, 5 dicembre

And afternoon

miseraestupendacitta — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:05:43 +0000

..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

miseraestupendacitta — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:36:11 +0000

Follie d’amore di Antonin Artaud

con Carole Bouquet

Sunday, December 4

Teatro Argentina

(foto: La Casa Encendida)