MUSEUM POETICA: TRANSLUCINE

Franca Mancinelli in the Darkroom

In my in-depth interview with Franca Mancinelli in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Bitter Oleander, she remarks: “When we write, we are often immersed in darkness, like a photographer in his darkroom. It is only with time that what has been imprinted on our film resurfaces.” And in that same issue, which includes a special feature on her writing, we published my translation of her sequence initially titled “In Focus, On Fire.” This group of poems would later be retitled and reworked as “The Darkroom” for her Italian collection Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (“All the Eyes that I have Opened”), published in 2020. That sequence, which evokes a difficult, indeed “erroneous” amorous relationship with a photographer, includes these two pieces:

the eyes don’t close.
I see from inside — the darkness
from the seed to this recess:
writing, my darkroom.

*

at this distance I can keep you in focus. You stand still, as in the first moments. Your ashes carried by the wind, into my darkroom.

Mancinelli indeed occasionally adopts terms from photography, in her poems or when she is describing her poetics, underscoring this notion of a “darkroom” into which she withdraws to create; that is, to use darkness and specifically the negative — the negative experience — to recover the hidden or forgotten light and then to shape this light, by means of words, into a tool enabling a new kind of seeing. “Light,” in this context, therefore means elucidation, lucidity, becoming enlightened to a greater extent than before, and thus passing out of the darkness, at least for a while. The act of writing, as Mancinelli conceives of it, takes her into her darkroom, a “place of the unknown, where [her] demons nestle [and her] most tenacious and impenetrable shadows [can be found],” as she has explained. It is as if the poet has intently focused on something (an event, another person), perhaps in the present, perhaps retrospectively, even prospectively; the snapshot is taken; and then, in the darkroom, the haunting polymorphic image emerges, perhaps years later, from her stylistic chemicals. 

Yet there is a broader perspective to this initially personal work of writing in the darkroom. Personal or particular elements in Mancinelli’s writing always aim for multiplicity and universality. She likes to cite the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s essay “What is the Contemporary?” in which one who is “contemporary” is defined as “one who firmly keeps his gaze on his own time to perceive, not its light, but its darkness.” “All eras,” continues Agamben, “are obscure — dark — for those who experience contemporaneity. One who is contemporary is precisely one who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen into the obscurity of the present.”

It is thus unsurprising that Mancinelli accepted the photographer Alessandra Calò’s invitation to participate in her project Secret Garden. The project, involving other writers and poets as well, will be published later this year in Italian by Danilo Montanari Editore. Calò has gathered and saved from oblivion a series of negatives depicting portraits of women without any other biographical indication. “Inspired by herbariums and by the constant search for themes relevant to the ‘feminine,’” as Calò explains, she “creates arboreal visions through those negatives, symbolizing the secret garden hidden inside of each one of us. Each portrait acquires a new identity thanks to the involvement of contemporary female authors.” Mancinelli has chosen to write a sequence of fragmentary pieces inspired by the portrait of one “Esther.”

—John Taylor

Ester

portami un fiore a brucarmi la pelle 
a mangiarmi le mani 
– per ogni vita che ho commesso                        
ho lasciato cadere le braccia. 

*

apro gli occhi a un’esplosione stellare 

— avvolta di materia nera
nel mio vestito della festa 
in questo quadrato di freddo 
in memoria. 

*

nasco dalla notte, per sottrazione.                                               

*

il buio mi ha forato le iridi 
per un lampo di spazio 
dove posso distinguerti
dove puoi farmi esistere 
trapassata. 

*

ho imparato il sorriso 
come una lingua straniera: 
da un taglio — inizio di ogni morte                            
di luna, un frutto                                        
lentamente decomposto nel mio corpo. 

*

tra poco il collo si separa dal viso 
si sciolgono i capelli dalla pelle 

— sgusciando via da queste linee 
rientrare nell’immagine latente. 

Esther 

bring me a flower to nibble my skin
to eat away at my hands
— for every life that I've committed
I’ve let my arms fall.                             

*

I open my eyes to a stellar explosion

— wrapped in black matter
in my party dress
in this quadrate of cold
in memory.

*

I am born from the night, by subtraction.

*

the darkness pierced my irises
for a flash of space
where I can make you out
where you can make me exist
passed away. 

*

I learned the smile
like a foreign language:
from a slash — the beginning of every death            
of the moon, a fruit
slowly decayed in my body.  

*

soon the neck separates from the face
the hair comes undone from the skin 

— peeling off from these lineaments
to go back into the latent image.

The original Italian poems have been written for a project conceived by the photographer Alessandra Calò. They will be published by Danilo Montanari Editore (Ravenna) in Calò’s catalogue Secret Garden (2021).

Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. Her first two collections of verse poetry, Mala kruna (2007) and Pasta madre (2013), were awarded several prizes in Italy and later republished together as A un’ora di sonno da qui (2018) — a book now available in John Taylor’s translation as At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (Bitter Oleander Press, 2019). Also in 2018,  her collection of prose poems, Libretto di transito, was published by the Bitter Oleander Press as The Little Book of Passage. The journal The Bitter Oleander devoted a special feature to her writing, with an in-depth interview, in its Autumn 2019 issue. Her new collection of poems, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (All the Eyes that I have Opened), appeared in Italy in September 2020. Most of the poems from this new book have already been translated and published in the following journals: The Bitter Oleander, Trafika Europe, Journal of Italian Translation, Strands, AzonaL, Osiris, The Blue Nib, Right Hand Pointing, Bengaluru Review, January Review, The Fortnightly Review, Cholla Needles, and Mantis.