Poems from Procne Machine (II)

Translated by Will Schutt.
_____



All year pigeons commandeer the tables,
harpooning glasses, knocking over breadbaskets
in this city overrun with tourists.
Their dumb gaze, their mutilated feet.
Sometimes they turn up in side streets
worn smooth by motorbikes. Their flesh
pokes through a bloodless pink
smear of feathers. And it’s always a struggle,
a torment to my gaze, which I avert
when I try to sidestep them, and I wonder
who’ll come collect their remains?
Who’ll remove them in the morning?
Will they end up in the wet waste or the trash?


Per tuttol’annoi piccioni invadono i tavolini,
arpionano bicchieri, rovesciano cestini
nella città infestata dai turisti.
Lo sguardo stupido, le zampe mutilate.
A volte si fanno trovare nei vicoli laterali
sfondati dai motorini di passaggio. Le carni
esposte tra le piume impiastricciate
di rosa senza sangue. E ogni volta è un conato,
una persecuzione dello sguardo che distolgo
mentre cerco di non calpestarli e mi domando
chi raccoglierà quei resti, chi li rimuoverà all’alba,
se finiranno nell’umido o nell’indifferenziato.


――


Swallows arrived in April, just like that.
In the orange light they formed
circles in space. In the bowl of the piazza
they chased one another. I couldn’t tell you
whether they were happy or angry.
They cut across balconies and windows
while a commotion, not a song,
drowned out every other sound of the city.
They paused for just a minute
on stone and ballast
before going back to chakking
with their wild chorus, as if off to the side
of some tragedy or comedy
put on in the open air.
Too otherwise absorbed, them, too engaged
to die or do harm.


Ad aprile sono arrivate le rondini, velocissime.
Nella luce arancione disegnavano
cerchi nello spazio. Nello slargo della piazza
si rincorrevano felici o furiose, non saprei dirlo,
sfiorando di fretta balconi e finestre,
mentre un frastuono, non un canto,
ricopriva ogni altra voce della città.
Si posavano il tempo di una spinta
tra le pietre di tufo e di piperno,
un attimo, prima di tornare a sgolarsi
nel coro infuriato delle altre, come a margine
di una tragedia o di una commedia
allestita nel vuoto dell’aria.
Troppo prese, loro, troppo indaffarate,
per morire o fare del male.


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Carmen Gallo’s first three collections of poetry, Paura degli occhi (2014), Appartamenti o stanze (2017) and Le fuggitive (2020, winner of the Premio Napoli), were recently collected in Stanze per una fuga (2025). She has published translations of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems. Originally from Naples, she teaches English literature at La Sapienza Università di Roma. Her most recent book of poetry, Procne Machine, is a finalist for the 2026 Strega Prize.

Will Schutt’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Fellowship, and the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of Westerly (Yale University Press 2013) and translator of several works from Italian, including Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems by Fabio Pusterla (Princeton University Press 2023) and My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin College Press 2018). He lives in Rome, where he teaches at John Cabot University, and co-curates Policromia, an annual international festival of poetry and translation in Siena.