Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

themselves, but feelings, emotions are

irremediably lost; and if at times we have

the illusion of recovering them through

memory, all that is left is an incurable

sadness in our baffled heart: “But what song,

what litany / rising from a church or

balcony / can make my heart / run wild

again, that now is in a daze?”

hat passes, then, vanishes forever. It can

happen that, as if from an enchanted spell,

one hears inside even his mother’s voice

along the twisting alleys of the old town,

evoking her sweet presence in a sudden

start, but all this is just a strange mixture of

the past with the nothing¬ness that remains.

It is true, the voice can insist in calling out to

the depths of memory, and so the cards of

the days get more and more mixed up, since

life wants to make fun of us, constantly

changing them: “Because life likes to have