“From Pain to Possibilities of Vision” is John Taylor’s introduction to his translation of my poetry book All the Eyes that I Have Opened, New York: Black Square Editions, 2023.
When I read Franca Mancinelli’s poetry, when I translate it, I am brought face to face with this question: Can something positive be drawn out of a negative experience—from psychic wounds, from loss or abandonment, from an unwanted state of homelessness, even from ruins and destruction? In short, can “pain” be turned into a “possibility of vision,” as she phrases it? It is this existential question that stands out in this new collection, and it builds into a theme that is also a movement, in the musical sense of the term, appearing and reappearing, indeed structuring the book as one section or sequence leads to, and dialogues with, the next one. Readers of The Little Book of Passage and At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (which gathers her first two books, Mala Kruna and Mother Dough), not to mention her collection of prose narratives and personal essays, The Butterfly Cemetery, know that her grappling with this issue stems from deep necessities. And if we listen attentively to her, this is because her carefully considered and ever-compelling poetic responses, be they expressed in the first or second person singular, always go beyond the poet’s self and concern us directly.
She begins with a concrete fact or happenstance, which she has experienced or witnessed, and then, with penetrating insight and exacting stylistic concision, she distills the essence—be it a state of mind and body or an enigma of our being-in-the-cosmos—that we can no longer avoid because it is also ours or can become ours.
The title of this new volume, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, is intimately related to this creative quest of sight and insight, of affirmation and openness, of building and rebuilding in the face of various kinds of blinding, negation, closure, and unbuilding. As an italicized distich in one of her poems reveals, the underlying image is that of a tree:
all the eyes that I have opened
are the branches that I have lost.
When a branch is removed—broken off by chance or sawed off intentionally—an “eye” remains. There is great pain, but this new “eye” can enable one to see something else, or differently. Potentially, a positive transformation can take place. As on a maimed tree trunk, an eye has opened on the body, as it were. Perhaps this eye still has scabs and scars, trickles of sap or blood, bruises and jagged edges—the fragmentary style of these poems reflect this, and with masterful craftsmanship—but unexpected horizons, and previously unnoticed presences, benevolent and nearby, have now come into sight. In her poetic prose text “An Act of Inner Self-Surgery” (The Butterfly Cemetery), Mancinelli explains how she came up with this title or, rather, how it came to her:
Once a few years ago in a woods in the Apennines, I was walking for hours, full of inner devastation, entrusting my sorrow to every footstep, listening to the light within the foliage of the trees, to disperse the circles of my torment like water enveloping a smooth boulder fallen to the bottom. When suddenly a tree with a very scarred trunk came to meet me. All the eyes that I have opened are the branches that I have lost—it said to me. Its sparse foliage opened out high, far above my eyes. You could read in its bark the history of cuts and amputations, healed and transformed into growth, obedient to light, beyond all obstacles. I continued to walk with this voice that had been articulated in me, and one clear image: there are losses that you can weep over with all your tears, fight with every effort, yet they are necessary. We would give our whole life so that they won’t happen, yet they are guiding our sap towards the shape and the place that belongs to it.
As she works through a painful severing and thereby acquires a deeper awareness and a new outlook (in the literal sense), Mancinelli is thus guided or counseled by this and other “master trees” (as she calls them). Such trees, as well as other natural elements invoked by Mancinelli in what she calls her “affective botany,” can teach us how to face up to pain and wounds and thus how to keep standing. In Italian, “alberi maestri” also means the “mainmasts” of a ship; in English, we can also think of a related, though different, nautical term that has a figurative meaning: “mainstays.” Relying on the age-old strength and guiding “mast- like” qualities of the trees, Mancinelli thus confronts head-on the negative factor: the harmfulness, the noxiousness, the threats to her—and, more generally, to our—well-being or personhood. In other words, her writing seeks to touch, to embrace, to take root in, to grow from, whatever can teach us, with a wisdom that we alone cannot muster, about disappointment, damage, and tragedy; she seeks sources that refresh and re-nourish, origins that restore and cure, or, to paraphrase one poem here, she “points” her eyes so that her “area” or “circle of life” will be “rounded off.” Here, “point” is a verb that indicates aiming exactly (which is another theme for her, that of seeing precisely), whereas the noun “point,” in its acceptation as a point of convergence, also crops up in poems where it suggests an “initial” or—to use an apt archaic word—“originary” locus at which all the crucial elements have gathered and from which all things are generated:
it has happened, stay: in the dark hollow like a uterus, dwell there is a point when life overturns becomes Morse code.
The reader of these succinct poems, such as the one just cited, might well have the impression that they are themselves “points” or, rather, “focal points” (to recall the photographic analogies sometimes employed by Mancinelli in this book). As her translator and reader, I often sense that by concentrating my attention on such fragments, I narrow in on something dense and compact— something indeed like a “point,” even a “black hole,” if this analogy is not too far-fetched—which, after a meditative moment, opens out for me into a vaster, multidimensional meaning. Like a “white hole”? In any case, the imagery of conception and pregnancy in the above poem releases—gives birth to, I could say—a cluster of significations that engage not only with the biological senses of coming into the world and being alive, but also with the coming into language—the Morse code—of our attempt to construct a meaning from them. Life itself can turn itself into a code that must be deciphered, into writing that must be read. And yet the “dark / hollow,” likened to a uterus, might also be something else: a refuge, metaphorical or not, where one can find care and protection. As has been seen, Mancinelli often draws her similes and metaphors from natural elements such as animals, various types of vegetation, or landscape features. Moreover, in her poetic cosmos, everything is in movement, even in metamorphosis, and forms are never definite; they are heading towards new forms, their next forms.
In their migration, identities open out, take on other configurations; bodies can come to have “an open texture,” as a text in the last section, Diary of Passage, phrases it.” The epigraph of the book, which evokes “birds of passage” and thus implicitly alludes to the title Diary of Passage, states this:
cannot scatter itself
puts itself back together at every turn
like a flock flying onwards.
In the epigraph, the grammatical subject is tellingly left unspecified. As a subset of this greater ensemble, human beings similarly fly onwards, leave their “contours”—as Mancinelli puts it in “a spoon in sleep,” her well-known poem from Mother Dough—and evolve into other forms, joining along the way something greater. It is a matter of being liberated and liberating oneself. “Sometimes it’s a storm, or a rock bumped into,” observes the poet, “deviating the course. And you find yourself free.” Of course, these “storms” and “rocks” are also the decisive negative events whose destructive energy the poet attempts to convert into a new possibility of vision. Apropos of this destructive energy, she recalls, in “An Act of Inner Self-Surgery,” her encounter with the Hindi female deity Kali in Calcutta, during her stay there as the Chair Poet in residence. One of the oldest temples devoted to Kali, the goddess of destructive forces, the destroyer of evil who also bestows “moksha” or enlightenment and emancipation, and the symbol of a primordial “darkness” from which everything is born, was in fact located just over a kilometer from where she was staying. “The forces of destruction are to be honored,” writes Mancinelli, and “honoring them means recognizing their power, their presence, yielding a space to them where they can receive our gaze, the gifts of every day.” She adds:
Otherwise they awaken, demand our tribute in blood. [. . .]. I met [Kali] last winter in Calcutta. [. . .] And I felt how vital it was to recognize that destructive charge which, left inside us, emerges in the other person to whom we lend the knife. While if we learn to welcome this charge, we can direct it towards whatever limits us, whatever blocks our way, illuminating parts of us that had remained dark and getting closer to what we are.
Another way of thinking about, in fact viewing, the multifaceted burgeoning effect in Mancinelli’s poems is clarified by the vocabulary of photography. She occasionally adopts such terms, in her poems or when she is describing her poetics, underscoring the 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. The sequence “Darkroom,” which tells of a relationship, could not be more explicit:
in the first sequence, you laughed and talked into my ear. You didn’t know you were inside the framing of the photo.
*
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.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.”
These and many other images in Mancinelli’s poetry, be they based on light and darkness or on natural elements—and however otherwise different—often merge in their search for a “beginning” at which, if one reaches it after the devastation, one’s own being can be re-founded, one’s own body be acknowledged or “recognized”—another key term—in new ways.
Recognition and acceptance are required for seeing again, from one’s new “eye,” once the “branch” has been lopped off. Note the use of “recognize” in these sentences from “Diary of Passage” and, once again, the potential conversion of “abandonment” into “restitution,” which is also a kind of “new start”:
The ravens have come to leave you with a lesson. The most difficult one. Those black fruits on the branches, that unexpected presence. And suddenly the detachment, the emptiness that comes back clearly. You call it abandonment, try to recognize it as a restitution.
At such beginnings where “restitution” can take place—at vital sources of renewal and growth—one’s place in the everyday world and in the cosmos can be reestablished or at least re-envisioned. The Italian noun “inizio” and the verb “iniziare,” and their various synonyms, in fact appear quite often in this collection, in contexts suggesting that “starting over again” and recovering something “initial,” primal, primordial (in the sense of fundamental and necessary), depends on accepting ruins, even death in both its literal meaning and its metaphorical extensions. “Deaths are time’s beads,” writes Mancinelli in one distich, “we go through them like a string.” And these deaths of our self, of our identity, bear us forward into other forms and existences. In one revealing poem, a symbolic “burial” leads to a “beginning” that comprises being put into the earth’s benevolent safekeeping. The poet’s being, her body, and her hands that write, are now like “roots at work”:
burial. And beginning. I am potted
and possessed. I live in the earth’s
safekeeping, with hands sunk
like roots at work.
“Burial and beginning.” Mancinelli likes to cite T. S. Eliot’s notion from “East Coker.” “In my beginning is my end,” he writes, and then, at the end of the same poem, he inverts this opening line by borrowing, and slightly adjusting, the motto that Mary Queen of Scots embroidered not long before her execution: “En ma Fin gît mon Commencement.” For the French verb “gît,” Eliot writes not “lies” (as in “here lies”), but rather “is”: “In my end is my beginning.” And even as the Anglo-American poet places “ends” and “beginnings” on the ontological level, Mancinelli’s poems also engage with our being-in-the-cosmos and in addition—this is not necessarily within Eliot’s scope—with the question of “how to live.” In this regard, I cannot help but evoke one French and two French-language Swiss poets whom I have also extensively translated: Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Philippe Jaccottet, José-Flore Tappy. Like them, Mancinelli explores the ways in which we can better embrace our transitory human condition and draw meaning and fulfillment from it.
Sometimes, of course, as in the “December 13th” sequence inspired by the legendary figure of Saint Lucy (who remains unnamed), living becomes perilous. In this sequence, the woman is “alive,” once “every blow [has been] erased,” when she is “beyond all your hands.” Yet another key theme informs this sequence devoted to Saint Lucy and, in fact, runs throughout All the Eyes that I Have Opened: learning how to see, restoring one’s sight, gaining new insight. Lucy is the patron saint of the eyes. In paintings, she is often depicted as holding her eyes on a golden plate. Mancinelli evokes this conceit in an image explicitly tracing the passage from wounding and brutal death to an offering: Lucy’s “gift” of the eyes so that we can receive from them a vision opening out towards a potentially positive transformation:
I look at your eyes on the plate
grains of a vibrating face
open like the blue
over a harvested field.
Moreover, Saint Lucy’s feast day—a festival of light—precedes Christmas and thus also is an “end” that is simultaneously a “beginning.” Before the Gregorian calendar became the rule, this feast day took place on the shortest, and therefore darkest, day of the year; after this celebration, more light would gradually come, every day. This book returns often to this theme of seeing and recovering sight. In a text from “Master Trees,” for instance, she writes:
when you see again, you’ll find everything supported by branches. Nothing has happened. We’re here on this framework of leaves. At times a cry opens the throat. We lose warmth. Then the shaking, cradling us in the light wind.
More often now than previously, Mancinelli has been exploring ancient sources that resonate in the present. A prime example is the sequence “To the tiny bronze offering bearers found on Mount Titano,” but there are traces of this same tension elsewhere in this volume, even in the stark setting of a migrant route in the Balkans. One prose piece from the sequence “Jungle,” for example, evokes “a soul among the forks of some branches” that appears to the narrator (a migrant), to whom the poet gives voice. This “soul” is actually a manuscript that has apparently been “kept tightly against [someone’s] chest and abandoned after a long journey” in the tree. Passages perhaps transcribed from some old story or sacred text—an “ancient voice”— can be made out on it.
In such ways, Mancinelli writes within an open, undivided conception of time wherein ends and beginnings blend, and the past, the future, and the present intermingle. This is additionally symbolized by the three blank pages that she has intentionally inserted into this book: they signify a recurrent “end and beginning.” Speaking, for instance, in the “Mount Titano” sequence to one of the ancient bronze offering bearers, she admits that “in the presence of emptiness / I cannot do anything but ask / to look like you and melt your feet / into lead planting you here / guardian on two legs.” The narrative voice is that of poet speaking in the present and asking for something to happen in the future, but it is also that of someone in the remote past who seemingly participates in a votive ritual. Human flesh is symbolically transformed into something sacred, even as Mancinelli seeks to glimpse the means by which we might better acknowledge—recognize—the place of our ephemeral bodies in something vaster, the cosmos taken in its physical but also potential spiritual configurations.
A mystical tension can indeed be perceived in her poetry, in which religious dogma is otherwise totally absent. One also senses the importance of “opening,” of learning how to open oneself up to something else, to the other, to otherness—to that awaiting form-to-come. This is another lesson that can be learned from a natural element, as from the buzzards in “Diary of Passage” which, perched on tollway fences, “confirm the route. Every now and then they come flying. You recognize them from the strength they draw from the sky. By simply holding their wings open.” Mancinelli’s emphasis on opening one- self outwards, to metamorphosis, and to transformation indeed hints at thresholds leading beyond the factuality of our existences.
Her gaze beyond the confines and constraints of our social and material world—her resolution to remove walls, boundaries, and other distinctions—is therefore exerted in time, in space, as well as in her depiction of relationships with others. These are oft-amorous situations involving “the other,” who is sometimes intensely present in her poems as one who is loved or who was loved (and who has now disappeared from her life). In this respect, the title sequence “All the Eyes that I Have Opened” is emblematic, as she shows, with sometimes harrowing imagery, how “the other,” how- ever initially loving and loved, can enter one’s existence and cause destruction. In such cases, the poet’s creativity stands up to the dismantling of a relationship by pinpointing the destructive phenomena and by accepting the potentially redeeming aspects—the broken-off branch, the newly opened eye—that can help her move forward and “grow” (another recurrent ideal). “I must create so that I will not be destroyed,” she has stated. Once again, individual contours blur, blend, are superposed. “I don’t believe in partition walls,” she writes, “I close my eyes, and go through the image.”
As she has progressed from Mala Kruna, a “bildungsroman” in verse, through Mother Dough, which already extends the autobiographical circumscription of the former collection, and The Little Book of Passage, whose acute personal source likewise ramifies into a transformative journey that we all can take, it is clear that All the Eyes that I Have Opened shows a still bolder venturing into previously little-explored areas beyond the self. Yet as she crosses previously uncrossed fields, her verse and prose retain all the intensity of her more strictly personal writings. Furthermore, after the verse poetry of At an Hour’s Sleep from Here and the prose poetry of The Little Book of Passage, this new collection combines the two literary forms into a subtly articulated rhythmic structure alternating vision and narration, the former responding to the latter and vice versa. In a strong sense, Mancinelli’s effacing of distinctions and blurring of boundaries enables her to continue to be entirely present even when the subject matter seems—but only upon a first reading—exclusively oriented towards others. She is fully within the otherness, deeply inside whomever she is not.
This taking into account of other lives and realities is, of course, most vividly exhibited in “Jungle” and “Diary of Passage.” Both sequences derive from her participation in the European project “Refest: Images and Words on Refugee Routes.” During this project, she traveled, with eight other poets, artists, and photographers, along the itineraries used by migrants on the Balkan Routes. Mancinelli knows all too well that if her poetics of self-transformation—the movement from pain to new possibilities of vision—is well founded, then it must sustain visions of horror and misery. At one point, she in fact wonders why she is there, on the trails: “Perhaps I have obeyed the sound of broken branches, which reaches me from this unknown language, like walking in a dense forest. There is something immediately familiar in these bits of bark that preserve meanings.” A tentative answer actually emerges in the next sequence, which is set in another place and alludes to another context. Something—first a sentence in her mind, then a sound, a breath, then breathing—is moving through the poet and asking to take shape, “to have body,” a new “place.” Already in a train, she is now underway in the deepest, most genuine sense—a kind of inner departure and moving ahead—through writing—that already starts to respond to the question: “Why am I here?”
how I arrived here, I don’t know. Someone asks me for a ticket. I close my eyes. The train keeps gliding, very slowly, through the darkness—I repeat a single sentence become sound, breath. This breathing that moves through me asks to have body. It asks to have a place. Or to go through the space between the eyes, welcomed by the smallest and meekest animals.
Even as the migrants can be broken along the way, and blocked at a border, the poet too has been shattered (by the traumatic experience underlying the sequence “All the Eyes that I Have Opened”) and stopped on her life’s journey. It is akin to the flow of a river that is “broken up, after a leap or fall” and turns into “foam.” A struggle begins “against a moving, impassable boundary,” as the prose piece puts it; in other words, a boundary that is also the inner impasse in which one can find oneself after a disaster. But then something can occur and free us, setting us back into the flow of life. By reflecting on the meaning of one’s life, of one’s being in the encompassing cosmos, and in Mancinelli’s case by writing, the liberating movement can commence. The book finishes with these lines:
I am limpid today, like a windowpane never lined by rain. I have forgotten what I have forgotten. I just look. Flocks
fly by. Through the light, warmth is gathered in the woods on the hill, in my body stretched out at last—I have believed in the sky. In the broken line of the horizon. Like a simple outline, a possible form of life.
And yet these same perceptions might equally have been those of a migrant, a simultaneity underscoring the highly thoughtful and crafted manner in which the sequences in this book form a coherent, intricately interrelated whole. The “Diary of Passage” is their diary of a “step” (as the Italian title “Diario di passo” also indicates). One could say “the next step,” the fundamental change awaiting them, or her, or us. In this regard, while she has extended and deepened her psychological, philosophical, and spiritual purview in this new book, she has continued to gather in and preserve, to protect, what is most helpless and fragile in herself or in others, a remarkable quality of her earlier work as well. Her poetic language aspires to bring life—the vital force—to ordinary language, giving it a transformative energy as well. As she labors over words initially jotted down in one of her beloved taccuini, her “notebooks,” she thereby sets very high standards for herself and for poetic language, conceiving it in such a way that it will be able to stand up alongside pain, be it hers or that of others, and be a fitting expression of it, all the while opening out and pointing ahead.
John Taylor Saint-Barthélemy d’Anjou 28 February 2023
Photo by Veronica Ujcich