Cover image by Francesco del Cossa, Saint Lucy (detail), 1473/1474
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All The Eyes That I Have Opened
Franca Mancinelli’s award-winning collection of poetry from 2020, All the Eyes That I Have Opened, has been translated into English from the original Italian by John Taylor. «All the eyes that I have opened / are the branches that I have lost», states one of the lines in the sequence “Master Trees,” which Franca Mancinelli welcomes on her journey. Like marks on tree trunks, every loss, every wound, can be transformed into possibilities for growth. Written by one of the most compelling new voices in Italian poetry, All the Eyes that I Have Opened weaves together verse poetry and poetic prose, creating «a fragmented trail of meaning» that «goes beyond changes in space-time and in the subject who speaks, be it human, a tree, an ancient votive statuette, an encamped migrant, or a woman in her liminal daily life».
sono le perle del tempo, le morti
le attraversiamo come un filo.
deaths are time’s beads
we go through them like a string.
è un chiodo la mattina
trafitta la mente
affiora un’immagine
come da un frutto marcio
torna in piccoli segni
la vita senza forma brulicando.
the morning is a nail
once the mind is pierced
emerges an image
as if from rotten fruit
swarming formless life
comes back in tiny signs.
trapassando la terra
nel sonno continuiamo a discendere
in circolo tra organi e pianeti.
passing through the earth
in sleep we keep going down
in circles between organs and planets.
ci svegliamo dentro gli occhi di un uccello.
È questo il mondo, un frutto spezzato
a colazione, il cerchio della tazza
specchio che si apre
su un prato, una coperta
a contenerci come un’isola
da cui non siamo nati.
we awake inside a bird’s eyes.
This is the world, fruit sliced
at breakfast, the cup’s circle
a mirror that opens out
onto a lawn, a blanket
including us like an island
from which we were not born.
da Luminescenze
corro. E sto fermo all’incrocio
dove rallenta, precipita
per una legge di gioia si trasforma.
Non credo ai muri divisori.
Chiudo gli occhi, e attraverso l’immagine.
from Gleams
I’m running. And standing at the crossroads
where it slows down, falls
is transformed by a law of joy.
I don’t believe in partition walls.
I close my eyes, and go through the image..
negli occhi chiusi una sorgente
di pupille –luminescenze
trascorse tra globi
custodi di un’unica immagine
gravitante nella polvere esplosa.
in closed eyes a wellspring
of pupils—gleams
gone by between globes
guardians of a single image
gravitating in the exploded dust.
l’infinito dei morti
espande un’altra galassia.
Il rosso nel buio continua
a sfociare nel mare
dove siamo senza corpo accucciati.
the infinite dead
expand into another galaxy.
The red within the dark keeps
flowing into the sea
where we crouch bodiless.
Eyes left by broken branches are symbols of clear-sightedness as much as regeneration. […] Mancinelli’s poetic vision «shatters the surface of reality as would a stone, water». […] A Tiresias, her «gaze freed / from the cage of my eyes», she is drawn more to the mystical than the exoteric, in exquisite, musical language.
***
Mancinelli distills emotion, memory and experience into crystalline elements, moving from the intimate to the universal in rarely more than a handful of finely wrought lines. Drawing her metaphors from nature and the land, with eyes, sight, branches, darkness and light as recurring images throughout this book, she focuses her attention on a world—internal, external, and interpersonal—in which the dynamic tensions are always shifting, always in flux, and aims to capture its essence.
(Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts)
***
From an oracular tree heard by Mancinelli [comes the] words that she has drawn on for the title of this extraordinary book of lyric poems. […]
Most of the poems […] are short lyrical meditative poems. There’s a sense they have been chiseled out of marble. Mancinelli’s vocabulary is deceptively elemental—but note how many of these simple words resonate with multiple meanings.
(Norman Weinstein, The Arts Fuse)
***
[A book] full of the deep compassion and elemental reverence for the life-force […].
But what struck me most was Mancinelli’s radiant hope in the face of hardship, channeled through her celebration of life. There is an exuberant spontaneity to her description of growth—in her words, «a law of joy». […]
There is faith in the supportiveness of nature. […] If we scrub off society’s needless complexities, she muses, we find ourselves cocooned in a beautifully designed cycle, which allows us to relish the present moment in all its sublimity.
(Shrinidhi Prakash, Hammerklavier)
***
Its eight sequences of verse and poetic prose […] are broadly and internally connected by a psychological link between wound and perception […]. Consciousness in the text is presented as decentralized and fluid in both the «eyes that I have opened» and the «flock flying onwards» metaphors. This flexibility, crucial to the “opening of eyes” in loss, mirrors the text’s construction as a «space where meaning can emerge by taking form in a sequence».
(Michael Collins, On the Seawall)
***
Mancinelli’s finely crafted poems have a surrealist quality, with a continual interplay between collapse and rebirth. Glimmers shine through detritus. She moves from dust to starlight. […] Things are in flux and overturning. Metamorphosis is the natural state, and there’s no choice but to yield to it.
(Amanda Holmes Duffy, Washington Independent Review of Books)
***
All the Eyes that I Have Opened [is] a meditation, an existential, ontological, and spiritual journey […]. The image that remains imprinted on the reader’s mind is that of a winter landscape. The bright snow crossed by lines of dark branches reminds one of ancient Japanese waka poetry. The book also shows a fascinatingly intricate architecture in which rhythmic sequences of poems and prose pieces are «like a flock flying onwards» which does not scatter itself and puts itself together at every turn, transmigrating into subsequent texts.
(Giorgia Meriggi, Journal of Italian Translations)
***
This new book [All the Eyes that I Have Opened] which, its translator John Taylor notes, means «nearly all of Mancinelli’s writing to date has become available in English» is her best yet. It’s tough acceptance, startling imagery, and the very human stories it alludes to, allow us to believe «in the sky. In the broken line of the horizon. Like a simple outline, a possible form of life».
(Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence)
***
[All the Eyes that I Have Opened], one of the most interesting releases of recent Italian contemporary poetry, […] indeed seems to thematize a state of limits: a Heideggerian Dasein (“being-there”) that includes not only the other’s presence, but also the other’s time frame. […] Taylor thus adopts a translation approach aimed […] at accounting for the plural otherness to which Mancinelli’s poetry not only refers, but which it implies in itself.
(Stefano Bottero, Gradiva. International Journal of Italian Poetry)
sono le perle del tempo, le morti
le attraversiamo come un filo.
deaths are time’s beads
we go through them like a string.
è un chiodo la mattina
trafitta la mente
affiora un’immagine
come da un frutto marcio
torna in piccoli segni
la vita senza forma brulicando.
the morning is a nail
once the mind is pierced
emerges an image
as if from rotten fruit
swarming formless life
comes back in tiny signs.
trapassando la terra
nel sonno continuiamo a discendere
in circolo tra organi e pianeti.
passing through the earth
in sleep we keep going down
in circles between organs and planets.
ci svegliamo dentro gli occhi di un uccello.
È questo il mondo, un frutto spezzato
a colazione, il cerchio della tazza
specchio che si apre
su un prato, una coperta
a contenerci come un’isola
da cui non siamo nati.
we awake inside a bird’s eyes.
This is the world, fruit sliced
at breakfast, the cup’s circle
a mirror that opens out
onto a lawn, a blanket
including us like an island
from which we were not born.
da Luminescenze
corro. E sto fermo all’incrocio
dove rallenta, precipita
per una legge di gioia si trasforma.
Non credo ai muri divisori.
Chiudo gli occhi, e attraverso l’immagine.
from Gleams
I’m running. And standing at the crossroads
where it slows down, falls
is transformed by a law of joy.
I don’t believe in partition walls.
I close my eyes, and go through the image..
negli occhi chiusi una sorgente
di pupille –luminescenze
trascorse tra globi
custodi di un’unica immagine
gravitante nella polvere esplosa.
in closed eyes a wellspring
of pupils—gleams
gone by between globes
guardians of a single image
gravitating in the exploded dust.
l’infinito dei morti
espande un’altra galassia.
Il rosso nel buio continua
a sfociare nel mare
dove siamo senza corpo accucciati.
the infinite dead
expand into another galaxy.
The red within the dark keeps
flowing into the sea
where we crouch bodiless.
Eyes left by broken branches are symbols of clear-sightedness as much as regeneration. […] Mancinelli’s poetic vision «shatters the surface of reality as would a stone, water». […] A Tiresias, her «gaze freed / from the cage of my eyes», she is drawn more to the mystical than the exoteric, in exquisite, musical language.
***
Mancinelli distills emotion, memory and experience into crystalline elements, moving from the intimate to the universal in rarely more than a handful of finely wrought lines. Drawing her metaphors from nature and the land, with eyes, sight, branches, darkness and light as recurring images throughout this book, she focuses her attention on a world—internal, external, and interpersonal—in which the dynamic tensions are always shifting, always in flux, and aims to capture its essence.
(Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts)
***
From an oracular tree heard by Mancinelli [comes the] words that she has drawn on for the title of this extraordinary book of lyric poems. […]
Most of the poems […] are short lyrical meditative poems. There’s a sense they have been chiseled out of marble. Mancinelli’s vocabulary is deceptively elemental—but note how many of these simple words resonate with multiple meanings.
(Norman Weinstein, The Arts Fuse)
***
[A book] full of the deep compassion and elemental reverence for the life-force […].
But what struck me most was Mancinelli’s radiant hope in the face of hardship, channeled through her celebration of life. There is an exuberant spontaneity to her description of growth—in her words, «a law of joy». […]
There is faith in the supportiveness of nature. […] If we scrub off society’s needless complexities, she muses, we find ourselves cocooned in a beautifully designed cycle, which allows us to relish the present moment in all its sublimity.
(Shrinidhi Prakash, Hammerklavier)
***
Its eight sequences of verse and poetic prose […] are broadly and internally connected by a psychological link between wound and perception […]. Consciousness in the text is presented as decentralized and fluid in both the «eyes that I have opened» and the «flock flying onwards» metaphors. This flexibility, crucial to the “opening of eyes” in loss, mirrors the text’s construction as a «space where meaning can emerge by taking form in a sequence».
(Michael Collins, On the Seawall)
***
Mancinelli’s finely crafted poems have a surrealist quality, with a continual interplay between collapse and rebirth. Glimmers shine through detritus. She moves from dust to starlight. […] Things are in flux and overturning. Metamorphosis is the natural state, and there’s no choice but to yield to it.
(Amanda Holmes Duffy, Washington Independent Review of Books)
***
All the Eyes that I Have Opened [is] a meditation, an existential, ontological, and spiritual journey […]. The image that remains imprinted on the reader’s mind is that of a winter landscape. The bright snow crossed by lines of dark branches reminds one of ancient Japanese waka poetry. The book also shows a fascinatingly intricate architecture in which rhythmic sequences of poems and prose pieces are «like a flock flying onwards» which does not scatter itself and puts itself together at every turn, transmigrating into subsequent texts.
(Giorgia Meriggi, Journal of Italian Translations)
***
This new book [All the Eyes that I Have Opened] which, its translator John Taylor notes, means «nearly all of Mancinelli’s writing to date has become available in English» is her best yet. It’s tough acceptance, startling imagery, and the very human stories it alludes to, allow us to believe «in the sky. In the broken line of the horizon. Like a simple outline, a possible form of life».
(Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence)
***
[All the Eyes that I Have Opened], one of the most interesting releases of recent Italian contemporary poetry, […] indeed seems to thematize a state of limits: a Heideggerian Dasein (“being-there”) that includes not only the other’s presence, but also the other’s time frame. […] Taylor thus adopts a translation approach aimed […] at accounting for the plural otherness to which Mancinelli’s poetry not only refers, but which it implies in itself.
(Stefano Bottero, Gradiva. International Journal of Italian Poetry)