09-24-2025, 05:32 AM
(09-22-2025, 04:02 PM)RiverNotch Wrote: Naught but this ceaseless wind is keeping me suggestion: Naught but this ceaseless wind's preventing meIn moderate critique (as unable to access Italian except via Latin - up through the floorboards and ignorant of the Lombards, as it were).
as ceaseless in my midnight musings, as unable in endless midnight thought, incapable,
to shut these leaden eyelids and to sleep from closing leaden eyelids, welcome sleep
dreaming of that serenity which even morning
will not allow alight upon my brow "to light" in place of "alight"
and make me like the soldier in the vale perhaps "cast" vs. "make"
of unripe Rimbaud’s writings, I am sure:
naught but this wind upsetting uncropped limbs
or making thunder corrugated steel or thunder-strumming corrugated... just a thought
and not the other voices that it brings,
the cries of pain, the questions only God
can barely start to solve, and the incessant if "solve," then "riddles" in previous line, else "answer" here
imbroglios ipso facto following: "contentions consequently following?"
naught seems to be tonight, not even sleep,
but this here creature curled up on my sheets, "this here" is a bit informal - "this same," perhaps, or two syllables by eliminating "up"
the sheets themselves, the bed, the room suffused perhaps "this" vs. "the" in one or two places for variety?
with an all-too-indigestible peace, ten syllables, but... see below
the trees and roofs outside---and this damn wind.
Originally written in Italian (massive plus if you can critique this too, since I'm still learning the language and am too timid to join any Italian Pigpen-likes):
Nulla ma questo vento rende me
cosi’ irrequieto, incompetente
di chiudere le palpebre e dormire
sognando della pace che al momento
non puo’ fermarsi, riposarsi come
un cadavere a lungo seppellito,
sono sicuro: nulla ma il ventaccio,
e non le voci che lui porta, non
i gridi d’agonia, le proposte
mostrate per risolverli, le liti
interminati nell’insania: nulla
mi sembra di sussistere stanotte,
perfino il sonno, ma quest’organismo,
la pace non gli raggiungibile,
il letto, ed il vento piu’ dannato.
I wonder if, already translated, it might be possible to mold this into tighter blank verse (IP). It's already quite close, as is the original, I think. Most of my comments, above, are more to suggest alternatives than actual improvements in themselves.
On the second to last line, I suspect the presence of an idiom too literally translated: for la pace non gli raggiungibile, Google gives a forthright if humdrum "peace cannot be achieved." In any case, the hyphenated adjective has to go.
Not, I think, the best possible critique, but I hope it's of some help.
Non-practicing atheist

