The Great Fear, and: Something Outrageously Alive, and: The World is Here

The Great Fear, and: Something Outrageously Alive, and: The World is Here Piera Oppezzo (bio) Translated by Luciano Martinengo (bio) and Norman MacAfee (bio) Keywords poetry, Piera Oppezzo, translation, Luciano Martinengo, Norman MacAfee, fear, survival, desires, protection, celebration Translated from Italian by Luciano Martinengo and Norman MacAfee THE GREAT FEAR The story of who I amis the story of a great fearof being myself,as opposed to the fear of losing myself,as opposed to the fear of fear itself. It could not have been otherwise:in anxiety one loses the memory,in submission, everything. Neither couldmy childhood,ravaged by my family,permit me a stable, concrete maturity.Nor could my isolated lifepermit me anything less fragilethan this struggle among anxieties and uncertainties. Childhood I have survived,adulthood I have survived.Almost nothing compared with life.I have survived, though.And now, among the ruins of my being,something, a substantial utopia, is ready to blossom. —1960s End Page 126 SOMETHING OUTRAGEOUSLY ALIVE I brushed my teethand drank my coffee.It's morning, here, in this cityschedules to keephousecleaning to repeat. I look outside controlling my energyand everything is good, is good enough.It is not that I wish not to seeit is not that I wish not to be.I want only to push a bit forward with my headto walk without creeping along wallsor crawling sideways on all fourswith my body held together by my clothes.I want my clothesto harness something outrageously alive. Soon I must actmust check this ammunition(wrapped around my head)if all is ready and in place. I touch it softly and look at myself in the mirror:we smile at each other as the day beginswishing that we be not afraid. —1976 End Page 127 THE WORLD IS HERE Such ceremonythe beginning of the day.The announcement that the world is herenever ceases to dazzle. You travel inside ittoday like yesterday like tomorrow.It is here. It is here. It is here. You canonly feel astonished. —August-September 2009 End Page 128 Piera Oppezzo piera oppezzo (1934–2009) was born in Turin. She lived her first years during fascist dictatorship, war-time devastation, and postwar deprivation. In spite of the trying circumstances of her early teens, she fought to create a personal space, physical, mental, to be left alone to write. The great writer Italo Calvino, who was an editor at the prestigious Einaudi publishing company in Turin, and its publisher, Giulio Einaudi, read Piera's work, and in 1966 they published her first book, L'uomo qui presente (Man Here Present), in Einaudi's Poesia collection. Over the next decades, five more books of her poetry and two novels would be published. In 2016, Interlinea published a major collection of her poems, Una lucida disperazione, which received the Lorenzo Montano Prize for the year's best book of poetry. In 2021, Interno Poesia Editore published a new collection, Esercizi d'addio, poesie inedite 1952–1965. Luciano Martinengo luciano martinengo is a film writer and director. Among his works are documentaries on American communes, the Italians of Montreal, the American composer John Cage, the French film pioneer Georges Méliès, and a 10-hour series on children's education in the city of Bologna. He lives in Milan. A friend for many years of Piera Oppezzo, he is her literary executor. He and Norman MacAfee translated the first collection in English of the poems of the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. It was published by Random House and John Calder and is available from Farrar Straus The Death of the Forest, his opera to music of Charles Ives; and The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now, about Senator Robert Kennedy...