Peter Covino
Photo by Francesco Gentile
Bio
Peter Covino is a poet, translator, editor, and associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of the poetry collections The Right Place to Jump, featured on NPR and the Huffington Post, and Cut Off the Ears of Winter. His prizes include an NEA Fellowship in Translation (2019); the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry; grants/residencies from Richmond American International University of London, and the American Academy in Rome; and a Frank O'Hara Poetry Prize for his chapbook, Straight Boyfriend. His poems have appeared in such journals as the American Poetry Review, Atelier, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and the Yale Review. He is one of the founding editors of Barrow Street Press.
Translating Dario Bellezza’s poetry is a work of incredible intellectual and linguistic pleasure but also a journey of psychic recovery and mourning. It’s work that helps me keep death at bay and to preserve the sounds of my own language and cultural-emotional inheritance. When I first started this project in earnest a few years ago, my father was at the end of his life and now my elderly mother is also quite ill. As an Italian-born immigrant to United States, the immersion into a poetic language close to the language of my birth has helped me reckon with my own displaced past. Bellezza went from being a major, openly gay literary figure in the 1970s to becoming more or less vilified by the right in the ‘80s. With the onslaught of AIDS, gay people became more marginalized even as queer identity paradoxically was beginning to emerge in a restrictive Catholic country. I initially set out to translate one of Bellezza’s eight full-length poetry collections in its entirety, but during the course of my work, Mondadori published his Complete Poems (2015) and that helped make a lot of work that was otherwise out or print more accessible. The incredible honor of this National Endowment for the Arts fellowship has given me further authorization and hopefully the added visibility to secure publication for a more selective representation of this daring, original poet’s work.
excert by Dario Bellezza
[Translated from the Italian]
Infant of a slightly precocious infancy
you were supposed to lift up the world without
my golden muscles and follow me into Hell
chastened from my forbidden desires, not
ever turn into an angel but remain a beast
toward my deadening rational displays:
exquisite and corrupt servant in the laboratory
of the backward alchemist who transforms
the gold of ambition into a vile
metal, without receiving recompense
for his servile drudgery.
For you the feigned words from the fake poet
that I was:
by the minute I resold the minutiae
on the libertine market of the shrubbery
or of the poorly-illumined monuments:
murdered genius overburdened
with simple-minded images culled from
Folly and Fate all the way to obscenity.
For your Cain-like and childish ire
that doesn’t forgive the malediction
of being born without the bread and butter
of sex and sin.
If to give away freely what we freely
received is merely to give away
in installments the scent of revisited memory
as a loan comfortably repaid
then in truth if someone calls me a:
“God of the broken sex of all bodies”
it’s the smell of my breath that betrays me!
About Dario Bellezza
The work of Italian poet, novelist, and playwright Dario Bellezza (1944-1996) was championed by such luminaries of twentieth-century Italian literature as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and Elsa Morante. Bellezza won wide acclaim, including the Viareggio Prize, Italy’s most prestigious poetry recognition for Morte segreta (Secret Death) (1976); as well as the Montale Prize (1994) for lifetime achievement. Yet, in spite of early and consistent accolades, as an openly queer writer who died a premature death from AIDS-related complications, Bellezza’s work remained marginalized and not readily available for years, until publication of Tutte le poesie, by Mondadori in 2015.