THE ARRIVAL by Amalia Guglielminetti, translated by Alani Hicks-Bartlett

THE ARRIVAL

By surprise, I will happen upon an azure morning in May:

after the long journey, I will be where you are, unexpected.

My face will carry the deadly pallor of a sleepless fatigue,

and the heart that shatters in me from the joy that is similar to sorrow.

Or it will truly be sorrow, it will be like a stifled cry,

like my mind’s treacherous forgetfulness.

And an hour, or perhaps a day—I will not have even seen you yet—

I will contemplate my return with an acute desire.

Perhaps, as if under a spell—I will not have even heard you yet—

it will seem that I have been cured of that love of shadows and weeping of mine.

But when you, with an astonished joy, outstretch your arms to me

I will fall into them with a blanched face, like a dying woman.

Author and Translator Bios

Born in 1885 in Torino, Italy, Amalia Guglielminetti (d.1941) was an incisive, engaging, and expansive protofeminist writer who was prolific in multiple genres: poetry, theatre, epistolary, and narrative. Hailed by Gabriele D’Annunzio as one of Italy’s most singular poets, Guglielminetti was met with great success during her lifetime, and was deeply valued by her contemporaries. Although contemporary Italophone readers continue to enjoy and appreciate her work, her extensive oeuvre has yet to receive the attention it merits amongst Anglophone audiences. Published in 1913, Guglielminetti’s third volume of poetry, L’insonne [The Insomniac], is arguably the most determinative of her nine poetic collections, and the collection most revelatory of a distinctive authorial voice. It covers themes ranging from: estrangement and affective distance from a beloved to emotional discord; from living like a somnambulist “as if under a spell” to negotiating hard-won felicity, akin to sorrow; from philosophical ruminations on the passage of time to the murky distinctions between light and darkness, vigilance and somnolence, life and death, as “L’arrivo” [The Arrival], the poem translated here shows.

Alani Hicks-Bartlett is currently a Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, where she is writing a monograph on disability and premodern literature. Her recent poems and translations have appeared in The Stillwater Review, ANMLY, Cagibi, carte blanche, The Laurel Review, Broad River Review, The Festival Review, Lolwe, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others, and she was nominated for a Pushcart by La Piccioletta Barca for her poem “bereavement.” She is currently working on a collection of villanelles, an epic poem, as well as a series of translations from Medieval French, French, Portuguese, and Italian literature.

© Amalia Guglielminetti. Translation © by Alani Hicks-Bartlett. All rights reserved.

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