IL ROVETO I, II, III, IV . The translators' notes. (Il Roveto, Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2005)

IL ROVETO I, II, III, IV

Volume: IL ROVETO. Poesie. Introduzione di LUCA LENZINIhttps://www.academia.edu/43689918/IL_ROVETO_Poesie_Introduzione_di_LUCA_LENZINI

IL ROVETO I

L’eccellenza del paradisiaco nella genesi e nel vocabolo:

Rosa Prima

Il consacrato mirabile del celato roseto non si lascia
sfuggire due rigori: il sermone intellettivo e l’allocuzione sonora.

L’intellettivo è l’esame dei radicali enigmi della
sopravvivenza, pena capitale, rinomanza del Poveracolo
e della sua santissima sorella.

La sonora è l’Ave Madrina, preceduta dal Pater,
filosofando e guardando con meraviglia in pari lasso le
quindici cardinali temperanze praticate dal fanciullo
scalzo e dolcissimo [e da Maria] nei quindici fatti
incomprensibili del Roseto propizio.

Nel brandello iniziale delle dieci rose di cui tratto, la
prima e l’ultima si omaggiano, e molto si vagliano gli
arcani gioiosi e i misteri angosciosi nella foggia e nella
regola in cui sono declamate al presente.

 
IL ROVETO II

 
Il rovo evanescente: Rosa Ultima

Devono una fede pia – increduli, non creduli – nel giusto
mezzo della verità e del vizio.
E sono questi Infanti orgogliosi, per carità, diffidenti a
negare – non le Sacre Scritture, ma il tranello alla fede e
alla morale [teso dal maligno].
La Tradizione smentiscono, in cui pure sprofondano per
orgoglio e pretesa sufficienza intinta del sangue del soffio vitale.
Seri autori d’umana fede, ai racconti non contrari né alla
ragione, polmoni straordinari e villosi – tesi i petti.
Ora il Rosario – salutazione angelica, santo rovo
evanescente, roseto, e, non per niente, perla d’Oriente e
d’Occidente – gioiello umile sottomesso, sola preghiera
essendo [le lacrime di Cristo di cui è intriso il sudario].
Certo è che i principi immateriali, inequivocabili,
poderosi e sfavorevoli del nostro periodo – scorrendo
con gli occhi di tal genere i rapporti – ne disporranno, in
ipotetico, l’autenticità come senza eccezione adibiscono a fare.
Nondimeno ego distinto non ho compiuto che trascriverli
da buoni autori contemporanei e in parte da un recente
libro del padre domenicano Anthonio Tomasi che
conferito ha il titolo Il Roseto ascetico a sua madre.
Del resto – indivisi – hanno appreso che sussistono tre
varietà d’adesione da concesse notizie. Agli episodi
riportati dalla santa pagella siamo tenuti ad offrire
assentimento altissimo; e ai resoconti irreligiosi che non
nauseano l’intelletto alcuno. Da niuna parte è scritto.

 
IL ROVETO III

 
*
Roveto che alimenta l’anima dell’aspide
come il sangue il corpo
e porta ad un cuore limpido
e puro così da poter veder il mondo torto.

Se stai cercando il roveto a memoria e non sai
da che parte cominciare, viene al punto
e addossati il vincolo d’implorare.
Puoi cercare in qualsiasi lampo

e ovunque. La richiesta
può cambiare la permanenza in vita
in un batter d’ala.
Chi cerca il roveto

è uomo singolare che indugia
meticolosamente, in serenità e silenzio,
volto bellissimo, vale a dire benevolo
che si rivela e splende
agli iridi del muscolo cardiaco.

 
**
Il cercare si fa disuguale.
Segue lunga sospensione
di latrato, impregnato
di desiderio intenso.

Un agognare del roveto il rovo.
Lo scopo della ricerca non sarà
conseguire ciò di cui si chieda ragione,
quanto piuttosto rimuovere la spina,

in divenire.
Colui che cerca, offre al roveto
ciò che è in suo potere
invocare: testimonianza
incessante dell’umana miseria. Anche se,

alla lunga, tra i labbri
si aprirà, costui, a devozione vocale
e, cercando, imparerà a cantare.

 

 
IL ROVETO IV

 
A lógica inumana do capitalismo

Posto fuori strada, nudo e lacero,
bocca universale, disumana,
Ei tutto si dona con una sola parola.

Ei mira – e si rimira –
come quando l’onda nasce e
muore. E contro l’energia, Ei vive ed opera,
vantando la soggiunta vetta.

Ai mortali muta indirizzo, all’uno l’amore,
all’altro il frangente, a tutti lor sorte.
Con vera calma, si vota a soppressione
della ragion fittizia. Ora,

come può Ei mai,
con cotal conoscenza,
negare siffatta potenza,
e al petto intanto stringerla?

Per propria essenza,
natura è sofferenza,
il sogno dell’Io
è parola d’artista.

(Erminia Passannanti, Il Roveto, Troubador Publishing Ltd., 2005)

THE THORNBUSH I

The excellence of the paradisaical in genesis and in word:
First Rose

The wondrous consecrated of the hidden rosebush
does not let slip two rigours: the intellectual sermon and the sonic address.

The intellectual is the examination of the radical enigmas of
survival, capital punishment, the renown of the Poor One
and his most holy sister.

The sonic is the Ave Godmother, preceded by the Pater,
philosophizing and marvelling in equal measure at the
fifteen cardinal temperances, practised by the barefoot and sweetest child [and by Mary]
in the fifteen incomprehensible deeds
of the propitious Rosebush.

In the initial fragment of the ten roses of which I treat,
the first and the last pay homage to each other,
and the joyful secrets and anguished mysteries are much weighed
in the form and rule in which they are declared in the present.

---

THE THORNBUSH II

The Evanescent Briar: Last Rose

They owe a pious faith—unbelieving, not credulous—in the just
middle of truth and vice.
And these Proud Infants, for heaven’s sake, are wary
to deny—not the Sacred Scriptures, but the snare to faith and
morality [set by the evil one].
They contradict Tradition, in which nonetheless they sink
through pride and assumed sufficiency dipped in the blood of vital breath.
Serious authors of human faith, to tales neither contrary nor
to reason, extraordinary and hairy lungs—chests stretched.
Now the Rosary—the angelic salutation, holy evanescent briar, rosebush,
and not for nothing, pearl of East and West—
humble submissive jewel, being the only prayer
[the tears of Christ with which the shroud is soaked].
It is certain that the immaterial, unequivocal,
powerful and unfavourable principles of our time—scanning
with eyes of such kind the accounts—will dispose, hypothetically,
its authenticity as they without exception are accustomed to do.
Nonetheless, I myself have only transcribed them
from good contemporary authors and partly from a recent
book by the Dominican father Anthonio Tomasi entitled
The Ascetic Rosebush to his mother.
Moreover—undivided—they have learned that there exist three
varieties of adherence from granted news. To the episodes
reported by the holy page, we are bound to offer
the highest assent; and to irreligious accounts that nauseate no intellect.
It is written nowhere.

---

THE THORNBUSH III

*

Thornbush that feeds the asp’s soul
as blood feeds the body
and leads to a clear
and pure heart so as to see the twisted world.

If you are searching for the thornbush by memory and do not know
where to begin, come to the point
and take upon yourself the bond to implore.
You can search in any flash

and anywhere. The request
can change the stay in life
in the blink of an eye.
He who seeks the thornbush

is a singular man who lingers
meticulously, in serenity and silence,
a beautiful face, that is, benevolent,
which reveals itself and shines
to the irises of the cardiac muscle.

**

The seeking becomes uneven.
A long suspension follows
of barking, impregnated
with intense desire.

A yearning for the thornbush, the briar.
The purpose of the search will not be
to achieve what is asked for reason,
but rather to remove the thorn,
in becoming.

He who seeks offers to the thornbush
what is in his power
to invoke: incessant testimony
of human misery. Even if,

in time, between the lips
he will open, to vocal devotion,
and, seeking, will learn to sing.

---

THE THORNBUSH IV

The inhuman logic of capitalism

Placed astray, naked and torn,
universal mouth, inhuman,
He gives himself all with a single word.

He aims—and re-aims—
like when the wave is born and
dies. And against energy, He lives and acts,
boasting the added summit.

To mortals He changes direction, to one love,
to another the breaker, to all their fate.
With true calm, He dedicates Himself to the suppression
of fictitious reason. Now,

how can He ever,
with such knowledge,
deny such power,
and meanwhile hold it to His chest?

By His own essence,
nature is suffering,
the dream of the Self
is the word of the artist.

-----------------------------------
On Reading Il Roveto (2005, Troubador Publishing Ltd), by Erminia Passannanti

Translators' Notes

---

THE IRONY OF ROSES

*Introduction to the collection Il Roveto (Troubador ublishing Ltd.,, 2005) by Luca Lenzini

Critical discourse around the poetry of Erminia Passannanti has largely mobilized conceptual categories rooted in twentieth-century modernism: surrealism, dreamwork, the fragmentation of the self. These terms are not misapplied. On the contrary, they touch upon some of the deeper currents animating her poetics—manifest also in Il Roveto—which unfold in a liminal zone between reality and imagination, between the unconscious and rational cognition, wherein the subject becomes the stage for a choreography of apparitions and erasures governed by a “fantastic logic” (in Guido Guglielmi’s phrase): unpredictable, disobedient, and critically insurgent.

Such a logic operates both at the level of poetic construction and linguistic articulation, through displacements and feverish mutations. In this collection, it reveals itself above all in the continuous contamination of heterogeneous and often contradictory registers: the collocation of colloquial expressions—such as “not for nothing” or the Christologically charged “arrivederci e ciao”—with archaisms that verge deliberately on the kitsch; the juxtaposition of religious diction with shards of bureaucratic jargon, procedural technospeak, or anglicisms. The result is a hybridized, creolized idiom that no longer lays claim to a native home.

Thus, we encounter “snowy expanses” alongside a “dark threshold” in the same line; liturgical Latin jostling with “subsection 3 of article bis”; “joyous arcana” mingled with “anguished mysteries,” “bolus” beside “brothel,” “socially determined” with “redemption.” High and low, sacred and profane, somatic and intellectual, concrete and abstract—these oppositions enter the poetic weave on equal footing, not as jarring incongruities but as elements in pursuit of a vision “beyond the veil and the cloud of impermanence.” The ambition is high. So much so that—by no means uncommonly—the drive toward a recomposition or sublimation of subjective fracture within the multifaceted mirror of the text (a dynamic that has led some to evoke Sylvia Plath, though other names could be summoned) turns paradoxically into a modality of irony: a dialectica destruens through which the trace of transcendence, that elusive promise of fullness, is approached via negation or regression, only to be continually deferred or denied.

“In distance, hope / in outline, the day / in immediate presence, absence / for their capacity to grasp therein / ideas inadequate to close inspection.”
(Teoria della pintura)

And by a specular inversion, the baroque exuberance of a mimetic enterprise that tends toward the limitless—imaginatively extroverted and audacious—can at times turn toward more restrained, meditative tones, the lyric subject transfigured into “the sole spectator among many empty chairs” (Il sentiero delle more).

In Roveto III, a poem that may be read as a keystone within the collection, the verb to seek occurs eight times. The structure of the text—and arguably its very metrics—offer the reader the imprint, the echo, of a quest, one traced along the paths of the great mystics. Yet it is telling that the poemetto—so it is styled on the title page, despite consisting of discrete, autonomous compositions—is defined not by narrative teleology but by a drive which, informed by the dialectical and theatrical dynamics already described, might best be characterized as “pedagogical.” A pedagogy, however, of the ungraspable—its object ever receding, ever falling outside of doctrinal containment, even as the texts teem with rites, prayers, and devotional tropes.

At times, both in the search for a structuring order pursued outside narrative and, more markedly, at the level of diction, there emerges a formidable genealogy—an intellectual lineage of considerable gravitas—in which special weight must be given to La poesia delle rose (1962) by Franco Fortini, a work Passannanti has both translated and commented on. This is difficult terrain: in Fortini’s text, the collision of reason and unreason, order and disorder, activates a symbolico-cultural universe of rare density, a figurative dialectics both artfully orchestrated and fundamentally ambivalent, wherein inside and outside contest one another while continually exchanging places. The polylingualism and ironic desublimation (Luperini has described Passannanti’s strategy as one of “humorous doubling”) that traverse Il Roveto stage a different kind of via crucis, one equally marked by psychic discontinuity but less obscure and more erotically wounded.

But then, what kind of knowledge might one salvage at the end of this itinerary of dérèglement and refusals? What lesson, if any, does the counterfeit liturgical table set forth in the text portend? An enigmatic prelude at the book’s threshold gestures toward an answer. A gnomic prose fragment closes with:

“War is continuous, incalculable. The transmutation of consent into ignorance is the condition of survival.
This is my perception of power relations: of abuse and legitimacy.
Everything is allegorical.”

It is rare to encounter statements so categorical and yet so measured within the elegiac, often introverted domain of lyric poetry. But those seeking direct and situated references to the historical present—rather than oblique fragments or lexical residues thereof—will be disappointed, and might suspect that the final declaration, “Everything is allegorical,” functions merely as a catchall to smuggle in impulses of a purely subjective order. And yet there is no smuggling here. For in Il Roveto, the exposition of subjectivity and the allegorical drive coexist in a strange, estranging symbiosis. Just as the intellectual element of irony does not dissolve but rather sharpens the mystical fervor of the imagery, so too the mention of “war” casts light on the latent violence that circulates throughout the texts—a violence ritualized and dispersed, frequently figured in sacrificial terms.

After all, what is it that irony and allegory share if not the gesture of pointing elsewhere? The verbal fabric of Il Roveto, saturated with religious overtones, proliferating across verse and prose, seems designed to translate—deliberately and to excess—the myriad forms of abuse, rendering them profane and challenging tradition in order to expose domination. Yes, everything is allegorical. At least for the reader who does not capitulate to the eternal così è broadcast from screens and repeated daily by the shrill chorus of opinion-makers; for the gaze that refuses surface appearance and seeks elsewhere, striving to decipher something beyond the tautological violence of normative doxa.

There is an echo of this in the meticulous—one might say pedantic—somatic instructions for the education of the spirit that Il Roveto metes out with bureaucratic sadism. This, perhaps, is the most radically new territory explored by the author in comparison with her previous work: a kind of script for the expiation of a character suspended between Beckett and Almodóvar. But against this imposed order, the disorder of the self responds with obstinate intensity—its conflicts, its dazzling visions: the bramble path, monks descending alone into the mountains, a face of radiant beauty.

For this reason, the prescriptions of Esercitazione all’ascolto should not be taken lightly. There is another order—undecipherable, unheard-of—whose trace poetry bears like the cross, or the thorn, of an invisible tattoo.

Luca Lenzini, Siena 2005.

TRANSLATORS ’ NOTES

1. Brian Cole

“Il Roveto” (which means “The Thornbush”) is a powerful and layered section of poetry by Erminia Passannanti. It’s not the kind of writing you skim through. It asks you to sit with it, to feel it in your body as much as in your mind. These poems put together religious imagery, philosophical thought, social criticism, and a kind of mystical searching that is both deeply personal and openly political. 

The poems seem deeply serious about spirituality and religious experience, wholly immersed in Christian imagery such as the rosary, Ave Maria, Pater Noster, and Christ’s tears, yet they maintain an intellectually probing, sometimes sceptical stance, questioning human pride, false faith, and the threats to authentic belief, while adopting a reflective, often sombre tone rather than a purely celebratory or dogmatic one.

Let’s start with the title: “Il Roveto” immediately brings to mind the burning bush from the Book of Exodus, the moment when God speaks to Moses. But in Erminia’s hands, the bush becomes something else. Yes, it’s still a sacred symbol, but it also begins to represent the burning questions of being human: suffering, thought, the body, and the constant fire of doubt and desire.

The First Poem – Il Roveto I

Here, the language is rich and intense—mixing liturgical vocabulary with the voice of the thinker. We hear about “the wondrous consecrated of the hidden rosebush” and how it relates to “capital punishment.” Christ is portrayed as “poor among the poor” (also named the “poveracolo”, sounding like “tabernacolo”. There’s also a mention of “his most holy sister,” possibly referring to Mary Magdalene, or maybe a broader symbol of sacred femininity.

This poem is full of allusions to the Rosary, but everything has been transformed. The traditional "fifteen mysteries" become something stranger, more dreamlike. The figure of “the barefoot child” brings gentleness into this world of high ideas, grounding the sacred in the real.

The Second Poem – Il Roveto II

Things shift here. We meet the “Proud Infants”, figures who are still connected to the faith but question it deeply. They don’t reject belief outright, but they refuse the traps that tradition sometimes lays for morality and conscience. There’s a tension between reverence and resistance.

This section also has a sharp wit. There’s a nod to a fictional Dominican priest named “Anthonio Tomasi” and his Ascetic Rosary, which may be a playful jab at overly rigid religiosity. Erminia seems to ask: Can we still find something true and holy, even if we don't buy into every rule? The answer seems to be yes—but only if we’re willing to speak in our own voice.

The Third Poem – Il Roveto III

Here, the mystical turns inward. This poem is quieter, but no less intense. We meet the “seeker”—someone who looks for the briar, for truth, not by solving riddles, but by embracing vulnerability and silence. There’s a beautiful image of someone who waits “in serenity and silence” for something sacred to reveal itself.

This isn’t about finding God in the heavens, but about being willing to walk barefoot, to open your mouth and sing through the pain. The “briar that feeds the asp’s soul” is a haunting metaphor: it suggests both danger and life, holiness and venom, all tangled together. The act of seeking becomes the devotion itself.

The Fourth Poem – Il Roveto IV

Now, the lens widens. The burning bush becomes a symbol for the world we live in today—specifically, the harsh, dehumanizing logic of capitalism. Phrases like “inhuman logic” and “a universal, inhuman mouth” show how Erminia sees modern society as a kind of false sacred—offering power but leaving us empty.

Still, the poem doesn’t stop at critique. There’s a kind of promise in it. Even here, in the wreckage, the poet believes in something real. “The dream of the Self / is the word of the artist,” she writes. That line says it all: art and poetry aren’t just nice extras—they are how we survive, how we resist the world’s noise with something real, something burning.

Reading “Il Roveto” feels like walking a strangely modern Via Crucis—a path of the cross made not of stone, but of words. It’s a journey through sorrow, knowledge, faith, defiance, and irony. Erminia never takes the easy way out. Her poems are dense, sometimes difficult, especially because they sound theatrical, but always intriguing. They carry a voice that is unafraid to break things open, to question, to stand still in the fire and wait for meaning to speak.

As noted by Italian scholar Luca Lenzini, who authored the introduction to the collection Il Roveto, “Passannanti’s poetry is a place of 'fracture and mediation'”—between the self and the sacred, the body and the name, guilt and knowledge. And perhaps that’s what makes Il Roveto so compelling: it is not just a book of poems, but a journey through a place where language burns, and something other than 'holy' rises with the smoke."

Brian Cole

(BA in Modern Languages, Oxford University)

co-translator of 5 poems from the collection Il Roveto /2005.

---

2. Anna Cole

I have co-translated these five poems with my husband, Brian. When I first encountered Il Roveto—The Thornbush—I knew I was being invited into something more than poetry. The text came to me not as a call to translate, but as a quiet summons to witness: to look closely at language spun so tightly with meaning that you risk unthreading it with even the gentlest touch.

These poems don’t merely invite translation; they demand dedication. It felt like stepping into a deep, mysterious spiritual labyrinth. But they are not “religious” in a simplistic or purely devotional sense. They resemble postmodernist theology in poetic form, where faith is both embedded in lyrical tradition and personally questioned.

“Il Roveto” is an allegorical cycle, structured like a Rosary—meditative and spiralling inward. Though I am not a theologian, I felt drawn to its pulse: its balance of weight and grace, its fierce mourning braided with awe. As someone who believes deeply in the power of the right words spoken plainly, I found in these verses a paradox I could not resist: a plain mystery. The allegory is thick, yes, but never smug. The poet does not seek to obscure—she seeks to distil.

I. The Paradisaical Excellence – “First Rose”

The first poem opens as a kind of genesis of the rosebush, of prayer, of poetry itself. The “hidden rosebush” is no mere flowerbed. It is the Rosary, yes, but also the human soul under contemplation. It’s “consecrated,” and yet thorned. Two “severities”—the intellect and the voice—approach it: one questions, the other praises. What is examined in this poem is the function of devotion: not blind belief, but deep questioning carried by sacred repetition. I was moved by how the poem does not dismiss suffering or doctrine, but sifts through them, almost like a child trying to understand why the world aches even when the prayer is beautiful.

II. The Vanishing Briar – “Last Rose”

This section speaks to the modern believer, or the nearly-believer, caught in an age that venerates critique over commitment. These “Proud Infants” aren’t unbelievers, but doubters wrapped in inherited faith. The poem is acutely aware of the tension between rejecting corrupt tradition and still needing the spiritual truth it sometimes obscures. In translating, I was struck by how tenderly the poet views this internal conflict. She does not scold. She mourns the loss of clarity. The Rosary here becomes a metaphor not just for prayer, but for memory, for ancestral grief, and for a practice we might inherit without understanding—but still find ourselves kneeling before.

III. The Seeker and the Briar

This is the most interior of the poems, a kind of spiritual map where seeking becomes a form of becoming. The thornbush (Roveto) feeds not the mind, but the “asp’s soul”—the serpentine, shadow self we each carry. Seeking the thorn becomes a way of encountering not doctrine, but truth stripped of authority: raw, bruising, vital. The seeker isn’t a priest or prophet. She is “a singular person,” quiet, longing, open. And the poet suggests that through the act of seeking, not finding, we begin to sing. Translating this section was like moving through silence, following soundless prayer until it finally broke into voice.

IV. Capitalism and the Thorn

This last piece turns outward again. Here, the “thorn” becomes a symbol of resistance, of the divine word cutting through the false logic of capital. “The dream of the Self / is the word of the artist,” the poet writes. And I hear it not as despair, but clarity. The God in this poem is not triumphant but torn, watching, absorbing the grief of a mechanised world. Still, He gives all. Still, He speaks. In this poem, language becomes the last act of hope.

Translating these four poems, gathered under the title “Il Roveto”, was not easy. Allegory rarely is, especially when it is alive, shifting with each re-reading, refusing final answers. I had to make peace with not knowing everything. I had to listen. I tried to preserve the rhythm of devotion, the breath between ideas, the hush of reverence. I am not a mystic. I am not a scholar in Christian Theology. But I am a woman who believes that poetry, like prayer, need not be understood to be lived. I offer these translations as someone who stood before the briar and quietly asked to enter.

That said, I may be completely wrong, and this series of poems, along with the entire collection, might be saying something entirely different from what I have understood. While it seems to speak deeply of religiosity and spiritual tradition, perhaps it is, in fact, a hidden parody: using the language and symbols of faith not to affirm them, but to question, subvert, or even gently mock the very traditions it invokes. That possibility lingers, inviting readers to remain open to multiple layers of meaning.

Anna Cole

(MA in Philosophy, Oxford).

Co-translator of 5 poems from the collection Il Roveto

About the Translators

Anna and Brian Cole are a husband-and-wife translation team united by their deep engagement with contemporary Italian poetry. Their collaboration here centres on four poems from the section "Il Roveto", which gives its name to Erminia Passannanti’s full collection (Il Roveto, Troubador Publishing Ltd., 2005). Their partnership is grounded not only in literary acumen, but in a shared commitment to exploring challenging texts through both a linguistic and emotional lens. Brian Cole previously translated Passannanti’s Macchina (Manni Editore, 2000), introducing Anglophone readers to the author’s distinct poetic voice—philosophically complex, formally adventurous, and rich in allegorical resonance.

With "Il Roveto", Anna joins the endeavour, bringing her interpretive clarity, philosophical insight, and poetic sensitivity to the translation process. Together, they approach Passannanti’s writing not merely as translators, but also as close friends of the poet. Their work on the four-part poem cycle “Il Roveto” reflects a partnership finely attuned to nuance: Anna’s background in philosophy and literature complements Brian’s experience with European poets such as Bartolo Cattafi and with Passannanti’s earlier work.

The result is a translation that remains faithful to the original's density while opening its resonances to English-speaking readers, aided by their thoughtful commentary. Their collaboration is a testament to the relational nature of translation—between languages, between authors and interpreters, and, in this case, between two people joined by both creative vocation and personal affection.