In the seven sections that mark the work ( "Introduction", "Love", "You", "Wisdom", "Fragments", "Canzonette of Canopus" and "Conclusion") Kuzmin puff impressions still lives on an album in which , as well as autobiographical story of a sparingly decrittabile affaire homoerotic, flock nerve figures of young men and courtesans - all fused with a city that serves not as a backdrop, but by subject, and is portrayed with a distant grace, at once, by every heaviness realistic and any abstraction bizarre. Then this "equidistance" is the outcome of a literary patina and a mannerism not specious, each reflecting the figures of poetic kuzminiana, it appears immediately to the reader, who finds himself thrown into a place still full of life, just barely distanced from the cooling touch of artifice. A place, therefore, "relived with an immediacy and a fervor unknown to all erudite rewrites in vogue in the symbolist epoch" (Ferretti) and that seems bathed in a bright nostalgia path from a compound grieve as those who practice a " Epicurean without vulgarity, refined un'edonismo "(Poggioli). That's why, despite the obvious literary debts of Kuzmin, already exhaustively probed by critics, despite the vague sense of shrine that blows from this elegant literature of fermented literature (he did speak of "valuable tempera dell'Alessandria gallery of the second century Christ "; Colucci), the Egyptian city ripullula still yearning for an existence in which a" radiant melancholy "(the third of" Wisdom ") poetry may be accompanied by an acceptance of the" death with no regrets for life "(ibid).
Particularly happy appears the translation, that moves within a loyalty register, as well as lexical, especially of tone. As Kuzmin, who at the time he bought an undisputed reputation for re-creator of past atmospheres, so the translator tinged his version of a stylizing paint that, in our latitudes and the height of 2015, primarily means use vocabulary here and there obsolete and a mellow music and not metronomic, that have the function of spacing the Italian in time without affogarvelo and thus to offer a convincing "parallel" operation of delicate repêchage implemented by the author. It can not, therefore, does not give an example:
«La gente vede gli orti e le dimore, / e il mare porporino del tramonto, / vede i gabbiani in volo sopra le onde / e donne in cima ai tetti piatti; / vede armature di guerrieri / e venditori di frittelle in piazza, / la gente vede sole e vede stelle, / ruscelli e rivi cristallini; / io invece vedo ovunque solamente / le gote tue olivastre ed emaciate, / gli occhi grigi sotto scuri sopraccigli, / l’incomparabile armonia del busto – così due occhi innamorati san vedere / ciò che il sapiente cuore ingiunge loro».
Alessandro Niero