Giacomo Sartori

trans. by Clarissa Botsford

Thank you, Frederika, for writing an email on March 18th five years ago, using the polite “lei” form, asking me for permission to translate a poem of mine. The frivolous little ditty was called “If I Die First” and the subject was, obviously, death.

You’d read it on the website Nazione Indiana and really liked it. Then you bought my first book from years before, which also ends with death. Our relationship started with death, which is always the best way to celebrate life (your translation is wonderful: to the boldness of your tone you add a fermenting, fizzy trill, that is all yours.)

Thank you for the delicacy of your soul that has known suffering.

Thank you for having fought with tireless determination, and without ever telling me about your defeats (which I could only intuit after the event), to publish my texts in your language. 

Thank you for your delicate but fearless sensibility, like a bird’s—you who so loved birds.

Thank you for having extended to our relationship, which was based on our literary work, our love of true words, the same purity I find in writing.

Thank you for your humility and devastating shyness in public, which were also awareness of your value, your embarrassment with handling it. 

Thank you for all your emails that were always quivering with dread at the idea you might be invading or taking up too much space, always on the alert, always necessary, even when the matter was light or simply urgent, always upbeat, Thank you for that name of yours—which is a little hard but which softens into the more evocative surname—that would arrive in my inbox.

Thank you for your intelligence.

Thank you for the generous and highly focused attention you paid to every single word of mine, even the ones that came out as light. Your ability to listen was like a scanner that gathers as much information as possible without judging, without putting things into boxes, without presuming. My words now wear the badge of your respect, steeped in your penetrating intelligence; my words are now especially careful to be as precise as possible. 

Thank you for your irony towards others and towards yourself, for your impatient inability to take yourself completely seriously.

Thank you for the benign seriousness with which you considered anything I wrote or had written. My works now wear the badge of that respect, they know they may deserve it.

Thank you for turning your gaze on to me, I perceived it as a reassuring (though disenchanted) enclosure of affection.

Thank you for never having talked ill of anybody to me, thank you for never going further than a fluttering or ironic allusion to this or that pettiness that had befallen you.

Thank you for your support in these five years, when in my life bastions crumbled and unexpected clearings opened up. Whenever I could, I expressed my gratitude, I have no regrets on this account, but I didn’t realize the strength your distant presence gave me. I felt it when I was informed you’d gone away. I’m feeling it now.

Thank you for the deep confidences in the words you spoke and in giving me access to the words you wrote (in recent times). They were blown-glass baubles I hung inside me, precious gifts I had to be careful not to shatter.

Thank you for expressing so often your gratitude, almost certainly born from the pages of my books, that I found so hard to accept (which is a form of stolid closure). 

Thank you for having always kept out of our garden all your numerous relationships, all the people you knew, the other authors you translated, your other affections, the fruits of your insatiable intellectual curiosity. Only now do I realize we were always just you and me. It’s a lesson I’m trying to learn. (“Keeping out” is not quite the right expression; it was rather not bringing into the picture anything that wasn’t strictly necessary, not mixing things up).

Thank you for your gaiety, just a little marbled with melancholy (you kept your ghosts to yourself), thank you for accepting that infinitesimal support I tried to give you when you needed it because it is by trying to care for others that you care for yourself.

Thank you for the example of how one can cohabit with physical infirmities, for how you accepted them without hating them (as long as they allowed you to cultivate your passion for the mot juste and the perfect turn of phrase), without hating yourself.

Thank you for the blessing (this, too, sprinkled with gaiety) you gave to my new love. Even before meeting him, from the idea you had developed from my words, and then when he was there in front of me when we met in December, and later.

Thank you for your modesty, which made me feel condescendingly tender, thank you for this distant proximity I don’t know how to define, that escapes my comprehension.

Thank you for being open to the sacred (which is simply what we do not know, what the words of great writers can conjure up), you who considered yourself an impenitent (and historicist) unbeliever.

Thank you for your torment, which in the still of your translations is transformed into delicate lace, crisp sounds that dress up my texts.

Thank you for dedicating your residual strength to translating a short story of mine, knowing full well, and telling me, that it was your last translation (but you wanted to translate it yourself). Thank you for resisting the exhaustion of physical pain. (It was—I now see—your way of saying goodbye.)

Thank you for your certainty that my work would be taken into consideration.

Thank you for leaving me now on my own with my force and with my fragility (a.k.a. on my ass), which is a way for me to use what you have given me and to make me ever aware of what I owe you.

Thank you for making me understand now what I could have given you before: I will always bear this is mind with the people dear to me.

Thank you for the message you sent me a week ago, the last one I received from you. In the last line you asked me if I could get rid of the word “death” (IS DEATH STRICTLY NECESSARY?) in the last line. I thought the word was right there but in order to please you I took it out. Both the last piece you translated for me and your last message ended with death. All that is left is the one in your message, yours. 

Thank you for not commenting on all these words; they are probably irritating you right now, or embarrassing you.

Thank you for leaving me with this pain and this emptiness, but also with that sense of fullness and joy that beautiful, peerless things leave you with. I will haul this cool, kindly shadow behind me wherever I go.

Giacomo Sartori is an agronomist specializing in soil studies. He is the author of seven novels and four collections of stories as well as poetry and texts for the stage and an editor of the literary collective Nazione Indiana. His novel I Am God was translated into English by Frederika Randall and published by Restless Books.

Clarissa Botsford has worked in the fields of teaching, intercultural education, editing, translating and publishing and is also a singer, violinist, and lay celebrant. Her translations include Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones, Condominium of the Flesh by Valerio Magrelli, and The Game by Alessandro Baricco.