I encountered this poem by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) this morning for the first time—and in Italian. I am reading The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani, and a young Ferrarese woman has translated the poem into Italian and sent it to a man who is in love with her. I don’t speak Italian, but I like the sound of it—and I’ve enjoyed to read the Italian version out loud, probably with an accent that would render the poem incomprehensible to an Italian.

Dickinson’s starting point must have been Keats’s famous like from Ode to a Grecian Urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Dickinson’s poem is bleak: truth and beauty, both entombed, chat away until “the moss had reached our lips,/And covered up our names.” The translator in the novel, a young spinster, describes it as the poem of an “elderly spinster. I read it more as life in Trump’s America.

Morii per la bellezza, Emily Dickinson

Morii per la Bellezza, ma ero appena
composta nella tomba
che un altro, morto per la verità,
fu disteso nello spazio accanto.

Mi chiese sottovoce perché ero morta
gli risposi “Per la Bellezza”.
“E io per la Verità, le due cose sono
una sola. Siamo fratelli” disse.

Così come parenti che si ritrovano
di notte parlammo da una stanza all’altra
finché il muschio raggiunse le labbra
e coprì i nostri nomi.

(traduzione di Piera Mattei)

I Died for Beauty by Emily Dickinson

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.”
And I for truth – the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.