Swan Isle
Review by David Starkey
As someone who has spent a fair bit of time in the Eternal City, I can say that in order to truly love Rome, you have to hate it first—maybe a little, maybe a lot. Many parts are overrun with tourists, things frequently don’t work, or don’t work the way you want them to, and the place has been around so long that, ultimately, it doesn’t care much whether you like it or not.
Rafael Alberti certainly had a love-hate relationship with the city, which is what makes the poems in Rome: Pedestrians Beware (Roma: Peligro para caminantes) so alive—and often quite comic. One series of poems, for instance, concerns the predilection of Romans to urinate outdoors: “I Go Out to Measure Streams of Piss,” “Rome Specializes in Cats and Piss,” “Today a Dog Pissed on My Shoes,” “Oh Urinal City of the Universe,” “How the Flowing Water.” Of course, there are more serious efforts, too. A number of the poems are set at night—“While I sleep, / the bells of the Trastevere / in my dreams they come and go”—and his sonnets can be quite lovely: “Oh Rome, my sorrow pleads, hold out your hands / and give me everything I left for you.” Even when Alberti is dogging on the city, there’s always a kind of sly admiration: “Rome cracks under the rain, Rome / murders her citizens when it rains. / What an honor to die crushed by a fragment / of Roman sculpture, / the shard of a cornice by Michelangelo, / by eternally illustrious, venerable rubble!”
Born in Spain in 1902, Alberti and wife fled the country for Paris at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. They lived with Pablo Neruda for a year, then moved to Argentina when the Nazis invaded France in 1940. They escaped the right-wing government for Italy in 1963, living in Rome until 1977 when they returned to Spain. His life was made more complicated by the fact that he refused to shut up when told to do so, and that outspokenness permeates his poetry.
This edition of Rome: Pedestrians Beware takes the form of a rectangular-shaped book, which makes sense considering that each poem is translated from the Spanish into both English, by Anthony L. Geist, and Italian, by Giuseppe Leporace. Geist also contributes a brief introduction, and he and Leporace co-author a short essay entitled “Alberti, Translators Beware,” which mostly focuses on the book’s inspiration, a class the two taught where students traveled to important places in Alberti’s life in Spain and Rome.
The other contributor to the book is photographer Adam L. Weintraub who, in his essay “The Language of Light,” notes that while he originally intended to faithfully translate Alberti’s images into photographs, he soon realized that the ever-evolving cityscape meant that he would have “to honor Alberti’s concepts, not his precise words,” which were written in the mid-60s. Weintraub tells us to “Enjoy the occasional glow of a mobile phone! Ignore the Smart car! And revel in the reality of Rome, today, eternally changing for subsequent eras.”
Like Rome itself, the book is something of a visual circus. The trilingual poems on one page face off against Weintraub’s spectacular color photos on the next. For someone with a limited working proficiency in Spanish and Italian (raises hand), just reading the poems in all three languages can be a bit exhausting, even when the phrasing is fairly straightforward: “A quien me ha mordido, / a quien me ha comido / la vida yo vi.” “The one who bit me, / the one who devoured / my life, that’s who I saw.” “Chi me ha morso, / chi mi has rosicchiato / la vita, ho visto.” Add to that the act of contemplating the photographs, then rereading the verse, and it makes for a very active reading experience, especially as the photos often don’t exactly match the words. The poem “arthritis (i),” for instance is illustrated by an elderly woman walking her puppy down a litter-strewn alley. “arthritis (ii)” is illustrated by steep stone stairs.
Even with the generous white space around the poems and photographs, the book can sometimes feel cluttered, but of course that’s exactly how Rome itself feels, and I would argue that Rome: Pedestrians Beware can hold its own against most guidebooks as an accurate representation of the city. If nothing else, it offers visitors the invaluable advice of minding how you go.
