By Diego Valeri
Translated by Laura Valeri
Beaten, uprooted trees are we
upright but smothered, and this miserly land
that carries us is not our land.
Around us, the rock blows enemy
winds, smokes opaque shadows of clouds,
sour suns flash from horizons
of green ice. Our secret roots,
in heat and frost, tremble naked.
Meanwhile, time turns in the sky
mornings, evenings: high desert
seasons; and the light of memory, and the fires
of hope, and the mad rainbows.
As if dead, we wait for death
to pass; and to each other we look, strangely,
with eyes like wilted leaves. And suddenly
we give a stupefied start when on the tip
of a dry limb a shoot unfolds,
and the bark may feel urging on the lip
of old wounds a living blood,
through the clouds a sweet wind flowing
like in the springs of our land.
Diego Valeri wrote “Exile Camp” about his exile to the Jungfrau region of Switzerland in 1944. In September of 1943 he was tried in absence by the temporary Nazi government occupying Venice and received a life sentence and exile to the concentration camp at Mathausen for refusing to print one of Hitler’s speeches in the newspaper he was curating during the temporary, Nazi-controlled Salo’ Government in Northern Italy. Diego Valeri is fondly remembered today as “the poet of Venice,” author of numerous celebrated poetry collections, works of travel prose and literary translations, and recipient of some of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes.
Laura Valeri is the author of three story collections and a book of essays. Her books have won the Iowa John Simmons Award, The Binghamton University John Gardner Award, and the Stephen F. Austin University Prize in Literary Fiction. Her new collection, The Dead Still Here, will be out in summer 2018 with Stephen F. Austin Press. Laura Valeri teaches at Georgia Southern University and is the founding editor of Wraparound South, a literary journal. Diego Valeri is her great, great uncle, and she’s at work on a biography about the poet’s friendship with Ezra Pound, research conducted under the auspices of the Diego Valeri Institute and the CINI Foundation in Venice, Italy.
