ABSTRACT
Giovanna Sicari’s poetry asks “how we would live,” as she puts it in Rome during the Vigil (1999), one of the six collections from which poems have been selected for Naked Humanity: Poems 1981-2003 , and translated by Emanuel di Pasquale. Like many postwar Europeans, the Italian poet (1954-2003) aims her verse at this at once existential and metaphysical question. Many poems, not to mention the aforementioned title, then simultaneously evoke her “keeping watch” while she is pondering the matter; in other words, waiting, suspending all action, indeed watching, as if she could not decide how to live. While remaining attentive to what might happen, is happening or—alternatively—while becoming aware of all that can never be fulfilled or recovered (as regards the absences and losses that haunt her), she finds herself enveloped in an “anxious darkness that trembles / that does not breathe.” However, the suffocating vigil kept by this single individual is not the only strange, and estranging, wakefulness depicted. A state of vigil can also define the human condition; it can be maintained by all of “naked humanity.”
