Zdzisław Beksiński

Verses that whispers of defeat not as capitulation, but as a profound, vertigo-inducing surrender to the self’s unraveling.

—A DEFEATED MIND—

In the end, as if by chance,
the consoling dawn arrived,
out from the curse
of an endless night.

I observed, dizzy, the clouds
beyond the window,
racing madly in the livid sky.

Then a sort of vision:
the rays of a pale sun;
the light escapes,
for brief instants,
from the funerary drape
that covers the earth.

I followed the thread of an idea
on the reasons for existence

but I lost myself,
in the remote folds
of a defeated mind.

The thoughts chased each other
and overlapped, then,
headless and tailless;
swift as the clouds
in the storm-bearing sky.

…………………..

This rendering aims to preserve the poem’s spare, almost ascetic economy of language—its Italian original, with its terse lines and unadorned imagery, evokes the stark precision of a modernist etching, where every word is a deliberate incision into the canvas of despair. Della Casa, in this piece, conjures a landscape that is both external and inexorably internal: the dawn is no triumphant herald, but a “consoling” intruder, arriving “as if by chance,” as though mercy were a mere accident of the cosmos. The “maledizione di una notte senza fine” (curse of an endless night) sets the stage for existential exile, reminiscent of Beckett’s tramps in “Waiting for Godot”, where night devours time itself, leaving only the hollow echo of endurance.
Consider the vertigo of observation: “Osservai con vertigine,” Della Casa writes, a phrase that tilts the reader into the abyss. The clouds, “impazzite” (driven mad), hurtle across a “livido” sky—livid, bruised, the color of flesh after a blow. Here, nature is no benign Romantic force; it is a frenzied mirror to the mind’s turmoil, a sky “foriero di tempesta” (bearing storm), pregnant with impending rupture. This is poetry as seismograph, registering the tremors of a psyche adrift. The “visione” that follows—a pale sun’s rays piercing the “drappo mortuario” (funerary drape)—offers a fleeting reprieve, yet it is ephemeral: light “sfugge” (escapes), a fugitive gleam in the shroud of mortality. One senses echoes of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, where fragmented visions flicker against the backdrop of a desiccated world, but Della Casa’s tone is more intimate, less mythic; it is the defeat of the singular mind, not civilization’s grand collapse.
At the poem’s core lies the unraveling pursuit: “Ho seguito il filo di un’idea sulle ragioni dell’esistenza” (I followed the thread of an idea on the reasons for existence). This Ariadne’s thread, meant to guide through the labyrinth of being, instead leads to perdition—”mi sono perso, nelle remote pieghe della mia mente sconfitta.” The “defeated mind” is no mere metaphor; it is a topography of folds, remote and labyrinthine, where reason folds upon itself like origami gone awry. Thoughts “si sono inseguiti e sovrapposti… senza capo ne coda” (chased and overlapped… headless and tailless), a headless chase evoking the absurd, cyclical futility of Camus’s Sisyphus. Swift as storm clouds, they portend not clarity but chaos—a mental tempest where existential inquiry dissolves into formless velocity.