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Mid-day Torpor, Pale and Vague

Mid-day Torpor, Pale and Vague

This is my version of Eugenio Montale's celebrated poem 'Meriggiare pallido e assorto' (original Italian here) , first written in 1916.

The date is significant. Though the poem appears as an anti-idyll, nature poem, it's actually permeated by the carnage of World War I. 

Montale

 

Midday torpor, pale and vague

Beside the crumbling garden wall

Hear from the thickets and the thorns,

Snap of blackbird, scatter of snake.

 

Through cracks in the mud, in its wrinkles,

Marauding armies of red ants

Now breaking ranks, now interlinking

To fight over some insignificant mount.

 

Leaves quake as the sea below

Ripples its scales, and starts up 

Cicadas shaking with rage 

Screeching from arid escarpments.

 

Blinded where sun blazes

Shadowed by sad amazement

How our life and labours

Are followed like this path

By a wall of jagged glass. 

 

Published in Translations
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Links and Contact Details

Live Tweeting

Over the last few years I've created some attention with my live coverage of the phone hacking trial in London, the most expensive and longest concluded criminal trial in British history. There are various accounts and articles about this on the web, including a radio play. My Twitter feed can be found here, and a collation of evidence from the trial, and all my live tweets, can be found at my Fothom Wordpress blog. There's also a Flipboard magazine and a Facebook Page. My Klout ranking is here.

More Journalism and Books

Various journalistic articles of mine are scattered throughout the web. There's some kind of portfolio at Muckrack. The most extensive reporting is for the Daily Beast and Newsweek, but there's more at the New Statesman, the New Republic, Aeon etc. I have two non fiction books published in the last year: The Fall of the House of Murdoch, available through Unbound or Amazon, and Beyond Contempt: the Inside Story of the Phone Hacking Trial, available via Canbury Press or also on Amazon. I am currently contributing to a new site for open source journalism, called Bellingcat, and advisor (along with Sir Harry Evans and Bill Emmott) to an exciting new crowdfunded journalism startip Byline. 

Getting in Contact

My generic email is my first name at peterjukes.com. That should get through to me pretty quickly. My Linked In profile is here. For non journalistic inquiries, for television stage and film, contact Howard Gooding at Judy Daish Associates. Examples of my television work can be found on IMDB. This links to the site for my forthcoming musical, Mrs Gucci. My radio plays can be found in various audiobook formats on Amazon and elsewhere.

 

Copyright

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Copyright Peter Jukes/Duende Productions 2014

Fiction

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