See, they are in an eggtimer instead,

There on the mantelpiece. Ah, ladies, I've

Determined, since he did no work alive,

The lazy pig shall do some now he's dead."

One widow took her man's remains as snuff,

Achieving an orgasmic kind of sneeze.

She said: "The bugger's appetite was rough.

He hentered, without even saying please,

My bother hapertures. Enough's enough.

But as he's dead I'll not begrudge him these."

Privy Matters

A man sat once, writhing in costive pain,

For a whole wretched hour, crouching inside

A public W.C. And though he tried

To loose the load, his muscles limp with strain,

He could not. Yet again. Again. Again.

But no. He heard a desperate urgent stride

To the next nook. A hefty splash. He cried:

"Lucky." – "Lucky? That was my watch and chain."

There is another ending, one that I

Have in a scatographic thesis met.

The costive heard the urgent feet draw nigh,

The thunder of release immediate.

"Ah, lucky," was his sigh. But the reply:

"Lucky? I haven't got me kecks down yet."

These sonnets are juvenile and tasteless, as one might expect from a Catholic Manchester schoolboy, but the same charges have been made against the work of Belli himself. One ought to note the attempt on the part of J. J. Wilson to use dialectal elements. A Catholic provincial, aware of his foreign blood, he never felt wholly at home in the patrician language of the British Establishment and would, especially in exalted company, deliberately use mystifying dialect words or adopt an exaggerated and near-unintelligible Lancashire accent. He was a small man, with reddish-gold hair inherited from his Irish mother, delicately, or frailly, made, shy, melancholic, heavy-smoking. He would smoke anything, from the wild flower called honesty to pure latakea, and his chest was weak. He was, he said, married to smoke. He never had any other wife.

Strangely, J. J. Wilson made his first translation of Belli, paraphrase rather, before becoming acquainted with the poet. A student at the University of Manchester in 1937, he was present at a lecture given to the University Literary Society by the Oxford poet G--y G--n. At the discussion over biscuits and coffee afterwards, J. J. ventured a remark to the effect that certain vital human experiences, such as menstruation in women and hangover in both sexes, had never been seriously dealt with even by modern poets. G--n looked him up and down over his coffee-cup and said: "You seem to be a rather coarse and unattractive character." Stung, Wilson went home and wrote the following:

The orchidaceous catalogue begins

With testicles, it carries on with balls,

Ballocks and pills and pillocks. Then it calls

On Urdu slang for goolies. Gism-bins

Is somewhat precious, and superior grins

Greet antique terms like cullions. Genitals?

Too generalised. Cojones (Español)'s

Exotic, and too whimsical The Twins.

Clashers and bells – poetical if tame.

Two swinging censers – apt for priest or monk.

Ivories, if pocket billiards is your game.

I would prefer to jettison such junk

And give them g--y g--ns as a name,

If only G--n had a speck of spunk.

Later he was to discover that he had, by anticipation, contrived a loose English equivalent of one of Belli's more outrageous sonnets.

Wilson took a moderate bachelor's degree in English Literature together with a subsidiary qualification in Italian. The language thus came back to the family via an interest in Petrarch. Of Belli Wilson had still heard nothing. He took a short holiday in Rome in 1938, was nearly beaten up by Fascisti when he made a "fat bacon" gesture at a portrait of Mussolini, but did not visit the Viale of Trastevere, where a statue of Belli stands. Because of his pulmonary weakness, he was rejected by the armed forces when war broke out, and he spent five years in the Ministry of Information, where his versifying talents were sporadically used for a propagandist end. He was loaned out briefly to the Ministry of Food, for which he wrote "Don't pine for a pud, make do with a spud" when flour was short and potatoes in reasonable supply, but the rhyme was rejected as possessing only a dialectal validity.

After the war J. J. Wilson, through a friend met in the American Embassy in London, was found a subsidiary post in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York City. He worked and lived in Manhattan until his death in 1959. He discovered the three-volume edition of Belli's Sonetti (Mondadori, 1952) in Brentano's bookshop, casually opened the first volume, and was at once both horrified and fascinated by the strange appearance of Belli's language:

Vedi l'appiggionante c'ha ggiudizzio

Come, s'è ffatta presto le sscioccajje?

E ttu, ccojjona, hai quer mazzato vizzio

D'avé scrupolo inzino de la pajje!

But, more than anything, it was the demented devotion to the sonnet-form that now drew him to Belli, and he saw a strenuous hobby beckoning – the translating of all the 2,279 sonnets of Belli into what he was to call "English with a Manchester accent." He needed help with the Roman dialect and had to search hard in New York, whose Italian population is mainly Neapolitan, Calabrese, Sicilian, to find a speaker and reader of Romanesco. A countergirl in the New York office of Alitalia – Susanna Roberti – was able to help him, and, horrified and fascinated by the magnitude of his self-imposed task, he set himself to translate a sonnet every day. He did not get far. He chose those sonnets dealing with biblical subjects and managed to achieve draft translations of them all. They follow here, unedited. He died prematurely (but what, when we think of Keats, can this be made to mean?), badly slashed and cracked by hoodlums on West 91st Street, where he lived, when he was staggering home at three in the morning from a party on East 84th Street. An uneasy and unhandsome death. The person is snatched away and the goods remain. And all this is the law and constitution of nature.

The Creation of the World

One day the bakers God amp; Son set to

And baked, to show their pasta-master's skill,

This loaf the world, though the odd imbecile

Swears it's a melon, and the thing just grew.

They made a sun, a moon, a green and blue

Atlas, chucked stars like money from a till,

Set birds high, beasts low, fishes lower still,

Planted their plants, then yawned: "Aye, that'll do."

No, wait. The old man baked two bits of bread

Called Folk – I quite forgot to mention it -

So he could shout: "Don't bite that round ripe red

Pie-filling there." Of course, the buggers bit.

Though mad at them, he turned on us instead

And said: "Posterity, you're in the shit."

Animals led a sort of landlord's life

And did not give a fuck for anyone

Till man fucked up their social union

With gun and trap and farm and butcher's knife.

Freedom was frolic, roughish fun was rife,

And as for talk, they just went on and on,

Yakking as good as any dean or don,

While Adam stood there dumb, with a dumb wife.

This was the boss who came to teach them what