Hungry Ghosts

By Gabriele Tinti & Roger Ballen at Poetry Foundation: Gabriele Tinti’s Hungry Ghosts is a cycle of 51 poems written in collaboration with the photographer Roger Ballen, whose photographic negatives are reproduced in the book. The images are mostly terrifying, in keeping with the otherworldly inclination of the poems. This bilingual edition includes Tinti’s original Italian poems with English translations by David Graham, interspersed with Greek lines taken from inscriptions found on archaeological objects and from ancient Greek texts.

The book is inspired by the Petavatthu, a Theravada Buddhist scripture that includes stories about the realm of the “hungry ghosts,” a category of supernatural beings ubiquitous in East and South Asian religions, with section headings such as “Abandoned Ghosts,” “Protectors,” “Guardians,” and “Hungry Ghosts.” The poems are quite short and try to emulate the obscure, esoteric quality of scriptural language, though they struggle, at times, under the weight of too many venerable references drawn from both Buddhist and Greek traditions.

In “Held tight in the stone” Tinti writes: “Held tight in the stone / he rises, bends, boils.” “Strange Sounds” begins:

Strange sounds
from somewhere,
stench of mildew,
ashes in the mouth

Ballen’s macabre images evoke a ghostly world that, the artist seems to suggest, may shadow our own. In one, a disfigured, oversized rat leans on a cube that bears a drawing of a child’s face; on the wall behind it, there are more heads and faces of children drawn in chalk. In another, a doll lies on the back of a pigeon while the oversized image of a child appears to look on from above. Reading this book in our current moment it’s impossible to not see the faces of the slaughtered children of Gaza in these images.

This is one of the points of tension in the book—while the poems gesture toward spiritual disillusionment and an afterlife, the images are resonant with the implacable and real horrors of the present. From “Faded Ghost”: