FOUND IN TRANSLATION
I’m excited to get to write for Mad Poets about poetry in translation. If you’ve attended a lot of the First Wednesday readings at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford, you’ll have noticed that translators of poetry (often also poets themselves) present their work from time to time. It’s a task that fascinates me: the verbal texture of a poem is so important, but every language has its own, even languages as close as French and Spanish, or German and Dutch. Every language has things it does better than any other, and you can bet those things wind up in poems. How then can a translator bring the poem into a new language, keeping it a poem instead of a prose retelling?
And yet poetry has exerted huge influence through translation, from Classical Greek or Latin shaping the writing of the Renaissance—or Italian sonnets spurring Elizabethan writing—to the very spare form of haiku flowering in other languages, including American English. Look closely at any big literary movement, and you’ll find translation at its roots.
So I look forward to writing about this.
ENGLISH BESIDE THE ITALIAN
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allegria, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2020.
I had to pick up this volume because I had previously acquired Brock’s collection of Italian poetry (data). I hear from people more knowledgeable than I about Italian poetic culture that Ungaretti is a very big deal, very popular—think W. H. Auden or Robert Frost. He’s present in public culture over fifty years after his death. Geoffrey Brock is a wonderful translator and a poet himself as well; anything he has translated is worth picking up to check out.
The volume has no introduction: you open it and immediately hit poetry. The final section of “Afterthoughts,” pp. 194-98, does provide essential context: Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in 1888 in Egypt (to Italian parents; his father was working on the Suez Canal), and he died in 1969. This book translates the 1931 version of Ungaretti’s evolving collection L’Allegria, which Brock calls “a seminal work of Italian modernism.” The poems were written between 1914 and 1919, overlapping WWI, in which Ungaretti fought in the Italian army. The publisher, Archipelago, always produces lovely books with a strong family resemblance. The presentation here feels especially well-suited to a bilingual edition of poetry.
Each poem appears in Italian on the left, English on the right (and implicitly secondary). Many of the poems are very brief, only two or three lines, and each poem gets its own page (or as much as needed), short ones tending to alternate with longer. Sometimes only the place and date of composition, supplied for almost every poem, make clear that difficulties evoked come from being at war. If you know French or Spanish, you’ll get a lot of the Italian, but it’s very rich and evocative even if you don’t quite get it. You can note the cognate words: “solitudine” and “solitude,” “benedizione” and “benediction,” “discendente” and “descendant.” Brock doesn’t do this mechanically: “sull’umido asfalto” (p. 4) is “on damp asphalt,” not “on humid asphalt” (which would have been kind of cool, but lazy); “confusa” (8) is “murky” (9), “torbido” (24) is “gloomy” (25). Words with Germanic origins get their chances alongside Latinate vocabulary. The only choice I doubted, in SONNOLENZA (SLEEPINESS, not “SOMNOLENCE,” pp. 100-101), where “the grumble of crickets” “E s’accompagna/ ala mia inquietudine” – “It keeps my troubles/ company.” Here the longer, more similar “It accompanies /my troubles” might have made the crickets work like an awkward musical accompaniment, as if the troubles too are audible (“inquietudine” after all). For those who know Italian, of course, you don’t need a translation to get Ungaretti, but you can follow and evaluate Brock’s work—and then share with readers who need the English.
Almost every poem offers a grain of the unexpected, or a turn at the end, and they are quite refined, satisfying to read from a variety of aspects. Some of the verses could be set anywhere, while others offer specific details from the poet’s life (his Arab friend who committed suicide after difficult immigrant experience, pp. 32-35), but always presented in brief brushstrokes.
Like a proper modernist, Ungaretti does not write formal verse and does not even use punctuation, but he provides a lot of delicate soundplay:
…un uomo (a man…)
e pare un’ombra (p. 6) (he seems a shadow (p. 7)
Here is the difficulty of the whole enterprise: the original is simple and clear (though evocative), and so should the translation be, but “man” and “shadow” have less phonetic relationship than uomo/un’ombra. How to balance what the original says in terms of meaning and HOW the original says it, which is what makes it poetry? Over the course of the book, Brock does convey both the sound richness and the simplicity of the originals, though not always in the same parts of the page.
In just a few cases the verse does rhyme, as in the third stanza from ANNIENTAMENTO = ANNIHILATION (pp. 50-51):
M’ama non m’ama She loves me loves me not
mi sono smaltato I have painted myself
di margherite with daisies
mi sono radicato have rooted
nella terra marcita in the rotted earth
sono cresciuto have grown
come un crespo like a thistle
sullo stelo torto on its twisted stalk
mi sono colto have gathered myself
nel tuffo in the cascade
di spidalba of hawthorn
The Italian has an incantatory quality (recalling the cliché—whose author I forget—that Italian speech is doomed to come out as poetry, if not as an outright aria): smaltato/radicato, margherite/marcita, torto/colto. Brock recreates some of that music with strong assonance: rooted/rotted, thistle/twisted/cascade, and cites minor folk magic with the “loves me, loves me not” game of counting petals.
In this brief poem, the translation gives a near-rhyme, mimic/tunic (pp. 132-133), and both original and translation have a haiku-like compression:
DORMIRE SLEEP
Vorrei imitare I’d like to mimic
questo paese this landscape
adagiato reclining
nel suo camice in its tunic
di neve of snow
Santa Maria la Longa il 26 gennaio 1917/January 26, 1917
Here’s a couple only in English:
SAN MARTINO DEL CARSO
Of these houses
there remain
only a few
pieces of wall
Of so many
who resembled me
there remains
even less
But in my heart
each has a cross
My heart is the most
broken country
Lone Tree Gully, August 22, 1916 (p. 103)
ITALY
I am a poet
a unanimous cry
I am a clot of dreams
I am the fruit
of countless conflicting grafts
grown in a hothouse
But your people are borne
by the same land
that bears me
Italy
And in this your soldier’s
uniform
I rest
as in my father’s
cradle
Lokvica, October 1, 1916 (p. 116)
And one more example brief enough to give both versions:
IL PORTO SEPOLTO
Vi arriva il poeta
e poi torna alla luca con i suoi canti
e li disperde
Di questa poesia
mi testa
quel nulla
d’inesauribile segreto
Mariano il 29 giugno 1916 (p. 36)
THE BURIED HARBOR
The poet goes there
and then returns to the light with his songs
and scatters them
Of this poetry
I retain
that nothing
of bottomless secret
Mariano, June 29, 1916 (p. 37)
Here Brock keeps that interesting syntactic inversion in the second stanza (where ordinary English would want “I retain that nothing of bottomless secret of this poetry”—though that’s still pretty strange!). Does it work? Perhaps the inversion, much less common in contemporary anglophone poetry, suggests a descent into the buried harbor, its depths and the secret things under the water there.
I’ll end by noting that many translations of poetry by a single author offer a selection of the author’s work rather than a collection; this one is really a book of poetry, chosen and ordered by Ungaretti himself. It can be read as a record of that moment in time, moving through the poems in the order intended, following the musical score of the soldier-poet’s moods or locations. Whether read from end to end or dipped into, Allegria has a lot to offer.
.
Poet and translator Sibelan Forrester has been hosting the Mad Poets Society's First Wednesday reading series since 2016. She has published translations of fiction, poetry and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, and has co-translated poetry from Ukrainian; books include a selection of fairy tales about Baba Yaga and a bilingual edition of poetry by Serbian poet Marija Knezevic. She is fascinated by the way translation follows the inspirational paths of the original work. Her own book of poems, Second Hand Fates, was published by Parnilis Media. In her day job, she teaches at Swarthmore College.