AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN ITALIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION: TWENTY YEARS IN PREPARATION

Ned Condini has mastered the translation of poetry between Italian and English, in part because he is himself a poet and in part because he is both Italian and American. His literary output includes poetry, short stories and novels, as well as adaptations of others’ work into both Italian and English. Born in Turin, he studied in Italy and England. For decades, he shuttled between Italy, England and the United States. After adopting American citizenship in 1976, he lived in northern New Jersey until he and his wife Marilyn moved to Etowah in Western North Carolina’s Henderson County in 2004.

The Modern Language Association of America published Condini’s An Anthology of Modern Italian Poetry earlier this year. This is his magnum opus of translation, twenty years in preparation, covering the period from Italian unification in the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The 427 pages present the poetry in his English translation with the original Italian text on facing pages.

“In the English language, my man is William Butler Yeats,” Condini told me recently, in a wide-ranging discussion of modern literature. He expressed great admiration for John Berryman (“a mind like that of Robert Lowell”), Wallace Stevens and Pablo Neruda. He recommended John Ciardi’s translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and regretted that Dante was no longer required reading in Europe.

Just as there have been social and political tensions in Italy ever since the Unification, so there have been conflicts within the world of Italian poetry. Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) was echoing Dante when he used terza rima (three-line stanzas with the chain rhyme the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d) in “Foxglove.” His contemporary poet Gian Pietro Lucini (1867-1914) used free verse in the sarcastic “Song of the Young Hero.”

In my early reading of the collection, I have also been impressed by the quality of Corrado Govoni, Guido Gozzano, Camillo Sbarbarro, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Pier Paolo Pasolini (especially the political poem “Gramsci’s Ashes”) and Giorgio Guglielmino (visual poems incorporating images and words). I am sure more pleasant surprises await; I must sip the poetry and not pour it down too fast.

Here is Govoni’s “Cavallo” in Condini’s brilliant English translation:

Horse
Wild springtime of the horse!
At each elastic step of his
on purple hooves that imprint moons of noise
a dusty hawthorn smokes, a mud bush blooms

The challenge of translating poetry stuns me. Poetry entails an economy of language and a precision of thought that already is difficult to reproduce in translation. Further complication is engendered by the presence of stanza structure, meter and sometime rhymes that work in the original language but may or may not work in another language. Comparing the originals with the translations, it is clear that Condini has used many techniques. Strictly rhymed originals often are rendered in unrhymed English in order to accommodate the best word choice. Six-line original stanzas become four-line English stanzas. But throughout, Condini gives us good English poetry.

Despite my limited hundred-word tourist vocabulary in Italian, I am currently keeping this collection of Italian poetry by my bedside and browsing through, reading the Italian aloud and then the translation. The book is a bargain at $11.95 from your local bookstore or the Modern Library Association. You are paying 32 cents each to meet thirty-eight remarkable poets. An Anthology of Modern Italian Poetry (ISBN 978-1-60329-032-6) will give you many hours of pleasure.

© 2009 Edward C. McIrvine

Arts Spectrum column #433

Illustration “Florence at Sunset” courtesy Wikipedia Commons

May 15, 2009