Posts filed under 'Italian poetry'

Farewells in the Form of Burials: Deborah Woodard on Translating Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly

The Dragonfly is the most propulsive of Rosselli’s works. . . one can imagine the poem “scrolling off” the typewriter platen as she typed.

Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly is a tour de force, a powerful composition of the Italian poet’s singular multilingualism, musicality, and vertiginous travels around language, in which she reaches the heights of ecstatic sensuality to speak of the deepest violences. This major work has recently been republished by the independent Entre Ríos Books via Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard’s mesmerizing translation, and in this following interview, Woodard divulges on Rosselli’s experimental style, the politics amidst the lyricism, and the extent to which the poet’s personal reality inhabited her work.

Eva Heisler (EH): What an experience reading The Dragonfly! The long poem meanders, sometimes circles, but never settles. In “Metrical Spaces,” an essay Rosselli wrote around the same time as this poem, she says: “I noted strange thickenings in the rhythmicity of my thought, strange arrests, strange coagulations and changes of tempo, strange intervals of rest or absence of action; new sonorous and ideal fusions in accordance with the changing of practical time, of graphic spaces and of the spaces surrounding me continually and materially.” This description is strikingly on par with my own experience of the poem as a voice on the move, passing through rooms and streets and texts. Can you say more about the relationship between these two texts?

Deborah Woodard (DW): “Metrical Spaces” is key to understanding what Rosselli is up to in this “poemetto,” or long poem. Both texts illustrate Rosselli’s experimental poetics—or rather, “Metrical Spaces” is the theory, while The Dragonfly serves as the theory’s exhibit A. Rosselli was searching for a poetics that would be less constraining than formal verse, which she calls neo-classicism, yet be more rigorous than free verse and the surrealism that evolved in the early twentieth century, and which she viewed as somewhat played out or “too easy.”

Basically, as the title “Metrical Spaces” indicates, allotment of space on the page serves as the poem’s (visual) metrics. As my co-translator, Roberta Antognini, has noted, The Dragonfly was originally published in an IBM font, which tended to make each word take up an equal amount of space—a crucial insight for understanding Rosselli’s spatial poetics. For Rosselli, the unit of composition is the word, and the first line of the poem determines the form, or the approximate length of subsequent lines.

Rosselli read Objectivist poet and theorist Charles Olson in her mid-twenties, a few years before writing the first draft of The Dragonfly in 1958, and she appears to have embraced Olson’s theory of projective verse and composition by field. Olson writes: “Then the poem itself must at all points be a high energy construct, and, at all points, an energy discharge. So how is the poet to accomplish same energy. . . what is the process by which the poet gets in at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place. . . ?” Olson goes on to say: “I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.”

For Rosselli, as for Olson, it is the typewriter that makes possible composition by field, enabling spacial precision via layout and allotment of white space, and serving as key to the author’s ear and breath. Rosselli describes working on the typewriter in terms that make it sound akin to a musical instrument, referring at the close of “Metrical Spaces” to timbres and tempos, and “writing faster than light.” Rosselli was a serious student of music, and around this time she was making the choice to give up music, in part due to financial constraints but also in response to her growing sense that she’d be able to find publishers and make her way as a poet. Not long afterwards, she sold her musical instruments, making a clean, if difficult, break and transferring her musical acumen to her verse. The Dragonfly is the most propulsive of Rosselli’s works; its narrative unfurls at quite a clip, and one can imagine the poem “scrolling off” the typewriter platen as she typed. READ MORE…

Ernesto Calzavara: Between Dialects and Words

Calzavara had left Italian behind, a language “in which he could never raise his voice.”

In 1966 the poet Ernesto Calzavara, born in Treviso in the northeast of Italy, published e. Parole mate, Parole pòvare (And. Mad words, Poor words). This collection of poems written in the trevisàn dialect became the emblem of Calzavara’s rebellion against the disappearance of local idioms in favour of the Italian language, but it was also his first step breaking away from the Neodialettali poets and the rural themes and settings of traditional vernacular poetry. The puns and wordplay in this collection are irretrievable in the Italian languagethey are part of Treviso as the landscape is, or the weatherbut Calzavara believed that dialects had an inherent linguistic power, and only by tapping into that power could they break free from their condition of dying languages. In this essay, Assistant Editor Marina Dora Martino, looks at Calzavara’s poetry in the context of Italian local languages in danger of fading away forever, and considers what it means to remember and forget a language, a place, and a way of life.

Growing up, I absorbed the notion that speaking in dialect was vulgar and inadequate, especially at school. I am not sure where or when my first encounter with the local dialect even occurred—my family (originally from Naples) didn’t speak it, the schools didn’t use it, and most of my friends practiced it only with their grandparents, if at all. Treviso, my hometown, is an ancient city in the northeastern plains of Italy, whose local variation of the Veneto dialect is known as trevisàn—the Veneto dialect being a sort of regional language understood everywhere in the Veneto region, from the mountains to the sea. Excluded from school and spoken rarely among friends, Veneto lingered somewhere at the edge of my life for a long time. It was only by chance, picking up a secondhand book at the town market, that I found out about the existence of local poets, and an entirely new literary world opened to me. This is how I met Ernesto Calzavara’s poetry and realised that I had to rethink everything I knew about the dialects of my country.

It is widely known that Italy has many regional dialects, but not everybody knows that they are more than a bit of an accent and the occasional slang word. Far from being only a distortion of standard Italian, dialects are complex and ancient ways of speaking—in some cases languages in their own right—and they have been around since long before standard Italian even existed. They were known as “volgari,” from vulgo (a.k.a. not Latin but the languages that most common people spoke in their daily life) and they had started emerging from Latin itself as early as the eighth century, transformed by virtue of contact with pre-roman local languages (Etruscan, Osco-Umbrian, Messapic, and the like) but also, throughout the years, by the influence (or invasion) of tongues from other lands, such as Gaulish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. The volgari were generally considered inadequate for the high expressions of the mind, so it was normal praxis for intellectuals to write and discuss their work in Latin. This was until Dante and Petrarch came around, bringing their Tuscan dialect to the forefront of poetic innovation and proving once and for all that volgari could take on the most exalted topics (the Sicilian school of poets had prepared the ground in this sense) as well as the lowest. Indeed, in De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante went even further and made the argument (in Latin, so that it couldn’t be ignored by the intellectuals) that the mother tongue was more noble because it was learnt from infancy, and non-mediated by grammar. Which makes it all the more ironic that his fourteenth-century Tuscan (and Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s) would later be picked by sixteenth-century intellectuals as the basis for standard Italian, as the result of an educated debate on which of the peninsula’s many languages should become its lingua franca; in reality, a debate of intellectuals for intellectuals that had little or nothing to do with the life of the vulgo. In 1861, the year of Italian unification, 78% of Italians were illiterate, and most of them spoke only their regional language. The unionist phrase “we made Italy, now we must make Italians” shows the uneasiness of a young country whose people couldn’t communicate with each other from region to region, which led to standard Italian being made the language of education, politics, administration, and entertainment in the attempt to “italianise” Italy. Despite this, by the 1950s and ’60s the gap between the official role of Italian and its place in the life of people, particularly in rural areas, was still shockingly wide. With the arrival of television the nation found its most powerful tool for counteracting illiteracy: TV programs like Telescuola and Non è mai troppo tardi (it is never too late) are believed to have taught half a million Italians how to read and write.

READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

To that grasp / of a palm in another's palm / to that simple act, forbidden to us now—

For the second week of our new Saturday column, In This Together, we present a recent poem from Italian writer Mariangela Gualtieri, newly translated by Anna Aresi and Sarah Moore. Below, Aresi explains the context of Gualtieri’s work and how the poem came to be such an instant success in Italy:

The first case of COVID-19 in Italy was diagnosed on February 21, just days before the Carnival parades and celebrations were scheduled to take place. Everything was immediately canceled and schools were closed, at first only in the most affected regions, until on March 9, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte issued the decree that would bring the entire country into total lockdown. The same day, Mariangela Gualtieri published her poem “Nove marzo duemilaventi” (“March ninth, twenty-twenty”). Within hours, the poem had been shared thousands of times on social media and in messaging apps, effectively becoming the text of the Italian quarantine.

Mariangela Gualtieri is a beloved Italian poet and cofounder of the Teatro Valdoca theater company in Cesena. The company has performed poems and works by major Italian authors, and Gualtieri herself is known for the masterful interpretations of her own works. She read this poem for a local TV channel exactly a month after its publication, on April 9; the recording can be found here (Italian only).

With more time on their hands and prompted by a sense of social responsibility, authors have been prolific during the lockdown, sharing reflections, diaries, and other kinds of writing, often to raise funds for hospitals and other organizations. Only in the months and years to come will we find out what pieces will stand the test of time, but even now we can be sure that this poem is here to stay. Though prompted by an unprecedented state of emergency, Gualtieri’s poem does not read rushed; on the contrary, it is a thought-out, compelling reflection on our (unsustainable) way of life in relation to the environment. Much like Dante’s Commedia, mutatis mutandis of course, the poem establishes a relation between the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm, inviting readers to reconsider our position as both individuals and as a species in relation to the universe.

As a final note on the translation, I should add that a first English translation, by Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford, appeared soon after the poem’s release. Rand and Botsford stated that they “deliberately chose to stick very closely to the Italian structure so that readers who do not know Italian can read the original in parallel and appreciate the language to the full.” With the poet’s permission, Sarah Moore and I took a different approach, seeking to provide Asymptote’s readers with an English rendering that also conveys the rhythm, bold syntactical choices, and flow of images of the original.

March ninth, twenty-twenty

by Mariangela Gualtieri

I want to tell you this
we needed to stop.
We knew. We all felt
how our actions
were too frantic. Staying inside of things.
Each outside of ourselves.
Squeezing each hour—making it count.

We needed to stop
and we couldn’t.
It had to be done together.
Slow down the pace.
But we couldn’t.
There was no human strain
that could hold us back. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

Defeating lockdown with what makes us human. The shared word—Ariadne's thread that allowed Theseus to find his way.

As COVID-19 continues to leave devastation in its wake, one is reminded of the importance of bearing witness. As Paul Celan said: “It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything.” In our new Saturday column, In This Together, we at Asymptote are gathering a series of texts from writers around the world—poetry, journals, essays, and all the other tools language gives us to see beyond the surface of things. Today, in our inaugural post, we present diary entries from French theatre director Wajdi Mouawad, translated by assistant blog editor Sarah Moore. Below, Moore gives us an introduction and context to Mouawad’s life and work:

Wajdi Mouawad has been the director of La Colline theatre in Paris since 2016. One of five national theatres in France, La Colline is renowned for its mission to stage contemporary works. Since taking up this role, Mouawad has programmed work by writers such as Édouard Louis, Vincent Macaigne, Elfriede Jelinek, and Angélica Liddell. Last month, I went to see Anne-Marie la Beauté (Anne-Marie the Beauty), a nostalgic, bittersweet monologue written by Yasmina Reza, one of France’s most successful contemporary playwrights. The following week, Friday March 13, I had tickets to see the new play by Peter Handke, Les Innocents, Moi, et l’Inconnue au bord de la route départementale (The Innocents, I, and the Stranger on the side of the departmental road). Handke, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a contentious figure, and I was curious to see what I’d make of this new text. However, hours before the performance was due to start, the French government limited gatherings to fewer than one hundred people in an attempt to curb the spread of coronavirus. And since March 17, the country has been on a strict lockdown. Now, beside each listing for Reza and Handke’s plays reads “—annulé.” Mouawad, like everyone else, is on lockdown, with life on pause. How does a playwright and director respond when his theatre must close its doors to the public? Since the first day of this lockdown, Mouawad has been keeping an audio diary, published on the website of La Colline. Through his diary, Mouawad reflects on this unprecedented situation, on how he can continue to write and engage with communities, and as he says, “how to turn the time of lockdown into a time that’s alive.”

Excerpts from “Lockdown Diary — Day One”

by Wajdi Mouawad

Washing them twice an hour and for thirty seconds each time. I’ve never had such clean hands as during these days of solitude. And yet, despite the cleanliness of my hands, I must be responsible for something. Lady Macbeth, unwittingly. But then, what is this stain which won’t go and which I can’t stop scrubbing? What crime have I committed? What king have I slain? Unless, reflecting my own era, I’m nothing more than one of the thousands of Pontius Pilates (another character obsessed by the cleanliness of their ten fingers,) who is wondering what all this has to do with them. In this case, what is it about washing my hands that today carries the risk of being put to death? Which Christ am I sending to his crucifixion? What is sublime and who dies? What departs? What spirit of the forest is deserting the world? What must I, from now on, mourn? Carefreeness. It’s been two weeks since I can say I’ve been feeling carefree: climate, fire, violence against women, liberalism. If the world I’m giving up through lockdown was that one, why wish this lockdown to end as quickly as possible? To return to what kind of world? Between a world that crushes me, and one that turns me today into a statue, how to prevent a state of shock, without a reply to this question: what to do with this lockdown? I open my eyes this morning after wandering all night long in the bois de Vincennes. What is happening to us? On this first day of lockdown, taking stock of the situation is impossible. It’s like writing yourself in reverse. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know where the measure of everything is. I don’t know if my lucidity is panic. In the evening, I go to bed and tell myself that without even knowing, I perhaps won’t see summer. So many of us won’t see it. Overwhelming and collective sorrow. I can’t reassure myself with the idea, increasingly fragile, that this only affects the elderly. And even if that were true, how can the death of others be reassuring? And anyway, how could we live in a world without the elderly if all the elderly were to disappear? For an hour, I’m overcome by unease and everything comes back to me. A civil war won’t stop the epidemic and misfortune doesn’t wait its turn. The gods don’t exist. No logic, other than nature and her disruption. Confused thoughts. Feelings in disarray. Multiple sensations. Like so many pieces of a puzzle, of no precise image except a fog, none of which fit perfectly together. Fear, sadness, anxiety, and memories. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Antonia Pozzi

But I burned / with the desire to spring out, / in the encroaching sun

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Antonia Pozzi. Translator Amy Newman writes that “Pozzi’s poetry was posthumously altered by her father Roberto Pozzi to reshape her public image; he scrubbed any evidence of his daughter’s passionate love affairs and her doubts about religion.” These translations represent the restoration of a singular vision, showing that the work of translation can polish away the muck of misrepresentation meant to stifle the subjectivity of women. In these poems the brightness of the mind is painted next to the depths of angst. Here, Pozzi explores the poetry of her own body and what it means to contemplate an individual death in a time of the hierarchy and patriarchy of war.

Thoughtlessness

I remember a September afternoon
in Montello. I still a young girl,
with slender braids and itching
to race wildly with my knees.
My father, crouched inside a passage
dug out in a rise of the ground
pointed out to me through a fissure
the Piave and the hills; he spoke to me
of the war, of himself, of his soldiers.
In the shadow, the grass, cold and sharp
grazed my calves: underground,
the roots were perhaps still sucking
some drops of blood. But I burned
with the desire to spring out,
in the encroaching sun, to gather
a handful of blackberries from a hedge.

Milan 22 May 1929 READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Perspective” by Maria Borio

that their borders invert onto one another as they age

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Italian poet Maria Borio. This translation of Borio’s work is deft, bringing out the implausibly smooth staccato of the original Italian. The mix of rhythm and flow in the poem is incapsulated by the symbol of the train that cuts and blows as it glides. Here, the movement of images works to push the boundaries of the movement of thoughts: brackets set off points of views that read almost like cinematic direction, suggesting that the pure movement of the verse—and thought—are always conditioned by some perspectival imposition. Come aboard Maria Borio’s powerful train of thought.

Perspective

The horizon line seemed the border of the world
halted midst your pole and the sea. The sea curving since

the earth is a globe, suspended between nose and horizon hands
fist fight, thrusting images of inconsistency against
[the horizon.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2019

October's new translations, selected by the Asymptote staff to shed light on the best recent offerings of world literature.

A new month brings an abundance of fresh translations, and our writers have chosen three of the most engaging, important works: a Japanese novella recounting the monotony of modern working life as the three narrators begin employment in a factory, the memoir of a Russian political prisoner and filmmaker, as well as the first comprehensive English translation of Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems. Read on to find out more!

the factory cover

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2019

Review by Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor

Drawn from the author’s own experience as a temporary worker in Japan, The Factory strikes one as being a laconic metaphor for the psychologically brutalizing nature of the modern workplace. There is more than meets the eye in this seemingly mundane narrative of three characters who find work at a huge factory (reticent Yoshiko as a shredder, dissatisfied Ushiyama as a proofreader, and disoriented Furufue as a researcher), as they become increasingly absorbed and eventually almost consumed by its all-encompassing and panoptic nature. Coincidentally wandering into a job for the city’s biggest industry, or finding themselves driven there—against their instincts—by necessity, the three alternating narrators chronicle the various aspects of their working experience and the deeply bizarre undertones that lie beneath the banal surface. READ MORE…

Giorgio de Chirico, The Poet

With a word, de Chirico made languages collide . . . In translation, I have tried to honor these textures, to stay hovering just a bit between.

Ut pictura poesis. The language of painters has long been a source of inspiration for poets, and a sense of poetics has equally been an irreplaceable element in painting. In this evocative, sensual essay on the iconic painter and poet Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), Stefania Heim illustrates the various intersections between literature and visuality, between translation into text and translation into images, and between life and the page. This piece has been adapted from the original introduction of Geometry of Shadows, the first comprehensive and bilingual collection of de Chirico’s Italian poetry and translated into English by Heim, which will be published by A Public Space Books in October 2019.

Sun-scorched piazza, marble torso, rubber glove, arched arcade tossing shadows, smoke puffing from a background train: the landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico’s imagination have become iconic. It is a kind of magic to imprint the scenes created by your yearning onto the malleable backdrop of so many minds.

The uncanny emotive power of de Chirico’s visual compositions has gotten him called a poet, even a great poet. “He could condense voluminous feeling through metaphor and association,” writes art critic Robert Hughes about the painter’s canvases, marveling that, “[o]ne can try to dissect these magical nodes of experience, yet not find what makes them cohere.” Metaphor, juxtaposition, unsettling connections, meaning evoked in the missing connective tissue between somehow familiar objects—these are a poet’s tools. De Chirico cultivated this association. He addresses the two “goddesses:” “true Poetry” and “true Painting.” With allusion, symbols, and mythmaking, he connects his work to the great striving of the ages. READ MORE…