Peter Dale. On translating Erminia Passannanti's poems.

Erminia Passannanti is an Italian poet and the translator into Italian of, among others, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath, R.S. Thomas, and TS Eliot’s (The Idea of a Christian Society and The Waste Land). She has published two books of verse, so far, the first, Noi Altri (I poeti del premio Laura Nobile, Vanni Scheiwiller, Collana All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1993) and Macchina (Manni Editore, 2000). In 1995, she won the first prize of the same “Rassegna Nazionale di Poesia Laura Nobile” (University of Siena). She is currently based in England, doing graduate research at Oxford into the important Italian communist poet and theorist Franco Fortini. She teaches Italian literature at Saint Claire's College, in Oxford.

As a translator of Dante’s terza rima, I met her in 1996, when we began the fascinating and lovely enterprise over translating each other's poems into our respective languages.

Her poetry is written in free verse, which uses occasional rhyme, assonance and consonance to give salience to structural elements in the poem. Her use of the free verse is unusual from an English-speaking view, or maybe merely from a current British perspective, in that it is dominated and controlled by considerations of syntax/structure alone. This is further characterized by a large amount of disruption to normal syntax in the interest of irony, elegy, farse and point.

Added to this, there is the use of language from a variety of registers and periods to create telling juxtapositions and sometimes expressionist and surreal effects. Phrases of memorial cultural significance are scrambled, rearranged and connected in surprising and shocking ways; the tone context of images is subverted and thwarted by such collocations and the vision travesties and contravenes expected codes of languages as with a dissociating mind. These shifts and contrasts are frequently slight – but deep and subtle in meaning. It is not possible to match all of them in another language.  

Luckily the poet’s attitude to translation, from her own wealth of experience, is that it is a creative process: she allows the translator a free hand in trying to match these things. What she is adamant about is the syntactical integrity of her lines. This would seem to give the translator at degree of latitude, but even languages as close as Italian and English in a certain habitudes of use, do not have the happy coincidence of syntactic preferences and forms that render this always possible in effective ways as I must indicate in the occasional note to individual poems.

All of the poems presented here (Agenda) are forms of dramatic monologue with clear and sometimes weird personas. They are centrally concerned with proclaiming the right of human individuality and freedom, despite, and because of, the ties and fetters imposed by culture, history, religion, politics, and the familial system. Underlying this passion for freedom, runs a deeper motive force for it: a sense of vacuity of human endeavours and desires in face of the cosmos and society.

All that we are sure of, like it or not, is the self. For all their variety and humour, the poems, perhaps unwillingly, contain like a thin seam in the ore this dark substratum.

“Snail”  

 

So taken

in the flux, taken

in the cadence, who knows

what the diamond you give me

arouses in me. I fall

 

in the mud, the mud

of oblivion. It is

all of a concord.

I want to think

what I think, down here

 

in the gorge of dreams.

I see them, I describe them,

it is all fretted.

I see your face

turn in the void,

 

the immense void,

a turning point, the crossroad.

I have a starry sky. I have someone

who watches me

and invokes. I want to remain

 

in this blessed mud

you have shown me.

It took me thirty years to return.

I have other options:

deciding to be some other animal.

(Translated by Peter Dale)

Peter Dale has translated a large number of Erminia Passannanti's poems. We are looking for a publisher to take on this book for publication.