Brian Cole's introduction to the poetry collection, Machine, by Erminia Passannanti

Machine (2005)

by Erminia Passannanti

Troubador Publishing Limited

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

For a translator it is always particularly exciting to translate poetry by a living poet who is available for comment and explanation. The language of poetry can be so rich in allusions and multiple meanings that without the poet’s help the translator is often left unsure whether his version is valid. This is perhaps particularly relevant to poems that have been translated by other readers - in some cases four other translators have produced versions of these poems.

The multi-layered postmodernist language of Erminia Passannanti’s work, with its at times surreal, at times pseudo-mystical, and at times expressionistic nuances, makes this personal contact even more important. Yet, an instance of poem whose historic allusions and references was unnecessary to discuss with the author, since its imagery opened up to the translator’s mind was:

NOT MORE HERMETIC

We tried to keep at its pace: if the order was to go up,

we would plod up the gravel hill,

when it speeded up, we would come down

running.

What is this hand-clapping in rhythm,

this lining-up on the horizon?

It is my temperament, no more hermetic

than so many others,

every morning with head downcast, incapable

of avoiding that slight dear malaise

of extraneousness. There is already someone

outside the door.

[…]

As in Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103” (Ariel, 1963), but with a more ethical perspective on the actual referent of the employed dramatis personae, a Jewish young woman preparing for being gassed, are overtones of prison camps, of boarding schools – but overwhelmingly of being ‘outside’, sealed off from ‘other people’ – though for the translator it is the poem that is ‘hermetic’.

Indeed this hermetic camp – which could also be interpreted as an oppressive, disciplinary college or ‘school’, or literary tradition (Ungaretti’s hermeticism) – imposes quite different problems on the translator, compared with the translation of more ‘classical’ Italian poets. For these too many others have produced versions, and the task is to convey more beautifully, or more clearly, a creation which is generally easily understandable in the original. The title of the poem tells the translator that the text will “no longer” be hermetic. But this is of course a mocking statement, still keeping inextricability of meaning on the front line. From Passannanti there are examples of this more straightforward style, yet employing as dramatis personae a disconcerting alter-ego for the poet’s mind, an old king, close in many aspects to mad King Lear:

THE KING, WORDS                  

I am not pleased with life

and I cannot change it.

So I do my utmost

to make it please me

and sometimes I forget,

I say: life is beautiful.

But other peoples' lives

are always in my mind,

and make me immensely melancholy.

[ …]

Simple, effective - and easy to translate. This too is not difficult, though the inner meaning is more elusive:

THE OTHER SIDE

I do not admit that one can            

have the same resonance

in the same place

with the same laws.                                  

At the use-by date one develops    

a different one

that melancholy in which reigns

paradise on earth

paradise located down here

that smells of buried potatoes

with no more resonance.

…

The renowned critic Romano Luperini said in his preface to the first publication of the Italian texts that the space of Passannanti’s poetry is between Sylvia Plath and Amelia Rosselli, but with a concreteness (even sometimes luminous) that is quite Mediterranean. This luminosity is commingled with a Nordic mist and becomes strange and lost – but yet it remains like the echo of a possible world now lost. The title poem expresses the poet’s central ‘message’:

MACHINE          

She keeps the trolley on the track of the madness,              

smoothly follows the rails. who knows

what happens in the heart of the night.

(the trolley on the track of the madness

holds me up).

…

The “machine” seems at first to be located in a hospital, perhaps a life-support machine, which limits the patient’s horizons and causes feelings of humiliation and an incapacity to speak or to see. The dramatis personae is an old woman, possibly hospitalized in a life-threatening emergence. The old woman is affected by an impairment of speech, but is alert and sensible to her present environment as well as her flow of memories and reflections on life and death, on being a woman in a world of men, of life struggle, and so on. The machine then becomes a sewing machine, leading to conflict between mother and daughter (in-law), and finally a typewriter, used by poets, , who are invading the “casa”, with pretentious grandiose poses and noises. The allusion in the final stanzas is to the fall of the Berlin wall and, extratextually, to a poem by a fellow German poet, Hans Ulrich Treichel, who Passanannti knew and was friend with in Salerno during the Eighties. “Macchina” gives rise to sensations of dislocation, oppression, an absence of intimacy and identity in a world of noise, obscurities and difficulties, as reoccurres infratextually in “-Ent”:

incipient darkness             

the blackout before                                               

advancing

in a turmoil of rooms

a house of darkness.

scars on the walls 

that are subsiding. and I sense

in myself the wide-open iris,

the window

on the darkness. the hand, the abdomen

above everything

emptiness.

[...]

This poetry is full of self-expression, by a personae that is complex Self, striving to express itself more effectively through the emotions. The translator has to try to identify with the poet as nearly as possible, while recognizing that his task will never be perfectly fulfilled.

Passannanti has tapped into the Zeitgeist and holds out a vision to her readers of a world in which sensibility and humanity struggle with the prevailing darkness the poet confronts in her emotional responses. Here is a sombre intuition of the vicissitudes of a world in flux and a self in urgent critical self-examination.

The language of this collection of poems, published in 2000, but completed in 1992 and recipient of an important national poetry prize in 1995, is on the one hand, intensely private in its arcane preoccupations with individual condition, yet offers the reader a compelling picture of the uncertainties and edginess of our bellicose industrialized world, and throws up strange questions. Can (photographic) machines, (war) machinery and/or (computer)machines, and the machine of art (the deus ex-machina) machinate? It is one of the questions of our age. Will artificial intelligence replicate itself in the machine? Might we identify the specter of mankind in the machine? We live in an age where, with every promise of technological advance of any kind, we are beset by profound anxieties about our planet’s own health and longevity.

The first section of the collection deals with various victim situations, with heavy religious overtones. Passannanti’s poetry touches allusively and compellingly on one of the greatest of historical events, mostly related to Warld War II, a time when Passannanti’s father was war prisoner in Düsseldorf, and to pre/post-war harmony/pain. The message contained in poems such as “Asses’ Milk”, “At the Olive Press” and “The Bramble Path”, with their memories of Passannanti’s parents story telling lies at the heart of “Machine”. One could tell that in this collections there is an implicit synergy between the author’s voice, rewriting the past in a postmodern style, and those of her parental figures, who, as Passannanti puts it, in life represented an incessant example of educational, biographical, existential narratives: “

Another poem, “In the Grace of God”, seems to imply that rebellion is useless, but “Snail” offers a way out - but only if the individuals can change their nature and adapt.

The next section shows the possibility of a false refuge in love, with ironic and even cruel overtones – the struggle for hope is most uncomfortable, as in her acknowledged antecedent, the modernist poet, Amalia Rosselli, to whom critics Luperini and Laura McLoughlin have compared Passannanti’s poetics. In the fifth text included in this translation, the poet is back to the melancholy of life experience, wearing the mask of dramatis personae, as in “Isolde” among others, though in another text, she seems to suggest that even of the point of feeling of the verge of suicide there might come in aid hope, represented by an ambiguously tender baby girl, crossing the park at night all alone, a hope dressed in white, almost scaring, and horror-film like. “There is hope …”. As acknowledged by Italian critic Franco Fortini in his 1993 comment to Passannati’s poetry, in these devastatingly expressionist or surrealistic scenarios, perhaps we can see the poet’s breakthrough to happiness with beautiful and powerful poems to her children, which are sort of celebration of the ability to survive life negativity: instances of such poems in this collection are “Valì” and “Piccolo uomo”. 
 

Thus, as it is the case for most postmodernist Italian authors, the translation of Passannanti’s poems are a most intricate and multilayered source of interpretation, at the core of which, but extremized, still lies the Italian lyric tradition. 
 

The most difficult aspect of poetry translation is perhaps the struggle to capture the tone and mood of the works. The judgment of the translator as to how far this struggle has been successful is unreliable, and it must finally be left to the reader to decide on the value of the translations as poems, and to the bilingual reader to judge the extent to which they fairly convey the originals.

Brian Cole