A talk delivered by Tom D’Egidio for the NY Browning Society at Westbeth in New York City, on September 29th 2021, as part of National Translation Month and viewable on YouTube
I’m going to translate Valerio Magrelli, a contemporary Roman poet who has the appropriately Roman name of Valerio which has retained its popularity since ancient times when there were many famous, and indeed valorous Valeriuses, including at least 5 poets. English cognates include both valor and valuable. Quite the opposite is Magrelli, which immediately reminds an Italian of magro or thin. Magrelli is furthermore a diminutive, suggestive of ancestors who were not only thin but also small. An English cognate is meager. Fortunately for Valerio Magrelli, it’s OK or even preferable for poets to embody many contradicitons.
And now for one of his poems, in my English translation (as with all his poems presented here), followed by the original Italian, from his second collection, Nature e Venature, of 1987:
I’ve often imagined that glances
outlive the act of looking,
as if they were arrows
with measurable trajectories, or lances
hurled in a battle.
Then I think that in the room I
just left, lines
of this kind must remain
for some time suspended,
crisscrossed, holding
their positions
as in a game of Pick-Up Sticks.
Ho spesso immaginato che gli sguardi
sopravivano all’atto del vedere
come fossero aste,
tragitti misurati, lance
in una battaglia.
Allora penso che dentro una stanza
appena abbandonata
simili tratti debbano restare
qualche tempo sospesi ed incrociati
nell’equilibrio del loro disegno
intatti e sovrapposti come I legni
dello shangai.
This very last line in his poem bothered me because Pick-Up-Sticks is an old-fashioned game with which newer generations may not be familiar. But it also intrigued me because the Italian is “Legni dello Shangai” or Shanghai Sticks. I looked up the history of the game and found out that it was first marketed in 19th century Germany, and suddenly everything clicked for me. I knew from the biography of Hermann Hesse that Lutheran missionaries, such as his father and grandfather, had spent time in China, bringing back a knowledge of the I Ching and its method of divination through the tossing of yarrow stalks, so that I was sorely tempted to rewrite the ending to say:
“Like the Augury to be had from the throwing of the Yarrow Stalks”.
That’s somewhat like the liberties Robert Lowell allowed himself in his fascinating if controversial collection of translations called Imitations.
But then in my mind’s eye I saw Magrelli’s poem as describing the hallucinatory party scene in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and decided to drop the whole thing.
Next I translated a Magrelli poem from the same collection that begins with two quotes some of you may recognise:
“And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead” -W.H. Auden
“…as when a crack appears
the length of a cup” -Rilke
I receive from you this red
cup with which to toast my days
one by one,
a string of pale mornings,
pearls making a long necklace of thirst.
And should it fall and break,
I full of compassion,
will see to its repair,
that my kisses may proceed
uninterrupted.
And every time that the handle
or rim cracks,
I’ll keep fixing it with glue
until my love has slowly accomplished
the making of a durable mosaic.
Down along the curve
of the cup’s white interior
the black crack descends
with the zig and zag
of a lightning bolt:
sign of a storm
that keeps on thundering
around in this landscape
of enamel.
E la crepa nella tazza apre
un sentiero alla terra dei morti
W.H. AUDEN
…come quando una crepa
attraversa una tazza
R.M. RILKE
Ricevo da te questa tazza
rossa per bere ai miei giorni
un ad uno
nelle mattine pallide, le perle
della lunga collana della sete.
E se cadrà rompendosi, distrutto,
io, dalla compassione,
penserò a ripararla,
per proseguire i baci interrotti.
E ogni volta ache il manico
o l’orlo si incrineranno
tornerò a incollarli
finché il mio amore non avrà compiuto
l’opera dura e lenta del mosaico.
Scende lung oil declivio
candido della tazza
lungo l’interno concavo
e luccicante, simile all folgore,
la crepa, nera, fissa,
segno di un temporale
che continua a tuonare
sopra il paesaggio sonoro,
di smalto.
The prominent ending of this poem on the word enamel, smalto, reminded me of the unusual use of this word, twice that I know of, by Dante in his Inferno. In the 4th Canto he takes his place alongside the ancient poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan who are standing on grass that Dante then realizes is in fact a hard surface of green enamel or as Dante says, “smalto”. Then in the 9th Canto, Dante is threatened by the Furies who say they’re going to get Medusa to turn him into what most translations give as “stone”, but again Dante uses this term “smalto”, or enamel, perhaps appropriate to hell because it is fused through great heat. And then there’s the monster of Canto 25 which, as it zigs and zags across Dante’s path, reminds him of a jagged bolt of lightning.
Auden, Rilke, and maybe Dante are part of this poem. Dante is after all the poet most likely lurking in the background of an Italian poem, as for that matter in the poems of such Americans as Pound and Eliot.
And so maybe the cup is a sort of infernal landscape of damage and danger, perhaps of punishment for kisses like Paolo & Francesca, the satanically red cup a scary stormy terrain, a circular pit through which one travels as along one of the Malibolgie, the perilous pits of Hell.
Poems are often made from other poems. But, a teacup from Hell? I don’t know.
For good reason the Italians have a saying, “Tradutore, Tradittore”, or Translator, Traitor. How can you make sure that all the cultural information gets into your translation? Like the Tardis in Dr. Who, the inside of the poem is much larger than the outside.
When Magrelli’s first collection appeared, in 1980 at age 23, it was declared the most important first collection since the appearance of Eugenio Montale’s groundbreaking classic Ossi di Seppia, Cuttlefish Bones, in 1928.
Who would have believed that a poetry collection with an obscure title, in Latin no less, would attract so much attention. That collection is called Ora Serrata Retinae, and the exact meaning was a puzzle to me, even though I studied Latin in school, because it is the scientific term for a bit of tissue connecting the retina with the optic nerve, and literally means “Serrated Edge of the Retina”.
High praise for that collection came from two Nobel Prize winners, Mexico’s Octavio Paz, and the exiled Russian Joseph Brodsky. It’s no exaggeration to say that Magrelli came out of the blue, already fully formed as a poet in his early 20s. Only a few months earlier, in the Roman summer of 1979, he was still so unknown, even in his native Rome, that he was not invited to participate in the big 3 day International Poetry Festival that included many young Roman poets. Here’s my translation of the first poem of that first landmark collection.
I don’t have a glass of water
by my bed;
I have this notebook.
Sometimes I write down words in the dark
and the next day finds them
stunned by the light, with nothing to say.
They’re night things,
set out to dry,
that curl under the sun’s rays
and even explode with a little pop,
leaving a scattering of fragments,
the broken shards of sleep
that overwhelm the page.
I manage to gather only
a cemetery of thoughts
in my hands.
Non ho un bicchiere d’acqua
sopra il letto:
ho questo quaderno.
A volte ci segno parole nel buio
e il giorno che segue le trova
deformate dalla luce e mute.
Sono oggetti notturni
posati ad asciugare,
che nel sole s’incrinano
e scoppiano. Restano pezzi sparsi,
povere ceramiche del sonno
che colmano la pagina.
È il cimitero del pensiero
che si raccoglie tra le mie mani.
One more particularly beautiful poem is from Magrelli’s 3rd collection called Esercizi Di Tiptologia or Typtological Exercises, of 1992, by which time he was not quite so intellectual, allowing himself to explore the mysteries of love.
The Embrace
As you sleep next to me I bend my body
and moving close to you draw
sleep from your face like a wick
draws flame from another.
And the two votive lights are there, the flame
catching, as sleep flows between us.
But as it catches, the furnace in the cellar
shudders: Down there the ooze of fossils burns.
Way down there prehistory glows hot, dead
submerged fermented peats
surge up into my radiator.
In a dark halo of petroleum
the bedroom is a nest heated
by organic deposits, by compost heaps, swamp gas.
And we, two wicks, are the two tongues
of that single Paleozoic torch.
Tu dormi accanto a me cosí io mi inchino
e accostato al tuo viso prendo sonno
come fa lo stoppino
da un stoppino che gli passa il fuoco.
E I due lumini stanno
mentre la fiamma passa e il sonno fila.
ma mentre fila vibra
la caldaia nelle cantine.
Laggiú si brucia una natura fossile,
là in fondo arde la Preistoria, morte
torbe sommerse, fermentate,
avvampano nel mio termosifone.
In una buia aureola di petrolio
la cameretta è un nido risacaldato
da depositi organici, da roghi, da liquami.
E noi, stoppini, siamo le due lingue
di quell’unica torcia paleozoico.
I should tell you that these translations are unlabored drafts, perhaps even studies for translations. They are quickly improvised attempts to match two languages that only sometimes talk to each other with seeming ease. English, with its huge vocabulary, and Italian, with its more precise tenses, are sometimes stubbornly at odds in ways that can get even stickier the more one pushes and pulls at the linguistic taffy.
I only hope that I’ve provided a flavor of this very fine contemporary Roman, Valerio Magrelli. Vanishing Points, a bilingual selection of his poems as translated by Jamie McKendrick, was published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux in 2010.
Tom D’Egidio is a member of the Suppose An Eyes poetry group at the University Of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. He is Vice-President of the NY Browning Society. He is invited to read his poetry with some frequency in NYC, most recently as part of The KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series, and in the Boog City 18.5 Arts Festival. He is a lecturer, on many occasions at The National Arts Club. His lecture, “The Montale-Browning Transference”, was officially sponsored by the Institute Of Italian Culture of The Italian Consulate in NYC. He translates poetry from Italian, Latin and Abruzzese dialect, and is currently at work on a novel, “Mondo Scungilli”, set in the NY art world c. 1980. His poetry collection, Years Of Pilgrimage, will be published, in a bilingual English/Spanish edition, by Darklight Publishing of Mexico City & NYC, later this year.
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