Gabriele D'Annunzio

The poet, Gabriel d’Annunzio (1863-1938), is a legend, but his notoriety often has less to do with his poetry than with his life.

He was a ‘decadent’ and had affairs with many women, including celebrated actress Eleonora Duse, and took delight in scandalising the defenders of public morals. He also seemed fond of duelling. He was – without doubt – a man of action. His most famous exploit came after the First World War. D’Annunzio had supported the allies during the war and lost an eye in the fighting, but was furious when the city of Fiume was taken from Italy at the Treaty of Paris. He marched with 2000 men on the city and forced the Allied Powers to withdraw. However, Italy didn’t want to support his irregular action, blockaded the city, and demanded his surrender. D’Annunzio’s reaction was to declare the city an independent state with himself as autocratic leader. Incredibly, he held onto Fiume for more than 18 months and declared war on Italy before being booted out. He was disarmed and allowed to walk free.

JG Nichols, in 1988, called his exploits “a sort of elegant hooliganism.” However, in a 1922 speech to the Chicago Literary Club, Rudolph Altrocchi said that “the epic of his record during the war must, we repeat, redeem, in the sight of all, his previous lyric and moral shortcomings and prove besides that they had not fatally undermined his virile stamina.” Original newspaper reports (you can read them in full by clicking on the .pdf button at the link) from the New York Times in 1920 give some idea of the crisis he caused.

His politics were ambiguous, to say the least. The Italian fascist movement cite his ideas as a prime influence, but he often seemed hostile towards the fascists. He’s described (in the Wikipedia article at the link) as Mussolini’s mentor, but the article is also clear that Mussolini greatly feared d’Annunzio’s popularity and regularly paid him stipends not to enter the political arena. He opposed Hitler and all attempts to align Italy with the German Nazi regime. On the other hand, in Fiume, he “popularised the black shirts, the balcony speeches, the promulgation of ambitious charters and the entire choreography of street parades and ceremonies,” and some have accused him (without any hard evidence) of originating the practice of poisoning opponents and prisoners with an excess of castor oil, which Mussolini picked up on and used with relish. Although d’Annunzio never tiptoed around Mussolini, it would be foolish to suggest that his own ideas didn’t have much in common with the fascism that built on their foundations. D'Annunzio died in a large villa provided for him by Mussolini himself.

He was the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to get too close to. He’d double-cross you as soon as look at you and his main principle seemed to be to get what he wanted using any means necessary, as long as the price was right. His ego must have been huge. His first poem, written in school, was dedicated to the King of Italy. From 1923 until his death in 1938, he collected items for his own museum to ensure his commemoration beyond his own lifetime. Just try that one!

What about the poetry? Well, he is one of Italy’s greatest poets although comparatively little attention has been paid to his work in the English-speaking world.

I translated one of his poems recently, quite a ‘free’ interpretation, and I hope to work on several more in the next few months. My translation is below and, for those who read Italian, the original poem is below that. On one level, it’s about the Icarus story. But I think it’s really about poetry, the singular “mad flight” that only the greatest and most innovative artists make, by which even their common destination must be arrived at “alone”. With reference to the poem, it might be useful to know that Daedalus, father of Icarus and maker of the fatal wings, also made a wooden cow for King Minos's wife to hide in. She was in love with a bull (a curse sent by the god, Poseidon) and the contraption enabled her to satiate her lust in relative safety. She then gave birth to the Minotaur, but that's another story:

The Wing in the Sea

Ardi, in the sea’s haze a wing,
cast adrift, shudders like a wreck.
The feathers, severed and scattered,
ripple in the air’s uneven breath.

Ardi, I see wax, the wing of Icarus!
When its creator served the king’s court
he built a hollow, wooden cow –
with far from innocent import.

Who will raise it? Who can reunite
feathers with strength greater than before
and again attempt the mad flight?

Such exalted destiny for Daedalus’s son!
Courage drove him high above normal frontiers
and he dropped to the whirlpools alone.

*

L'Ala sul Mare

Ardi, un'ala sul mare è solitaria.
Ondeggia come pallido rottame.
E le sue penne, senza più legame,
sparse tremano ad ogni soffio d'aria.

Ardi, veggo la cera! E' l'ala icaria,
quella che il fabro della vacca infame
foggiò quando fu servo nel reame
del re gnòssio per l'opera nefaria.

Chi la raccoglierà? Chi con più forte
lega saprà rigiugnere le penne
sparse per ritentare il folle volo?

Oh del figlio di Dedalo alta sorte!
Lungi dal medio limite si tenne
il prode, e ruinò nei gorghi solo.

Suona per Te

Alexander Hutchison writes:

This is to let you know about an event on the evening of Thursday May 8th at 6pm (note new time!) in the Italian Cultural Insitute, 82 Nicolson Street, Edinburgh. I have been working with Alessandro Valenzisi on Italian versions of my poems – and we will be reading from and commenting on a selection of the poems and translations.

In the first part of the evening Professor Jonathan Usher of Edinburgh University has been invited by the Director of the Institute, Dr Luigino Zecchin, to provide an introductory critique and talk about the poems, and there will be an opportunity to put questions at some point to all participants.

Refreshments will be provided, and members of the audience will also receive a presentation copy of a booklet Suona per Te, printed specially for the occasion.

I do hope you will manage to make it along on the night!

If you are planning to go, can you RSVP the Italian Cultural Institute
on iicedimburgo [AT] esteri.it so they have an idea of numbers.


I certainly plan to be there. It should be really good.

Poet Assassinated

Astonishing story in the Guardian today about the murder of Sardinian poet, Peppino Marotto.

Described as “a man who helped many and did not have enemies,” we later learn of his “imprisonment in the 1950s for robbery and attempted murder, and his reported ties at the time with a notorious bandit, Pasquale Tandeddu.”

But he began writing in prison and seemed to change his life when he came out, acting as a local peacemaker and union official. He was a communist, believing passionately in equality and justice. Last Saturday, he was shot dead, almost certainly as a result of a vendetta held against him for his crime from over 50 years ago.

Of course, although he was shot in a busy street in broad daylight, no witness has yet come forward.

Reflections on Translating Quasimodo - Part 1

Translation is a hard art. Before I began translating poems, I thought that was simply a case of finding words closest to the original words and then stringing them together. But it’s not so simple.

In my translation of Quasimodo’s Snow, I had many decisions to make, even though Snow is a short poem. In L3, the poor ones are chiusa within the soldiers coats. My “trapped” may be a bit strong. Is that what Quasimodo means? Or is it just that they are wrapped in them, dwarfed in coats to big for them? Or in some way the coats act as a metaphor for people closed off from each other, or from the world? I made the decision for “trapped.”

Then in L7-8, I had a real problem and I may not have translated it correctly. I went for “Strike/ at my forehead, strike towards my heart.” The Italian is “Battete/ sulla fronte, battete fino al cuore”, literally “Hit/ on the forehead, hit until the heart.” But whose forehead(s) and heart(s)? Is he exhorting the “dead” to beat on their own foreheads and hearts? “Fronte” and “cuore” are both singular but can refer to a generic plurality of foreheads and hearts. Or is he referring to the foreheads and hearts of the poem’s “we” – Quasimodo and whoever he is with at this moment, or perhaps humanity in general? Or is he thinking of his own forehead and heart - he, the narrator, the poet?

I went for that last option.

Oh, you dead. Strike
at my forehead, strike towards my heart.

However, I noted later that Jack Bevan, who translated Quasimodo’s poems for Penguin (remember the days when Penguin published stuff like this?) for the Selected Poems in 1965, went for the dead - a very different meaning, and I always suspect other translators know something that I don't know (especially those published by Penguin). My Italian can be really dodgy at times. Bevan writes:

…Ah, these dead ones! Beat
your foreheads, beat right down to the heart.

And finally, we have the final two lines, and the tricky image of the closure. Quasimodo writes:

Che urli almeno qualcuno nel silenzio
in questa cerchio bianco di sepolti.

Literally, “That someone at least may howl in the silence/ in this white circle of those having been buried.” Does Quasimodo really mean that there are graves arranged in a circle? Or is “cerchio” being used to connote completeness, like a circle, and by extension, a metaphor for the earth? And it was problematic to find a translation for “sepolti”, a participle being used as a noun, “the having been buried.” That image of burial was important, connecting the snow and the dead. I went for:

Someone should at least cry in the silence,
in this white sphere of the buried

Jack Bevan leans more to the literal:

Let someone, at least, howl in the silence,
In this white circle of buried ones.

There are no final answers. Each translation must stand as a poem. The translator can only hope against hope that he has communicated something of what was in the original writer’s mind.

Neve

Snow

Evening falls: once more the earth departs –
the images we love, trees,
animals, the poor trapped
in soldiers’ coats, mothers
whose tears have dried out their wombs.
The snow on the lawns shines at us
like a moon. Oh, you dead. Strike
at my forehead, strike towards my heart.
Someone should at least cry in the silence,
in this white sphere of the buried.

- Salvatore Quasimodo, 1947 (my translation)

Quasimodo Again

I’ve translated another two Quasimodo poems, the first two from his 1947 volume, Giorno Dopo Giorno (Day After Day).

On the Willow Branches

And we, how could we have sung
with a foreign foot pressed on our heart,
among the dead littering the piazzas
on grass brittle with ice, over the lamblike
crying of children, over the black howl
of the mother who stumbled upon her son
crucified on a telegraph pole?
On the willow branches, as offerings,
even our harps were suspended,
and rocked gently in the mourning wind.

Letter

This silence frozen in the streets,
this apathetic wind, which now slinks
low through dead leaves or rises again
to the colours of foreign flags…
perhaps my anxiety to send word to you
before the sky once more shuts
over another day, perhaps the inertia,
our most contemptible evil… Life
is not in this terrible, dark beating
in the heart, life is not piety, life
is no more than a bloodsport where death
is in flower. O my sweet gazelle,
I remind you of that bright geranium
on a wall riddled with bullet holes.
Now, does even death hold no consolation
for the living, even death for love?

Another Quasimodo

I’ve managed to translate another Quasimodo poem, but not one of his pre-war efforts. This is post-war, that hint of ever-present doom within the pastoral scene, and yet...

Almost a Madrigal

The sunflower bends to the west
and the day already accelerates
to ruin within its eye and the summer air
thickens and already twists the leaves and the smoke
of building sites. Everything recedes with the dry
flow of clouds and screech of lightning –
the sky’s final trick. Again,
as ever, my dear, we are struck by the change
in trees cramped within the circle
of canals. But it is still our day
and still that sun, which departs
with the thread of its tender ray.

I no longer have memories, I do not want to remember;
memory rises again from death,
life is without end. Each day
is ours. One will stop forever,
and you with me, when it seems late to us.
Here on the canal’s bank, feet
swinging, like children,
we watch the water, the nearest branches
in its shade of darkening green.
And the man who approaches in silence
does not conceal a knife in his hands,
but a geranium flower.

Quasimodo

Salvatore Quasimodo is an interesting figure because his poetry changed completely through extreme historical circumstance.

Before the Second World War, he was one of the “hermetic poets”, along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, who drew inspiration from the French Symbolists. They sought an unadorned verse in which an image would evoke its object in the purest form possible, but they used a personal and obscure set of symbols that can be difficult to interpret without knowing the “key”.

After WW2, Quasimodo’s poetry made a radical change. On receiving the Nobel prize for Literature in 1959, he referred to this in his acceptance speech:

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate "when the trees fall and the walls collapse ". At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician and the mediocre poets with their armour of symbols and mystic purities pretend to ignore the real poet. It is a story which repeats itself like the cock's crow; indeed, like the cock's third crow.

Quasimodo’s poetry became an exploration of Italian society in the wartime years and how that experience continued to affect it post-war. There is a search for meaning through the agonies of guilt, violence, and shame. I’ve translated one of these poems below, and it has a urgent and direct power (or at least, it should have if I've done my job adequately):

Man of My Time

You are still made of stone and sling,
man of my time. You inhabit the fuselage,
with evil wings, the sundials of death,
I have seen you – on the fire wagon, at the gallows,
at the torture wheels. I have seen you: it was you,
with your perfect science committed to extermination,
without love, without Christ. You have killed again,
as always, as your fathers killed, as the animals
killed on seeing you for the first time.
And this reek of blood is as the day
when a brother said to his brother:
“Let us go to the fields.” And that cold, stubborn echo
has reached as far as you, in your days.
Forget, O sons, the clouds of blood
risen from the earth, forget your fathers:
their tombs sink into ashes,
the black birds, the wind, cover their hearts.

- Salvatore Quasimodo, 1947.

A Translation from the Italian...

I'm really glad to have come across this poem from Bologna poet, Davide Rondoni, from a collection published in 2003. Really good, I think, although I can't vouch for the translation (I did my best):

To love someone…

To love one person
is a long journey –

cliffs, falls of water
and sudden, expansive darkness
the closure of forests,
flashes at times
on a silence vast as the sea

and streets high above, (shout)

avenues immersed unexpectedly
in unfamiliar light

To love one, a thousand, everyone
is like holding a map of wind.
We can’t succeed, but the heart
has been placed at the centre of the chest
for this great, marvellous failure.

On the plateaux of each night
here I am with repetitions and hands that have spilled poetry:
do not wish them ill, they are yours, do not make them go away.

- Davide Rondoni (from Avrebbe amato chiunque (He Would Have Loved Anyone) , Guanda, 2003), translated by me.