Journal of Italian Translation

English Translations of Poems by Davide Rondoni
by Gregory Pell
Gregory Pell teaches Italian language, literature and cinema at Hofstra
University (NY). He has published articles on Luzi, Montale, Tobino, and
film. His translation focuses on Paolo Ruffilli and Davide Rondoni. Recently,
he has published a book on cinematic and holographic images in Eugenio
Montale’s poetry.
Poet, essayist, playwright, translator and editor, Davide Rondoni is
one of contemporary Italy’s most active and diversified writers. His contribution
to literature includes his recent founding of the Centro di Poesia
Contemporanea (Università di Bologna) and his continuous participation
in the journal clanDestino, of which he is founder and director. In these capacities,
Rondoni has his finger on the pulse of Italian poetry. Spanning 20
years, Rondoni’s own poetic activity, which reflects such influences as
Rimbaud, Luzi, Testori, Bigongiari and Caproni, has most recently culminated
in the works Avrebbe amato chiunque (2003) and Il veleno, l’arte (2004).
Rondoni’s awards are numerous and his poetry is recognized in translation
in such countries as France, Spain, the United States and Russia.
The difficulty in translating Rondoni’s poetry is not the result of
an elaborate or opulent use of language; nor is it necessarily a
result of a reliance on impenetrable slang or idiom. Rather the
difficulty can be attributed to his capturing the immediacy of the contexts
around him in a language that is exceedingly organic and expressed through
a rhythm that causes the poetry to seem meditated or uttered under the poet’s
breath. Three problems present themselves. First, as a translator, I feel humbled
and unnecessary: his poetic language seems so simple that I am almost
tempted to overjustify my role by implying things in my rendition that were
not implied in the original. Second, in this lyric unpretentiousness, culturallinguistic
differences arise. Rondoni employs the banality of a key term like
“autogrill” (in one of his most well-known poems, “Bartolomeo”) which
cannot be rendered in English in one word: ‘rest area’, ‘service area’, and
‘highway reststop’ are too clumsy to be poetic. One could say the same thing
for the use of “benzinai” in the same poem: “filling station attendants,” “gas
station attendants”, or “gas attendants” take away from the terseness and
the musicality. I chose the latter, for it was the shortest version I could find to
emulate the syllabation, without overlooking the suggestiveness of gasoline
found in “benzinai.” Third, there remains the task of capturing the vagaries
and contingencies of intonation: Rondoni’s is a poetry that must – perhaps
more so than others – be spoken aloud, as it follows broken rhythm and
unfixed, uneven lineation reminiscent of Luzi’s poetry, which is, likewise,