Journal of Italian Translation

Gregory Pell/Davide Rondoni
137
full of deliberate horizontal tabulations. Rondoni’s poetry, then, is deceptively
plain, so my role is to take the ordinary Italian and marry it to a corresponding
syntax, replete with Rondoni’s deliberate lack of punctuation, in
an English version. Rondoni’s primary insistence on the tabulation of verses
and the positioning of certain types of words at the end of each verse demands
it. Yet, how does one translate a poetry that sounds like the manifestation
of a man’s contemplations, or his remarks about life as it happens
around him? How does one reproduce the cadences that follow a rhythm
found somewhere between thought and dialogue? How does one translate a
word that simultaneously exists as the beginning of a new thought as much
as it exists as a continuation of a previous thought? At best, one can listen to
Rondoni intone his own verses; but even if solutions presented themselves
in such a reading, I would have to betray the written verse and that could
violate the very primacy of Rondoni’s original, albeit unusual, choices for
his verse delineations.