Journal of Italian Translation

Rina Ferrarelli
given me an experience similar to that of the original readers at the time of
Swift and Alcott.
The picaresque journey that is translation has continued throughout
my life. Not only because learning involves translation; I have been professionally
involved with translation for many years, in my work, and as a
poet. When I was still in college, I was asked by the poet Sam Hazo, who
was one of my English professors at Duquesne University, to translate a
few poems of Quasimodo. I did, and that started me on my way, publishing
them in Choice, a poetry journal edited by John Logan. But that was the
beginning and the end for many years. Life intervened. I had no time write
or translate when my kids were little. But when I started working, still
part-time and at a research job in anthropology with a flexible schedule,
my languages came into play again. I read and translated from ethnographies,
some of whom were in French, Italian and Spanish. It wasn’t until I
was through with this project that I started literary translation again. I have
since rendered into English hundreds of individual poems, and I have collected
some of my translations of modern Italian poets in three books: the
poesie-racconti of Giorgio Chiesura, who spent two years in various German
internment camps during WWII; the lyrics of Leonardo Sinisgalli; and
most recently the work of Bartolo Cattafi, a Sicilian poet, forthcoming from
Chelsea Editions.
I always translated from Italian into English. For the past year, though,
I’ve undertaken the arduous task of translating my own poetry into Italian.
And for reason that I’m trying to fathom, it’s proving to be much more
difficult, much harder and time consuming than translating into English.
After doing so much translating of poetry, some of it nationally recognized,
I’m beginning to feel how impossible the task is, how preposterous at times.
Utterly necessary—I have to remind myself over and over that I’m doing it
for people who don’t know English, some of them close friends—and utterly
baffling.
I don’t know for sure why I feel so differently about translating into
Italian. It’s true that I have not been back in Italy for several years, and that
the language that was fresh in my ear has now become faint. Not that the
language of poetry has much to do with the spoken tongue. Still, the point
is valid. Also true that I always write in English, think in English, and have
done so for decades, and that I seldom have much chance to speak Italian.
The most significant reason, perhaps, might have to do with the fact that
I’m translating my own poems, work that I feel is finished, that I have abandoned
and left behind. Thus, the challenge of reading, digging, understanding,
of discovering another persona, of hearing another voice is missing,
and this, which should make things easier, make them go faster, slows everything
down instead. I’m not terribly interested in going over old poems,
in reworking them in another language, even Italian. No, I’m not, not especially.
But I am doing it. And through it, I’m coming full circle. I’m reversing
the process. Writing in English about my childhood in southern Italy, I
41