Journal of Italian Translation

John Du Val
But with the name Charley I was missing something. Trilussa had been
Trilussa since he was eighteen. He even signed his name Tri. But he was born
Carlo Alberto Salustri. Carlo. For a poet who described his poetry and his
personality as a series of masks, this mention of his almost-forgotten (well,
forgotten by me anyway!) first name was a moment of delicious intimacy in
a volume of translations where it would not appear elsewhere.
Also, as the months went by, it dawned on me that February is not May,
no more than age is youth or disillusion hope. January wasn’t May either.
Carlo, Mimi, and the month of May too were all written back into the poem.
While I was at it, I changed Rosa, who had been Rose in the English, back to
her original name, but Paul, whose name in Romanesco was Pasquale, stayed
Paul to rhyme with the wall on which he had carved his name. Now, I thought
the translation was finished, and I submitted it, just as it appears at the
beginning of this article, in a volume of translations from Trilussa for the
University of Arkansas Press.
One of the outside readers for the University of Arkansas Press, however,
going over the manuscript before its publication, did not think the
translation of the last line was finished: “‘He’s worse off than me’ is a grammatical
error; than is a conjunction not a preposition; me should be I, as in
“‘He’s worse off than I am.’”
I knew that. This is one of those few instances in English where what
everybody says is an error and what is correct is pedantic.
“You’re right, John” replied Miller Williams, the editor of the Press and
the poet and translator who had introduced Trilussa to me. “But,” he added
gently, “your error comes at the end of the poem, where it’s so obvious....
Look, you don’t have to rhyme the end of the poem with three. Paul could
have been in love with Rosa in 1724 or 1725 or even in 1726. What difference
does it make?”
Of course. I could translate by the numbers. Vistas of alternate endings
opened before me. To be systematic, I began with 1721.
seventeen hundred twenty-one.
Then I murmured to myself, “Poor Paul,
he’s done worse than I’ve done.”
There. I had scored with my first shot. The grammar was correct without
being pompous, the rhyme was perfect, and the line meant pretty much
the same as the original:
“...li ventotto agosto
der millesettecentoventitré.”
Allora ho detto:--Povero Pasquale,
sta un po’ peggio de me.
I read the English to myself aloud. Maybe I hadn’t scored. Something
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