Journal of Italian Translation

John Du Val
tated this discussion, I liked my first choice best. I decided that it might be the
context, rather than the line, that needed changing, because Trilussa’s
Romanesco, though by no stretch of the imagination ignorant sounding, is
conversational, and I felt that he would, if he had been writing in English,
have written the kind of grammatical error that people condemn only in
writing, never in conversation. But did my language sound conversational
enough throughout the poem? I went back through the translation and
changed the barely eloquent line seventeen, “but not enough to summon
back to life,” to “but not enough: they don’t bring back to life....” And I changed
the self-consciously elegiac, “I stood in sorrow there beside the wall,” to, “I
stood there, feeling bad beside the wall,” a perfectly correct sentence in English,
but colloquial enough even to make some readers suppose that the
incorrect “feeling badly” would be more dignified.
Finally, before the anthology Tales of Trilussa went to press, I went
back through all the poems, making tiny adjustments toward a more conversational
English in the hopes that readers would not fault the English version
of “A Mimi” for a technicality, and on page 54 I printed,
seventeen hundred twenty-three.
Then I muttered to myself, “Poor Paul,
he’s worse off than me.”
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