Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

WHISPERED URGENCY: TRANSLATING SOUND AND MOMENTUMIN RAFFAELLO BALDINI’S “E’ MALÀN”By Adria BernardiWhen I first had the opportunity to hear RaffaelloBaldini read his poetry aloud, I heard something Ihad not heard in my own reading of them, a whisperedurgency, and because of this I had slowed the pace of hispoems too much. When I had a second opportunity tohear him read, including the poem “E’ malàn,” I againheard this whispered urgency. What I also heard washow phrases and images accumulated, one after theother, with no respite; there was seemingly no pause forbreath as he read, which gave the poem simultaneouslyboth nearly unbearable weight and incredible headlongmovement.“E’ malàn” (1) is made up of just such an accumulation,and what accumulates is noise. For the narrator,this accumulation of sounds is a barrage, an overwhelmingdin, which becomes transformed at the end of thepoem. It is Baldini’s layering, together with a poetic languagethat mimics spoken conversation, which give thispoem both weight and momentum. You arrive at the endhaving heard or spoken words with edges and gnarls andspikes; you arrive at the end of the poem out of breath.In the introduction to Baldini’s collection, Ad nòta(Nighttime), Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo begins: “Were itnot for the lazy prejudices still alive that relegate a poetwriting in dialect as ‘minor,’ even when he’s major,Raffaello Baldini would be considered. . . one of thethree or four most important poets in Italy.” (2)This salvo raises what tends to be the first questionin any discussion of the poet’s work, as it is in discussingthe works of those who write in a dialect: Why dialect?“But who’s going to understand your dialect?” he isasked in a collegeal interview by critic Franco Brevini.“What are the motivations for this choice?”(3) he isasked in another interview.“It’s probably an inevitable question,” Baldini concedes.“To which there can be more than one answer,including, ‘I don’t know,’ which seems like a nonresponse,but it isn’t.”(4)Like poetry written in other regional dialects,Baldini’s poetic language is fundamentally oral. In thesame interview, he says, “Well, for me the essence of thedialect, at least for me, is orality, . . . it’s an oral animal.”(5) It is, he reminds the interviwer, a language that didnot have an extensive written tradition until 1946, whenTonino Guerra’s groundbreaking, I scarabócc,(Scribblings) (6) was published. Along with Guerra(1920) and Nino Pedretti (1923), Baldini is one a “trio”of poets to write in romognala dialect and who share originsin Santarcangelo di Romagna, a town near Rimini.Born in 1924, Baldini was a journalist for many years forPanomama, where he wrote extensively about religion.All of his poetry and each of his three theatrical monologuesare written in romognola. (7)In reading the poem, “E’ malàn,” (Noise) one canbegin to see and hear some of the differences betweenthe sounds of Baldini’s romagnolo and standard Italian.In romognola, as in in other dialects, words end in a consonantwith great frequency. The effect of this dominanceof consonant-ending words is evident from thebeginning with the title. E’ malàn has a clipped, rushedsound. Il rumore is softer and slightly more elongated.E’ malàn is spoken with impatience, while il rumore, tomy ear, is a word that cannot be rushed in quite the sameway.From the beginning of the poem:E’ malànU i à da ès un pòstdvò ch’e’ va réss tótt e’ malàn de mònd,pr’aria, d’in èlt, chi sa, o alazò in fònd,mo dalòngh, ch’u n’i pò rivé niseun,una gònga, cmè un gòurgh, mo svérs, un mèr,che da ’d fura u n s vaid gnént, però avsinés,s’u s putéss,te préim u s sintirébb un sbruntlaméntcmè quant i bumbardéva vérs maréina,pu a fès piò sòtta, sl’òural,mè a dèggh ch’ l’à d’avnì fura un batibói,un diavuléri, che par no inzurléiséun u s chin mètt al dàidi tagli urècci, . . (p. 118,ll. 1-13)This is the Italian, which the poet himself translated:Ci dev’essere un posto / dove va a finire tutto ilrumore del mondo, / per aria, in alto, chi sa, o laggiú infondo, / ma lontano, che non ci può arrivare nessuno, /una conca, come una gora, ma immensa, un mare, / che34 Translation Review