Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

The Poetry of Amedeo Giacomini:
It’s Almost Winter
by Francesca Cadel
Translation of poems by Dino Fabris
Amedeo Giacomini (1939-2006) was a poet from Varmo (Udine),
the author of books of prose, essays, poetry in Italian and dialect, and
translations. During his lifetime he was the greatest living poet writing in
dialect from Friuli, at the North-Eastern border of Italy. His books have
captured the interest of major Italian critics in recent years – and the most
prestigious names have always been enthusiastic (Maria Corti, Cesare
Segre, Dante Isella, Franco Brevini) - pointing to the expressive power of
his verses. A selection of Giacomini’s poetry was translated by Adeodato
Piazza Nicolai and published in the anthology Dialect Poetry of Northern &
Central Italy, edited by Luigi Bonaffini and Achille Serrao (Legas, New
York, 2001). Presunto inverno (Presumût unviâr. Poesie friulane 1984-1986,
Introduction by Dante Isella. Milano, Libri Scheiwiller, 1987), Giacomini’s
most important collection of Friulian poems, was published in 1987, and
was translated into English by Dino Fabris (1930-1999), finalist in the
Lockert Library in Translation Competition at Princeton University Press.
Fabris was born near Casarsa, in Friuli, and emigrated to the US in his
early childhood, following his father. He was a free-lance journalist, an
editor, a translator and a poet himself: his translations of Pasolini’s poems
appeared in various journals and in the anthology Italian Poetry Today,
edited by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman (New Rivers Press, 1979). In
1980 his unpublished translation of Pasolini’s La Nuova Gioventù was
awarded the Columbia University Translation Prize.
Fabris’ translation of Giacomini’s Presumût unviâr has never been
published and was sent to me by Fabris’ widow, together with some letters
between author and translator. In The poetry of Amedeo Giacomini: It’s almost
winter I would like to finally publish such a translation with selections
from the letters. In my introduction to the texts I will discuss Giacomini’s
poetics. Deeply involved in translation from his beginnings, Giacomini
was in fact a translator from French, Provençal and Latin, and his passion
for languages led him to direct the literary journal Diverse lingue and to
teach Friulian literature at the University of Udine. Like Pasolini, Giacomini
recalls the topos and the suggestions of untranslatability, defining the Italian
text placed at the bottom of the page as an “interlinear version” of his
Friulian poems. Despite this sort of truism, his poetry was built on the
relation between his Friulian paternal language and the refined Italian he
was using and showing as an intertext 1 . The best results of such a poetic
are indeed shown in his 1987 Presumût unviâr where Giacomini dialogues