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

D’Agostino/Buzzati 181
sonalized moments of introspective gloom, the latter is generally
more nostalgic, juxtaposing a macrocosm of history and extistential
tedium with a microcosm of individualized memories and singular
occurrences. What both collections share, however, and what steadfastly
binds them to the rest of Buzzati’s prolific creative output, is
an overarching notion that, try though we might, do what we like,
live where we may, what we cannot avoid or deny is that today and
tomorrow are like this year and the next, parts of a strange interim
called life that bridges an ultimately unconscionable present with
an inevitable future in death.
One of the greatest challenges in translating Buzzati’s poetry
lies in the faithful transmission of his sometimes strikingly non-
poetic, so to speak, poetics, a stylistic trait evidenced not only in the
often blunt straightforwardness of his language, but also in his intermittently
crude imagery, detached dialogues and somewhat disembodied,
ostensibly stream-of-consciousness apostrophizing.
Another problem I often faced was that of properly conveying in
English certain instances of Buzzati’s poetically licensed, and in some
cases grammatically permissible in Italian, use of anonymity, ambiguous
pronominality, and abrupt shifts in point-of-view and subjectivity.
Lastly, of course, I also struggled, as many translators of
poetry certainly do, with the relatively paradoxical difficulty of simplicity—the
difficulty, that is, of keeping simple that which is simple,
of resisting the occasionally vexing temptation to create poetry and
mellifluousness, or sometimes just lexical perspicuity, where they
are not already present. Instances of most of these translation-related
obstacles, as well as excellent examples of the thrust of Buzzati’s
thematic and stylistic tendencies, can be readily seen, alongside my
hopefully successful English rendition, in “Non è vero che” (“It Isn’t
True That”).