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Book Reviews
Bartolo Cattafi, Winter Fragments: Selected Poems 1945-1979,
edited and translated by Rina Ferrarelli. Chelsea Editions, 2005,
Pp 205.
In the “poetic statement” that editor and translator Rina Ferrarelli
places at the beginning of her collection of Bartolo Cattafi’s poems
(Winter Fragments: Collected Poems 1945-79, Chelsea Editions, 2005),
Cattafi reflects on his poetic origins: “As in a second childhood, I began
to number the things I loved, to spell out in verse a naïve inventory
of the world” (xiii). The poetic world that he constructs is a lyric
yet universal one, made up of concrete matter and images, but no less
metaphysically charged for that fact. As Ferrarelli puts it in her “Introduction”
to Cattafi’s work, although Cattafi is firmly fixed in the linea
lombarda tradition of engaging in “a poesia in re, a poetry embodied in
things,” “these poets…are not afraid to be intellectual,…not afraid to
make metaphysical leaps despite [Cattafi’s] exclusion of the intellect
from the poetic process (xv).” In Ferrarelli’s new volume, the full
breadth of Cattafi’s “naïve inventory” of human experience is now
more accessible to an English-speaking public, whose encounter with
this poet will be facilitated by Ferrarelli’s editorial choices no less than
by her careful renderings of Cattafi’s lexical economy, formal integrity,
and consistent rhythms.
The volume’s presentation of Cattafi is thorough,
contextualizing both the man and the writer with the aid of ample
paratextual materials: a “Statement by the Poet,” an “Introduction”
to “Cattafi’s place in Contemporary Italian Literature,” translation
and selection notes by Ferrarelli, a brief chronology of Cattafi’s life,
and informative (if sparse) poem content notes at the very end. Perhaps
the most important properties of the volume’s paratext, however,
are its facing text format and Ferrarelli’s work in selecting its
poetic components. The decision to reproduce Cattafi’s original texts
is a fortuitous one that gives the reader not only greater perspective
on each poetic piece, but a more pronounced sense—even if only
typographically—of Ferrarelli’s translation decisions and strategies.
The reader with access to both source and target languages, moreover,
will have the tools to trace the migration of Cattafi’s evoked
world from Italian to Ferrarelli’s English.
What emerges most powerfully from Ferrarelli’s editorial and